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The Book in the River That Almost Stole a Sister Back · Adoption Reunion Stories

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: At 6.40 in the morning on February 11th, 2019, a
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: fisherman named Mark Vaughan pulled his line from the cattail
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: fork and saw something that should not have been there.
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: A book, floating face down in 38 degree water, spine intact,
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: pages still mostly closed. He had fished that stretch for
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: 11 years and never once found anything like it. The
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: odds were one in a million. It happened anyway. Von
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: lifted the book from the water, read the cover, and
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: understood nothing about why it mattered. Nobody did. Not yet.
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: Nobody did. Not yet. What followed over the next 72
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: hours involved a librarian's lunch break, a car accident on
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: a two-lane road, an email that sat unread through an
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: entire night, and a phone call that lasted two hours
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: and 40 minutes. But to understand what made any of
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: that possible, you have to go back 40 years, to
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: a yard in the American South, to a four-year-old girl
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: who walked out of the frame and never came back.
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: There are two things to hold onto from the start. First, first,
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: the book Vaughan pulled from that river was one of
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: only three copies in any library system in the country,
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: and it had sat on a shelf for seven years
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: without a single person asking for it. Then, in January
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: of 2019, two people placed a hold on it at
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: the exact same time. They had never spoken. They did
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: not know the other existed. Second, one of those two
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: people had been searching for the other for 39 years.
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: This is not a story about what was lost. It
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: is a story about what a waterlogged genealogy book, a
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: borrowed library card, and a borrowed Wednesday night phone call
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: made possible. And the thing that reading this case makes
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: undeniably clear is that the reunion almost did not happen.
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: Not because the trail ran cold, but because of a
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: moment of completely ordinary bad luck on the night it
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: was supposed to begin. David Bauer was nine years old
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: in the summer of 1979 when his sister Karen disappeared
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: from the backyard of their home in the American South.
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: He was at school. By the time he came home,
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: she was gone. His mother, Denise Bauer, told police that
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: Karen had wandered away from the yard. Karen was four.
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: The search produced nothing. No confirmed sightings. No leads that held.
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: The case went cold fast. The way cases involving small
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: children often did in 1979, when there were no national databases,
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: no coordinated search infrastructure. and no mechanism for connecting a
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: missing child in one state to an informal placement in another.
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: David grew up in the specific silence that follows that
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: kind of loss. Not grief with a shape to it,
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: not mourning with a defined end, but something more like
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: a frequency that never fully stops, a question that has
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: no answer but will not go away. He became an
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: estimator for a construction firm in Spokane, Washington. He built
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: a practical life, And every Wednesday at nine in the evening,
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: Spokane time, he called Nora Fleming. Fleming was a retired
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: social worker in Louisville who coordinated volunteers for a nonprofit
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: cold case clearinghouse. She was not a detective. She was
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: not an investigator in any formal sense. She was a
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: woman who had spent her career connecting people to systems
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: and who, after retirement, had redirected that skill toward families
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: like David's. For six years, every Wednesday without fail, she
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: and David talked. They went through leads together. They documented
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: what existed and what did not. Fleming treated David's search
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: as a living file, not a closed one. That Wednesday
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: call was, by any measure, the structural center of his week.
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: Fleming knew something David did not. In 2015, A volunteer
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: genealogist working through her organization had found a connection between
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: Roy Pitts, Nojus Earl, who had been Denise Bower's boyfriend
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: in 1979, and a man named Harold Pitts, Roy's cousin,
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: who had lived in eastern Tennessee. Harold Pitts had been
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: briefly married to a woman named Connie Fenn from Harlan County, Kentucky.
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: The marriage lasted less than two years and produced no
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: children but it placed Harold Pitts in contact with the
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: Fenn family network at exactly the right moment. That connection
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: by itself proved nothing. What it did was give David's
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: search a geographic direction it had never had before. By
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: January of 2019, David had been pointed toward a genealogy book,
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: a privately published family history called Our People, The Fenn
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: Family of Harlan County, compiled by a woman named Dorothy
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: Fenn Wasilewski, and printed in a spiral-bound edition in 1987.
