I wrote to Ruth Solomon before I called the police, and I have never regretted the order.
It was a short letter and it said: someone lives here now, my name is Alice, I have found something, the police have it, please call me.
She called eleven hours after it would have arrived.
The first thing she said, before hello, was: “Is she alive?”
And I had to say I don’t know. I’ve had to say that to Ruth Solomon a great many times since and it has never once got easier.
I drove down to Warwick on a Saturday in March.
She lives in a small house with a ramp on the front for a husband who died in 2021, and she had made an enormous amount of food, which I have come to understand is what she does when she is frightened.
I told her everything. All of it, in order, including opening the letter, which I apologised for and which she waved away with a violence that surprised me.
She was completely calm about the passport and the money. She had already worked out both interpretations before I got there; she’d had five years and a lot of nights.
She was not calm about the notebook.
She had not known. That’s the part I was not prepared for. She had suspected, for about two years, in the way you suspect — Karen stopped coming to things, Karen got quiet on the phone when he was in the room, Karen explained a bruise once in a way that Ruth thought about for a month and then let go.
But she did not know there were two hundred and forty-one entries, and I had to sit at a kitchen table in Warwick while a seventy-one-year-old woman worked out in real time that her daughter had been writing them down for three and a half years and had never once told her.
She said, “Why wouldn’t she tell me?”
I said I didn’t know.
I do know now, or I think I do, and it’s in the next part, and it is the single worst thing in this whole account.
His name was Michael and Ruth had met him perhaps nine times.
She described him and it was the most useless description imaginable, which is the point: pleasant, funny, worked in medical equipment sales, remembered her husband’s name, brought a plant once. She said, “I liked him,” with the specific flatness of a woman who has had five years to hate a sentence.
They were not married. They had lived together in my apartment for about two and a half years. His name was not on the lease — Ruth was sure of that, because Karen had said so, and because the management company had confirmed it to the police in 2019.
After Karen was reported missing, Michael was interviewed. Twice, Ruth thought. Then he moved out of state — Ruth believes to Pennsylvania, and does not know where — and he has never been arrested, charged, or named publicly in connection with anything, and I want to be extremely clear that nothing in this account should be read as an accusation against any identifiable person. I do not know his surname. I have deliberately not tried to find it. That decision is the whole of chapter five.
The eleven weeks of nothing broke in May, and it broke because Ruth called them, not me.
A detective called Alvarez rang me on a Tuesday and asked me to come in, and I sat in a room and went over how I found it, and then she told me three things.
The first was that the case had been reclassified. It had been open, but it had been open in the way things are open — a file that exists. It was now being worked. The box did that.
The second was that the flash drives had contained photographs. She would not tell me of what. She told me the dates on them ran from 2016 to 2019 and she watched my face while she said it and I understood what she was telling me, and I have never asked another question about those drives.
And the third was the one I did not see coming at all.
Alvarez said: “The notebook’s contemporaneous, and it’s detailed, and it names locations and times. Do you know what that is?”
I said evidence.
She said, “It’s a case. She built a case. That’s not a diary. Nobody writes a diary with no adjectives in it for three years.”
She said the entries were written the way you write when you have been told what a statement needs to contain. Dates, times, locations, injuries, duration, witnesses where there were any. And she said that in her experience people write like that for one of two reasons: because a lawyer or an advocate has told them how, or because they have researched it themselves and are preparing.
And then Alvarez said the thing that changed everything for me, in a completely flat voice, looking at a folder rather than at me:
“People who are building a case are usually building it because they’re planning to leave. And people who plan carefully enough to build one over three years usually plan the leaving carefully too.”
I said, “You think she got out.”
And Alvarez said, “I think it’s a live possibility and I have to work it as if it isn’t. Those aren’t the same job.”