For the purpose of the report, he pulled two shoe boxes from the attic filled with souvenirs from his childhood.
There were newspaper clippings, faded Polaroid photos, photographs, school reports, in short, all the little things he could take with him from his family home before he went to live with his aunt, his mother's sister, Lucy Wilson. They told Alan to sit at the kitchen table and take more things out of these boxes, spread them on the counter like pieces of a puzzle, look for those among them that would make it easier to see the whole picture, and move from all sides towards its center. Only there was not a single piece of it in Alan's boxes. There was nowhere to start working on the puzzle. It was as if instead of a thousand pieces of one puzzle, he had managed to collect one piece from a thousand puzzles.
"It's us," he said, looking at the Polaroid photo on the campsite.
The close-up of the camera must have caught the disheveled Alan and Veronica standing on either side of their mother
the background of the tent. My husband looked nine, so Veronica might have been eight, with
they were both covered with dirt, and their mother, wearing a red and white headscarf, was staring at the camera with her chin proudly upturned.
"I don't have any pictures of my father," he added sadly. - He has always photographed us, so I have to rely only on my memories to describe him. Nevertheless, I can still see him in front of my eyes, tall and shapely, always wearing a peaked cap and a tiny mustache on his upper lip. He was really handsome. Veronica inherited his beauty from him. He reached for a yellowed piece of newspaper.
"And here's the clipping," he continued, carefully unfolding the fragile paper. "I found it among a few things in my father's almost empty drawer.
The cameraman aimed the camera lens at a blurry photo of the school cheerleading squad. There were a dozen girls there, some smiling, others making silly faces.
- Apparently Dad left them, because Veronica is on it, still small and ungrown, but her name was in the signature. He was so proud of it. Of course I'm talking about the father. Every move us about it
he told. By the way, he liked to joke that we were the best family he had so far. An interview with Ronald Cane, former director of my University (University of California Berkeley), is also planned to be included in the report.
"It's a big mystery," he said. - I knew Richard Stiles. We went fishing together several times. He was a good man. I can't imagine what happened to him. Maybe we are dealing with an accident similar to the Manson family? Well, you know, with the killers traveling across the country that Alan's family got in the way just because they were at the wrong time and in the wrong place.
An interview with Aunt Lucy was also recorded.
"I lost my sister, brother-in-law and nieces," she confessed. "But Alan lost much, much more." Fortunately, he managed to shake it off and grew from a wonderful boyfriend to a wonderful husband and father.
If the producer of the report was going to keep his word and cut out the malicious comment of a retiree who currently lives in Alan's house, casting a shadow on him that he had something to do with the disappearance of his entire family, he might have inserted a few sympathetic comments from these interlocutors.
When the report was aired a few weeks later, Alan was dumbfounded as he was first shown a detective questioning him in his family home right after his neighbor, Mrs. Jameson, called the police. He was retired and living in Arizona, and the words "Retired Investigator Frank West" at the bottom of the screen left no doubt. He was the one who led the investigation until he closed it after a year without even a hint of evidence. The producers of the report sent it to the named address a team from a friendly TV station, which recorded the statement of a former policeman against the background of an aluminum mobile home shining in the sun.
"From the beginning of this investigation, I was tormented by the question of why this particular boy was saved. Because I assumed, of course, that the rest of the family died. Somehow I never got over the theory that they had all suddenly secretly left, leaving him home alone. I would assume blindly that the family is kicking a troubled teenager out of the house because such things happen all the time. But for everyone to disappear without a trace, not to have any more to do with the troubling child? It made no sense to me. And that meant there was some dirty gameplay involved. Hence I kept returning to the original question: why was he the only survivor? With this assumption, there aren't many options.