I meet Ivan one night at his house, which he shares with several large dogs who sniff around continually for the meat he’s just smoked himself and served me on a paper plate. It is the most delicious meat I have ever encountered. In Montana, people have smokers in their yards with the same ubiquity that the rest of America has backyard grills. To me they’re a cultural oddity; something I didn’t even know an individual person could own until I came here and saw how everyone owns one. Alyssa is also at Ivan’s with her daughter. Though they’ve long since broken up, Alyssa and Ivan remain close friends. People wander in and out. Leather-jacketed motorcycle-driving type of tough guys who shake my hand, graze at Ivan’s meat, wander outside to smoke and drink beer. Ivan’s hair is shorter now, and his face is rounder than in the videos, but he looks like a solid Viking descendent.
Ivan was Rocky’s best friend growing up. As kids, they played Pong and Atari, rode bikes around the neighborhood. Ivan says Rocky was always in trouble—stealing, drinking—but he kept quiet about his problems at home. One day, Ivan says Rocky just vanished and it turned out he’d gone into Pine Hills for the better part of a year, and after that, Rocky moved to Florida for a while to live with his real mom, who had relocated there, and Ivan didn’t hear anything about him.
Ivan and Rocky reconnected after Rocky and Michelle got together and the kids were born. Then Ivan and Alyssa started dating, and they moved in together, and Rocky would sometimes come by the house to hang out with Ivan, but Michelle almost never came. “Her age is something he never talked about,” Ivan told me. “I knew he was controlling, but I never knew he was abusive.”
In the early days, Rocky and Ivan partied together, snorting coke, drinking to oblivion. But after a while, Ivan said he’d had enough. He slowed down, stopped partying, went to school, and became a designer at a consulting firm for electrical transmissions. “He didn’t want to quit,” Ivan says. “He had no intention of quitting … I’d be like, ‘Dude, you’re going to kill yourself. What’re you doing? Enough’s enough.’ And he’d say, ‘I’ll be fine.’ ”
The two would go weeks, sometimes longer, without talking. Rocky wasn’t open to confrontation when it came to what he considered his personal life—which was anything to do with Michelle and the kids. Ivan had started dating Alyssa when he was in his early twenties, and slowly, as he heard stories from Alyssa of what was going on in Michelle’s house, he’d try to broach the subject with Rocky. “[Rocky would] say things like, ‘Dude, it’s none of your business.’ He was dealing with it; it was his family and don’t worry about it,” Ivan told me.
Ivan knew things were bad, but he didn’t know just how bad, and he didn’t know what to do. On several occasions, when Michelle managed to get away for a few hours to Alyssa and Ivan’s place, she’d wonder aloud what Rocky was capable of. She’d talk vaguely about how he’d threatened her or threatened the kids. Ivan said he didn’t realize what she was really asking him, how he was the only friend she knew who’d grown up with Rocky, and she wanted to know, needed to know, whether her husband would ever follow through on his threats to kill her, to kill their children. Ivan didn’t understand that she was speaking this kind of code, using the words most victims of domestic violence use—weighed under by shame, by fear, by economics. Ivan would say to her, “I couldn’t see him hurting you, especially not the kids.” Never the kids.
What Ivan didn’t know and Michelle didn’t share was that Rocky would sometimes take the kids away from Michelle if he was angry at her. He’d disappear with them for hours, take them to the movies, camping, or wherever, and Michelle would be stuck there at home, worried, frantic that maybe this time he wouldn’t come back, and the kids became pawns, a way for him to keep her obedient, conciliatory. A way for him to make sure she didn’t leave. By the time he’d return, she’d just be thankful they were okay. He didn’t need to hit her. He had all the control he required.
Alyssa and Melanie spent more time at Michelle’s house than anyone in those years. Melanie, by now, had developed a full-blown drug habit herself. Rocky had offered her a hit of meth when she was in high school and for the first time ever she’d felt like she could focus. It was a kind of self-medication for her, kept her alert for days on end so that she could do her schoolwork and hang with her friends and still have time to do whatever came her way. She didn’t like Rocky, didn’t like to be around him, but he provided her with drugs and so she tolerated his mania. They’d be out there in the garage, away from the house, and Rocky would have one or the other of his Mustangs in there, hood up, wheels off, and he’d talk and talk and talk, a completely different human being from the silent man with downcast eyes who’d sit at their holiday table. Melanie says he dabbled in dealing, earning a little extra cash on the side. As a construction worker, he was often unemployed through the winter, and since he refused to allow Michelle to work, money was always tight.
