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that flipped in the opposite
direction of all the others. This is trouble , Laura told herself. It’s
the first week of school, and he’s clearly taken .
    She forced herself to shove all the Charlie images out of
her head as she continued on with her research, entering a few search terms
into the news database. She watched as dozens of links related to the term “safe
+ river ” popped up. The top result on the page was the last line Laura
expected to see: Local Girl Takes Own Life in Freezing Navesink River. It
was her story.
     
via The Asbury Park Press
     
Englewood, NJ — The ritzy commuter
town of Englewood is shocked today by reports that fifteen-year-old student
Sarah Castro-Tanner may have taken her own life with a plunge off the abandoned
freight train tracks into the icy Navesink River.
 
Castro-Tanner’s parents, Jim Castro and Alice
Tanner, both longtime Englewood residents, reported that the teen went out at
6:00 p.m. on the night she went missing to go see a movie. They called police
when she did not return by the next morning. Forty-eight hours later at
approximately 11:00 a.m., articles of clothing matching her parents’
description washed up where the riverbank meets the Hazlet inlet.
 
“We are exploring this from every angle,
including a suicide,” a spokesman for the Monmouth County sheriff’s office told The Press . “We have yet to discover a body. However, we’ve
estimated that river temperatures were twelve degrees overnight. A body between
100 and 150 pounds loses consciousness after approximately ten minutes in below-freezing
water, and death from hypothermia can follow just fifteen minutes after.
Currents of the Navesink and proximity to the Atlantic inlet also mean a body would
move out to sea very quickly. Further investigation is, of course, ongoing.”
 
The spokesman also reported that police collected
evidence of Castro-Tanner’s fingerprints along the railing of the bridge, which
sits over thirty feet above the river. Hers were the only fingerprints found. The
Castro-Tanners have requested privacy regarding the matter, promising to update
through the sheriff’s office following an investigation.
     
    Laura’s mind filled with questions the moment she finished
reading the article, but one kept sticking out: why did the town
assume Sarah was gone?
    For the next thirty minutes, she was caught in a spiral of internet
searching. She read at least a half-dozen other cases where bodies were
presumed to have washed out to sea—bodies from murders, accidents, or suspected
suicides like Sarah’s story. In each case, police assumed the person would
never be found, but sport divers or fisherman ultimately discovered them every
time, sometimes years later. According to this article, it had only been eighteen
months since Sarah disappeared. Laura couldn’t think about the poor girl’s body
slowly freezing without getting chills all over her own body.
    Laura went back to the original article she’d stumbled upon
and stared at the screen, fixated on Sarah’s sophomore yearbook picture. She
didn’t exactly see the connection that everyone else saw, but it made sense
that the whole school was affected by someone that even remotely resembled
Sarah; her story was totally tragic.
    Then Laura noticed that the article featured a whole
gallery of images from Sarah’s life. She clicked through to find one of eleven-year-old
Sarah holding up a watercolor painting of a goldfish, eight-year-old Sarah
blowing out the candles on her chocolate-chip-cookie birthday cake, and Sarah
around age five, riding on her dad’s shoulders as they walked through an
amusement park. Every single Sarah had curly black hair, stark-white skin, and
deep brown eyes, and every single Sarah wore the exact same expression on her face: loneliness.
    “Everything okay?”
    Laura’s stomach jumped as she whipped around in her chair. Charlie.
    “Sorry to startle you,” he said. “Are you in here all
alone?”
    She