About the Book

The Story Behind The Lucky One

By Lori Rader-Day

I live in Chicago, where you get to know your neighbors whether you like it or not. In our case, we have a better-than-average chance of encountering the neighbors to our left, with whom we share a waist-high, chain-link fence. An ugly fence. About two years ago that house was sold, noisily re-developed, and sold again. One day a sweet young family appeared: mom, dad, toddler daughter, and a shaking terrier. The first meeting occurred over the ugly fence, Natallie introducing me to her little girl, Eden.

“Ohhhhh,” I said. “Uh, I don’t usually do this right away, but—”

My next novel, Under a Dark Sky, was due out in a few months, and it featured a protagonist named Eden.

Natallie was thrilled. But then she didn’t know the kind of book I wrote—a dark story with a character getting herself into trouble. A murder book. “Yay,” she said.

Hmm, I thought. Probably not “yay.”

A few weeks later, over the fence again, I brought up the topic of replacing it. It was their fence, but we had been pricing out a taller one to put up alongside it. That would leave them with the original but would probably trap grass in between. “If you wanted to work on this together . . .” I offered.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “We’re interested in that. I hate this fence. Someone could just lean over and grab Eden.”

“Whoa,” I said, stunned. It was my job to imagine the worst. “I never even thought of that.”

“It’s just because I was kidnapped as a child,” Natallie said.

“Stop,” I said. “You? You yourself were kidnapped? You just became the protagonist of my next book.”

She was thrilled again. “Yay,” she said.

Probably not “yay.”

Natallie’s story, in short: Someone reached over the fence at her (inadequate) daycare and took her to their home to give her a snack, but then panicked and set her loose—two years old—in a public spot. She was returned within a few hours, safe. She remembered everything, but the woman was not held accountable.

Is that a novel? Not exactly. But it was the beginning of one.

When I encounter the seeds of my next novel, it’s a physical response. It’s not dissimilar from getting a case of nerves, which makes sense when you think about what it means to discover the project that will consume the next year of your life. It’s a weird thing, when the fuse is lit. It can be only a few words—I was kidnapped as a child—or an article I’m reading. It’s not always violent or immediate. Sometimes it’s more like . . . I’m filing away some little piece of new information when my internal librarian says, Hold up a minute, kid. You have a lot of files in that drawer already.

When I heard Natallie’s story, I realized I had a lot of files in that particular drawer.

* * *

The Lucky One is about a woman who once went missing but was safely returned. Alice Fine’s childhood close call with a kidnapper who was never brought to justice has made her timid. She volunteers with an online community that looks for matches between cold-case missing persons and unidentified remains, a job that reminds her how lucky she was, until the day she spots a face on the site she recognizes—her kidnapper.

On the Doe Network, the website I used as the model for my book’s online sleuth community, I discovered a face I knew. I hadn’t forgotten about Debra Jean Cole, not by a long shot, but it was a surprise to see her there, still gone, still a child.

Debra Jean was twelve years old when she disappeared from my hometown, from the same small subdivision of MarLee in which my family lived. (I have in my memory that she was called “Jeanie,” but that might be wrong.) She rode my school bus, but I shouldn’t have known her. I was only eight. On at least one occasion, though, she and I sat together on the bus. On a day in March, about five months before she would go missing, we planned the colors for my upcoming birthday party and a shopping list.

Pink and green. Streamers.

I remember feeling a little pressured by this bossy girl, presuming that my family could afford party decorations, that I felt the same way about pink and green that she did. I didn’t know that her birthday was eight days after mine, didn’t understand until recently she might have been planning a party for herself that she couldn’t have.

Debra Jean Cole disappeared August 29, 1981. She was considered a runaway. Someone said she could be pregnant—but none of this was reported in the newspaper.

I was shielded from most of this at the time. I know what I know now because when I decided to write about missing persons and the real amateur sleuths who track them in The Lucky One, I wanted to do the kind of research those sleuths might do. For practice, I went to my hometown library and researched Debra Jean.

I couldn’t find a single word published at the time of her disappearance. No Amber Alert, not in 1981. Not even a notice to watch out for her. She was twelve.

Just over two years later, on October 7, 1983, a young woman’s body was found along US 52, very near my grandparents’ house. A farmer and his son made the discovery and, for some reason, called my grandfather, who worked out of his nearby garage as a farm equipment mechanic. He went down the road to advise. They called the police.

It was not Debra Jean.

It was, however, her older sister, Frances Annette Cole.

Annette had gone missing only a couple of days before, probably considered a runaway. She had been raped and shot.

At this point, Debra Jean’s photo finally appeared in the newspaper, alongside news of her sister’s murder. Age twelve, age sixteen.

None of this passes the sniff test, does it? Debra Jean never came home because she never left home.

The Coles’ stepfather, Omer R. “Steve” Beebout, died of a heart attack in 1989 at the age of 49, never facing charges, never confessing a thing. Almost ten years later, authorities matched Beebout’s DNA to the semen left on Annette’s body. Case closed—except one little girl is still missing. She is presumed dead by most, but still listed on NamUs.gov and other sites, for when her body is discovered. If her body is ever found, it will probably be from dumb luck.

The Lucky One isn’t about the Coles, but it owes a great deal to them. For that reason, the book is dedicated in part to the memory of Debra Jean Cole and Frances Annette Cole. When The Lucky One launches in February, I’ll be throwing a big party. You can bet there will be streamers. They’ll be pink and green.

At our house in Chicago, we still haven’t built that fence. Instead, we’ve been talking over it and getting to know new friends. All of us are watching out for Eden and now her new little sister, too. Her name is Alice.