Published September 20, 2005
There were no Amber Alerts in 1985. In some places you still had to wait twenty-four hours to report a child missing. Then they were treated the same as adult cases. Most police departments had no special training for cases of missing children; they were usually dismissed as lost or a runaway who would turn up given time.
In Davy’s case no ransom was demanded after he disappeared, and though local businesses took up a collection and offered a sizable reward, no credible leads surfaced, no answers to the questions we walked around with day and night. After public interest waned and normal life (for everyone else) resumed, my parents did what they could to raise awareness about Davy’s case, to ensure people wouldn’t forget him.
Some boys remember playing golf, or hunting, or fishing with their dad. Some remember accompanying their father to his alma mater for Saturday college football games, decked out in the school colors, learning the fight song. Some boys recall shooting hoops in the driveway as father-son bonding moments. For me, the special times I remember with my dad revolved around looking for my brother, traipsing in lockstep through woods and farmlands, faithfully replenishing the “Missing” posters that hung around Wynotte and neighboring towns.
There was a poster of Davy on a light pole by the entrance to my school. It remained there all through my high school years, my brother’s eyes watching me as I entered and exited. I tried not to look at it as I passed each day, but I knew it was there. I could feel Davy watching me have the life he was denied, growing taller and leaner while he stayed the same, at least in our minds. All I knew was that the poster faded a little more every year. By the time I graduated, his face had mostly disappeared.
I began noticing that shopkeepers would avoid eye contact when we came in carrying our printed sheets bearing Davy’s photo. One finally told me that, in all honesty, Davy’s “Missing” poster turned people off, made them forget all about spending money in his establishment. The missing kid was bad for business, bad for morale. Wynotte used to be a happy little town, idyllic and insular. Davy had disturbed all that, disrupted the peace the townspeople had taken for granted.
But my father didn’t understand that. I don’t think it registered with him for a long time—much longer than it took my mother—that people no longer thought Davy could be found. They’d given up. And so, whenever he looked at me and said, “I’m going searching; do you want to come?” I would always say yes because I couldn’t bear for him to go it alone, to believe by himself. We would put on cool clothes in the summer and warm clothes in the winter, and out we would go: looking and looking and looking with dogged determination.
On the best days, we would stop afterward and get a McDonald’s hot fudge sundae. Dad liked his with nuts; I liked mine plain. We would sit in the car and eat our sundaes and he would say, “Don’t tell Mom. She’ll say I spoiled your dinner.” And I would promise not to tell. And he would say, “One of these days, we’re going to find your brother.”
And I would promise him that, too, even though I knew one of those promises was impossible to keep.