November 4, 1971 Jennifer Rose Cooke, a girl from California, just turned 18, goes missing in a frigid forest in West Germany. She has been hitchhiking. First she caught a ride with a trucker, then with a West German soldier. Maybe she was trying to visit a young professor she had met on the boat over from New York. On that trip, he had heard her say she might throw herself overboard. April 28, 1972 Another girl, just turned three, lives with her parents in a house in Laurel Canyon that lets the California rain in. Her biggest fear is of the brown snails in the garden; she will not cross the brick path if one is there. It is her father's twenty-sixth birthday; on this day his sister Jenny's remains are found. Officially, she died of exposure, although a murder investigation is begun and the file remains permanently open.
Summer 2003: I walk past the Balboa park BART station, here in the south-central outskirts of San Francisco. This place is not on the maps of the city...
My instinct, mid-stream in the molasses flow of late-afternoon San Francisco traffic, was to just keep moving. This was getting us nowhere. Mom sat be...
I measure the imported rice, squeeze the plum tomatoes and chop them, chop the flat-leaf parsley and rosemary from the garden, the garlic, the onion. ...
Up at Pulgas Ridge Megadog and I walk the Cordilleras Trail past the multiple-addiction rehab center tucked at the edge of San Francisco Water Departm...
It doesn’t help that I have PMS on the day my chicken dies. I find her in the backyard coop, one wing drooping out of the nest, her head lolling. I ha...
Three o’clock in the afternoon, and Shirley, of Shawnee Memorials, just across Harrison Avenue from Fairview Cemetery, was not taking any shit off my ...
The sound of pistons pumping, a lawn-mower pulse and wheeze, comes up behind her, and she looks over her shoulder to see the VW coming up fast: black ...
"I serve with the German Armed Forces. My garrison is Hardheim, where I am stationed at Carl-Schurz-Kaserne. At present, I attend the Bundeswehrfachsc...
Terminal burrowing can be identified in reports of hypothermia deaths, but has only recently been given a name. It is a behavior pattern observed in t...
She's six years oldAll she sees are dirty walls around her Men coming in and out the front door She wants to run cry and yell But there is nobody ther...