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: Three copies existed in library systems, one in Lexington, in-person
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: access only, one in Middlesbrough, Kentucky, missing since 2006, one
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: in Dunmore Parish, Louisiana, catalogued in 2012. David placed an
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: interlibrary loan hold on the Dunmore copy in January of 2019.
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: He did not know that a woman named Karen Norris,
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: living on a rural route outside Dunmore, had placed her
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: own hold on that exact book two days earlier, on
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: January 31st. Karen Norris had held a Dunmore Parish Library
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: card since 2014. She had borrowed that same book once before,
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: in October of 2016. She had found one thing of
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: interest inside it, a passing reference to a Harold Pitts
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: as a former brother-in-law of a Fenn family member. It
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: was not conclusive. It was barely a sentence, but it
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: was a thread. Karen had been pulling on threads for
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: eight years, ever since a woman named Sylvia Norris, dying
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: of cancer, had told her the truth about who she was.
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: Sylvia had raised Karen informally from the time Karen was
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: very small. She had received the child through a family
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: connection she described only vaguely. A man, a cousin of
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: a cousin, a favor done outside any official record. Sylvia
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: was not cruel. She was not neglectful. By all evidence,
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: she raised Karen with care. But she had never told
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: her the truth. Not until the end. Karen had been
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: born Karen Bower. She had a brother named David. She
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: had been taken from a yard in the summer of 1979,
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: when she was four years old. By the time Karen
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: understood this, Sylvia was too sick to answer questions. By
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: the time Karen had enough to search on, she could
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: not confirm that David was still alive. She did not
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: know his address. She did not know his name had
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: never changed. She knew only that a man named Roy
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: Pitts had been connected to what happened to her, that
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: Roy Pitts had a cousin named Harold, and that Harold
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: Pitts had once married into a Kentucky family called Fenn.
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: Two people. One book. One library system. Seven years of
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: that book sitting untouched. And then, in the first weeks
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: of 2019, both of them asked for it at the
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: same time. David Bauer had been searching for 39 years.
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: He was nine years old. The summer Karen disappeared. Nine
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: years old, sitting in a classroom, when it happened, which
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: meant he carried the particular weight of someone who was
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: not there and could not have stopped it. He was
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: 48 now, an estimator of construction projects in Spokane, Washington.
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: He had a precise and methodical mind. He applied it
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: to the search. the same way he applied it to
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: everything else. Every Wednesday at nine in the evening, Spokane time,
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: he called Nora Fleming. Fleming was a retired social worker
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: out of Louisville. She coordinated a volunteer organization that worked
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: cold missing persons cases, matching researchers and genealogists with families
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: still waiting. She and David had been running that Wednesday
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: call for six years. Fleming's network had turned up the
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: connection in 2015. A genealogy volunteer had traced Roy Pitts
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: to a cousin named Harold, and Harold to a brief
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: marriage to a woman named Connie Fenn from Harlan County, Kentucky.
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: The marriage had lasted less than two years, no children.
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: But the Fenn family connection put Harold Pitts in the
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: right orbit, at the right time, to have known someone
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: who needed a child placed quietly, and someone else who
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: might take one. That was the thread, and the thread
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: led to a book, Our People. The Fenn Family of
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: Harlan County, 1901-1985. A privately printed spiral-bound genealogy, compiled by
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: a woman named Dorothy Fenn Wasilewski, in 1987. Three copies
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: existed in library systems. The copy in Lexington was accessible
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: only in person. The copy in Middlesborough, Kentucky, had been
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: missing since 2006. The only freely circulable copy in any
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: library system in the country was sitting at the Dunmore
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: Parish Library in Louisiana. David placed an interlibrary loan hold
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: in January of 2019. He had no reason to think
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: Louisiana meant anything specific. He was following the only copy available.
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: And because he was methodical, he waited. What he did
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: not know was that a woman named Karen Norris, living
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: on a rural route just outside Dunmore, had held a
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: library card at that same branch since 2014. What he
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: did not know was that she had borrowed that exact
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: book in October of 2016. and found inside it a
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: single passing reference to Harold Pitts as a former brother-in-law
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: of a Fenn family member. One sentence, not enough to
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: act on, but enough to remember. What he did not
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: know was that on January 31st, 2019, Karen Norris had
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: placed her own hold on that book. The book had
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: not circulated in seven years. Now it had two holds.
