I tried to relax and be a good sport that weekend, but my mind was constantly occupied by the stories of the missing women. I wanted to know everything about them and this strange place. I found it difficult to think about anything else. I was like a woman possessed. I realized, it wasn’t just being out of work that caused my post-graduation restlessness. I needed purpose and I had found it.

As soon as Elle and I got back to Boston on the Monday following our trip to Vermont, I spent the entire day in the local library researching the Cold Hollow area. I was like a sponge, soaking up everything I could about the area which grew ever more mysterious the more I learned. How could such a remote place lose track of so many people? There were several possibilities: runaways, women escaping abusive relationships, and illegal border crossing into Canada for a new life. But in my gut, I felt that there was something more sinister lurking beneath the surface of Cold Hollow.

I spent my evenings caring for customers at Fratelli’s but my mind was still in Vermont. I desperately wanted to go back and unearth the story I knew was there. I felt like I had stumbled onto something big, a story that mattered. I needed to go back, so I suggested to Elle that we should take another trip to Cold Hollow, but she wasn’t interested.

“I thought you didn’t care much for skiing? Besides, I really can’t afford to take another trip right now, sweetie. Maybe we could do something fun this weekend here in town.” She tried, but Elle could not understand for the life of her why I wanted to go back so badly and I couldn’t bring myself to tell her my real motives, and that was the end of the discussion. That was when I decided to expand my job search beyond the Boston metropolitan area.

The following Sunday, Elle and I had dinner at her parent’s house as we often did. Martin or “Marty” as everyone called him, Elle’s father, worked as a computer technician for a prominent banking chain and often regaled us with tales of office antics that made time pass so slowly your hair was measurably longer by the end. I was getting antsy when Daphne, Elle’s mother, mentioned that Marty had just set up a new home computer with access to the internet. “Maybe Kelly could get online and send her job applications through e-mail?” she suggested. “That would save a lot of time, right?”

After dinner, Marty brought me into his office and set me up on his computer. I’d not spent much time on the internet as the technology was very new then, and I wasn’t really excited about browsing jobs with Elle’s dad that evening anyway. Then it occurred to me, what if I sent my resume through an e-mail to The Cold Hollow Chronicle and, to my surprise, I received a reply just a few minutes later. As it turns out, the newspaper was hiring a reporter and they were desperate. Finally, I had not only found a job, but I found a job in the heart of a mystery. This was the break I needed, but when I told Elle later that evening, she didn’t share my excitement.

“Kelly, you’re going to give up everything that you have here for some small-town newspaper?”

“Give everything up? I’ve got nothing here,” I said but as the words left my mouth, I heard the way they sounded and I could tell I had hurt her. “I didn’t mean...What I meant was, I’m not going to give everything up. You’re coming with me. Aren’t you?”

Elle scoffed at the thought and that made me angry. I was too blind at the time to see how ridiculous my request must have sounded. “Kelly, I have a job here. My parents are here. Your parents, our friends. I don’t want to move to Vermont. And I definitely do not want to move to Cold Hollow!”

“You don’t understand, Elle. You have everything you could possibly want! I have nothing! I can’t stand relying on you financially any longer. It’s killing me. Can’t you see that? It’s killing me!”

Those were just some of the many things that were said that I still regret saying that night, but I had made up my mind. I was a writer and I wasn’t going to wait for the stories – or the work – to come to me. I had to go to the story, and the story I was going to tell was in Cold Hollow.

Things were tense between Elle and I for the next week while I prepared to move to Vermont. There were a few moments when I felt uncertain about my decision, but ultimately I knew that I needed to at least try. Other than Elle, I didn’t have much I was leaving behind in Boston. I wanted to tell her that this wasn’t the end for us, it was just a detour, but I didn’t. I suppose deep down I didn’t believe that myself and so we exchanged as few words as possible while I packed.

Elle and I never officially broke up, whatever that means. As I made the drive north on I-93, it was obvious that we weren’t together anymore even though we never said the words. In spite of everything, I never thought that was going to be the end for me and Elle. Not really. In my mind I clung to a childish fantasy; I would move to Cold Hollow, break the story of the disappearing women, and eventually move back to Boston with a national scandal under my belt. I imagined the Boston Globe, The New York Times, even Elle herself clamoring after me. But that’s not quite what happened.

The Case that Never Was

My first week in Cold Hollow was a bit rough. I rarely could sleep through the night during those first days in town and hardly had any appetite. When I wasn’t fantasizing about the investigation I was about to begin, I thought about Elle. The breakup had been much harder on me than I initially thought. My body and mind struggled to keep up as I searched for decent furnishing for the old Victorian era home that had been carved up into several crappy apartments divided by paper-thin walls. Fortunately, the other units were empty so the only noise I had to tune out was caused by the sound of eighteen-wheelers barreling down the state highway just a few feet from my front door.

I soon discovered, time moves strangely in small towns. Sometimes it's slow and crawls so that a day feels like a month. When that happens, it has to catch up somehow and days will suddenly breeze by like hours. I had two weeks before I officially started the job at the Chronicle, but that didn’t stop me from trying to gather materials for my story. I considered calling her, just to let her know I made it safely, but the phone seemed heavier and heavier every time I lifted it from its hook on the wall. We had been nearly inseparable for our entire relationship and now I was going through emotional withdrawals. Eventually, I decided going cold turkey from one another was probably for the best.

