I looked for her for five months. I’m not proud of most of it.
I want to lay out what I actually did, because when people hear “I looked for her” they picture something noble and it was mostly a woman in her twenties in an apartment at midnight doing things that were, at best, none of her business.
I read every public post on that community page from 2019. I found six people who had commented on the HAVE YOU SEEN KAREN post and messaged four of them; two replied, neither knew anything, one was quite unpleasant about it.
I found the textile thing. She’d been part of a weavers’ guild — that’s what the ceiling bolts were, a loom, a big one, suspended — and there’s a newsletter archive, and she’s in it eleven times between 2015 and 2019 and then never again.
I called the dental practice eight blocks away and was told, correctly and immediately, that they could not confirm whether anyone was or had been a patient.
I made a spreadsheet. Of course I did.
And in August, on a forum for that guild, I posted something. I have gone back and forth for a long time about whether to reproduce it and I’ve decided to, because softening it would be dishonest:
Looking for anyone who knew Karen Solomon (Providence, weaver, active until 2019). Not press. Living in her old apartment, in contact with her mother. Any information appreciated, including where she might be now.
Three weeks later I got a private message from an account with no photograph and four posts, all about yarn.
It said one line:
Please stop.
I want to describe exactly what I felt, because it was not what I expected and it took me a long time to be honest about it.
I felt caught.
Not frightened. Not confused. Caught — the specific hot feeling of being a person doing something they have half-known was wrong for a while and has just been seen doing it.
I typed about six replies and sent none of them. Then I sent: Is she safe?
Two days later: Yes.
Then: Her mother thinks she’s dead.
And nothing came back for nine days.
On the ninth day it said this, and it’s the longest thing that account ever sent me, and I have it saved:
I am not going to tell you anything that identifies anyone. If you post again I will not answer.
Some people don’t leave a note because a note is a starting point. The first thing that happens is somebody who is looking gets shown the note. Everything a person who has left touches becomes a way to find them. Her mother is being watched. She has always been watched. That is not paranoia, it is the actual arrangement.
You put her name on a public forum with the word “now” in it. Please think about what you did there.
She knows what it costs her mother. She has always known. It is the price and she decided it, not you.
I did not sleep for a while after that.
I want to be careful, because there is a version of this where that message is the truth and there is a version where it’s a woman in a different state who knew Karen and is guessing, and there is a version where it’s nothing at all. I have no way to verify a single word of it. I never learned who sent it. The account was deleted within a month.
But I took it to Alvarez.
She read it twice on her phone. She asked me to forward it, which I did. And then she put the phone down and said something I have thought about every week since.
She said: “I can’t tell you what to think about that. I’ll tell you what I do with it, which is nothing, because it’s an anonymous message with no verifiable content and I can’t put it in a file.”
Then she said: “Off the record. Do you want my honest view of your five months?”
I said yes.
And Alvarez said:
“If she’s dead, everything you did was harmless and slightly helpful. If she’s alive, everything you did was the most dangerous thing that’s happened to her since 2019, and you did it from an apartment with her mother’s phone number in your contacts, and you did it in public, under a search term he would also use.”
I asked her — and I could barely get it out — I asked her whether she thought I’d put someone in danger.
And she said the only completely kind thing she ever said to me. She said, “You found the box and you brought it in the same week. Most people would have kept it or binned it. I’d rather have you than most people.”
And then she said, “But you need to stop now.”
I said what if she’s dead.
Alvarez said, “Then she’s dead, and it’s my job, and it has been for five years, and you finding a forum post is not what solves it.”
I said what if she’s alive.
And Alvarez looked at me and said, “Then she’s spent five years building a life where nobody can find her, and you’re the only person in the world who’s currently trying.”