Day 29 (ONE MORE DAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

On a rainy and blustery April day, when the high winds scoured the sands from the beach and the waves lashed about violently Sgt Vocci showed up on our doorstep with the suitcase, handing it over to me and relaying their new information. The condo owner told the police that Brad had left them a forwarding address for Seattle, which turned out to be a strip joint near the Ballard section of Seattle. Seattle PD had arrested Cynthia Rose for prostitution and released her over five months before. The trail grew cold from there, no one knew where they went but now Sgt Vocci knew to start making inquiries at various strip clubs again. NCIC would show them when she was arrested again and he felt certain we’d get a hit, a real lead, soon enough.

But no more leads came in, it was as if the trail went cold at Seattle. Against Sgt Vocci’s advice I even flew to Seattle one blustery fall day and spend days searching the strip clubs and homeless shelters. At night I drove along the long strip of highway between Seattle and Tacoma where the local prostitutes plied their services. No one knew anything about Cynthia. Defeated and exhausted I returned home.

I’d stopped being depressed and now I was angry, horribly angry.

Calling Momma and Daddy to tell them that Cynthia was missing was the hardest thing I’d ever had to do. Daddy’s terse, “I’m not surprised she came to a bad end” mixed with Momma’s hysterics still give me the chills when I think about it.

Watching me obsess over Cynthia’s disappearance combined with whatever my parents had told Hope Maria kept her on the straight and narrow when she was living with us. She quietly kept wearing her long denim skirts and button up blouses and kept her hours filled with either caring for the triplets or school. We never bonded as close friends in the way Cynthia Rose and I had. Sometimes I got the impression that in those days I frightened Hope Maria. I’m sure I came off as unbalanced many days.

But life moves on, while I heard occasionally from Sgt Vocci that they had no new leads but that detectives in the department were going over the case file again, nothing new turned up.

We moved in those ten years, much more than I would have liked, but in order for Jude to keep his career moving forward it was necessary. He seemed to get promotions every couple of years. Two years after Cynthia’s disappearance he was promoted to one of NASA’s facilities in Florida. I resisted going, I loved our home and didn’t want to sell it but mostly I didn’t want to somewhere else in case Cynthia Rose was still alive and decided to land on our doorstep. This idea, that Cynthia might try to contact me, through work, at my home, nagged at me, gave me sleepless nights and broke my heart. But what could I do, I’d promised in front of God and everyone to love, honor and obey so it was with a heavy heart we left Bay St Louis.

Immediately upon moving Jude broached the idea to me of having more children. He wanted a son or daughter of his own, that was his biologically. So in the middle of moving we started trying to get pregnant.

I hated Florida, there I was miserably pregnant in the insane heat and humidity more intense than anything Biloxi ever dished out, living in a rented house I didn’t particularly like that was a hard six block walk from the beach. I hadn’t been able to get a position immediately with any mental health clinic. I felt stuck in this place against my will. It didn’t help that I suffered from the worse morning sickness I’d ever had and that Jude worked long hours.

So I tried not to bug Sgt Vocci too often or complain to Jude much. I tried to settle into life in south Florida. After unsuccessfully trying to make friends among the largely uneducated housewives in our neighborhood I spent my days concentrating my attention on Seth, Jacob and Rachel and their different personalities.

Sometimes I did some digging on my own at the strip clubs and in the prostitution areas of our part of Florida, looking for any hint of Cynthia Rose, asking questions again only to find no one knew anything. Another repeat of Seattle.

Florida didn’t last long, less than a year, so heavily pregnant and wrangling toddlers I had to pack up so Jude could take his new promotion in Houston. Again I called everyone I could think of in the Biloxi area and left my new contact info on the million to one chance that Cynthia Rose reappeared and tried to contact me.

Houston was a breath of fresh air after the hot humid insularity I’d experienced in our small town in Florida. It was a booming large city, you could almost feel the pulsing vitality of this place. This time we bought a house again, not on the ocean since the beach was a good hour or so from the town of Houston, but in a nice newly built neighborhood surrounding a lake, not too far from the new airport.

