I had stayed until midnight the night I first unraveled the code of the files. It had not been dedication that had kept me glued to the pages.
The letters were not always written to Dr. Richards. Many were firsthand accounts, all had most words blacked out. I knew all I was supposed to be doing was finding the dates to figure out some kind of order, but I quickly realized it would be more complicated than that. While some were dated in the upper left-hand corner in standard letter format, the rest required full readings to find some mention of a day, a time, or even a month.
Soon, even if letters were clearly dated, I found myself reading them in their entirety. Several I read more than once. I had to put on my sweater due to the goose bumps on my arms.
When the clock hit 12:30, I grabbed my coat and hurried home, fearing Tom would be pacing in alarm. But he wasn’t home either, which meant he was out with his law-school buddies, blowing off steam.
I made angry laps around the apartment. I’d never been a drinker, and while I didn’t disapprove of alcohol, I certainly didn’t like how it was contributing to my solitude. He hadn’t even stopped by to leave me a note to say he was going out.
The next morning, I left without leaving him a note, making his lunch, or waking him, since had slept through his alarm.
I got to work early and waited. When Dr. Richards arrived, I practically blocked his entrance into his office, holding up one of the files.
“What is this?”
The professor’s head was down as usually, but upon seeing the letters in my hand, he glanced at my face and told me to come in and close the door.
He sat down, folding his fingers behind his thick, dark-red hair, which was already streaked with silver, even though he wasn’t yet thirty.
“You can read them?” he asked.
“Of course I can read them.” I hoped the bags under my eyes didn’t give away how long it had taken me. “I don’t know how else to say this: It’s disturbing. These are letters about people disappearing, being abducted, losing their loved ones. This has nothing to do with astronomy.”
“It has everything to do with astronomy,” he responded quietly.
I stood with my arms folded across my chest, waiting for him to continue. “I’ll be honest with you, Miss Stanson—”
“It’s Mrs. Roseworth.”
“I suspected you were bright, but I actually didn’t think you’d figure out the system this quickly.”
“Well, you thought wrong. And I’m wondering if you should be giving this to police instead of to me to organize for you.”
The professor reached deep into his pants pockets, and then fumbled in the interior of his coat, finally locating his keys. He pivoted his chair around and unlocked an old file cabinet behind him, pulled out a drawer, took out a thick envelope, and slid it across the desk.
“Open it.”
I picked it up and lifted the clasp. I expected to find more blacked-out papers, but instead saw what looked to be hundreds of photographs of varying sizes.
“What is this?”
“Those are the people we’re trying to help. They’ve had someone disappear, or are missing themselves. I keep that envelope close by, and about once a day I open it, to remind myself why it’s so important to keep all this so … shall we say … cryptic.”
I once again looked around at the posters of space and maps of various states and countries, connected with pushpins, notes, and coordinates.
“What’s going on here?”
Dr. Richards chewed on his lip.
“I will tell you one thing: The second I think you’re up to something illegal, I’ll go to the police.”
“It’s nothing like that. But you have permission to do so if I ever break a law. I suppose you could say that some people come to me when someone they love goes missing.”
“Why would they come to you? You’re an astronomy professor.”
“Because they can’t get answers from police. And they know something is wrong. I believe we have the ability to tell—to sense even—that something has happened beyond our understanding.”
I raised my eyebrow.
“Has anything ever occurred in your life that you can’t explain?”
“Honestly, no.”
“Then you’re lucky, and I hope, for your sake, that the rest of your life goes that way.”
“I don’t understand. Why would they come to you if someone is missing?”
“They don’t just come to me. They come to all of us who are trying to find the truth.”
“What truth?”
“That the government is aware of people disappearing and refuses to acknowledge it. I really shouldn’t discuss this anymore until you agree to keep what we do silent. I had to see first if you could even decipher how we communicate–-it can get complicated. Maybe I should have you sign something.”
“Does the university know about this?”
“Oh, no. I’d be fired if they knew the amount of time I devote to this. They pay me to teach students about stars; students who actually don’t care about stars and only want to fulfill their undergraduate demands.”
