When the results did come in, Ma refused to believe them. I’ll admit I also had a difficult time accepting the data. The state crime lab in Madison reported that there was absolutely no overlap in our DNA samples and the DNA of the bone fragments they’d analyzed. There was no chance the fragments belonged to Dee. Dr. P corroborated this assessment when she noted that, given the advanced decomposition of the fragments and the associated coffin, the individual was likely interred between 1870 and 1920. Further, given the soil strata, the grave had likely been disturbed and the coffin’s original remains scattered. Apparently, someone had emptied the coffin of most of its original contents and buried the dresses and the dog there more recently. Dr. P said she would not conjecture beyond that.
Months later, when a backhoe stripped that same plot of land and they excavated a thousand tightly packed graves, including some coffins that had been stuffed with medical waste—parts of humans, and waste from dissections, and other unspeakable things in jars—they didn’t know who those people were either. Milwaukee had a bad problem with losing track of its people, the living and the dead alike.
Ma didn’t care. She wanted the bones buried next to her anyway. She believed they were Dee’s. We didn’t know what to do. Over and over, she called Dr. P, who told her there was no possibility that they could give the bones to her because it was illegal to do so. Ma called the Journal Sentinel, who refused to engage. She called our congresswoman, who said what politicians always say—I’ll see what I can do. Ultimately, what she could do was very little. Ma became irate and inconsolable. She would throw things at us when we visited her. She smashed all of our photos except Dee’s. The nursing home tried to put her on sedatives, but she refused to take them. She felt she’d come closer than ever before, and now she was being deliberately denied solace. Most days I felt the same way. I had also believed the results would be conclusive, because I’d sunk so much energy into my case against Frank. But I knew I couldn’t and shouldn’t believe any of it now. Still, it wasn’t easy to accept.
Alexis Patterson’s case came to my mind. Alexis was seven years old when she disappeared on her way to school. The Journal Sentinel covered her story, but there was no outpouring of support from around the world, and there was barely any national coverage. In fact, a white supremacist, who was later arrested (but not prosecuted), posted hateful flyers near America’s Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee asking why any white person would care about the disappearance of a Black child. The national outlets seemed, largely, through apathy, to endorse this hateful man’s perspective.
Alexis Patterson was never found. Her family endured far worse than mine: racism, national indifference, bogus tips, and futile citywide searches. Divers skimmed the muck of the Milwaukee River’s bottom: nothing. Much later, an Ohioan claimed his wife, who had no memories of her childhood, was Alexis Patterson. The Sentinel covered this development, too. This woman had a scar under her left eye that matched the scar seven-year-old Alexis had. The Sentinel called this woman, who by then had two children of her own, and she said only, “I am not that girl. That is a ridiculous question.” Police said that, given the woman’s age (she was seven years older than Alexis would have been), it was unlikely this Ohioan was the missing child. But Alexis Patterson’s mother said, “My heart is telling me this is my child. My baby is coming home.”
I understood this sentiment perfectly. So did my mother.
In the wake of the results, I realized that my case against Frank, especially without Dee’s body, was exactly as Dana had described: very weak. It wasn’t that I no longer believed Frank was guilty; I believed it more strongly than ever. But in this retelling, I saw that I had somehow exposed my own complicities more than I had indicted Frank. As I reviewed the pages I’d lent to Dana, it occurred to me that I’d almost built a case against myself.
What emerged most clearly from these memories was that I’d kept Dee’s relationship with Frank a secret; I’d never explicitly tried to deter her from seeing him; and perhaps even more unforgivable, I’d acted badly in the days and weeks and months after her disappearance. First I’d been incredulous, then I’d been distracted and confused, and finally, I’d zeroed in on Frank in a way that had left my family frustrated. Against my own will, this was the narrative that had taken shape. Dana corroborated this assessment when she came by to return the pages I’d lent her. She handed them back to me with an old transcript stapled to the top. I didn’t recognize it.
“Would you be okay if I asked you a few more questions?”
I shrugged. I’d promised myself in the days after we got the results that this time I was really done. Maybe I’d go through the study and clear out some of the files. Maybe I’d finally clean up the apartment. Maybe I’d even try to leave the bounds of the city. (I knew this was all a reach.)
“I don’t know what else there is to ask,” I told her.
“Does anyone else know about the photo you showed me?”
“Wolski. It’s in the police records. That’s it.”
“Has my dad ever seen it?”
Even decades later, I blushed. I shook my head. “Not that I know. Thomas Alexander, he seemed to know about it. Not sure how. Leif thought Erik had seen it too. I don’t think so, though.”
Dana thought on that for a minute. “The photo. What happened that day,” she said. “It’s why you blame yourself . . . for what happened to Dee.”
“Oh, baby,” I said. “I mean. It’s complicated. I don’t really blame myself.”
“You do, though,” she said. “I know. I’ve seen it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“They made a transcript with you too. I found it.”
“A transcript?”
“An interview like they did for everybody else . . . Leif and Dee’s roommates and her friends. I found yours too.”
“I don’t remember any interview,” I said.
She pointed at the transcript she’d stapled to the top of the case. “Read it,” she told me.
“Okay, okay, I will,” I assured her.