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: and it was at the bottom of a river. Mark
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: Vaughan pulled it out of the cattail fork at 6.40
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: in the morning on February 11th. The temperature was 38 degrees.
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: He had fished that stretch for 11 years. He set
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: the book on the bench of his truck, wrapped in
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: a rag, and delivered it to the library that afternoon.
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: Amanda Marshall, the librarian on duty, set it on a
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: drying rack and did not look at the hold slip
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: until the following morning. february 12th marshall picked up the
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: book she opened the circulation record the hold from spokane
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: had been sitting in the queue since january the hold
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: from k norris had been placed 12 days earlier two
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: holds same book one from washington state one from a
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: rural address she could drive to in 20 minutes she
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: called the spokane public library to notify them she did
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: not give them karen's name She did not have authorization
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: to share patron information across systems. She noted only that
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: the Dunmore copy had been located and was drying out
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: after water damage. Then she got in her car. Marshall
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: drove to Karen's address on her lunch break. The record
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: does not capture what was said at the door. What
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: it establishes is that Marshall knew both names were on
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: the same book and that the local hold belonged to
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: a woman she could reach in person. She drove there.
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: Karen Norris was 44 years old. She had been searching
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: for eight years under conditions David had never faced. She
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: did not know with certainty that her brother was still alive.
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: She did not know his address. She did not know
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: that the name Bauer had stayed constant, that David had
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: never stopped, that a woman in Louisville had been running
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: Wednesday night calls on her behalf without knowing she existed.
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: She knew a handful of things. She knew her birth name.
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: She knew the name Roy Pitts. She knew the name
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: Harold Pitts. She knew the family called Fenn. There is
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: something almost unbearable in the precision of that gap. Two people,
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: converging on the same obscure book from opposite ends of
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: the country, each holding one half of a connection neither
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: of them could complete alone. Marshall brought those halves together
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: in a library parking lot on a Tuesday afternoon in February,
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: while a wet genealogy book dried on a rack inside.
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: That evening, Nora Fleming was in a car accident at 5.40
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: in the afternoon. Her phone was destroyed in the collision.
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: She was not seriously hurt, but she could not call
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: David that night. Wednesday was their night. This was Tuesday, April.
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: David had no reason to expect contact before nine the
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: following evening. He went to sleep at 10.30 without any word.
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: February 13th. A message from Amanda Marshall sat unread in
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: David Bower's email inbox. He did not check it that night.
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: The subject line identified it as coming from the Dunmore
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: Parish Library. February 14th. 7.20 in the morning, Spokane time.
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: David read the email. Consider what the record actually shows
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: about how Karen ended up in Louisiana. Sylvia Norris said
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: she received the child through a family connection, a man,
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: a cousin of a cousin, a favor done outside any record.
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: She never named the man precisely, and by the time
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: Karen was asking, Sylvia could not answer. Roy Pitts was
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: the name Karen knew. Roy Pitts had been Denise Bauer's
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: boyfriend in 1979. Roy Pitts died in a Mississippi prison
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: in 1993, serving time for aggravated assault, a charge unconnected
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: to Karen's disappearance. He never spoke about it. Picture Roy
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: Pitts in the summer of 1979, in contact with a
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: household where a four-year-old girl lived, and in contact with
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: a cousin named Harold, who had recently married into a
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: Kentucky family with ties stretching into Louisiana. Picture an informal arrangement,
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: two phone calls, a drive, no paperwork, no official record,
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: no one who needed to know. It holds together, but
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: it does not close. Harold Pitts' marriage to Connie Fenn
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: lasted less than two years and produced no children. The
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: family connection to Sylvia Norris runs through that Fenn line
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: at the right time, with the right geography. The thread
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: is coherent. Every piece fits the shape of it. But
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: here's the thing. Coherence is not confirmation. Roy Pitts never
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: confirmed it. Harold Pitts was never questioned on record. Denise
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: Bauer died in 2001. Without ever revising the account, she
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: gave police in 1979 that Karen had simply walked away
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: from the yard. No one was ever charged. No investigation
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: was reopened. What the record gives is this. A child
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: taken through an informal net but was not truthful, found
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: decades later by a book that two people needed at
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: the same time, retrieved from a river by a man
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: who had no idea what he was holding, the how
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: of it. The specific hands, the specific calls, the specific
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: road remains unconfirmed. What is confirmed is the outcome. David
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: called Amanda Marshall at 8.05 in the morning, Louisiana time,
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: on February 14th. Marshall gave him a phone number. He
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: dialed it. The call lasted two hours and 40 minutes.