Once, Melanie said, he took her with him on a drug deal across state lines, to North Dakota. Crossing state lines drew a bigger charge if he got caught, Rocky told her, so he was bringing her along, and all she had to do was say the drugs were hers if they got caught. She was a minor and she’d hardly be in trouble at all, he’d promised. Melanie was young and stupid and wanted drugs, so she went along with it. They did these occasional drug runs, leaving after Michelle went to bed, and getting back home before she’d wake. He’d give Melanie an ounce of weed for going with him. Those moments sometimes haunt her now, especially since she has children of her own. She’s been clean for a while now, a few years, but the pull toward drugs is always there, and the terrible knowledge of all she’s skirted is like a deep-bellied tug that just never quite goes away.
As the years went by, Melanie says, Rocky grew more and more paranoid, the drugs took over logic and reason. He told her once that the FBI was watching him, watching both of them. That they couldn’t be too careful. He thought they had cameras set up in the alley behind his house. Melanie knew it was the drugs talking, but she kept quiet and tried to ignore his ranting. After he started shooting up, Melanie says she stopped coming around. She was in her late teens by then, and one night Rocky told her the Feds were coming out of the garbage cans in the alleyway, and she says she just couldn’t be around him anymore. It was exhausting. In the year before the murders, Rocky had gotten clean, in fact. But Melanie says it was too late, his mind already far too compromised.
Alyssa says Rocky tried to entice her with drugs, too, early on, but she refused him. Alyssa says she never trusted him after the day he drove into oncoming traffic to scream at Michelle. It was a glimpse into his madness, how he’d put his own and others’ lives in danger to avenge the perception he had of being wronged. There were times he’d yell at Michelle for how often Alyssa came over, for how much time they spent together, but Alyssa seemed to be the one person he couldn’t force Michelle to avoid.
Still, Michelle didn’t confess to Alyssa just how much she put up with from Rocky. And their marriage wasn’t without the normal pressures of most marriages: finances, young children, expectations and responsibilities in and out of the home.
Sally says Michelle always wanted to go to college, but felt she had to wait until her kids were in school. Once Kyle started kindergarten, she enrolled immediately at Montana State University in Billings and applied for financial aid. The school told her she had to show her parents’ tax returns in order to qualify for any kind of aid and she was aghast. She’d been on her own for years by then; they hadn’t claimed her since she was maybe fifteen, and she told the school she wouldn’t do it, there had to be some other way to qualify for financial aid. As an adult, with no income of her own outside of her boyfriend, and no savings, she thought she’d just automatically qualify for aid.
Get married, they told her, and you’ll qualify.
Sally got a call that very afternoon from Michelle. She said she and Rocky were going to get married at a justice of the peace the following Wednesday afternoon and could Sally attend. It was both sudden and anticlimactic. She and Rocky had been together for nearly eight years by that point. For Michelle, it was the biggest irony of her life, a system that forced her to marry a man she was working so hard to leave.
In their wedding photos, Michelle is painfully thin and wears a pastel tea-length dress. Kristy and Kyle crawl on the grass underneath the table where Michelle and Rocky cut their cake. Both families are there, a couple of other guests, and the reception is held under a picnic awning at the park. The day is sunny, everything a verdant green. Michelle isn’t smiling.
At MSU that fall, she began taking her required general education courses. Her plan was to be a nurse. She’d never forgotten how the nurses had cared for Kristy when she was in the NICU, how much she credited them with keeping her daughter alive. The campus was close enough to her house that she could walk. So she’d drop off the kids at their school, and then she’d go to school herself, and always, always, there was Rocky, following her on the days he could, making sure she was going where she said she was going, doing what she said she was doing. He made no attempt to hide the fact that he was following her, as if he wanted her to know, wanted her to get the message that she was his to control, that he was allowing her this luxury of school, but one misstep, and it would all be taken away from her.
She found it difficult to study in the afternoons or evenings, with the kids always in need of something—food, entertainment, bedtime routines—and Rocky always interrupting, so she told him she needed to study in the library or she had no hope of passing her classes. But Rocky refused. She told him she had a study group, other students from her classes. They were all meeting in the library. But still Rocky refused. She could study at home, or she could forget college. So she lied. Told him she’d signed up for another class, and then snuck to the library to study in peace and quiet. She had to track it, the schedule, to make sure she didn’t screw up and miss a study session or Rocky would know. Until her death, she managed to keep this lie from him.
