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Andrew ELLIS Bates
boyfriend. “She’s a fifteen-year-old girl,” I told them. “Of course she has secrets.” By the time they found a flap of her black windbreaker snagged on a tree branch a few hundred feet from her favorite running trail, I knew Hattie was dead, though I never admitted that to anyone. Instead, I did what the Hamiltons now subject themselves to. I went to churches with Dolly and pleaded, “If you saw anything that night. If you think of anything…” We too went on morning shows and held up pictures of our daughter in her cross-country uniform and said, “Please. Please. Please.” I did those things because you can’t not do them. Who quits? Go silent, and people think you have something to hide. They think you’re the monster we pride ourselves on sniffing out, even though we know it’s impossible. A few years ago, we helped a woman in Virginia search for weeks. She did everything right. She cried so long and hard her body just squeezed the air out of itself once it ran out of tears. Then, finally, one night she asked us to drive her out into the country, to this field you could pick out of anywhere in America. She led us along a deer path and stopped after we’d passed a cluster of spring wildflowers, almost colorless in the dark, but whose fragrances produced visions of violet and yellow. “I don’t know why,” she said, tapping a large, thin piece of shale with the toe of her black nurse’s shoe, “but I buried him right under here. I put him in the ground, and I’m sorry I wasted your time.” “Why?” I asked Dolly that night, after we’d called the police and they’d dug up the boy. “Why do we insist on putting ourselves through other people’s miseries?” We sat in our rental car, a forest green Ford Taurus, letting it