Twenty-six months after my granddaughter vanished, I watched her chew toast on my sister-in-law’s tablet in real time, and my sister-in-law pulled it out of my hands and said, “That’s an old clip, Lena. You do this to yourself every single week.” Then she carried the jelly I’d paid for up the stairs.
The little red tag in the corner of that feed said LIVE.
Jayla would’ve turned eleven in March. Tristan, my son, still paid every month to keep the tip line on her flyers ringing.
Every Tuesday I drove groceries over to Olivia’s place in Kendallville and stocked her pantry, since she’d quit driving after her hip.
“Store-brand beans again,” she said the second I came in. “I told you I can taste the difference.”
They were two bags for three dollars. There was a cow in a bonnet on the front.
Her tablet buzzed while I was loading juice into the fridge, and I swiped the doorbell alert to see whether a package had come.
The porch camera came up, and below it sat a second square marked UPSTAIRS.
A girl was sitting behind a door left open, picking the crust off her toast.
Jayla never touched a crust till the soft middle was gone.
I lifted the screen closer to my face. Olivia reached across the bags and took it from me.
Twenty-six months.
The Christmas before she disappeared, I’d given Jayla that same tablet for her games. Maybe Olivia had saved some old recordings off it.
Then Olivia climbed the stairs with the grape jelly I’d bought TODAY.
She’d left the tablet face down next to the bags, so I flipped it over and tapped back into the cameras.
Still live.
Olivia stepped into that doorway holding the jar. Jayla reached up for it, and I pressed both buttons for a screenshot right as the display went black.
Olivia had kept my granddaughter UP THERE ALL ALONG.
My hands wouldn’t close.
“Finish unpacking for me, would you?” Olivia said from the top step. “Tristan’s stopping by at NOON.”
I took my phone out to the car and dialed 911. A dispatcher named Brianne said to wait at the curb until deputies came.
Olivia walked out onto the porch after me holding the tablet, and a text dropped down over the screen before she got it flipped.
It was from Tristan.
“Do NOT let Mom near Jayla till I’m there,” the text said. “If she gets her alone she’ll say why we took her.”
The bottom step
Mom was me. There is nobody else on this earth Tristan calls that.
So my son knew where Jayla was. He knew while he was printing the flyers at the FedEx on McGalliard. He knew every month he paid the bill on that tip line, and every Sunday he sat at my table and told me the detectives were working a lead in Ohio.
Brianne was still on the line. “Ma’am? Are you with me?”
“My son’s in on it,” I said. “He just texted her.”
“Stay at your vehicle. Two units are on the way. Do not go back inside that house.”
I didn’t go back inside. I went up two steps, which is not the same thing, and held my hand out.
“Give it here, Liv.”
She held the tablet flat against her chest with both arms.
“You need to go home and lie down,” she said. It was the same voice she used about the beans. “You’re going to scare her.”
Scare her.
She didn’t say there was nobody up there. She didn’t say old clip this time. She said I was going to scare her.
Then she went inside, and I heard the deadbolt turn.
I stood on her second step with my hand still out in front of me like I was waiting for change. Somewhere above the porch roof, behind a blind pulled all the way down, my granddaughter was eating toast with grape jelly I’d taken off the shelf at Kroger at eight o’clock that morning.
What had they told her about me?
Olivia’s lists
The first Tuesday was twenty-six months ago, four days after Jayla didn’t come back out of the Walmart on McGalliard.
Tristan came to my house with a sheet of yellow legal paper folded in thirds.
“Aunt Liv just had her hip done and she can’t drive,” he said. “And you can’t sit by the phone all day, Mom. You’ll lose your mind.”
He was right about the second part. I’d sat by the kitchen phone so long I’d stretched the cord out of its curl.
So I took the list. Milk, bread, the good coffee, Epsom salts, a box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, grape jelly.
I asked about the cereal. Olivia said the surgeon wanted her eating something in the morning and she couldn’t face eggs. I asked about the jelly, because in forty years of Thanksgivings I had never once seen my sister-in-law eat anything grape. She said the anesthesia changed her taste buds.