In the fall of 2001, Michelle began to suspect Rocky was having an affair. She claimed to have evidence of this affair, but Rocky denied it. Alyssa remembers talking to her about it, hearing her say she’d put up with so much from Rocky already, that she wasn’t going to put up with this. Sally thinks of it with a slightly different shading: “Michelle needed a reason to leave him. She had too much pride to just go, and she knew he’d come find her.” The affair provided a kind of cover for Michelle, a rationalization to end a marriage that anyone would understand. Michelle said she was afraid she’d catch a disease, so Sally took her to see a doctor at the Riverstone Clinic. She said she couldn’t study; she was so consumed by fear and anger. She had always been a bit of a hypochondriac, Sally said. And she needed to be able to do her homework. The doctor gave her a prescription for antidepressants. Later, Michelle confessed to Sally that Rocky found them, said he wasn’t going to have a “psycho-wife” on meds, and threw them away.
One afternoon in late September, Michelle showed up at Sally’s house with the kids and asked her mom to watch them. She said she was going home to confront Rocky about the affair. Whatever you do, Sally remembers Michelle saying to her, don’t let Rocky take them. And then she left.
An hour and a half later, Rocky showed up at Sally’s house. She saw his white Subaru pull up to the curb and she ran to the front door to lock it, following Michelle’s instructions. He had a look in his eye that scared her, she later said. To Sally, Rocky had always been just a silent presence at the dinner table, or a shadow sitting in a car. To see him now, his face twisted with rage, was shocking. He stormed through her yard, arrived at the back door just as she clicked the dead bolt. He threw his body against the door and she heard a crack. She told Kristy and Kyle to go to the living room. Melanie was there, too, six months pregnant. Sally heard another crack as Rocky continued to pound the door with his small frame. She yelled to Melanie to call 911. Kristy and Kyle were on her couch, and when she looked at them she saw something that chills her to this day. They didn’t show terror or hysterics. They weren’t screaming. They weren’t crying. They had gone still, their eyes in a kind of catatonia. My god, Sally thought, they’ve seen this before. They’ve seen their father like this.
She heard the crack of glass as Rocky broke the back door window, and then his pounding footsteps across the kitchen. She threw her body on top of Kristy and Kyle, grabbed hold of the couch, and tried to shield them from their father. Rocky grabbed Sally by her neck and one arm, and threw her off them. He grabbed Kristy, held her around the waist. Kristy didn’t make a sound, except to say to Sally, “It’s okay, Bugga. I’ll go.” By now, Melanie had called 911. Sally was still partially atop Kyle. Rocky’s arm was dripping blood all over. He stormed past Melanie, who tried to block him from leaving through the front door. With one hand, he yanked her away violently. And then he was at the door of his car, tossing in Kristy like an oversized stuffed animal he’d won from a county fair. He peeled out from Sally’s house.
It was over in minutes.
The police, when they came, were uninterested, Sally said. They asked her what she wanted them to charge Rocky with. “I mean, isn’t that your job?” she remembers thinking. A year after the murders, the chief of police at the time, Ron Tussing, would acknowledge to a local reporter that they could have acted slightly more “sympathetic,” adding, however, “it’s obviously more routine for us than it is for the victim in these cases.”
Rocky was eventually charged with misdemeanor criminal mischief for breaking in to Sally’s house. The police report filed from that day downplayed, in Sally’s opinion, the violence of the moment … the breaking glass, the screaming, the volcanic rage in Rocky’s body. It said only that Rocky “broke out the rear window at his mother-in-law’s residence while gaining entry into her home to remove his nine-year-old daughter.” (She was seven.) But Sally has photographs from that night showing the broken glass, the blood on her wall, the injuries to Melanie, whose arm bruised from elbow to wrist, scrapes and scabs where he had drawn blood. And Sally has her own memory of the children’s eyes—so vacant, so nonplussed—and Rocky’s eyes, so terrifyingly cold. A look she would come to describe as sheer evil.
