How She Disappeared

There were some things you never spoke about in a small town—even though the rumor mill ran like clockwork, ever-shifting yet always somehow relevant. Barb at the Old Knocker Diner would say a few words over her pot of coffee right before she poured you a cup, or Denny at the gas station would fill you in on the latest gossip while he handed you your pack of cigs. On November 1st, that was how the name Laney Romano started as just a name on the tongue, an idea, rather than a substantial construct of a person.

That is, until the local police got involved. Then the chatter really started.

Word had it that her mother, Dottie, was beside herself over on old Sycamore Lane. The church ladies went over for a visit right after the police left in their squad cars, and Dottie could barely string together sentences, she was so distraught. And she hadn’t even known what costume Laney had worn the night before because of a shift at the 24-hour clinic down the road. Plus, it didn’t help that Laney wasn’t like most fifteen-year-olds: the poor girl never broke a rule, had never been caught smoking or taking a hit of weed, and she was on the honor roll every semester. Good girl probably would have been stamped next to her name on heaven’s list.

A day later, after a scope of the local forest preserve, a member of the search party found Laney’s phone, bedazzled with a rhinestone case, with a cracked screen. The police bagged it up as evidence and promised to try and find any evidence to Laney’s whereabouts from it. But even two days in, the static noise from the town was dimming a tad, the headlines moving on. No one needed a fortune teller’s crystal ball to tell where this story was likely going. Girls went missing and never turned up in places like this all the time. It was a shame tragedy had become a way of life for the rural areas where no modern girl wanted to be tied.

Four days in, the fervor reignited when scraps of a Supergirl costume were found on the edge of a pond, tangled in dead branches, a clue that solidified that there was far more to the story that had yet to unfold in full. Not long after, it was confirmed that Laney’s DNA was found on the costume. That same morning, Barb at the diner could barely hold up her pot of coffee because her body was shaking with the news ready to burst out of her. The old television set was fired up in a corner, ready for any news conference yet to be held by the investigation team.

Whispers began to circulate that there was a murderer in town. Neighbors glanced at each other with more suspicious eyes, and even old men like Don Joyce on Beech Avenue were given more than a passing glance now. Because of course it was a man: who else would want to do anything criminal to a young sweet girl like Laney?

But even this landscape of wariness couldn’t last ad infinitum. The townspeople drifted to thoughts about Thanksgiving and Christmas coming up. Sure, it was a shame that Dottie would be by herself with no uplifting news or shred of hope to get her through the first holiday season without her daughter, but what could anyone do about it? The first snowfall even cancelled another search party. Whatever secrets still remained about Laney Romano, they were likely being blanketed by the fresh snow.

On Christmas morning, a well-being check on Dottie Romano found the poor woman unconscious with a bottle of sleeping pills empty beside her. Even as she recovered in the hospital under suicide watch, there came a new line of questioning: did the mother know something about her daughter’s disappearance that made her feel moved to take her own life? Garish as the accusation would have been, that didn’t stop the rumors or the insinuations in the local newspaper.

By New Year’s Day—a fresh start for everyone—Laney Romano was just another name to throw around casually. Most of the townsfolk couldn’t have even told you enough to give a good composite sketch of the girl whose face had been plastered over the news sporadically in the past months. The town, it seemed, was ready to move on. Whether girls left or were taken away, the point was that they were gone. And gone girls did not matter in the grand scheme of things, did they?

The police tried not to say it was becoming a cold case, but any tips had dried up around the holidays. The last substantial bit of information had been an anonymous call that a girl matching Laney’s description had been seen at a Target in the city. Her friends—the girls who had actually known Laney on a day-to-day level—just shook their heads amongst themselves and said that was obviously a lie because Laney never shopped at Target.

And so it went. A girl’s name that had once been a hook for the newspapers went to die in the backs of the minds of the people who might have been able to keep her memory alive for at least a bit longer. Even her mother, still in recovery, told her sister in confidence (but of course it wasn’t) that she was thinking of moving to another state—anything to get away from the town that had chewed up her daughter and spit her out without a second thought.

Girls didn't die just at the hands of the people who should be protecting them; girls died when they fell out of the spotlight, when their stories were just taken as fodder for views and readership, when their names were no longer profitable or relevant to the wider scheme.

Laney Romano’s body was never found, not even a year later, and the posters that had been plastered with her face grew faded and torn. She may have been alive, she may have been dead, but she disappeared the day her small town stopped talking about her—the day she was left to her fate, whatever it was, because no one else could be bothered to care anymore. Laney just became a cautionary tale for mothers to share with their daughters: remember to be seen, no matter what you do. That’s the only way you can survive in this world.

Those words would probably be true for a long time to come.