...And Never Let HerGo

Marie—or Mike for that matter—that Robert and Susan began to worry. When Susan Fahey called her sister-in-law, all she got was an answering machine.
    Mike Scanlan was concerned, too. He had surmised that Anne Marie had been home earlier in the day because he’d driven by her apartment and her car was there. And yet she hadn’t returned any of his calls. At 9 P.M. Mike called Annie’s older sister, Kathleen Fahey-Hosey.
    “Michael called me and asked me if I had heard from Anne. I responded no,” Kathleen recalled. “As soon as Michael told me they had plans and that Anne Marie didn’t show, I knew something was terribly wrong. . . . She was just so happy with Michael—Michael was her future. She would never break plans on her own.”
    Kathleen told Mike she would call him right back, and then she called her sister’s friend Ginny Columbus—who was a coworker at the governor’s office—to see if she knew of any plans Annie might have had. Ginny was instantly alarmed, too, and she called Jill Morrison. Ginny and Jill lived closer to Annie’s apartment than Kathleen did, so they volunteered to go over and check on her.
    When no one answered their knocks at Anne Marie’s apartment, the two women asked her landlady, Theresa Oliver, if she had seen her. Theresa hadn’t seen Anne Marie for a day or so, but that wasn’t particularly unusual. Anne Marie’s step was so light that she could come in through the front door and be up the closed-off stairs to her apartment without anyone hearing her. Now, on Saturday night, Theresa walked up to the third floor and found Anne Marie’s door locked, with the dead bolt in place. She opened the door and called Anne Marie’s name—but there was no answer. Fearing that she was intruding, she walked through the living room to the kitchen, peered in the bedroom, but didn’t see Anne Marie.
    Jill and Ginny immediately called Kathleen back. “The lights are off, Kathleen, and her door was locked,” Ginny said. “Annie’s not there—but her car is parked outside.”
    “OK,” Kathleen said, “I’ll be right over.”
    Kathleen then did something that might seem an overreaction; she called the Wilmington Police Department to report Anne Marie as a missing person. The detective on duty told her she would have to come down to the station or call from her sister’s apartment. The moment she called Mike Scanlan back, he said he was on his way to pick her up. Both of them felt such a sense of urgency, although they had nothing tangible to go on.
    W HEN Kathleen and Mike arrived at Annie’s apartment and spoke with Ginny and Jill, they learned that Annie apparently wasn’t with anyone they might expect her to be with. With a dull sense of acceptance, they realized that since Thursday night, June 27, Annie hadn’t been in any of the places or with any of the people who made up her world as they knew it.
    With Kathleen beside her, Theresa Oliver unlocked the dead bolt on the door of Annie’s apartment. Kathleen called her name softly.
    There was no answer.
    A gush of fetid air washed over them, and they involuntarily held their breaths against the foul, rancid odor. It was initially indefinable, but then they smelled garbage and something rotting.
    Kathleen rushed first toward the bathroom; all she could think of was that Annie had fallen in the shower and hit her head on something. She flung the door open, clicked on the light, and pulled back the curtain. The shower was empty. Everything in the bathroom was spotless. For some reason, she looked for Annie’s toothbrush. It was there, where it always was.
    Kathleen moved next to the single bedroom. Annie’s bed was all white, with a comforter of white-on-white puffed hearts and ruffly white pillow shams. But it wasn’t made the way she usually made it. Maybe it was her imagination, but it looked to Kathleen as if two fists had yanked the comforter up and then pushed it flat, leaving two indentations.
    The little television set that Kathleen’s husband, Patrick Hosey, had given Annie one Christmas sat in its usual spot on the radiator underneath the bedroom window. There was a new air conditioner there, too, and it was turned on. That was why there was such a chill in the apartment on this hot summer night.
    Annie’s jewelry boxes were lined up on top of the radiator, as always. Her blouses and dresses hung in the closet from hangers that were all pointing the same direction. Most of her shoes were in their