Lisa Gardner - Hide

I wonder about it again, as I traverse yet another crowded subway train, filled with potential danger, and yet emerge safely at my destination. As I climb up the stairs into the rapidly darkening night. As I make a left and head once more to my tiny North End apartment.

My footsteps are brisk and sure, my chin up, my shoulders square. But I'm not simply telegraphing my capabilities to potential muggers. I'm honestly happy to be going home. I'm looking forward to seeing my dog, Bella, and I know that after spending all day cooped up alone, she is looking forward to seeing me.

We will probably go for a jog along the waterfront, even though it's after dark and in a crime-infested city. We'll run very fast. I'll bring a Taser. But we'll go, because Bella and I both like to run, and what else can you do?

I am alive. And I am young, and I am helpless not to look ahead. I want to expand my business someday, maybe have two or three assistants and rent a real office space. More than sewing, I have a flair for color and space. I've been thinking about taking classes in interior design, of building my own little Martha Stewart empire.

Sometimes I think of meeting someone special. I attend the small community church just around the corner. I have made some passing acquaintances. Every now and then, I try to date. Maybe I will fall in love, get married. Maybe, someday, I'll have a baby. We will move to the suburbs. I will plant dozens of roses and paint murals in every room. I will never allow my husband to buy luggage; he will think it's a charming eccentricity

I will have a daughter; in my dreams it's always a daughter, never a son. I will name her Leslie Ann and I will buy her dozens of personalized ceramic mugs.

I think of these things as I reach my apartment building, as I look left, then right, note no strangers lurking in the shadows, then slip the outer-door key from between my clenched fingers and unlock the old, solid wood door. Bright lights fire up the little antechamber, left-hand side covered with a row of slender brass mailboxes. I close the exterior door, making sure it latches behind me.

I get my mail: some bills, some junk mail-good news, a client's check. Then I peer through the glass window of the inner door to make certain the lobby is clear. No one is about.

I enter the lobby, I start climbing up five flights of narrow, creaky stairs. I can already hear Bella above, having caught a whiff of my approach, whining excitedly at the door.

There is only one problem with my fantasies, I think now. In my dreams, no one is ever calling me Tanya. In my dreams, the man I love calls me Annabelle.

IT PLAYED OUT like this: The police weren't going to help me. Paranoid or not, my father had been right: Law enforcement is a system. It exists to aid victims, to catch perpetrators, and to advance key officers' careers. Witnesses, sources-we were fodder along the way, disposable objects inevitably ground up by the huge, bureaucratic machine. I could sit by my phone all day, waiting for a call that would never come. Or I could find Dori Petracelli myself.

My desk was covered in a jumbled pile of fabric scraps, window-treatment sketchings, and client proposals, not an unusual state of affairs for an apartment that offered more ambience than square footage. I gathered the whole mess into my arms and shifted it to the alarmingly large pile tilting dangerously on the coffee table. Now I could see my target: my laptop computer. I booted it up and got to work.

First stop, the website for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. I was greeted with photos of three small children who had been declared missing in the past week. One boy, two girls. One was from Seattle, one from Chicago, the other from St. Louis. All cities where I used to live.

I wonder sometimes if this is what got my mother in the end. That no matter how much we ran, we still ended up running again. If you want to get technical about things, there's no safe place to raise a child. Crime is universal, registered sex offenders live everywhere. I know; I check the databases.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children hosts its own search engine. I entered female, Massachusetts , and missing within 25 years . I clicked on the arrows to launch the search, then sat back and chewed on my thumbnail.

Bella came out from the tiny kitchenette, having just scarfed down her dinner. Now she regarded me reproachfully Run , her gaze said. Outside. Get a leash. Fun .

Bella was a seven-year-old purebred Australian shepherd, her leggy, athletic body a mottled mix of white splashed with patches of brown and blue. Like a lot of Australian shepherds, she had one blue eye, one brown. It gave her a perpetually quizzical look she liked to use to her advantage.

"One moment," I told her.

She whined at me and, when that still didn't work, flopped onto the floor in full doggy snit. I had received Bella in lieu of payment from a client four years ago. Bella had just destroyed the woman's favorite pair of Jimmy Choo heels, and the woman had had enough of the dog's high-strung behavior. Truthfully, Australian sheepdogs aren't good apartment dogs. If you don't keep them occupied, they do get in trouble.

But Bella and I did all right. Mostly because I liked to run and, even entering the middle-aged phase of a dog's life, Bella thought nothing of whipping out a quick six miles.

I would have to take her out soon, or risk losing one of my favorite throw pillows or perhaps a beloved bolt of fabric. Bella always knew how to make her point.

The search was done. My computer screen filled with a scrolling column of bright, happy faces. School photos, close-ups from the family album. Photos of missing children always showed them happy The whole point was to make you hurt worse.

Search results: fifteen.

I reached for the mouse and slowly worked my way down the column: Anna, Gisela,Jennifer,Janeeka, Sandy,Katherine,Katie …

It was hard for me to look at the pictures. Even with my doubts about my father, I always wondered if I might have become one of them. If we hadn't moved, if he hadn't been so obsessed.

I thought again about the locket. Where had it come from? And why, oh why, had I given it to Dori?

Her name did not appear on the list. I allowed myself to exhale. Bella perked up, sensing the release in tension, the possibility of beginning our normal nightly routine.

But then I noticed the dates. None of these cases were older than '97. Despite the open search parameters for time, the database must not go back that far. I chewed on my thumbnail again, debating options.

I could call the hotline, but that might raise too many questions. I preferred the anonymity of Internet searches. Well, at least the appearance of anonymity, since God knows the proliferation of spyware probably meant Big Brother, or at least a marketing mega-machine, was following my every move.

I knew another site to try. I didn't go there as much. It made me sad.

I typed into my Internet search engine: www.doenetwork.org. And in two seconds, I was there.

The Doe Network deals primarily with old missing-persons cases, trying to match skeletalized remains found in one location with a missing-persons report that might have been filed in another jurisdiction. Its motto: "There is no time limit to solving a mystery"

The thought gave me a chill as I sat, one hand now clasping the vial of my mother's ashes, the other hand typing in the search parameter: Massachusetts .

The very first hit sent me reeling. Three photos of the same boy, starting when he was ten, then age-progressed to twenty, then to thirty-five. He had gone missing in 1965 and was presumed dead. One minute he'd been playing in the yard, the next he was gone. A pedophile doing time in Connecticut claimed to have raped and murdered the child, but couldn't remember where he'd buried the body So the case remained open, the parents working as feverishly now to find their son's remains as they must have once worked, forty years ago, to find their child.