People don’t just disappear off the face of the earth. Well, sometimes they do, but the practice is generally frowned upon. Elaine Caudwell headed up the Missing Persons Unit of the local precinct. She didn’t love her job – love wasn’t strong enough a word. She lived her job. There was nothing else in life for Ms. Caudwell. The job had eclipsed every other person in her family, everyone she’d gone to school with, every individual who did not pertain in some way to her mission of finding those who couldn’t or wouldn’t be found. Cases like those of Jimmy Hoffa, Judge Crater and Amelia Earhart both obsessed and infuriated her.

As Ms. Caudwell often said, there is no such thing as a perfect disappearance. Forensics always turns something up. A hair, trace of blood, activity on a credit card or bank account. A Social Security number. Anything. The point was, people didn’t exist in a vacuum. They had basic needs that had to be fulfilled, and if they were dead and beyond needs, then evidence existed somewhere. People didn’t stay missing long with Elaine Caudwell on the case.

Until she realized she was in menopause.

Sometimes you don’t realize you want something until you can’t have it anymore. Now, the uselessness of her womb gnawed at her. Elaine’s famous concentration faltered. Her recovery rate dropped. Never having bothered to make friends among her co-workers, she no longer had anything of value to add to her job. Recognizing this, Elaine took her retirement, with full pension.

And then she did a very strange thing. She disappeared.

Well, not quite. Her old co-workers could have found her, if they’d bothered to try. They might have found airline manifests. Phone records of calls to an attorney. A passport application.

Elaine was gone for a month. When she returned, she was the proud adoptive mother of a young Zimbabwean girl. Elaine’s face hurt from smiling so much. The child took an instant liking to her, and they spent long, happy days in the park, at the Zoo, at her toddler gymnastics class, making cookies together, singing, laughing.

A few years later, Elaine sat on a bench in the park, watching her daughter run around with the other children and feeling more contented and purposeful than ever before. One of the women from Missing Persons was there with her child, too. Seeing Elaine, she was reminded of the tight-lipped, tense workaholic she used to know, and wondered if this was Elaine’s sister.

Whatever happened to Elaine, anyway? After leaving the force, she’d just disappeared.

Copyright 2006 Amy Frushour Kelly. All rights reserved.

Reproduction by any means prohibited without prior written consent.