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Sylvia

October 1989

Who will save the children? That’s the question I wake up with this morning, the thought that comes barging in without invitation and stays parked there, like the neighbor’s fat cat I can’t seem to shoo away from my garden. I’ll be seventy-five this month, old enough to leave so many thoughts behind, but this one curls its way around the edges of my mind like the ribbons of cream in my afternoon cup of Earl Grey. I rise and do what I have done every day since living alone. I part the yellow ruffled curtains that rim my second-story picture window. I look out the window and beg the sunlight to give me strength enough to start one more day. The sight of the rose bush helps, as does the view of the crumbling red brick wall. Both have always made me feel like I live somewhere enchanted, somewhere far away and storybook, like France, perhaps, or maybe Ireland. Anywhere but here, this greasy-spoon town.

I complete my morning ritual by kneeling next to my bedside table, lighting an amber-scented candle, and saying a simple prayer, the prayer of St. Francis, which I’ve said every morning for as long as I can remember. “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love. Where there is injury, pardon.” And so forth. I’m a believer, but I don’t believe in everything that everybody else in this town seems to. Things aren’t so black and white, so fixed, so certain.

I do believe in the message of hope, though, so each morning I pray, rounding out my morning ritual as if by completing these modest tasks my day will hold some shape. A useless hope, as it never does, the day giving way and deflating to the endless quiet of widowhood. I kneel and complete this simple prayer, but this morning, I add another, more urgent one to it: Who will save the children?

It was the latest poster that got to me. There hadn’t been a new one up in a few years and I had hoped that it was finally over. But last Saturday, as I did my usual grocery shopping in the next town over—for the freshest tomatoes and peas—I couldn’t help but see it. Amidst the wall of frayed missing children’s posters, still white but beginning to yellow, their shining, helpless faces calling out to me—a blizzard of despair—there it was. A new one. Bone-white, crisp, and tacked up next to all the others.

Lucy Spencer. Blond Hair. Age 10. Missing since September 29th, 1989.

It was then I knew there was no turning back. I had to find a way to tell someone who would listen. The children wouldn’t be safe until they stopped them. Until they stopped him.