In the weeks and months after Caitlin disappeared, rumors had started to spread. New Cambridge, Ohio, is a small college town of about fifty thousand people, mostly middle class, mostly quiet and pleasant. It was primarily populated by professors and their families and students who came and went based on the academic calendar. Bad things didn’t happen in New Cambridge, at least not bad things that people knew or talked about.
But even if friends tried to insulate us from the gossip, we still heard what people said: Caitlin was pregnant, and we’d sent her away. Caitlin met a lover over the Internet and ran off with him. Caitlin fell victim to an online predator who’d kidnapped her. Or Caitlin simply ran away. Tired of the boring life in a small college town, she’d taken matters into her own hands and run off for greener pastures. California or New York. Seattle or Miami.
The police, of course, interviewed all of our friends and family, and they talked to a handful of my students and examined police records, but they found nothing. In those first days and weeks after Caitlin didn’t come home from her walk, the police treated us with the due deference owed to the parents of a missing and possibly murdered child. They spoke to us in soothing tones, they offered us platitudinal encouragement-which actually felt wonderful to hear-and they answered our calls and questions promptly. But it didn’t take long for cracks to appear.
It began with Buster and his indecent exposure rap. He lived an hour away in Columbus and wasn’t in New Cambridge the day Caitlin disappeared-as far as we knew-but he couldn’t provide a rock-solid alibi. He said he was at his house. An ex-girlfriend claimed to have spoken to him on his cell phone an hour before the disappearance, but she didn’t know where he was while they talked. For a while, Buster became something of a suspect, even though the police refused to call him that to either Abby or me. He endured some heated questioning, and some not so subtle threats in the interview room. While he never requested a lawyer or offered anything close to a confession, and while no evidence linked him to the commission of a crime, word leaked to the newspaper that Caitlin’s uncle-unnamed-was a person of interest in the case.
I never offered a particularly strong defense of my brother. Not to Abby and not to the police. I did tell them I didn’t believe he would harm Caitlin. In fact, he was a surprisingly doting uncle to Caitlin, one who often sent birthday gifts and, on the rare occasions when he visited us, went out of his way to talk to Caitlin as though she were more adult than child.
“But that’s just it, Tom,” Abby said to me on one of the days Buster was going a few rounds with the cops. “He paid so much attention to Caitlin. Didn’t it seem out of character to you?”
It did. It really did. And I allowed the suspicions of the police and Abby’s doubts to become my own to such an extent that they never fully went away, even when the police finished with him and let him go. I still found myself returning to those questions again and again: Where was he that day? Why did he seem to care about Caitlin so much? Was his indecent exposure charge really just a drunken misunderstanding?
But if my doubts about Buster remained alive, even in the back of my mind, the police-absent any conclusive proof of his involvement-moved on to other things. They examined every scrap of mail, every phone call, every bill and financial statement we possessed, and none of it led anywhere-except for the computer we’d purchased for Caitlin, the one she used in her room. There were no unusual e-mails, no evidence that she made contact with a man who might have lured her away or taken her. But Caitlin had been searching the Web the day she disappeared, and in the hours before she walked out the door with Frosty, she’d visited Web sites for Seattle, horses, Amtrak, the U.S. presidency. I didn’t see anything nefarious or unusual in this list. A curious child surfed the Internet, following her train of thought wherever it might go. I do the same thing every day.
But the police jumped on two items from the list-Seattle and Amtrak-and decided there was a decent chance that Caitlin had run away. They questioned us about it, placing special emphasis on whether or not there were difficulties in the home. They asked her friends, her teachers, our neighbors, and many of them said that, while they didn’t believe anything was wrong, they did think Caitlin was something of a distant child, one who kept to herself, one who really didn’t allow others to know what she was thinking. All true, and all things Abby and I had told the police from the very beginning. We didn’t always know what Caitlin was thinking, but what parents of a twelve-year-old do?
From that point on, a slight rift grew between the police and us. They slowly drew down their resources-the SBI removed their consulting agent from the case, the New Cambridge PD cut back to one detective-and we sensed, both Abby and I, that the authorities were no longer taking us seriously, that we were being moved to the back burner as long as no new information came forward to propel the case along.
Did I really believe that Caitlin had run away? I like to tell myself I never did. But I have to admit there were nights-lying in bed, staring at the ceiling-when the results of those Internet searches cycled through my brain like trains themselves. And I had to ask myself, there in the dark: What was Caitlin really thinking or doing? Did anybody-even me-really know?