I believed her. Why wouldn’t I? She was Francisco’s big sister. She held Tristan at his christening when I was too wrung out to stand. When Francisco died, she was the one who knew which drawer the insurance papers were in.
Every couple of months I went out to her detached garage and jumped her Buick so the battery wouldn’t die, since she wasn’t driving it. That was the kind of thing I did for Olivia. That was the kind of thing she let me do.
Kristine is Jayla’s mother. She and Tristan split when Jayla was four, and for five years they handed that girl back and forth in the Speedway lot off Route 32. Then the summer Jayla was nine, Tristan drove her home from the county fair with beer in him and put his truck in a ditch. Nobody got hurt. The deputy wrote it up anyway.
Kristine asked the court for primary custody and permission to move to Crawfordsville, where her new husband had work. The hearing was set for the second week of September.
I wrote a letter to the judge. Judge Yancey. One page, my own handwriting, because I don’t trust myself with printers. I said Tristan loved his daughter and was a good father sober, and that Jayla should live with her mother on school nights and see her dad every other weekend. I signed it Lena Frazier, paternal grandmother.
Tristan read it in the court file. He didn’t speak to me for three weeks.
Then Jayla went missing, and the hearing got canceled, and my son showed up with a yellow list and called me Mom again like nothing had ever happened.
I was so grateful to have him back that I didn’t ask him one thing.
After that, Olivia wrote the lists herself. Twenty-six months of them. Grape jelly every Tuesday. The cereal changed when it was supposed to change, Cinnamon Toast Crunch to Frosted Mini-Wheats, right around the age a girl gets told she’s too old for the sugary kind.
The deputies pulled up at 11:31. That morning’s list was still folded in my coat pocket.
Deputy Lassiter
Two cars. A woman deputy with her hair in a low knot came up the walk first. Her name tag said LASSITER.
I told her all of it. I told it too fast and out of order, the toast, the crust, the red tag, the jelly, the text. She wrote some of it down.
Olivia opened the front door before anybody knocked.
She had her cane. I hadn’t seen that cane in a year and a half.
“Officer, I’m so sorry,” she said. “This is my brother’s widow. Her granddaughter’s been missing over two years. She comes Tuesdays to help me, and some weeks she just, well.” She turned the tablet around. “Look at what she thinks she saw.”
The screen showed the porch camera, and under it a black square. The words under the black square said UPSTAIRS OFFLINE.
“That camera hasn’t worked since spring,” Olivia said. “When it did, I had it on the guest bed, because I fall. There’s old video saved on there. Lena finds it. Every single week.”
“It said LIVE twenty minutes ago,” I said.
“Every week,” Lassiter said. She was looking at me.
“I took a screenshot,” I said. “On that tablet. Show her.”
Olivia thumbed into the pictures like she’d been waiting for me to ask. The newest one was black from edge to edge. Not one thing in it.
I’d pressed the buttons one second late.
“Mrs. Frazier,” Lassiter said, “have you called in sightings before?”
I had. Forty-one of them. A girl at the Indianapolis airport. A girl in a Dollar General circular. A girl getting off a Ball State shuttle with the same backpack. Every one of them I called in to the number on the flyer, and every time, Tristan phoned me back inside an hour to say the detective had checked it and it wasn’t her.
“That’s different,” I said.
“Mind if we take a look upstairs, ma’am?” Lassiter asked Olivia.
Olivia didn’t hesitate. “Of course. My nephew’s on his way. He’ll be sick about this. He’s always the one who has to calm her down.”
The other deputy went in. I heard him on the stairs. A door, then a closet, then another door.
He came back down shaking his head. “Sewing room. Bed’s made. Nothing.”
Down the hall behind Olivia, the back door to the yard was standing open about four inches.
The number on the flyer
Before I could open my mouth about that door, Tristan’s truck came around the corner. It was 11:40. He parked across the end of Olivia’s driveway like he meant to block it.
He went to the deputies first. Not me.
