Summer 1996
The first time my parents’ lawyer called to tell us that my sister’s body might have been found was eight weeks after she disappeared. It was March 1, 1986. By then, every day bled into the next like an endless waking nightmare for my family, especially for my mom. I remember prescription pill bottles taking up a whole shelf in the bathroom closet. My mother may not have been able to pull herself together enough to do laundry or cook dinner, but she always managed to go to the pharmacy or the liquor store.
By early March, Steven was in jail on charges of aggravated kidnapping and second-degree murder, which struck some people as odd, since there was no hard proof that my sister was dead. My parents hadn’t given me any inkling of that as a possibility, not yet. They were still holding out hope that Steven had stashed Turtle away somewhere—maybe at a friend’s house—and that she was alive and unharmed. Because I was seven years old and had never known anyone who died, death was still more a vague idea than an inevitability; it was something that happened to old people, something—so I’d been told—that I wouldn’t have to worry about for a very long time.
Back then I still believed in God. Every morning when I got up, and every night before I went to sleep, I prayed for him to send my sister home. I tried to be as clear as possible about my request: Please let Turtle come home. I don’t remember ever asking for my parents to stop being sad or for Gretchen to stop acting crazy; I knew getting Turtle back would solve all of my family’s other problems.
Imagine Point Pleasant way back in 1986, when the neighborhood was still new enough that even our row of cheap, cookie-cutter town houses had some sheen to it. When Channel 4 News anchorwoman Stacy Middleman stood in our driveway to film a segment on Turtle’s kidnapping, she described us as living in “a quiet family neighborhood in a small community.” She spoke to my parents a few times, her film crew lugging its gear into our living room and taking all afternoon to set up, while Stacy and my mom sat at our kitchen table and looked through the carefully assembled photo albums that documented my sister’s brief, interrupted life. Imagine me peeking around the corner to get a glimpse of the celebrity who was drinking tea with my mother. (Until Turtle’s kidnapping, my mom had been a dedicated coffee junkie, but now her stomach was too weak to handle anything stronger than green tea.) I wanted to ask for Stacy’s autograph, but I was too shy.
We got used to seeing news vans parked outside our house. I guess they felt it made a better story if they filmed their segments at the scene of the crime. They all seemed like nice people who didn’t want to interfere too much with my family’s attempt to keep our pain and worry from bubbling over, which used to happen at the slightest provocation or reminder of Turtle’s absence: back then, just seeing a kid with blond hair was enough to make my mother lose it. All the reporters and behind-the-scenes tech guys did their best to be kind and respectful, but at the end of the day they wanted a good story more than anything else.
When the police found Turtle’s red shoe on the side of Route 22, somehow the press found out before my family. We came home from the mall to find Stacy Middleman reporting live from our sidewalk, holding up a shoe similar to the one that had belonged to my sister; I guess it made a good visual aide. It had been almost a week since the last swarm of reporters had shown up at the house, so we knew right away something big must have happened to prompt their arrival. Gretchen had opted out of our trip to the mall that day; she was alone in the house when the Channel 4 News van pulled up, and she saw the shoe in Stacy’s dainty, well-manicured hand. After closing the curtains and turning off most of the lights, Gretchen took a few of our mom’s Xanax pills and spent the afternoon drawing shallow lines across the skin on her Achilles tendons with a steak knife. The wounds weren’t deep enough to do any lasting damage, but you can still make out the scars if you look closely enough.
But back to the shoe: it was a real blow to our family, but it could have been worse. Lots of little girls owned the same kind of shoes, which our mom had bought from Kmart. Plenty of those same little girls had to have worn the same size. There was a chance—a small one, but still a chance—that it wasn’t her shoe at all. If they’d found, say, Boris, the stuffed bear she’d been clutching when Steven carried her away, it would have been worse, I think, because there would have been no doubt that it had belonged to Turtle. Because Mrs. Souza had used purple thread to reattach his ear, he was unique. There was only one Boris.
The discovery of the red shoe was the first of many false alarms regarding the recovery of my sister’s body. (Even now it makes me shudder to use those words, but they’re better than the alternative of calling them her “remains.”) The police initially thought it was a big deal because of the location of the ditch along a secondary road two miles away from the home Steven Handley shared with his parents. The road was surrounded by woods. At first, the theory was that Steven had tossed the shoe out his car window before or after dumping Turtle somewhere nearby—or maybe it had fallen off without him noticing—and then he’d quickly returned home.
Police and volunteers searched within a two-mile radius surrounding the drainage ditch for fifteen days. They used four cadaver dogs. They scanned from above in a helicopter. They found nothing.
Things like this have happened again and again over the years: someone finds some bones in the woods that look as if they could belong to a human child, authorities are called in to investigate, forensic tests are conducted, and my family waits for weeks, only to learn that the bones belong to an animal and not somebody’s daughter. A tipster in upstate New York calls the police because his downstairs neighbor has a quiet little girl who looks like she could be an older version of Turtle, and our hopes soar at the possibility that every fact we know about her disappearance is somehow wrong. We ignore the ridiculousness of our new theory, in which Steven had an accomplice—someone for whom he was willing to go to prison—who’d whisked my sister away in the night in order to raise her in a middle-class suburb eight hours’ drive away. It’s not impossible. Miracles happen. Never give up hope, people used to tell us; hope will sustain you. Hope only sustains for so long before it corrodes into fantasy. Without evidence, hope becomes delusion. After enough time, people stop grieving with you and start grieving for you. It’s a lonely feeling.
Last year, on Christmas morning, my family got up to find that a sealed white envelope had been slid through our mail slot overnight. Thinking it was a card from a neighbor—there was no stamp, which meant that someone had hand-delivered it—my mother opened it right away.
It was a photograph of Turtle from when she was three years old, asleep in bed. Nobody knows who took the picture. Nobody knows where it came from. When we called the police, they told us it was probably someone’s idea of a sick joke.
Things like this happen more often than you’d think, they said. The world is full of people who like to watch their friends and neighbors suffer. And we’re still supposed to hold on to our hope—even knowing something like that.