“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Just some stuff,” I said. “Why don’t you go to bed, and I’ll be up in a bit. And in the morning, we can talk some more about what we should do.”

when she left, i closed the door and returned to my desk and opened the folder. Back when I had first collected these clippings, with the idea of possibly doing a book on the case someday, I had arranged them in chronological order.

The first story, dated October 9, carried this headline: “Police Comb Neighborhood for Girl, 5.”

My recollection was that this story hadn’t made the front page. It had been splashed across the top of page three, six columns, with a picture of Jesse Shuttleworth. It was a blurry photo, no doubt blown up from a cheap snapshot, and the larger it got, the poorer the definition. She had curly red hair, brown eyes, a smile to melt your heart. The story rated about fifteen inches. The editors probably hadn’t wanted to go crazy with it. Not yet. She would only have been missing a few hours by the time the first edition closed. She could be at a friend’s, she might be lost. You didn’t want to go and put it on page one, then, just as the paper hit the streets, have people hear on their car radios that she’d been found at a sleepover. So you hedged your bet, you put it on three.

The story, by Renata Sears, one of the paper’s tireless police reporters, read:

The city was holding its breath last night as police combed the Dailey Gardens neighborhood in their hunt for little Jesse Shuttleworth, a 5-year-old kindergarten student who vanished from the park sometime yesterday afternoon.

Jesse’s mother, Carrie Shuttleworth, 32, of Langley Ave., told police Jesse had been playing across the street from their home, in the Dailey mini-park, around 4:15 p.m. when she went missing.

The teary-eyed mother, at a hastily called news conference on her front porch last night, said Jesse had been playing on the swings, and was always good about coming straight home.

“I just want her to be okay,” she said. “I’m just praying that she gets home safely.”

Police refused to speculate about the nature of Jesse’s disappearance, but they have set up a command post at the park, and asked neighbors with any possible information to please drop by. “At the moment, this is a missing-child case, as simple as that,” said Sgt. Dominic Marchi. “We’re hoping that she’ll turn up any time now.”

Police would not discuss a rumor of a scraggly-haired man who was seen near the park earlier in the day.