When the Stars Go Dark

Anna recalls the Christmas morning when she was eight when her mother disappeared and how she tried to maintain the house for her siblings. The morning after Christmas, Anna tried to make eggs for breakfast but instead triggered the fire alarm. The police arrived and discovered the three kids without any adults.

Will and Anna now head to the Curtis home to talk with Cameron’s adoptive parents and to check Cameron’s room for clues. Troy, the girl’s adoptive father, describes Cameron as a “nerdy bookworm,” an idealist who dreamed of changing the world. Emily admits that she and Troy had begun fighting more and that turmoil might have upset Cameron.

Before Anna and Will check out Cameron’s room, Emily shares her story of arriving in Hollywood when she was 19 and finding success on television before taking a hiatus to care for her family—a challenge, given Troy’s serial philandering. Emily admits that Troy’s latest affair, with an assistant producer at his studio, is ongoing. She shares that lately Cameron had become more introverted. Teenagers, Will assures her, “can be hard to read” (83). Emily tells them that Cameron had found a kindred spirit in her English teacher, Steve Gonzales.

Will and Anna go into Cameron’s bedroom. Books that reflect Cameron’s moodiness are stacked on her desk: poetry collections of Rainer Maria Rilke and Anne Sexton and a copy of The Catcher in the Rye. Emily admits she might have missed signals Cameron was sending. As Emily talks, Anna notices lots of tiny scratch marks around the window indicating that Cameron might have snuck out, leaving willingly.

Will and Anna depart the Curtis home. Will suggests looking into Emily’s brother, Cameron’s uncle Drew Hague. Routine computer searches turned up that Drew had been accused of rape in college but that the girl later said it was all a misunderstanding.

Anna shares with Will her theory that perhaps Cameron was running away to meet someone and had simply avoided the surveillance cameras. Will hedges around the question he wants to ask: whether Anna’s intuitions about Cameron’s dark secrets might be about Anna’s own past as he remembers her being “a pretty happy kid but maybe [he] wasn’t paying attention” (98).

Anna recalls that her mother had been found dead on Christmas night. Having a drug addiction from a young age, she had borrowed money to buy the children gifts but bought heroin instead and overdosed. She was found dead in a parked car. Because Anna’s father was in prison, Social Services placed the three siblings in different foster care homes.

The next morning, Monday, Anna and Will interview Gray Benson, Cameron’s best friend. Gray tells the detectives that Cameron was upset because she had found out that her philandering father’s girlfriend was pregnant. But more urgent, Cameron had visited a woman’s clinic to secure birth control pills to help with her complexion. The exam, however, had revealed scarring inside her vagina consistent with sexual activity or possibly childhood sexual abuse. After sharing that with Gray, Cameron shut down and withdrew.

On the way back, Will receives a call from headquarters: another girl has gone missing, Shannan Russo, 17. Shannan has been missing since June, but the family was only reporting it now. Will heads to Gualala to talk with the lead investigator.

Anna goes to the high school to talk with Steve Gonzales, Cameron’s English teacher. He shares that Cameron wrote some promising poems and that he encouraged her to submit them to the school’s literary magazine. In Cameron’s locker, Will and Anna find a well-thumbed copy of Jane Eyre and a postcard where she had copied out in longhand a lengthy poem from Rainer Rilke about being alone and feeling hurt. Anna now suspects Cameron has been sexually abused but doesn’t know who the perpetrator is.

Will returns from Gualala and meets Anna for a drink. Shannan Russo was a troubled kid with a drug addiction who had run away in June. She left a note. Her mother thought nothing about it until Tally Hollander, a local psychic, phoned her out of the blue and said she had a vision of Shannan dead in the woods. The mother called the police. Will recognizes the name—Tally had used Cameron’s tipline to tell police she had a vision of the girl being trapped in “some sort of tight space in the dark” (121). Anna considers possible links between Cameron’s and Shannan’s disappearances.

Will tells Anna that Cameron’s mother failed a polygraph. Will theorizes that Emily’s guilt over her daughter’s disappearance might have skewed the results. Anna, however, wonders if Emily is trying to protect her brother.

Anna suggests that Cameron might have been signaling that she had been sexually abused. Anna theorizes that predators pick up on those signals, what Anna calls “bat signals” (126). Cameron, radiating signs of her wounded heart, might have attracted her abductor. Will is not sure—such theorizing is more intuitive than it is grounded in evidence.

Will and Anna drive to Petaluma to check into any links between the disappearance of 12-year-old Polly Klaas and their two missing girls.

In Petaluma, they speak with the lead detective. They talk with the two friends at the sleepover where Polly had been kidnapped. Anna, although sympathetic, sees no links. As they prepare to return to Mendocino, the lead detective tells them that Tally has contacted them.

Anna is not prepared to ignore the help of the psychic. Her adoptive mother, Eden, was “sensitive,” and could “see the future in dreams and visions that arrived when she could sense someone was in trouble” (140). Anna hesitates to ask Eden a question and then asks if Eden thinks she’s a good person. Eden suggests Anna must be worried about her brother and sister; she consoles Anna by assuring her she was not to blame for the three of them being in foster care or for her mother’s problems.

As they prepare to leave Petaluma, the lead detective offers them the use of a helicopter to help in the search of the woods around Mendocino and to take aerial photos.

As they drive out of Petaluma, Will and Anna see a town rally/press conference about Polly Klaas, whose story has gone national. The town mobilized a platoon of searchers and set up a control center to coordinate the search. Flyers are posted all over town, and banners hang over the main streets. That kind of community support, Anna thinks, might help Cameron and let her abductor know that the town won’t stop looking for Cameron until they find her.