Be careful what you ask for.
When digging deep, you may uncover bodies.
Maisie's life has been falling apart since her older sister went missing years ago without a trace. With a dead father and a mentally unstable mother, the teenage girl ha...
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-MAISIE-
THIS IS HOW the case went:
Isla Maria Campbell-Lopez. 17 years old. Daughter of Cara Campbell and Gabriel Lopez. American born. Half Scottish, half Hispanic. Last seen Saturday, December 16th around eight p.m.
The cops worked mainly with two theories.
The first one: Isla ran away.
"It's not unusual for teenage girls to need a break sometimes. They go to a friend's house, or an older boy's. They get mad at their parents. They have their secret little world," one of the officers said to my father. "In most cases, they come home by themselves. It usually is all resolved in the first twenty-four hours."
To back up this supposition, a clerk on a gas station a mile outside the state border, in New Hampshire, contacted the police when he read about the case on Facebook. He was the last known person to have seen my sister and he said she had seemed distressed, but okay, not under any duress. There were also a couple of CCTV footages showing her filling the tank and trying to use a broken pay phone. She was alone and to this day, no one has any idea who she was trying to call.
But a few things quickly ruled out the theory about Isla being a runaway. First, she didn't fit the profile—it wasn't unusual for her to have a weekend away partying or take a couple of days avoiding our parents, but she wasn't the type of person that just leaves their whole life behind. No clothes had been packed, no goodbyes had been said to family or friends—not even her precious camera she had grabbed.
Not to mention, when we called the cops, it had already passed an entire day without news from her.
My parents were away that weekend, and my twin brothers were throwing a party at our house Saturday night. Fin was at one of his basketball teammates' house, just up the street. Alasdair was at his place, and I was at Angie's.
Isla had asked our brothers for the car, which she hadn't done for over a year, and disappeared, leaving no explanation behind. My brothers had thought that she was just going to the party her senior year was throwing, the one where all her friends were at. Only Sunday night, when our parents arrived home, and Isla still hadn't gone to pick me up at my friend's, did we realize something was wrong. Very, very wrong.
The nail on the coffin was the car—without my sister in it—being found on the side of an unnumbered road the following Wednesday. In the state of New Hampshire, 100 miles away from Boston MA, our hometown. Even though the clerk and the CCTV footage proved she had crossed state lines on her own, this still lead to the theory about a suspicious disappearance.
With no shreds of evidence, however, the case went as cold as snow pretty fast.
There was nothing in the car that actually indicated an attack. There was no witness around. There was no more sightings of her after she left the gas station. Her laptop and cellphone—both confiscated by our mother three days before the disappearance when my sister suffered a moderate concussion—were clean. Too clean.
