Looking back, it’s wild how forty years can just vanish into this empty haze. It started like any normal Friday. Clara packed up seven-year-old Lily and five-year-old Toby into the station wagon, heading out for a weekend visit with her sister Gwen over by the coast. I stayed back to finish up work, planning to drive down and join them Sunday evening.

Sunday night never happened.

Instead, Gwen called me that night asking me where Clara and the kids were. “How do you mean where they are? They should have arrived at your place until now.” But they didn’t, and by Monday, the police got involved, and within a week, their faces were all over the news.

Divers dragged that freezing, swollen river for days. They hauled up old tires, rusted scrap, and garbage, but not a single trace of Clara or the kids. They did find the station wagon, though, parked right near the edge of an old bridge with no guardrails. The driver’s side door was unlocked, the key was sitting right in the ignition, and Clara’s handbag was on the seat.

The cops tied it up in a neat little package: Clara must have hit black ice or dozed off, gone off the unlit bridge, and the river carried them off. Two years later, the courts signed the papers declaring them dead.