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About two weeks before Melissa died, she held a fundraiser for her AIDS ride account. She gave us three day's notice. I wasn�t sure I�d be able to go, I told her, but I�d make a contribution regardless.
The day of the fundraiser, I was worn out. The Artboy and I were dancing on the edge of breakup and I couldn�t gather myself together to get to Cambridge to give her a check I could just as easily mail. I went home to find my roommate Steve sitting on the couch. Erica, our other roommate and Steve�s girlfriend, had gone to the party, as she was working right down the street from it. Erica chatted briefly with Melissa, gave her our regrets and a contribution for herself and Steve, ate some food and came home.
I wrote the check, but somehow just didn�t get it in the mail. The Artboy and I stuck our feet into the breakup pool, Steve asked Erica to marry him and our house turned into Wedding Central�things were a little crazed.
Melissa disappeared on Sunday. Monday night, our phone rang, our friend Jim. Steve answered it, chatted briefly with Jim, then asked Erica and me if we�d heard from Melissa. None of us had, but he assured Jim that we�d call if we did. Slowly, over the course of the next few hour, we gathered the little information there was to know. Melissa was missing, and had been for almost 24 hours. We learned that she�d called her mom, her dad and her friend Nina from the cell phone. We learned that Michael Gentile had told the police he dropped Melissa off in Halifax where she was going to meet a local friend. We knew Melissa didn�t have friends in Halifax.
The case still hadn�t made the news. I called my stepfather, to see if he�d heard any news from the state policemen who work out in his gym. Steve called a high school friend who also knew Melissa and was now a Randolph cop. The more we learned, the less encouraged we got. Finally, we called Chris. Chris lived at home before he became my roommate, and calls to his house after 10:00 were almost never made. For this, we made an exception. Twenty minutes later, he was at my house. The four of us huddled together on my bed around the cordless phone, Zorro filling the air space around us.
Steve and Erica eventually drifted off to their own rooms. I woke up when the newspaper hit the porch the next morning to find Chris asleep, fully dressed, on the very edge of my bed. My landlady�s Boston Globe offered a photo of Melissa on the front page but no new information. All four of us wandered to work in a daze.
That daze lasted through most of the next week. Information was slow in coming and disheartening when heard. On day three or four, volunteer searchers, with the help of a family friend who flew in from California because of his dowsing abilities, found her backpack and bicycle in the marshes. I read about the discovery on CNN.com, which was constantly loaded on my computer screen. Twenty minutes later, I bagged work and went home. I�d had enough.
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