The residence was in Kentucky, and when I gave the deputy the address he went quiet again. It had belonged to my aunt until 1978. The woman reported missing had apparently called police from a house my aunt owned four years after she supposedly disappeared from hers. The deputy couldn’t tell me who lived there now, but he gave me the date of the anonymous call. I went back upstairs and checked the Bible. The same date was written beside one verse in pencil, along with four words: “She made it out.”
I finally found the woman’s younger brother through an obituary. He was seventy-one and started crying when I said my aunt’s name. He told me his sister hadn’t run away because of a boyfriend like their parents claimed. She’d been pregnant, and the father was a married man nearly twice her age who had threatened her when she said she was keeping the baby. My aunt worked with the man’s wife. She hid the girl in that attic room for six weeks while relatives, police, and the man himself searched for her. Then she drove her to Kentucky and helped her start over under her middle name.
The brother said his sister was still alive. She was sixty-nine now, and she’d spent fifty years believing nobody from that house would ever find her. When I called, the first thing she asked was whether the room still had the painted-over window. Then she told me why my aunt never removed the bed or the clothes. “She promised me there would always be one place in the world where I could come back and still be the girl I was before everybody decided what should happen to me.” My aunt kept that room untouched for the rest of her life.
Then she asked me to open the dresser again and pull the bottom drawer all the way out. There was a thin envelope taped underneath it that I hadn’t seen. Inside was a photograph of my aunt beside a young woman holding a newborn, and a letter dated 1975. The woman on the phone said, “That’s my daughter. Your aunt delivered her in that room before she got us out. But look at the name she wrote on the back, because that’s the part nobody ever told you — and you’ll understand why she left you the house when you see whose last name my daughter has.”