But we didn’t have much time to unpack and get settled in before I went into labor and our daughter was born. I wanted to name her after my missing sister Cynthia but somehow it seemed a bit morbid so we named her Abigail Rose instead. Momma came down to help me and oohed and ahhed over our new house and how much the triplets had grown.

Immediately after the birth, two weeks or so, I started looking for a position as a psychologist in the town of Houston. After receiving quite a few offers quickly Jude asked me why I didn’t just hang out my own shingle and start treating patients on my own. He pointed out that by going out on my own I could write my own schedule and specialize in treating people who’d lost loved ones. “You have the compassion and personal experience to make it work,” he said, “use all you’ve gone through with your sister’s disappearance to work for you.”

And so I did, found a small office, made a few contacts at physicians offices and with the local police and human services agencies before hiring a receptionist and a housekeeper and starting to treat people who’d lost the people they loved. For the first time since leaving Bay St Louis I felt useful again, like I was doing something to contribute to the good of society instead of aimlessly drifting through my days in a haze of Barney, applesauce and endless laundry. Some women are meant to be stay at home mothers and some are not. I was not.

One of the women I was treating that lost a daughter in a very similar way to Cynthia Rose’s disappearance and during her treatment she started talking of her involvement with an organization dedicated to finding missing adults, the National Missing Adults Organization. She was involved with the local chapter and told me about how much attending helped her because she felt as though she wasn’t alone in it. Just knowing others had gone through the same experience helped her. That day I broke a rule good therapists never break, I told this patient, Pamela Geldmann about my sister’s disappearance and she convinced me to attend a meeting of the NMAO.

My first meeting at NMAO was eye opening and I plunged into a new cause with a fervent passion. After a few months I started attending the national events and throwing myself head first into the cause of finding the thousands of missing adults in our country. I added it as another part of my life, squeezing in the time between my work, my family and my still futile search for my sister Cynthia Rose.

When Jude was offered a high level bureaucrats position with NASA at their Washington DC office after a few years in Houston I was excited. Moving to the Greater DC area meant to me that I’d have even more time to devote to NMAO and their quest to find the missing. I already held a position on the national council so the move to DC would work on all levels for me.

My parents were thrilled with the move because it would put us a two and a half hour drive from their home.

The kids whined about it. Seth, Jacob and Rachel were now seven and Abigail Rose was four. The kids didn’t want to leave their friends but were excited to see their grandparents, the only grandparents they had considering Jude’s parents had passed away when he was in college.

In some very sick humor that the universe seemed all too eager to inflict upon me I discovered mere days before the move that I was pregnant again. Jude was overjoyed but I was a little less enthusiastic this time. I’d never intended to spend the years of my younger adulthood caring for babies and young children like I had as a teen.

But we went through with it all, I moved again with horrid morning sickness and we settled in an area of northern Virginia just over the DC line called Clarendon. The houses in our neighborhood were beautifully maintained classic homes from the thirties. We moved into a stone Cape Cod with five bedrooms within a ten block walk from the nearest Metro station. This house also had the virtue of a nice mother in law apartment over the garage that I immediately converted to my office.

When I wasn’t being a wife and mother and seeing new patients in my home office I could be found downtown helping out at the NMAO office, still hopeful that one day I’d know what happened to Cynthia Rose. As the organization gained media visibility I was asked to take on the part of speaking in public about the cause nearest my heart, and I appeared on news programs, conferences and talk shows drumming up support for our cause, stalking members of Congress to get legislation passed to allow for a freer exchange of information between law enforcement agencies.

During one appearance while I was in the last month of my pregnancy I’d been surprised at the talk show by a so-called psychic brought on by the host, who asked her what she could see had come of my sister. This woman, whom made me feel very uncomfortable, looked right at me and said on national television, “Your sister is dead, murdered and buried in a potters field.” At her words I fainted and I felt the flicker of hope in my heart for Cynthia’s whereabouts vanish.

I never appeared again on a talk show touting NMAO so rattled I’d been by this trick by the tv producers. From that point on I stuck with conferences and news programs, no more talk shows.