Dr. Richards then added quickly, “I’ll pay you to do this on the side.”
I tried to not let on that at that very moment, I was ensnared. The student loans Tom would rack up by graduation seemed insurmountable.
“I won’t do anything that’s illegal, and I won’t keep quiet if I even think you’re doing something that harms someone.”
“There’s nothing harmful about anything we’re doing. Honestly, most people would laugh if you told them what we do.”
“And what is it, exactly, that you do?”
“Start organizing all those papers by date. You’ll find the reference to a date on every other page. I’ll pay you a $1.50 an hour.”
I started doing the math in my head. It didn’t even meet minimum wage standards for 1969, but it wouldn’t be bad extra money. “I still don’t know what this is about. Why are these people disappearing? Who is taking them?”
Dr. Richards stared hard at me, and then pointed up with one finger. I looked up at the ceiling covered in maps of the stars.
Like all children of the fifties, I’d seen the movies featuring the campy music, the flighty women, and cardboard-cutout heroes who fought against invaders from other worlds. When I had read over the documents from Dr. Richards’s office, I tried not to think about those films. Because the people who documented the missing were real, and they were afraid. The letters, the bizarre phone calls, all came from very serious people.
I only told Tom that I was doing additional freelance copy editing work for a professor. It meant I would be staying later at the office. He certainly didn’t object to the extra cash flow.
So I combed through the papers, leaving the neatly organized stacks in boxes outside the professor’s office each evening. When I arrived the next day, the boxes would be gone.
One night, with the campus silent with snow, I had set a box outside Dr. Richards’s door, surprised to see the light still on. I knocked. He looked up and motioned me in.
“You’ve been getting the checks in your mailbox?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“No, thank you. It’s unacceptable, the conditions of those files.”
“Do they really think…?”
He put down his pen and rubbed his eyes. “Think what?”
“That … aliens … took their loved ones?”
“You’ve read it all. What do you think?”
“I know they’re afraid. They’re really afraid. And I know they’re desperate to believe in something that explains what happened. But if you read the newspapers, you know that terrible things sometimes happen: drugs, alcohol, mental illness. I wonder if you’re feeding them false hope.”
Dr. Richards jutted out his jaw. “It’s a fair criticism. Something I’ve wondered myself. But it’s the commonality that keeps me up at night.”
“Commonality?”
He leaned his chin on his right hand. “How can someone in Malvern, Arkansas, describe the same kind of being that someone in a remote village outside Kenya, Africa, says they saw as well? It’s all the same, with some small variation. Look here.”
He handed me two pieces of paper. “You know this family. The Gobels.”
“How can you forget? It’s terrible.”
“Farm family. Outskirts of Cape Girardeau, Missouri. Wake up one morning to find their two-year-old daughter gone. Massive search, police, FBI, everything. No one finds anything. The mother, Sarah, is so distraught, she hires a hypnotist to force her to remember everything about that night. And when she’s put under—what does Sarah see?”
“It’s not what she sees. It’s what she feels. Something probing her body. Large eyes. Wide forehead, gray skin. Then bright lights…” I paused, finding the words on the page, “… and her daughter going into them.”
“The Semitacalous, from the Zakynthos Island in Greece.” Dr. Richards slid me another folder. “You know their story too: Elderly couple. Go to bed one night. Anna wakes up the next morning, her husband, Georgios, is gone. But she doesn’t need a hypnotist—she remembers everything. The probing, the wide head, the irregular eyes. The bright lights and her husband rising into them.”
He placed the folders on top of each other. “The Gobels’ daughter went missing on August 20, on the same night Georgios Semitacalou disappeared. Neither has ever been seen since.”
He looked down, his pen scratching across the paper before him as if I had never interrupted him. “Now you tell me what to tell these families.”
I looked out his small window. “I … hate it for them. How long can they keep looking? How long do you tell them to keep hoping?”
“Forever.”
“Why? How can you even encourage them?”
“Because sometimes they come back,” he said, continuing to write.