Standing here on the lawn, I look at the photograph and read the article. She with them now, sharing their ordeal, or is she somewhere else, alone, thinking back on them and smiling a little as sheĭrives a camper along the highway? Why wasn't she in the picture? No family, nowhere she belongs? Where did she come from and how does she fit into the lives of these beautiful people? Is It seems strange to me that the girlfriend is 'unidentified.' Why hasn't her own family reported her missing? Maybe she has However, there is no sign of the camper, a truck or of any of their other belongings. 'We found the camera at a picnic area at the foot of the mountain,' a state trooper is quoted as saying. The picture? That only makes sense since she's not in the photo. Did the 'girlfriend' who accompanied them take It evidently was taken just before a hike,īecause they're all wearing backpacks, and there's a camper in the background. Of the family-the couple, handsome, outdoorsy-looking people about the age of my own parents, and the pretty, laughing daughter. They went for a weeklong camping trip and now, ten days later, they haven't returned. Other times it's a real article with a photograph, like it is today.Ī family-parents, their teenage daughter and an unidentified girlfriend-are missing, believed lost in the San Andres Mountains Only a few lines, one of those filler items they use when the big stories aren't long enough to reach the bottom of the page. Usually, if I look long enough, it's there-a story that fits. I find it at last on page seven of section C. Of the sun on my back and the dew on the grass already drying beneath my feet. I pick up the paper, roll off the rubber band and begin leafing through, standing there in the front yard with the thin rays On the back of my neck, promising the heat of the coming day. I go out this morning to get the paper and although it's still early, barely eight o'clock, the sun is warm on my hair and

Summer of fear by lois duncan