?Thirty years ago, her brother, age ten, had left home one morning, never to return. In a small town, kids did not go missing. Some thought he had run away; those who knew him, and the family, could not imagine this. Others thought he was simply lost and would show up in a few hours. Twenty-four hours later, the entire town was searching. They searched for days finding no trace, nothing. Any abandoned mine within a walking radius of town was searched?nothing.
Until last week, while unpacking things for the rummage sale, an old box had fallen apart in her hands, spilling contents at her feet. She found the shirt her brother had worn the day he went missing.
Sara and Greg listened and let Grissom ask questions. His first one was, ?How do you know this is his shirt??
The woman smiled. She resembled their sheriff in hair and eye color, the shape of her face, but feminine traits took over when she smiled. She softened; her face became younger as she talked about her missing brother.
?Evan was spoiled by all of us. He was our mother?s change-of-life baby, I was fifteen years older?our older brother, Roy, your sheriff, was already in college. He gave Evan that shirt because it was the colors of his college.?
?There must have been hundreds of shirts just like this one.?
The woman looked at Grissom, her eyes becoming serious, shining with sudden tears. She blinked before pulling the sheet away from the stack of boxes. She opened the one on top and pulled out a small shirt. One of the other women smoothed the sheet across another box and Susan unfolded the shirt.
?Dr. Grissom, this shirt belonged to Evan. I?m positive.? Her finger pointed to several small dark spots. ?See these,? she said. Her voice lightened as she talked.
?Evan had started a fire at home several days before he disappeared. He had a pack of firecrackers?those small ones that kids bought back then?and threw the lighted pack into the yard. Caught grass on fire and tried to put it out.? She laughed at the memory. ?Our parents were so angry?it could have been a disaster, but a neighbor kid helped put it out. In the process, Evan got these holes burned in his favorite shirt.
?He loved this shirt?it was the right colors?he wanted to be a Rebel just like his brother. He had worn it every day, all summer. My mom would sneak it in the washer. It?s his shirt?but where has it been for thirty years??
?We kept the box and we several boxes that were around it.? Another woman said.
The reason for the stack of boxes explained.
Two women lifted several small jars from the top box and placed these items on the sheet. ?This is what was in the box.? The jars were filled with buttons, safety pins, thread in dozens of colors. There was an old canvas bag, zippered on one side with some type of lock at one end.
Sara and Greg had pulled on gloves as the objects were placed on the sheet. Greg picked up the bag looking perplexed.
Sara whispered, ?It?s an old bank deposit bag.? It had been cut next to the zipper.
?We touched everything,? Susan said as she watched Sara and Greg. ?When we realized it was Evan?s shirt, we put everything in another box.?
Grissom asked, ?What is in these boxes? Why did you put these aside??
The four women explained the rummage sale as a community event. The center was opened each day and people brought donations in all year.
?These were in the back so we can make a guess that these boxes have been here for nearly a year. The one with the shirt was on the floor.? The woman indicated the stack of boxes. ?We never opened these.?
Greg was turning each small jar in his hand. ?There might be fingerprints on these.?
?That?s why I brought you, Greg.?
Grissom and the deputy left to drive a vehicle to the community center so the boxes could be transported to the back room of the sheriff?s office.
The women were relieved to have someone remove these boxes which seemed tainted with an unsolved mystery of the missing child. After Grissom left, they quickly changed the conversation to local talk?where to eat, the historic aspects of the town, the local gift shop. Greg and Sara managed to respond with polite answers and agreeable replies. They paid attention to directions to the two places to eat in town.
For the next hour, Sara and Greg opened each box in the collected stack, finding a jumble of things, but none seemed to be connected to a young boy. If anything, the boxes contained the remnants of a long forgotten closet?old shoes, old sweaters, various pieces of decorative china and glassware?but nothing gave any clue to the owner.
Greg found another group of small jars filled with buttons. ?Hey, look at this?same kind of jars, same kind of buttons.? But nothing indicated who or where this odd assortment of bits and pieces had originated.
Grissom had gotten a file from the deputy; only a few lined pages of notes made thirty years ago about a missing boy. A map, yellow with age, was spread across the table before him, black marks indicating places that were checked by searchers. He had the shirt and using a magnifying light he had brought from Las Vegas, he was collecting and labeling everything but dust in the air. He had found four dark spots that were not burn marks?possibly blood, but too many years had passed for his field testing to determine.
Sara had taken over dusting for prints finding mostly smudges on the small jars. The few clear prints would probably belong to the women at the community center. She fed a card into the reader which would transmit it to the lab in Las Vegas, thinking most of this was a useless exercise?most people had never been fingerprinted. She examined the bank bag finding one tiny bit of paper inside no larger than her fingernail.
Greg worked on listing every item taken from the boxes. He sneezed often, but he was organized, lettering each box, numbers on each item. Occasionally, he would lift an object and raise his eyebrows in an unspoken question. Sara or Grissom would provide an answer and he returned to work.
The deputy sheriff and Susan arrived late in the afternoon. Sara was not sure?did they expect some miracle solution in a few hours, she wondered. She and Greg got additional chairs and gathered around Grissom. He could explain what they were doing.
Sara was amazed that Grissom could take the simplest lab work and explain it in extraordinary terms or take the most complicated, complex project and break it down into an uncomplicated description. Today, he talked to Sheriff Atwater?s sister, quietly telling her each step in the process of trying to piece together a cold case based on a missing child?s shirt. In his gentle, soothing voice, he explained the odds.
?We know, Dr. Grissom, we will never know what happened to him. My mother has lived every day believing that Evan would walk in the front door on day. My brother and I know better. I?I haven?t told her about the shirt. I didn?t want to get her hopes up.?
Grissom was quiet for a few minutes before he spoke. ?Could we talk to your mother? There might be something she can tell us. I?d like to show her some of the things here.?
