Entry #67

Sorry I didn't get to update yesterday, to whoever is reading my stuff. I was too busy shoveling snow and doing schoolwork that needed to be done.

I went to the library on Monday, as I said I would. I went to the biggest one in the area, which has newspapers from this whole side of the Hudson River dating back to the late 1800s. It even has National Geographic magazines dating back to 1926. Yeah, I spent a while looking at those. Cool stuff.

Anyway, I didn't want to look through every newspaper, so I asked the librarian (this crotchety old lady, she totally thought I was going to break something, or not behave well) if there was a way I could view only the obituaries in each paper. She said there wasn't, but I could view them online, on their website.

Every single obituary had been painstakingly transcribed onto their website. I can't believe they went to so much trouble to do that.

Even though everything was neatly arranged on the site, I still didn't want to look through every obituary. There must have been thousands. So I scrolled through them, looking for anybody under the age of 18. Through the years, there were a fair number of horse accidents, car accidents, drownings, so on, but very few kidnappings.

In fact, the highest concentration of kidnappings where the body had been found was in the past three years. Why hadn't I heard about this on the news? Why weren't the police saying something about kidnappers on the loose? Reading through the obituaries of these kids, some of them my age, most of them younger, even I could spot the similarities in the way their bodies were found.

And the way their bodies were found was strikingly similar to the way I saw the policeman dying in the tree. They had all been found lying on the ground with their stomach slit open. And these kids were usually found a few months after they had been taken.

According to the reports, there was no other sign of bodily harm. Which means these weren't normal kidnappers or rapists. In one respect, I know James is still safe. But if I don't find him, he's going to end up like all these other kids--12 other kids. There have been 4 every year the past few years.

When I read through all of these I started crying. Really, I started crying in the middle of the library. The person--a woman, I think--sitting next to me looked over at me, looked a bit worried, but returned to what she was reading.

Nobody cares about anybody else. Everyone is just wrapped up in his or her own life, and doesn't see the tragedies that happen around them. Oh God, what do I do? Do I go back to the shed? I think I have to, at some point. Please let me--and James--be safe.

R.C.