Give us hope for our tomorrows,
Tell us life will still go on,
Show us, Lord, that all this darkness
Will be followed by the dawn.
Linda Elrod
I'm still looking for a missing piece to the puzzle. Maybe if I find it and put it in place ... the picture will be different.
Every morning I wake early ... 5am or 6am and re-live the events....
Tiffany, Neil, Jacob and I are watching videos at our house. It's 1 a.m., and Bob arrives home from work just after the first video is over.
Bob says hi to everyone and says he's headed to bed. He's too tired to watch a movie. I'm tired too...and decide to go to bed with him.
But it's a Friday night...and the other's aren't ready to give up..weekends are too short. Tiffany, her brother Jacob, and Neil decide to watch the second video.
Movie's are usually two hours,..so it must have been about 3a.m. when Tiffany stuck her head in our room to tell us the video was over. She told us she'd take Neil home and be right back.
I fall back to sleep. When I wake, I realize it's 6AM and Tiffany didn't wake me to say she'd gotten home. That's strange .... she knows I'm a worrier. She always lets me me know she's home. I get up and look out the front window ... I don't see my car. I go upstairs ... and see she's not in her bed.
Okay, this has never happened before.
On the kitchen counter is Tiffany's pager. She got it so her friends and her nervous mom could always find her. She left it behind, obviously not planning on being gone long.
Then I remember I have Neil's number. Tiffany had wrote it down for me earlier that week.
I locate it and call Neil. He's been asleep. He says Tiffany dropped him off and left ... he doesn't know where she is.
Hmm....well, it's a 20 minute drive to town...forty minutes round trip... She must have gotten tired and pulled off the side of the road to sleep. With school that day, and work afterwards..it was 10pm before she and Neil picked up the movies and drove out to watch them with us. She must have gotten tired, I reason. She'd had a long day...she probably pulled off the road to sleep.
Still, I couldn't picture her sleeping very long before finishing the drive. I go get in the car to go look.
Just down the road from us, I see someone putting a firetruck away. I don't think much about it..
Further on, I see two more firetrucks by the substation, also being put away. It crosses my mind that there must have been a fire somewhere...maybe BAD if it took three trucks.
I drive all the way to town and don't find her...then I drive by her grandmother's house to see if she perhaps went there to sleep. The car's not there either.
Okay, now I'm really worried. It's just not like her to not keep me informed. I head back home.
Coming down our lane I can see the kitchen light is on. But no car out front. As I open the kitchen door I can see Bob is on the phone, ... tears are streaming down his face.
He must be talking to Tiffany. But what could be so bad? I feel dread rising...but then re-assure myself...It doesn't matter,... whatever it is, the three of us can work it out.
Bob turns and tells me ..
(As I leave to go look for Tiffany, I failed to notice the patrol car headed to our house. I also drove past the scene of the accident twice without being aware of anything out of the ordinary. Everything and everybody was already gone.
Bob, seeing the patrol car lights coming down our lane, at first thought that it was either Tiffany or me coming back. The phone rang at the same time. A sheriff's dispatcher on the other end asked Bob to go to the door; saying he'd find an officer there.
Bob goes to the door to meet the officer. The officer says there's been an accident. He has bad news. Then the officer lays Tiffany's drivers license on the table.
Learning that I was out looking for Tiffany ... the Highway Patrol now went looking for me. When I returned I found Bob on the phone talking ....not to Tiffany, but to the Highway Patrol, .... telling them that I'd returned.
(On her way home, Tiffany was hit head-on by a drunk driver who had come around the corner on her side of the road. Her neck broken, she died at the scene.)
Do you know how ... if you lose something,.... if you retrace your steps you can sometimes find it? I keep thinking we need to try. I want everybody to back up. Retrace their steps. I want us all to go back until I can find Tiffany ... and then I want to take her out of harm's way. I want to find her. I want a different ending to this story.
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