Michelle and Kyle slept at her mom’s house that night. It was the end of September 2001, and for the first time since she had gotten together with Rocky, Michelle began to tell Sally of her years with him, of how he controlled her movements and who she socialized with, of how he tried to keep her from seeing Alyssa, of how he’d take the kids for leverage, of how he’d threaten the three of them. Stories of being beaten in front of the children. Many people told me they didn’t think Rocky was physically abusive. Gordon and Sarah, Paul, Melanie. None of them saw outright evidence, they told me. Sarah says she’d have seen bruises on Michelle at some point and never did. But Sally and Alyssa both say Rocky’s abuse was physical, and Michelle herself wrote of his physical abuse in an affidavit that she later recanted. Sally tells me this as we sit on her couch, a large framed photo of Michelle and the two children looming in the corner. Sally’s house is just a mile from where Michelle lived and died with her children, in a quiet corner of Billings near the airport and Montana State University, where Michelle took her classes. Directly behind Michelle’s house is a parking lot for the emergency room of St. Vincent’s Hospital, literally steps away from where she died.
That night was the first time Sally heard about a rattlesnake Rocky had recently acquired from somewhere and kept in a cage in their living room. Michelle was terrified. He told her he would put it in her bed while she slept or sneak it into the shower with her. A murder that would look like a freak accident. Sally understood immediately that her daughter’s situation was far beyond her own casual acquaintance with domestic violence. She sat and listened, but felt ill-equipped about what, exactly, to do. She called Paul and asked him to get rid of the snake. She begged Michelle to take out a restraining order against Rocky. Michelle promised her mother that she would.
“I urged her to write it down, all of it,” Sally said. And Michelle did. In her affidavit, she wrote: “He beat me in front of my kids. One of the times was Tuesday night on the back porch in front of my son—Kyle. He made death threats in front of my children, sisters and his parents. The death threats were that he would kill me, himself and my kids if I ever leave him.”1
Rocky and Kristy, meanwhile, had spent the night in his car. Later, Kristy would say they’d gone “camping.” In the morning, he was arrested when he returned home to get items to stock the family’s camper; presumably he’d been planning to take Kristy camping in the woods for the weekend. Instead, he went to jail.
Michelle filed for a restraining order. The charge was called partner and family misdemeanor assault (PFMA), and the attorney general’s office filed it—in the same court docket—alongside Sally’s earlier complaint, linking the two in an administrative hiccup that would have far-reaching consequences. In Montana, it takes three PFMA charges before a domestic violence misdemeanor assault can be charged as a felony.2
That Saturday night, with Rocky in a holding cell at the local jail, Alyssa took Michelle to a bar for her birthday. It was Michelle’s first time in a bar. The first time the sisters went out, alone, without fear of Rocky. Michelle just couldn’t quite relax, Alyssa said. She worried about the kids, about whether she was doing the right thing with Rocky. She didn’t want to keep her kids from their father; she just wanted their father to change.
“She had one drink,” Alyssa said. And then she just wanted to go home, be with the kids. She was twenty-three years old.
“He tried to convince Michelle that the outside world was where the danger was,” Melanie told me. “His influence was huge. He didn’t want her to see that [the danger] was him. He wasn’t safe.”
On Monday, Sarah and Gordon bailed Rocky out of jail for $500. Sarah says it was the only time they’d ever bailed him out, that she was against it but decided not to stand in Gordon’s way, and that she called Michelle to tell her. She says that Rocky had called over the weekend, crying, upset, saying he didn’t do anything wrong, he was just a father trying to get his child. And then Gordon called a bail bondsman who happened to be a woman, and he remembers her telling him how a lot of “these women” just make all this stuff up about violence. They called Michelle and said they were going to get him. This was back when Sarah and Gordon believed that a restraining order mattered.
Michelle, in Sally’s words, “freaked out.” She started yelling on the phone, and they promised her they were taking him to his brother’s house and he would stay there until things were sorted out, whatever that meant. Sarah thought if he stayed with Mike they could account for him better. And they thought he had maybe changed. He’d been clean for the better part of six months by then. Michelle still had her order of protection. Sarah said she was “wound up. She was not the Michelle I knew.” She was irrational, angry one minute and scared the next. She said she wouldn’t go to a shelter—why should she? The house was hers, her father’s. And Rocky would find them anyway. She said she’d become an exotic dancer to support the kids. Then she said she’d be fine, they’d all be fine, because her father had given her Mace. The Mace would protect her. The Mace would keep her safe.
“There was no reasoning with her,” Sarah said.
Michelle’s response was the response of most victims.
She thought of the children.