“I’m the father,” he said. He had one hand up with the palm out, the way you come at a dog you don’t know. “I’m so sorry about this. Mom. Mom, come here. It’s okay.”
“Where is she, Tristan?”
He talked to Lassiter, not me. “She’s been having a real hard time. Her doctor put her on something in the spring. She goes through these old clips and she gets convinced. It’s on me. I should’ve been the one doing Aunt Liv’s groceries.”
“She says she saw a text from you,” Lassiter said. “On your aunt’s tablet.”
“Sure, I text my aunt.” He held his phone out for her. “Here. ‘Don’t let Mom near Jayla’s stuff till I’m there.’ Liv keeps a box of Jayla’s things. Drawings. Mom gets into that box and she’s wrecked for a week.”
Jayla’s stuff. He’d worked that out on the drive over. The thread on his phone ended right there, neat, nothing above it and nothing below.
Lassiter read the screen a long time. Then she looked at me again.
The other deputy was already walking back to his car.
I had my phone in my hand. I’d had it in my hand since Brianne.
And I had the flyer. I always have the flyer. There’s one in my glove box and one in my purse and one taped to the side of my refrigerator, Jayla’s third-grade picture with the gap in her front teeth, and under it in red, HAVE YOU SEEN ME? CALL 24/7, and a 765 number.
Tristan set that number up the first week. He said a private line meant tips went straight to the investigator instead of getting lost at the county switchboard. He said it cost him forty dollars a month. I offered to pay half, and he wouldn’t let me.
Forty-one times I’d called it. Sometimes a man picked up and took the information. Sometimes it went to a voicemail. Then, inside the hour, Tristan.
I dialed it with Deputy Lassiter standing right there.
It rang in my ear.
And it rang about four feet away, in the front pocket of my son’s jeans.
Tristan’s hand went to that pocket and stayed there.
“Sir,” Lassiter said. “Take your hand out of your pocket for me, please.”
The Buick
Nobody was looking at me after that. Lassiter had Tristan turned around with his hands on the hood of his truck, the other deputy was jogging back up the drive, and Olivia was saying “He hasn’t done anything” through the screen door to anybody who’d listen.
I walked around the side of the house.
The back door was still open its four inches. Olivia’s yard runs downhill to the detached garage where the Buick sits. The side door of that garage has a broken latch, and it swings in any wind at all. I’ve told Olivia a hundred times to get it fixed.
It was shut.
Somebody was holding it from the inside.
“Jayla,” I said. “It’s Grandma.”
Nothing. Then a scuff, a sneaker on concrete.
“I’m not going to open it. I’m going to sit right here.” I sat down on the cinderblock step with my bad knee out straight and put my back against the door.
It was a long time before she said anything.
“Daddy said not to talk to you.” Her voice was lower than the one I had in my head. She was eleven. I kept forgetting.
“I know he did. I saw.”
“He said if you found me you’d make me go to Crawfordsville and I’d never see him again.”
“Who told you I’d do that?”
The door moved. It didn’t open. A sheet of paper came out under it, folded in thirds, gone soft as a dish rag along the creases.
I knew it before I opened it. One page. My handwriting.
Jayla should live with her mother on school nights. Somebody had gone over that line in yellow highlighter. They’d gone over Lena Frazier, paternal grandmother too.
“Daddy got it from the judge,” she said through the door. “He said you wrote it to give me away. You and Mom were going to take me where he couldn’t come. So him and Aunt Liv had to keep me safe till I was old enough to tell the judge myself.”
Old enough. Twenty-six months in a sewing room, waiting to get old enough.
“Did you write it?” she said.
“I wrote it,” I said. “Every word of it.”
The sneaker scuffed again, closer to the door.
“Then read me the rest,” she said. “Daddy only ever read me the yellow part.”
Noon
I read her the whole letter through a garage door. It took two minutes. The part about her dad being a good father when he wasn’t drinking. The part about every other weekend, and Wednesday suppers with him, and a line near the bottom I’d forgotten I wrote: She loves both of them and she should not have to pick.
