The Shelton High School basketball team—Kip and I were teammates—joined in the effort to find Lee, with one of the deputies providing us some basic instructions of how to conduct a search. He didn’t really give us a protocol, and I doubt any of us would have followed it anyway. An inch-by-inch grid was the way they might look for evidence, and that’s fine. We were looking for our buddy’s kid sister.

Kip and I were paired up.

“She’s dead,” he said to me as we scoured the neighborhood.

“You don’t know that.”

We went from house to house along Tamarack Lane. It was almost like a parade, in that there were people sitting outside watching us, urging us, offering to join in.

“I know my sister,” Kip said. “She’s not a flake.”

“No. She’s not.”

“So someone took her and killed her.”

“Maybe he only raped her,” I said.

As if rape were ever an “only” anything.

Kip was stoic about everything that was happening; oddly matter-of-fact about it. It was pretty much how he was about everything. I knew it then and I knew it later when he went to Afghanistan.

“My parents will never get over it,” he said.

“Sure they will,” I said. “We’ll find her and bring her home.”

“No they won’t. Not if she’s raped.”

His words hung in the cooling air. It was a strange response, but I understood because I knew his family. They were very conservative. I’m sure that having a daughter who was raped would be more than difficult for them. I didn’t let it pass through my mind that they would rather have her dead than living with the lasting impact of a sexual assault.

Or living with the label of victim.

“She was raped, you know.”

“Must have asked for it.”

“Some of these girls these days . . .”

That she was a sixth grader would be lost to time. Some drunk somewhere would twist it into her fault—the way people do when they try to keep random evil at bay by affixing blame. It is always easier to sleep at night if the monsters outside your house only knock when you give them cause.

Tamarack Lane is a dead end. Literally. And while there is a “No Dumping” sign posted there, people continue to leave yard debris, grass clippings, and the occasional discarded household item. That evening Kip and I poked through the discards there in search of his sister. Well, Kip poked. I had my mental grid set up and was working systematically through it. It was beginning to get dark, and Kip said that we should knock off, go get a couple of flashlights and try the park.