Finding Melissa

I was explaining Cassandra to one of Rackspace's architects over lunch on Dec 16 when Rachel called: "I can't find Melissa. I sent her to clean her room, then when I went to call her to come eat I couldn't find her. I was downstairs almost the whole time, and I didn't hear the door open, but I've looked everywhere and I can't find her. If I can't find her in another ten minutes can you come help look?"

I'm a little slow but I realized that the right answer here was, "I'm on my way." We'd walked to the Thai place for lunch, so I ran back to the parking lot and drove home. (It was a long enough run that I was quite sore the next day. I call this "the Melissa exercise plan.")

At home, I doublechecked Rachel's canvasing. She'd been thorough: all the closets, under all the beds -- even in the furnace recesses, which wouldn't have occurred to me. No Melissa. I called in my Loud Daddy Voice. No Melissa. But her shoes were all present and I didn't see any jackets missing (although she has several), and it was cold enough out that I thought that if she HAD taken off she'd either gone inside or she'd be back.

We said a prayer, and I checked our closest neighbors. Melissa is not shy about inviting herself over to play with her friends, but none of them were home. The few people who were home hadn't seen her.

One of the women I talked to suggested that she might have gone down to Matthew's school. That seemed like an idea worth following up on, since she's set off to do just that before. (After a lady in a pickup truck brought her back the last time, Rachel instituted the rule that either Melissa has to come to school when I dropped Matthew off, or Rachel needs to be awake in case Melissa woke up and decided to pull that stunt again.)

Nobody at the school office had seen her, but they said they'd keep looking.

Having exhausted the high probabilities, I started moving down the lower ones. I expanded my radius of neighbors, and was doing this when a patrol car and an unmarked cop car went by and stopped in front of our house. Rachel had called the police after calling me the first time, and they were finally arriving (about an hour later).

I kept going down the street, and a few minutes later Rachel called me: "they found her." She'd hidden in one of the large padded bags we keep under the guest bed for our dining room table leafs. The difference between amateurs and professionals: Rachel and I had both bent over, seen the closed bag, and moved on. The policeman lifted the bed up and from that vantage point it was clear there was something else in the bag. Good thing, because they were about to call in the helicopter and everything.

We called the school and the nice lady who said she'd help drive the neighborhood and look to say "never mind," and sat down to figure out what to do with this girl. (We're still working on that one.)

My family knows stubborn, but to hide silently in the dark for an hour and a half, at the age of four? That's pretty exceptional.