PROLOGUE
The first poster was put up within a day of the disappearance. In the end there’d be over 1,500 of them, plastering what seemed like every available inch of the village. All of them mass-produced by the owner of a local printing company who barely knew the scared-out-of-their-minds parents but figured it was the least he could do.
It was nail-gunned to a telephone pole in front of Fredo’s Famous Pizzeria, an example of doubly false advertising, since its pizza wasn’t famous or even well-known, and the pizzeria wasn’t owned by anyone named Fredo. The owner was a Serbian named Milche, who thought an Italian name made more fiscal sense. Being an aficionado of The Godfather, he’d picked Fredo over Michael, which seemed to him too Anglicized. Like many pizza parlors throughout Long Island, it had evolved into a hangout for the too-young-to-drink crowd, and when Milche would shoo the local adolescents out of the store at closing time, the reigning fourteen-year-old wiseass would turn and utter this famous if misquoted line: “You broke my heart, Fredo, you broke my heart.”
What was really breaking hearts was the subject of the poster placed on the telephone pole outside Fredo’s on July 10, 2007. MISSING it said in black letters printed in Helvetica bold, and underneath, a picture of six-year-old Jennifer Kristal. It was her first-grade school photo, a little girl all dolled up and smiling for the camera.
It was a dichotomy that was particularly hard to comprehend for any parent strolling by—what was innocence doing plastered to a telephone pole? Telephone poles were for garage sale notices, local politicians’ campaign posters, and handyman ads with phone number slips hanging down like stripper tassels. They weren’t for a six-year-old girl with a traffic-stopping smile who’d walked down the block to her best friend’s house one day—yes, she was just six, but it was only two houses away and it was summer, and it wasn’t like they lived in the projects or something. This was upper-class suburbia, for God’s sake, and her mom, Laurie, had walked her to their screen door and even stood and watched a bit while Jenny skipped down the front steps—whereupon Jenny disappeared. Never showed up at her best friend Toni’s front door, never came home.
Poof.
That was hard for people to get their head around. A child just disappearing like that—like one of those sequined assistants in a magic act. It made existence seem too ephemeral, made them question their assumptions about everyday life. If little girls could just disappear into thin air, then what else was possible?
People didn’t know quite what to say to Laurie and Jake either—it was Jake who’d put up that first poster. People would generally avoid them if they had enough time to see them coming. Neighbors would duck into a store or pantomime that they must’ve left something in their car so that they had an excuse to turn around and go look for it. It was as if grief was catching. But, really, what do you say to parents whose kid had been stolen from them, whose only daughter had been taken God knows where—four states away by now, or in some dank basement, or the kind of place you didn’t even want to think about.
At first, there were some impressive and enthusiastic community efforts at pitching in. Not just from the owner of the local printing company, but from Laurie and Jake’s inner circle—the Kellys, whose daughter, Toni, was the best friend Jennifer had been on her way to see that afternoon, and the Shapiros, Kleins, and Mooneys, who were all fixtures at Laurie and Jake’s Fourth of July barbecues. The blowouts always featured a kick-ass fireworks show, courtesy of Jake’s stepbrother Brent, who drove up a truckload of cherry bombs and bottle rockets from North Carolina and, rumor had it, sold them on consignment to the neighborhood teens.
In fact, people who’d never even met the Kristals joined in the search, people from the neighborhood whose daughter or son was in the same first-grade class as Jennifer, or on the same soccer team. People who didn’t know Jennifer at all but had kids of similar age and experienced “there but for the grace of God” moments. And there were those who helped because they were simply drawn to that sort of thing.
There were Jennifer Park Searches, where volunteers groggily gathered at six A.M. in Hunter Park. They’d form a line straight across, not unlike the first wave of a football onside-kick formation, combing the tangled shrubs straight down to the lake. There was a Jennifer Hotline manned round the clock in those first few weeks, fueled by prodigious amounts of coffee provided gratis by the local Dunkin’ Donuts. A rotating support group set up shop in the Kristals’ house on Maple Street, bringing baked ziti, casseroles, bagels, and other assorted nourishment so that Laurie, Jake, and their son, Ben, could have something to eat. Not that Laurie or Jake consumed many calories that first week, but Ben, who was all of eight, walked around with a perpetual smear of doughnut glaze across his upper lip.
There was even a mass rally held at the local school auditorium, where the teary parents addressed the overflow crowd, beseeching anyone who’d seen anything, anything at all—a strange car, an odd-looking person—or overheard even a mildly suspicious comment to please, please report it to the Jennifer Hotline. The detective in charge of the investigation, Looper, a veteran of some twenty years, weighed in, providing the somewhat morose admonition that the first few days were crucial to there being a happy conclusion here—saying this even as the first few days were, in fact, coming to a close.
After Looper came to a dead end, there would be others placed in nominal authority: a private investigator hired by the Kristals named Lundowski who charged five hundred dollars a day to “beat the bushes”; Madame Laurette, a psychic, who claimed to have helped the police solve a number of baffling missing persons cases; and later on—much later—a cold case detective named Joe Pennebaker who would scrupulously go over every single piece of evidence again. Which sounds more impressive than it was, since there really wasn’t any evidence—not any physical evidence, anyway.
There were, of course, the usual false alarms—a registered sex offender who lived within running distance of the Kristals, a volunteered confession from an elderly man named Tom Doak, who kept a cache of pornography in his basement featuring young girls of indeterminate age. But the sex offender was found to have an airtight alibi, and Doak a long history of providing false confessions to the police—including copping to the assassinations of Medgar Evers, John Lennon, and, yes, even President Kennedy, though Doak would have been beginning second grade at the time.
After a while, that first poster, like the community’s interest in Jenny’s disappearance, slowly began to fade. As hard as that was to grasp for her grief-stricken parents, it happens that way. Life intrudes; there are family matters good, bad, and banal to contend with—graduations and divorces, anniversaries and funerals. A kind of communal attention deficit disorder seems to be on the uptick in this country anyway—the result of the internet, probably, where the next cigarette-smoking baby or celebrity train wreck is just seconds away. People lose interest at warp speed.
And there were other tragedies to wallow in for those who liked that sort of thing. For committed Republicans throughout the neighborhood—and Long Island was one of their last remaining downstate bastions—one of those tragedies was war hero John McCain losing the presidential election to a Chicago liberal who’d been a US senator for about ten seconds. A McCain/Palin poster was placed directly beneath Jenny’s, which despite almost a year and a half of inclement weather still retained her radiant smile, though her eyes had pretty much faded to two dull coins. Someone had crossed out MCCAIN/PALIN with blue spray paint and substituted HOPE AND CHANGE, BABY.