In the summer of 1972, a girl from Lawrenceville named Dotty Kavenaugh disappeared. She was eight years old, and on a Monday evening toward the end of June she’d left home on her bicycle to return some overdue books to the public library. Her bicycle was found on a corner across from the courthouse where, a witness said later, she had been talking to a man in a pickup truck. The truck was a 1953 Chevrolet, white with a black grille and a homemade camper on the back.
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I was 16 that summer, and although I didn’t know Dotty Kavenaugh–I lived in Sumner, a small town eight miles west of Lawrenceville–she was as real to me as the fields of wheat and corn and hay, the woodlands and the river bottoms and the oil lease roads, all the landscapes where thousands of volunteers searched for her. I thought of all the times when I had been her age that my father, enraged, had reached for his belt, and I had found myself caught in an attack I didn’t know how to stop. I thought of how often, now that I was older, we fought with ugly words and curses and sometimes even shoved at each other. I couldn’t stop thinking about this Gonder. He was a fugitive now, and though I had no sympathy for him, I wondered whether he was frightened–out of his head because he knew he had gone too far–or simply crazy, cold, and without remorse, calmly calculating his next move.
That summer I was a thief. I went into stores and stole cigarettes, record albums, whatever caught my fancy. I’d never meant to have this sort of life–I thought I was a good person who would survive my poor choices–but there I was shoving at the limit of common sense. Where was the line between the foolhardy and the truly criminal? For the 24 hours or so when no one knew where Gonder was, I felt an odd guilt of my own because I knew my life was suspect.
“The truck,” I told him. “It didn’t want to start.”
That’s when he pulled me from the tractor’s drawbar. I lost my balance and fell, my head narrowly missing the sharp teeth of the combine’s sickle. I lay on the prickly wheat stubble, and my father stood over me. At first, neither one of us spoke, both stunned by how quickly this thing had happened.
“I bet they saw that old truck backed into the machine shed.” He wiped at his sweaty face with his sleeve. We had a 1953 Chevy truck, bluish black like a bruise. From the air, the people in the helicopter would have only been able to see its front, the dark grille, and they had likely radioed to the state troopers to check it out. “They probably thought they had their man,” my father said, and he said it quietly, as if he, too, felt how easily a life one thought was hidden could come into view.
Then on Sunday morning, as my mother was listening to the Church of Christ services on the radio, a bulletin interrupted the broadcast.
