My mom only turned away for a moment. She was pregnant with my brother and sister and we were crib-shopping in an Indianapolis department store. When she turned back I was gone.
A teenage store clerk saw the woman pick me up and begin to run. It happened so quickly that by the time my mother turned around the woman holding me and the clerk running after her were no longer visible. The sliding glass doors at the entrance slowed the woman enough that the clerk could tackle her. She wrestled me out of the woman’s arms and the woman escaped out the door, vanishing into the parking lot. She was never caught.
My mom told me this story several times throughout my childhood. It’s not something a neurotic insomniac child takes in and forgets about. I thought about it some nights as I laid in bed, imagining what might have happened had we made it through the door. I never imagined she could have killed me. I was a pretty, blonde, two and a half year-old. It just doesn’t seem like a woman in her 30’s or 40’s (the description given to the police) would take a little girl to murder her. I imagined that she would have raised me. And I would have had a different life.
