The wood continued to hiss, an angry whisper about the dead. From the ashes there would be answers. From the ashes there would be questions. On this day, a single body was found.
The question was, which one?
6
* * *
ONE WOMAN, LORENE BIBLE
* * *
Today
I chose to write about the case in late 2015. Living for most of a decade in Ireland (though I was born and raised in New York), I spoke to Lauria Bible’s mother for the first time in early 2016. It was nighttime, and a carnival spun brightly outside my office when I called Lorene, six hours behind me. I was newly wading the waters of nonfiction, a little apprehensive.
“To be honest, I have no idea what the hell I’m doing,” I said to her. After all, I was just a writer with no law enforcement experience (at least not on the right side of the law) or any experience in investigating.
“Neither do I, but I just keep doing it anyway,” she responded.
That single sentence would help me get through it all.
I come to Oklahoma, thinking that it’ll be hard to write about the dead, but it has proven harder to write about the living, about those who’ll have to read themselves through my eyes. This is most true for Lorene Joyce Bible. She is guarded. She holds her head high and listens more than she speaks. She is Lauria Bible’s mother, and she is the only reason this case isn’t forgotten on a shelf somewhere. Her maiden name is Leforce, and it’s always felt apt to me.
I meet Lorene for the first time at the Bible farm, the cattle ranch that runs through her husband’s family as the hay baler runs outside. I’m not the first person to sit face-to-face with her and ask her the tough questions about her daughter’s 1999 disappearance, and I won’t be the last. She sifts through a thousand photos of Lauria, knowing by only the feel of her hand which worn photo is the one she prefers the world to see—it is one of Lauria posing in her cheerleading uniform. It is the same photo that makes up Lorene’s Facebook cover on the “Find Lauria Bible—BBI” page, where I first contacted the Bible family in early 2016. In the photo, Lauria looks like her father, Jay.
“The Bible Bureau of Investigation,” Lorene explains when I ask what BBI stands for, “because we never stop searching.” She comes from a large family, including Lisa Bible-Brodrick, Lauria’s cousin, a woman who was raised like Lauria’s sister, one of Lorene’s own. She is Lorene’s right-hand woman, especially in this new age of technology. This network of Lauria’s relatives and friends comes with children who know their long-lost cousin or aunt only by word of mouth, by the stories and photos of those I interview today. They know her only as well as I do. But the Bibles are a people who have withstood the unbearable, a people who manage to find God’s peace not when the clouds part but in the midst of the storm.
Lorene tells me she named her daughter after Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the children’s Little House on the Prairie series, part of which was based nearby. Having herself seen the tougher side of country living, Lorene holds the children’s stories close to her heart. “It is still best … to make the most of what we have,” Wilder wrote in The Long Winter. “To be happy with simple pleasures; and have courage when things go wrong.” They are the kinds of principles that the Bible family clings to, the simplicity that gives birth to perseverance over the years. Lauria’s mother added the “i” to her daughter’s name to make it more distinctive, Lauria’s own.
Like many witnesses years later, it remained silent.
Lauria is the only daughter of Lorene and Jay Bible and the only sibling of Brad, who is two-and-a-half years older. Her middle name, Jaylene, is a portmanteau of her parents’ names. She came from a family built on Midwestern convention, of Sundays at Grandma Dixie and Grandpa Kenneth’s, sit-down dinners with the family, of faith. Lauria used to babysit for several families in the Bluejacket–Vinita area, toting a large bag filled with coloring books and board games, making her the most beloved babysitter among children to the point that kids used to beg their parents to leave the house so that Lauria could come over.
Lauria materializes for me in Technicolor through those who can’t wait to talk about her. How summer days were spent lighting firecrackers here on the Bible farm, putting them under the feed buckets and sitting on them, accompanied by hysterical laughter, pop and snap, and the smell of gunpowder under the white Oklahoma sun. How Lauria would walk barefoot through the garden rows, milk and black pepper and corn bread in hand as the pecans landed hard on the tarps across the yard (I even hear how she’d skim the cream from the top of Grandma Dixie Bible’s fresh milk and pretend not to know who had done it).
“She certainly wasn’t one to lay around,” says her cousin Lisa.
“Let me tell you about Rambo,” one of Lauria and Ashley’s best friends, Sheena, recollects, laughing with tears in her eyes. She tells me of a time back in kindergarten class in Bluejacket, where most friendships are formed in the first few years of the local students’ lives, and Sheena had just sat in front of Lauria. “You should have seen it. She was wearing a matching yellow windbreaker jacket and pants, a jogging suit. It was ridiculous, but it was fashionable for back then.” She smiles. “She had one of those sweatbands around her head, looking like Rambo. I didn’t know how to take her.” Sheena describes the mischief in Lauria’s eyes when Lauria wrapped her feet around the legs of her desk. With a raised eyebrow, and with Sheena pulling her head back to study the girl, Lauria leaned back and quickly lifted up her windbreaker and shirt, flashing her bare-skinned chest at the stranger for a laugh. “I knew right then, I wanted to know this girl. She was wild.” It was the start of an unbreakable friendship.
The stories that fill Lauria’s short sixteen years are plentiful, as are Lorene’s boxes of her daughter’s report cards and childhood drawings, which she regularly keeps in the trunk of her car when media appearances are steady enough. Despite this, I connect with Lauria best through her school binder, filled with Lauria’s creative writing assignments written months before her disappearance. I carry them with me over time, over visits to Oklahoma, running my fingertips over the long-dried ink as though they’re an epitaph on a gravestone. I hear Lauria better through the voice that continues here on paper than through her grinning in fading photographs.
“You say a bedtime prayer, and in the darkness, it’s so peaceful, and you can rest,” Lauria wrote for her creative writing class only weeks before the fire. On another page, she wrote, “Each locust, steaming madly across the smoke-filled,gray sky. One by one they attack their prey, pounding them helplessly into the ground. Not one locust is slowed down or shot down. And when the helpless prey surrender, they are attacked and captured by the forceful locusts, who torture and kill their prey, sucking their blood until every last drop of blood is drank and the life of their prey is sucked right out of them. Every last breath gasped, a slow and painful death they had.”
Somehow, through her schoolwork, I find myself nostalgic for a childhood that I hardly remember. And I find I’m no longer connecting to Lauria, but I am connecting to her absence. Youth, lost.