Empty Promises

working, so Deanna couldn’t be with him.
    Deanna had gone to work that day, and her co-workers remembered walking with her to her car in the company lot a little after 2:30 P.M. Deanna drove a dark maroon two-year-old Buick Skylark, which she kept immaculate. As far as any of her co-workers recalled, Deanna was happy that day. If she had been worried about anything, she didn’t let it show. She was smiling at them as she drove away shortly before 3:00 P.M.
    Denton Buse was a handsome, muscular twenty-six-year-old. He was very concerned when he learned Deanna had not arrived at her mother’s house. When he got home from his job at 9:00 P.M. that Saturday, everything was as they’d left it. Nervously, he waited there for Deanna to come home. She had to be visiting friends or relatives. He tried to tell himself that she must have mentioned it to him and he’d forgotten, but he couldn’t remember that she’d had any plans. Denny Buse called every acquaintance and all of her family but no one had seen or heard from Deanna after she left work.
    Surely, if she had been in an accident, someone would have been notified. There were some lonely, heavily wooded spots on the road between Redmond and Bellevue as it meandered along Lake Sammamish, but the road between Redmond and Monroe was well traveled. It seemed impossible that an accident would have gone unnoticed.
    “We grew more and more worried,” Denny Buse would recall, “and finally, at 12:15 A.M. , after calling all the hospitals and the state patrol and not finding out anything about an accident, we called the sheriff’s office and reported Deanna missing.”
    At the first light of day, Buse and his father-in-law drove back and forth over Deanna’s usual route from their home two miles north of Monroe to the United Control plant. They scoured the areas on either side of the road fearing that they might spot the Buick Skylark crashed there. They searched for several hours—and found nothing.
    Snohomish County officers, led by Chief Criminal Deputy Russ Jubie, scoured the county for some trace of Deanna Buse. Four days after she had vanished, their hopes for her safety faded. Either Deanna Buse had reasons of her own to disappear—which her family said was impossible—or she was being held captive. Or worse, she was dead.

    Susan Bartolomei and Deanna Buse never met; in fact they lived almost a thousand miles apart. Only a terrible kind of synchronicity placed both of them in the path of two strangers within a short time frame.
    Were it not for the unbelievable courage of seventeen-year-old Susan Bartolomei, there might never have been an answer to what happened to Deanna Buse.
    Susan was supposed to disappear, too, on the Monday night following Saturday, August 19—the day Deanna vanished.
    Howardine Mease and her family were driving along Route 120 in the evening of August 21. They had visited their daughter in Clear Lake, California, and then headed south on a meandering vacation path back to their home north of Santa Barbara. They had planned to drive straight through the night, but as the hours wore on, their brakes overheated from the strain of too many hills along the road. Rather than risk a runaway wreck, the Meases pulled over to a wide spot in the road where they spent an uncomfortable—but safe—night, bundled up in sleeping bags on folding lawn chairs. “We woke up about ten minutes to six,” Mrs. Mease recalled. “We packed up our sleeping bags and chairs and drove off. We hadn’t gone more than a mile when we saw a person lying in the road that bisected 120. We stopped, and my husband reached the person and called to me to bring a mat right away. I ran back with the mat and saw that the person was a young girl.”
    They thought at first she must have been hit by a car, and she seemed to be dead. “She was lying facedown on the road. She was motionless, but when I held her wrist, I found she had a faint pulse. My husband stood by the road to flag down a car to go for help. Two pickup trucks came by and they both said they’d call the authorities.”
    Helpless to do much, Howardine Mease knelt beside the young woman, and talked to her, assuring her that help was coming. “I asked her her name,” she said, “and she said it was Susan Bartolomei and that she was from Ukiah. She gave me her parents’ phone number. She told me that she and her boyfriend had been hitchhiking because of car trouble.” Ukiah, the injured girl’s