Beatrice Arnold, a college student working the night shift, was the last-known person to speak to the missing girl. At 10:47 p.m., Beatrice was perched on a stool behind the counter, reading a tattered copy of The Second Sex. She would be the first to recall seeing Suzanne Lombard and the first to contact the FBI once the disappearance hit the news.

At 10:48 p.m., a balding man with long, stringy blond hair entered the store. On the Internet, he’d come to be known as Riff-Raff, but the FBI identified him as Davy Oksenberg, a long-haul trucker out of Jacksonville with a history of domestic violence. Oksenberg bought beef jerky and Gatorade. He paid cash and asked for his receipt but idled at the counter, flirting with Beatrice Arnold, in no apparent hurry to get back on the road.

The first and best suspect in the case, Oksenberg had been questioned repeatedly by the FBI in the weeks and months after the disappearance. His rig was searched and searched again, but no trace of the missing girl was found. Grudgingly, the FBI cleared him, but not before Oksenberg lost his job and received dozens of death threats.

After his departure, the store fell still. An eternity ticked by . . . and then you saw her for the first time—the fourteen-year-old girl in an oversized hoodie and Phillies baseball cap, a Hello Kitty backpack slung over one shoulder. She’d been in the store the whole time, standing in the camera’s blind spot. To add a layer of intrigue, no one could say for certain how Suzanne came to be in the store in the first place. Beatrice Arnold didn’t remember seeing her enter, and the security tape offered no answers.

The hoodie hung off her in great, draping folds. She was a pale, fragile stalk of a girl. The media liked to contrast the black-and-white footage with colorful family photographs—the smiling blonde girl in the blue bridesmaid’s dress, the smiling girl at the beach with her mother, the smiling girl reading a book and gazing out the window. They stood in bold relief to the grim-faced kid in the baseball cap, hands thrust deep in pockets, hunched low like an animal watching warily from its burrow.

Suzanne wandered up and down the aisles, but her head was cocked toward the front window. One hundred and seventy-nine seconds passed. Something out the window caught her eye, and her posture changed. A vehicle perhaps. She snatched three items off the shelves: Ring Dings, a Dr Pepper, and a box of Red Vines licorice. A combination now known eerily as the Lost Girl’s Picnic. Suzanne also paid in cash, dumping crumpled dollar bills, quarters, and pennies on the counter before shoving her purchases into her backpack.

The security camera caught her eye, and for a long moment Suzanne gazed up at it—an expression frozen in time and, like Mona Lisa’s smile, interpreted a thousand different ways.