Everything in West was fine until the little girl went missing. It truly was quite the tragedy: a little doll, only three years old, sporting thin blonde hair and the brightest blue eyes, always wearing the innocent expression of a toddler - the face of a child yet untarnished by the darkness of the world. This little girl had that pageantry-type cuteness, the child prodigy look of Colorado’s JonBenét Ramsey, who - would you look at that - also disappeared.
Except JonBenét was most certainly dead, and we had absolutely no clue if West’s missing girl was dead. The rumor was that nobody could figure out where the hell she went. There was no body, no little dress left behind, no hair clip or cutie little bow dropped haphazardly in the snow. No footprints - well, besides her own, which had suddenly vanished between a pair of pines one winter day at the Colorado ski resort her family was visiting. There were the little shoeprints, the dainty indents in the snow: step step step, then the pines, and then - nothing. Just crisp, clean snow splayed out ahead, all the way down the side of the slope, curling into the mountains a few miles out - the mountains just visible through the light snowfall. It was as if she had vanished into thin air.
It may have been a Colorado mystery, but I suppose the facts suggest her story was much less like JonBenét’s and much more like Madeleine McCann’s.
Oh, I’m sorry - I’ll stop being so dark and dramatic. I’ve gotten really into serial killer podcasts and missing persons shows lately. It’s not good for the soul, but it makes for better storytelling.
What is it about us that loves to hear the darkest stories - what is it about humans that makes us crave a story of dark mystery and despair, the loss of life and suffering of others? I don’t know, but damn - it’s addicting, isn’t it?
But this story is real. I swear. Little girl, cute little thing, disappeared between the pines. No evidence, no body, vanishing footsteps. That’s the whole bloodless story. Crazy, no?
What’s wilder still is how the little town of West found out about the disappearance. There must’ve been some kind of police or news connection with somebody in Colorado, some kind of leak, because the story got down to Texas in record time. The community got together and held a vigil for the little girl, as if she’d already been confirmed dead. There we were, candlelight reflecting in the faces of West’s nervous parents, oblivious cowboy boot-sporting children, and the deep wrinkles of downtrodden grandparents. Cowboy hats cast shadows across mens’ unshaved faces, light weaving between the trimmed beard hairs of these true, heart-of-Texas conservatives.
The little girl’s parents seemed shockingly optimistic when they returned to West. They’d waited nearly a month to come back, supposedly stuck in Colorado searching day and night for their daughter - except when they were stuck in police interviews, of course. Their extended family was all down in West - the worried-sick grandparents, the prayerful aunts and their heavy-set husbands, even the little cousins who cried that sweet, goofy Ellie wasn’t returning with the rest of her family.
Parents often decide it’s better not to tell their kids when something terrible has happened. It’s to “protect them from evil,” or something like that. What a stupid thing to do - kids don’t stay kids, they grow up one day and are forced to face the darkness - and worse still, when they inevitably meet it head-on, most will also discover the people they trusted most had lied to them!
“No, it’s not lying,” you will say. “It’s just bending the truth a bit. It’s keeping innocence intact. It’s protecting little minds so kids can just be kids.”
“Okay,” I’d respond. “Tell that to the kid who was adopted, but didn’t find out until their 18th birthday. Or the kid who sprung from an affair and found that out as an adult. Or the one whose dog didn’t go to a special farm to live out his “golden years” - he really got hit by a car just down the street. I mean, where is the line? What dark things should we tell kids, and what dark things should we not?”
Anyways, this is exactly what happened with little Ellie’s cousins. Nobody told them she wasn’t coming back, because their parents didn’t feel it was their place, and Ellie’s parents didn’t have the heart. It was an odd period of limbo, an awkward hush-hush at depressed family gatherings, Ellie’s siblings attempting to keep their advanced knowledge quiet for fear of parental discipline.
For the next couple of months, life went on in West, the little girl’s parents flying back and forth between Texas and Colorado as the search continued. Eventually, spring rolled around, the constant blanket of fresh snow at the ski resort thinning until, one day in mid-April, the ground became visible. The earth between the pines, where Ellie’s footsteps had mysteriously vanished back in late December, had of course been cleared of the snow and searched when the girl went missing. In fact, the whole region had been combed, the areas boasting multiple feet of snow dug deep into in search of her. But nothing had been found. There was nothing to suggest she was dead or alive, nothing to suggest that she had ever visited the resort, nothing to suggest that she’d ever even existed. Just nothing - a deeply frustrating and horrifying mystery for her parents, her siblings, the resort staff, and the entire town of West.
But when the snow started to melt away, when Spring had finally sprung - the sun’s rays uncovered something strange.
A little boy, just about Ellie’s age, made the discovery. He’d wandered off a bit, but of course stayed within eyesight of his father, who was acutely aware of the recent story of the missing little girl. With no indication of anything gone awry, the little boy skipped back to his father, a co-owner of the resort who unassumingly strolled the grounds with his son on this particularly warm April morning.
Tugging insistently on his father’s arm, the little boy grinned as they made their way over to a ridge on the side of the slope. There, in the ground, was something very odd indeed - a hole, perhaps three feet wide by three feet deep, sat just at the edge of the slope. The hole was much too large and precise to have been dug by an animal, the dirt perfectly scraped away so that the inside was smooth all around, as if it had been patted down with a shovel. But the oddest part of all was the single pink snow boot that stood decidedly in the center of the hole - the very center, in fact. The left foot boot appeared soaked inside and out from the melted snow, but otherwise, stood perfectly upright, not a scrape or hint of dirt anywhere on it.
“You found it just like this?” The man asked the little boy.
The child nodded confidently.
“Are you sure?” The man reiterated.
“Yes, daddy,” he said. “I’m sure.”
“Did you touch it?” The man asked.
“No, daddy,” the little boy said, exasperated. “I remembered what you told me. Don’t touch any weird things on the slope until they figure out the mystery.”
“Good job,” the man said, wrapping his arm around the little boy’s shoulders and trying to maintain a calm composure.
The boy’s father pulled out his cell phone and dialed 9-1-1.
Not the end yet… stay tuned for Part Two! Please leave a comment, like, share, and/or subscribe if you liked this post. It means the world to me! ❤️
Story three is for Jonah, the guy who always reads & watches mysteries with me… and who always reads my writing, even when he’s had a long day.