She did not think of the criminal justice system, or whatever domestic violence resources were available to her. She did not calculate what areas of Billings would be off-limits to Rocky with her order of protection. Her response was autonomic: fight or flight? What do you do if a bear is coming at you? Do you rear up and scream to make yourself big or do you play dead? You certainly don’t sit and consider the wildlife protection services that might be available to you if the bear would only give you a little time to gather yourself together.
And then there’s this: the bear isn’t just coming at you. It’s coming at your children, too. What do you do?
Would the district attorney be there, in her house, when Rocky was released? Ready to protect her? Would a police officer be there, gun drawn, convincing Rocky that Michelle and the children hadn’t meant to piss him off? Would her family members be there? Would anyone, anywhere, in any system be there to stop whatever he might do? To stop the rattlesnake from slithering into her bed at three a.m.? To deflect the bullet that might fly from a grandfather’s heirloom rifle? Melanie said the minute she got that call from Gordon and Sarah, Michelle’s demeanor changed. “Her confidence about the restraining order, everything changed,” Melanie said.
Michelle recanted.
This is one of the most profoundly misunderstood moments in any domestic violence situation.
Michelle did not recant because she was a coward, or because she believed she had overreacted, or because she believed Rocky to be any less dangerous. She did not recant because she was crazy, or because she was a drama queen, or because any of this was anything less than a matter of life and death. She did not recant because she had lied. She recanted to stay alive. She recanted to keep her children alive.
Victims stay because they know that any sudden move will provoke the bear.
They stay because they have developed tools, over the years, that have sometimes worked to calm down an angry partner: pleading, begging, cajoling, promising, and public displays of solidarity, including against the very people—police, advocates, judges, lawyers, family—who might be the only ones capable of saving their lives.
They stay because they see the bear coming for them. And they want to live.
Why victims stay isn’t the question we need to be asking. Rather, I think a better question is: how do we protect this person? No qualifiers. No musing about why she stayed or what she might appear to be doing or not doing. Just one simple question: how do we protect her?
Within minutes of Rocky’s arrival at his brother’s house, Michelle was on the phone with him, making plans, making promises, negotiating—though she wouldn’t have put it this way—for her very life. “She needed more time to figure out what she was going to do,” Melanie said. “And now I know it was all out of fear, her changing instantly as soon as she knew Rocky was out of jail.”
Michelle stormed into the Billings district attorney’s office, hysterical, as the former district attorney, Stacy Farmer (now Tenney) described it to me later. Michelle recanted everything. He’d never made a threat, she said. There was no snake. She was the one who was to blame. He was a wonderful husband. A wonderful father. It was the two of them, her and Rocky, against the world. The system was doing this to her family. Stacey Tenney said she knew Michelle was lying. Of course she was lying. But what can a prosecutor do with a hostile witness? There was no evidence; there was no witness.
Years later, I would think of Michelle, this moment, as I’d listen to a domestic violence advocate tell me: “We now know it’s the ones who don’t show up in court, who don’t renew the restraining orders, who are in the most danger.”3
Stacy Tenney said the snake thing got them all. It was just so specific a detail, such an obvious fact in the shape of the overall story, but at the house, when the police supposedly checked, there was no snake. If there’d been a snake, they might have had material evidence. But they never found a snake. (It is also unclear if they looked. Did they check the garage? Police reports in Montana are not public record.) It was her word against his, and now she was going back on her word, siding with him. What could they do? In court documents, the affidavit filed in support of Sally’s claim said just two sentences about the violent incident at her house: “Def broke out the rear door window at his mother in laws [sic] residence while gaining entry into her home to remove his nine year old [sic] daughter. The def was upset that his wife had dropped her off there while the two of them were involved in a domestic dispute.” Nothing about assaulting Sally or Melanie, nothing about the blood on Sally’s wall, her account of the glazed look of the children, the terror and sheer strength of Rocky in that moment.
“The criminal justice system,” Tenney told me, “isn’t set up for uncooperative witnesses.” And Tenney had enormous gaps in her knowledge, just as they all did then about Rocky and Michelle’s history. I’ll hear this same thing from prosecutors around the country over the years.
But I’ll also hear this: murder trials happen every day in this country without victim cooperation.