When my first day at work finally arrived, I showed up at The Cold Hollow Chronicle offices nearly an hour before they opened. Despite my difficulty with sleeping and eating at that time, I was buzzing to get started at my first reporter job. My boss, Wayne, was something of a stickler. He was a New York City transplant who had been married to a local woman. By the time they divorced, his roots were too deep to leave, and too shallow to feel at home. He had a sallow angular face that hardly ever smiled. It’s not that he was altogether unpleasant, but he was serious about journalism, right down to the stories he published about, say, goings on down at the local library. Hence, my first assignment: a puff piece about the librarian who put on a special collections exhibit made entirely out of items from the lost and found. My next assignment was covering the girl scout troop in town that would be using half of their yearly earnings from cookie sales to fund a trip to Florida.

Needless to say, these weren’t exactly the most titillating assignments, but I bided my time until I could pitch my great journalistic endeavor of uncovering some dark conspiracy theory on the missing person cases. I knew I had to prove myself before getting to the good stuff. Wayne expected high-quality reporting turned in on time and if you were good at your job you might occasionally get a small head nod in your direction. He made the Chronicle feel much more like the Times with the way he ran it.

Being the impatient and overeager reporter I was back then, I started investigating the missing person cases whenever I had a moment of downtime at work. During my lunch-breaks, I was down in the archives at the Town Office or at the library just a few blocks away from my apartment searching for mentions of the missing women. I steadily collected copies of police records, old Chronicle issues, and anything else I could get my hands on that I felt might be of relevance to the disappearances. I filled several spiral-bound notebooks with commentary and questions. When all was said and done, I was zeroed in on five missing women from the last ten years:

Julie Clark, 23, last seen at her home in Fletcher on May 13, 1994.

Madeline Patterson, 41, last seen leaving her brother’s house in eastern Montgomery on December 8th, 1993.

Mikayla Padgett, 26, last seen at the Montgomery High School gymnasium where she coached women’s basketball on September 29th, 1994.

Sophia Boggs, 33, last seen with her husband outside a steakhouse in Belvedere on March 13th. 1995.

Leah Ackerman, 19, last seen in a taxicab heading south of Waterville on July 12th, 1993.

It was nearly two months into my job at the Chronicle that I finally mustered the courage to make a pitch to Wayne about my findings.

“Hey, boss, got a second?” I asked, hovering awkwardly in the doorway of his office at the end of the hall in our windowless little cave.

Wayne glanced up from the yellow legal pad where he had been scribbling notes and nodded for me to come in, but said nothing. He was always writing out lists and chewing on the tip of his pen cap.

“So, listen, I’ve got this idea rolling around in my head and I was wondering what your thoughts might be. I’ve been digging around and sort of stumbled upon an interesting missing person case – several actually – that have happened in the region the last few years and––”

“No,” he said matter-of-factly, and went back to writing.

I was surprised by how quickly and suddenly he shot me down. Wayne, ever-thoughtful, never interrupted me. Despite his intense moods, his manners never strayed far from him.

I stumbled for words. “Well, the cases – I mean, they’re unsolved,” I said, stuttering. “Isn’t it a bit strange? They’re all, well, they’re all women and––”

“No, Kelly,” he said without taking his eyes off the pad in front of him.

I took a moment to breathe. I had come all this way for this job, lost my girlfriend, lived alone in a crappy apartment in a house as breezy as the barren tundra. I wasn’t about to let one simple “no,” or even two, stop me.

“It could be a really interesting story if we maybe looked into any connections between the women. Or maybe there’s something about all of the places they disappeared from––some connection, or––”

He stopped writing and looked me in the eyes then. “No,” he said a third time with a firm finality to his voice. There was a seriousness I’d not seen in him at that point, and he got up from his desk and came to stand in front of me. “Jackie, stick to the profiles. Okay?”

I narrowed my eyes, trying to feel him out. He was always a bit stiff, but now he was tense.

“Wayne, what...What’s the problem?”

“There’s no problem, Kelly. The Chronicle just isn’t the place for that kind of writing. That’s all.”

“That kind? What do you mean?” I pressed him, and felt him pulling away. Not physically, but emotionally. He didn’t want to debate with me, and felt he couldn’t or shouldn’t explain his reasons.

He cleared his throat and looked more deeply into my eyes. It wasn’t a standoff per se but I could sense that something wasn’t quite right between us. For whatever reason, Wayne wanted absolutely nothing to do with the story of the missing women.

If it feels wrong, it is wrong. The words of my old professor echoed in my mind. There was definitely more to the story than I realized. But whatever it was, this wasn’t the time to ask.

“O-okay. Yeah, no problem. Um, just forget I mentioned it.”

Obviously, I had no such plans to forget the cases. If anything, the strange behavior they elicited in Wayne only encouraged me to dig deeper. But from that point on, I had to research the story – my story – on my time.