The latch clicked. Jayla came out with her backpack on both shoulders and toast crumbs down the front of her shirt.
She didn’t hug me. She took the letter back and folded it on its old creases.
We came around the front of the house at noon exactly. Tristan was sitting on the porch steps with a deputy on each side and his phone in a plastic bag on the hood of the cruiser. Olivia was in the doorway behind him with no cane.
He saw Jayla and stood up, and both deputies put a hand on him.
“Jay. Baby. Go back inside with Aunt Liv.”
“Sit down, sir,” Lassiter said.
“She’s my kid,” he said to her. “You get that? She’s mine. Her mother was going to haul her two hours up the road and I’d get every other weekend, like some uncle who visits. Because of that.” He pointed at the paper in Jayla’s hand. “My own mother wrote the judge. You know what that’s like? Your own mother?”
Nobody answered him. He kept going.
“I never laid a finger on her. Ask her. She’s got her own room. She’s got schoolwork, Liv taught her fractions. She’s got a tablet. She was safe. She was a hell of a lot safer than in some apartment in Crawfordsville with a guy who—” He stopped. “I paid for everything.”
“I paid for the groceries,” I said.
He looked at me then. It was the first time all day.
“You paid for the groceries,” he said. “Great. You want a medal? You put her face on a flyer and cried on Channel 13 and wrote letters. I’m the one who raised her for two years.”
“You told me Lena knew,” Olivia said from the doorway.
Everybody turned.
“You said she’d agreed to it and she just couldn’t know where, so she wouldn’t have to lie to the police.” Olivia had both hands on the doorframe. “You said till the hearing got thrown out. You said a year, Tristan. I drove that baby out of the Walmart lot with my hip on fire because you said a year.”
“Liv, shut up.”
“Ma’am, I’m going to ask you not to say anything else,” Lassiter said to her. And then, to the deputy on Tristan’s left, “Go ahead.”
He put the cuffs on my son on Olivia’s porch steps. Tristan didn’t fight it. He kept his eyes on Jayla the whole time.
“Tell them, Jay,” he said. “Tell them you wanted to stay.”
Jayla held the letter against her backpack strap.
“You didn’t read me the part about Wednesdays,” she said.
Lassiter came down the walk to me with her notebook out. “Mrs. Frazier, I’m going to need you at the station. The number you dialed. Anything Olivia gave you in writing.”
I took that morning’s yellow list out of my coat pocket. Grape jelly was the second line.
“Mom,” Tristan said from the steps. “Mom. Don’t.”
I put it in her hand.
Crawfordsville
Three Tuesdays later I drove an hour and a half up to Kristine’s apartment with the trunk full.
Tristan is in the Delaware County jail. Olivia is home on a bond with an ankle monitor and a lawyer, and she doesn’t answer when I call, which is fair, because I don’t know what I’d say if she did. I gave my statement twice. I’ll give it again in front of a jury if it comes to that, and it will.
The week after, I called the number on the flyer one more time, from my kitchen. A recording said it was no longer in service.
I still haven’t taken the flyer off the fridge.
Kristine let me in and went back to her laptop at the counter. We are polite with each other. We have twenty-six months to get through, and she doesn’t owe me a thing.
Jayla was at the table in a sweatshirt that still had the fold lines from the store, eating toast.
I sat across from her and watched it the whole way through. No screen. No little red tag. She ate the soft middle first and left the crust in a ring on her plate.
I unloaded the bags onto Kristine’s counter. Orange juice. Bread. Grape jelly. Two bags of store-brand green beans with the cow on the front.
Jayla looked over at them.
“You got the cow ones,” she said.
“Two for three dollars,” I said.
She picked the crust ring up off her plate and set it on the table in front of me.
If this one stayed with you, pass it to somebody who still keeps a flyer in the glove box.
For more family secrets and unsettling twists, read about the daughter-in-law who sent her husband and sister conflicting stories, then follow the strange store announcements in the story of the missing heaters and the fever medicine swept off the shelves.
