JUNE 1991
We are walking hand in hand through a beautiful, sun-drenched meadow. In the distance, a line of shady trees marks the edge of a forest. As we approach a small hill, she lets go of my hand and climbs ahead. Seconds later, I reach the top, but she has disappeared. At first I think she has slipped into the forest, but she is nowhere to be seen. I look and look, and call her name, but she is simply gone.
When I wake up I am trembling, drowning in the deepest sadness I have ever known. In the early summer dawn, I can see the shadows of boxes littering the bedroom floor, awaiting the movers who will take them to our new house just outside of Chicago. I grab my sleeping husband and shake him awake.
“Ed! Ed!” I half-sob, half-whisper. “I dreamed I lost my sister.”
AUGUST 1991
The phone rang while I was on deadline. I grabbed it without looking up from my keyboard. I didn’t have time for interruptions. My daily column was going to be late—again. But at least I had a scoop to show for it, if I could only finish the damn thing without distractions. Around me were the familiar sounds of the newsroom—Kevin in the cubicle next to mine, on the phone with a source: “You better not be fucking with me. It’s going in the paper tomorrow.” Our boss, Laura, tapping a stiletto heel and yelling for copy, where the hell is everybody’s copy? Dennis, complaining loudly about the editor recently promoted from our bullpen of reporters: “Didn’t take him long to become an asshole!”
The phone cord knocked a pile of magazines onto the floor. My desk was a disaster, a firetrap of newspapers, discarded drafts of articles, photos of my infant daughter, dead flowers still in the vase, scrawled reminders for the babysitter. It was barely controlled, comfortable chaos, just the way I liked it. Unless this caller had something I could use for tomorrow’s paper, this would be a very short conversation.
“It’s Jerr…,” the caller began, tentatively.
“Yes?” I was ready to slam the phone down.
Pause. “It’s your Mr. K.”
I froze.
I turned away from the keyboard. Mr. K? I hadn’t seen my childhood music teacher, Jerry Kupchynsky, in a decade, maybe longer. Once, he had been the most towering figure in my life, other than my parents. His voice, a booming, yelling voice with a thick Ukrainian accent that never mellowed, was embedded in my brain. I could still hear him from all those years ago: “Playing sounds like cheeken plocking! Wrist back! Elbow out! Again!”
But that was a long time ago. Now I was a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and lived with my husband and my new baby and a live-in nanny in a Manhattan apartment. I was on a first-name basis with chief executives and politicians and billionaires. I hadn’t thought about my old music teacher back in New Jersey, much less picked up my viola, in years. Yet here I was, suddenly feeling like I was twelve years old again. “Your Mr. K” realized it even before I did: he would always be Mr. K, never plain “Jerry,” to me.
This wasn’t a social call. “Stephanie is missing,” he said, his words spilling out quickly. Stephanie, the younger of his two daughters, was, like him, a violin teacher. She had just moved to a new job in upstate New York, he was telling me. When she didn’t show up for lessons a few weeks back, the police searched her apartment. Her groceries were still on the floor, waiting to be put away. But she was nowhere to be found. No note, no sign of struggle… and no trace of where she went. It was as if she just disappeared.
She is simply gone, Mr. K told me. I lost her.
I had grown up with Mr. K’s daughters. The older one, Melanie, was my age. Named for the saintly sidekick to Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, she was just about as perfect: a violin prodigy, brilliant student, conservatory graduate, violinist with the Chicago Symphony. Stephanie, just a few years behind us, was the fun one: a gifted violinist with a mischievous streak, the kind of girl who laughed good-naturedly when she hit a wrong note and who listened to Pink Floyd when her father thought she was practicing Mozart.
And now she was missing.
Could I possibly help get media coverage of her case? Mr. K was asking. Perhaps if others heard about her disappearance, some stranger out there might provide some clues. Maybe she had fallen and hit her head and gotten amnesia, he said. If her story made the news, surely someone would recognize her. Maybe she needed a break and wanted to clear her head alone, away from the phone, for a few days, he said. His voice was pleading.
I forgot about the deadline. And the column. I pulled Kevin in from the next cubicle—he covered the television business and had almost every TV news producer in town on speed dial.
It was unfathomable that fun-loving Stephanie would simply disappear. Mr. K knew that better than anyone. With a new daughter at home myself, I couldn’t even begin to ponder the horror of simply… losing a child. It was too awful to contemplate. Nor could I reconcile this vulnerable, frightened old man on the phone with the invincible, intimidating figure from my childhood.
But I knew what I could do. For the first time in my life, I was the one giving instructions to my old teacher. “Tell me everything, from the start,” I commanded him, flipping open a fresh reporter’s notebook. “Tell me your story.”