Upon bailing out of jail, Rocky broke the restraining order immediately by accepting the call from Michelle. She later said he had a right to talk to his kids. They met the following afternoon, at North Park, where she and Alyssa used to hang out and smoke cigarettes after school. It must have seemed like another lifetime to Michelle. No one knows exactly what Rocky said to her, but he convinced her to let him return home. Perhaps he found a way to remind her that it was his work that paid the bills, kept food on the table, clothes on the kids’ backs. He did provide for her; he also kept her from providing for herself. And where could Michelle hide in the small city of Billings, where everyone knows everyone? Was she going to pull the kids out of school and sequester all three of them at the top of a glacier?
And now she’d gone and invited bureaucracy into the privacy of their home, their life. “It broke so many boundaries between them, her telling on him,” Alyssa said. “She was exposing him for who he really was in the eyes of others—something she hadn’t done before. It was taking some of his control from him, and she had to give it back to him in order to not die.”
Earlier that year, Michelle had received a small inheritance from her grandfather in North Dakota. With the money, she bought a camper for their weekend trips, and then gave the rest to her father, in secret, as a down payment on the house she and Rocky had been renting from him ever since they’d left Rocky’s tiny trailer. It was part of her long-term strategy. Her dad would act as the bank since she had no credit and no employment history, and only her name would appear on the deed, so that legally she could someday get Rocky out. Rocky, of course, knew none of this.
But even if all that worked out, how would they survive in the short term? She had no income and no work experience. The day he busted through Sally’s door, Rocky had proven that moving in with one of Michelle’s parents wouldn’t stop him. Maybe she should have fled the state, risked going to prison on a kidnapping charge, or left her kids to be raised by a father who was teaching them to swim one day and threatening them with a gun the next. Alyssa suggested every crazy idea she could conjure. Maybe Michelle could move to California. How about getting a wig, covering her body in tattoos, changing her name, escaping the whole place? Canada, maybe? Sarah offered to give Michelle money to go to her sister’s house in Arizona. An old friend of Michelle’s offered a cabin in the woods out of state. But Michelle said to Alyssa, “ ‘Where am I even going to go in this world?’ That man would have spent every bit of energy, every penny tracking her down.”
Alyssa says her mind went to every possible scenario it could in those days. Change Michelle’s identity, squirrel her away, get rid of Rocky somehow. “Your mind goes that far with it, you know?” she says. “I was going, ‘Somebody needs to kill him because he’s going to kill her.’ ”
Michelle recanted for the same reasons victims everywhere recant: they believe they have no other viable choice. Rocky moved back in that day.
When Sarah found out, she immediately called Sally. Neither of them knew that Michelle had already dropped the restraining order. Both women called the police. Sarah told them that Rocky was dangerous, but when Sally called to say she’d pressed charges against him for assaulting her and breaking in to her home, she learned her charges had been dropped. It was that administrative hiccup. Her charges filed in the same docket at Michelle’s and when Michelle recanted, the entire case was dismissed. Today, Sally believes this paperwork error may well have doomed her daughter. How it kept Sally from going ahead and pressing charges herself.
Soon after, Michelle called both women, furious, saying that the police had tried to arrest Rocky in front of the kids and now they were upset. Until Michelle called them, neither woman had known that Michelle had recanted. Michelle told them they needn’t worry about her. She had the Mace, after all.
So Michelle and Rocky cut them off, all of them, both families. October dragged on. Sarah and Gordon, so used to seeing the grandkids a couple of times a week, felt a palpable emptiness. Once, when Rocky drove up to pay back the bail money they’d used to free him, Michelle was in the car with the kids and Gordon went outside. Sarah was still too angry to join him, but she watched through the window as the kids grinned at Gordon. Later, Gordon told her Michelle wouldn’t let the kids get out of the car to hug him. “I could not believe she did that,” Sarah told me. “That was the last time we saw the kids,” she pauses a moment, looks upward, then says, “or any of them.”
As she recounts this moment to me, sitting in their backyard, Gordon silently sobs into his hands.
The Tuesday before Thanksgiving, Alyssa got off work and drove by Michelle’s house. She’d been calling her sister since the night before, and then on and off throughout the day, but Michelle hadn’t answered or called her back; the house was dark and silent, and something immediately felt off to Alyssa, though she could not—not then and not later—pinpoint exactly what. She wanted to stop to check, but she was physically unable to stop her car. Her body willed her forward. She drove on.
She called Sarah asking if she’d spoken to Michelle. Sarah said they’d been cut off since October. When Sarah hung up, she looked at Gordon and said, “Alyssa can’t find Michelle.”
Alyssa made one last call, to her father. “Dad,” she said, “I think something’s wrong.”