I moved out of the apartment in 2023.
Not because of any of this — the building sold and the rent went up by four hundred dollars, which is a much more Providence reason. I gave the management company a forwarding address, in writing, twice, and I am told her mail still comes.
The case is open. It has been open since November 2019 and it was worked properly for about fourteen months after I found the box and it is now open in the older sense again, which Alvarez told me herself before she moved to a different unit. She was straight with me about it. She said cases like this don’t close, they just stop having anyone whose week they’re in.
Nobody has been charged with anything. I want to state that plainly one more time, because this is the internet and people are creative: I do not know the man’s surname, I have never tried to find it, and nothing here is an allegation about any identifiable person. If you go looking on the basis of this account you will be doing the exact thing the whole last chapter is about.
I still call Ruth on Sundays.
Three years. Every Sunday except four, twice for flu and twice because I was on a plane, and both plane times I texted her from the gate because a Sunday with no call is not a neutral event for a woman who has had one daughter stop answering.
We do not talk about the case much any more. We did for about a year. Now we talk about her neighbour’s dog, and a hip replacement she is putting off, and a very long-running dispute about a hedge.
She sent me a card at Christmas that said to Alice, who wrote back.
I have to say something about that, because it is the closest thing to a point that this whole account has.
Six letters. Ruth Solomon wrote six letters to her daughter’s old address over five years, and the first five went to people who did the correct thing — wrote NOT AT THIS ADDRESS on the envelope and put it back in the box, which is exactly what I did for four months, and which is exactly what you are supposed to do.
I only opened the sixth because she underlined a sentence twice.
There were four people in that apartment before me. I have thought about them a great deal. None of them did anything wrong. And that box was eighteen inches above their heads for five years.
So: what do I think happened.
People always ask, and for about two years I refused to answer on the grounds that my opinion is worth nothing, which was true and also cowardly.
I think she got out.
I want to be honest about the quality of that belief. It is not evidence. Alvarez would tell you — did tell me — that the notebook reads like preparation, and that a person who prepares like that often leaves like that, and that’s the strongest thing there is, and it is still just a pattern.
Everything else I have is worse. An anonymous message from an account that no longer exists. Three lines in pencil I burned a copy of. The fact that a woman who hid a box that carefully in a ceiling was clearly capable of hiding herself.
And a piece of reasoning I’ve never been able to shake, which is this: the passport and the money were still there. Whatever happened to Karen Solomon after 31 August 2019, she never came back for them. If she died, that makes sense. And if she lived, it also makes sense, because coming back to that building — ever, at any point, for any reason — was the one thing that could undo everything, and eleven thousand dollars is a great deal of money and it is not more than that.
She left it. Five years, and she left it.
That’s a woman who decided something and then held it, which is the hardest thing in the world, and is exactly what I would expect of the person who wrote two hundred and forty-one entries with no adjectives in them.
I don’t need to know any more. That took about two years and it’s the only genuine progress I made.
For a long time I thought the story had one ending available and I hadn’t found it yet. It doesn’t. There are two, they are enormously different, and I am never going to be told which one it is, and I have had to learn to put down something I was not allowed to finish.
Ruth hasn’t. Ruth can’t. That’s the difference between us and it is the entire difference, and it is why I call on Sundays and will keep calling on Sundays until one of us can’t.
If it’s the first ending, then a woman was killed in 2019 and the person who did it is somewhere in Pennsylvania and the file is in a cabinet in Providence, and I hope somebody’s week it becomes again.
And if it’s the second — if there is a woman somewhere with a different name who learned to weave in Rhode Island — then I want to say the only thing I’ve ever actually wanted to say to her, which is not come home and is not your mother misses you, because she knows both and neither is mine to say.
It’s just: the box is gone. They took it in 2019’s file and I burned my copy and nobody is looking for you from this end any more.
You can stop checking.