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: They spoke for two hours and 40 minutes. There is
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: no transcript of that call. What is known comes from
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: the shape of what happened after. A late March meeting
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: in Memphis, Tennessee, chosen because it sat roughly equidistant between
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: Spokane and Dunmore, a city neither of them had any
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: particular claim to, which made it neutral and therefore right.
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: Karen Bauer had been Karen Norris for 40 years. The
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: name she answered to, the name on her library card,
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: the name she had carried down every rural road outside Dunmore.
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: Sylvia Norris had given it to her, and Sylvia Norris
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: had taken the full story with her when she died.
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: What she left behind was a single deathbed disclosure, the
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: name Bauer, the state of Washington, a sister told she
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: was someone else's child. Karen had been searching under that
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: name for roughly eight years. She had found the Fenn
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: genealogy book in October of 2016, checked it out for
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: three weeks, read it carefully, and found one thing, a
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: passing reference to Harold Pitts as a former brother-in-law of
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: Connie Fenn. That was all. A name at the edge
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: of a family tree, already cut loose. She returned the
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: book undamaged and kept looking, She placed a new hold
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: on it in January of 2019. No one can say
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: exactly why. Whether something new had surfaced, whether she was
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: retracing old ground, whether it was simply the only thread
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: she still had, the hold sat in the queue. David's
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: interlibrary hold had already been placed through the Spokane Public Library.
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: He had traced the Pittsfen connection through a genealogy volunteer
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: working with Nora Fleming's organization. The Dunmore copy was the
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: only circulating copy in the country. He had requested it
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: in January. His hold also sat in the queue. Then
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: the book went into the river. Mark Vaughan pulled it
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: from the cattle fork at 6.40 in the morning on
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: February 11th in 38-degree air with no way of knowing
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: what he was holding. He brought it to the Dunmore
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: Parish Library that afternoon. Amanda Marshall set it on a
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: flat surface to dry. The next morning, she processed the holds.
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: Two names, one local, one from Spokane, Washington. No investigation
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: prompted that alignment. No search algorithm connected them. A man
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: fishing in the cold found a waterlogged book and did
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: the ordinary thing. A librarian dried it out and did
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: her job. That was the mechanism. Marshall drove to Karen's
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: address on her lunch break rather than wait for the mail.
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: She knocked on the door. Karen opened it. Marshall did
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: not know, at that moment, the full weight of what
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: she was delivering, only that the hold slip had a
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: name from Spokane. and that something about two people requesting
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: the same obscure book at the same time felt worth
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: a drive. What Karen understood when she heard the name
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: David Bauer from Spokane is not in any record. What
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: happened next is, she called him. There was no arrest,
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: no trial, no official accounting of what happened in 1979
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: in the yard where a four-year-old girl was last seen
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: by her family. Roy Pitts died in a Mississippi prison
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: in 1993. Harold Pitts was never formally questioned about Karen's disappearance.
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: Denise Bauer died in 2001, and whatever she knew or
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: did not know went with her. The case remained technically
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: open and practically cold. What the record holds instead is this.
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: A woman who spent roughly eight years searching for a
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: brother she was not certain was still alive. a man
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: who spent 39 years keeping a weekly phone appointment with
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: a retired social worker every Wednesday at nine in the evening,
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: because having a standing call meant having a reason to
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: believe the search was not over. A book compiled by
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: Dorothy Fenn Wazielewski in 1987, printed in a spiral binding,
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: never digitized, three copies in the world, one missing since 2006.
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: One restricted to in-person access. One pulled from a Louisiana
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: river on a February morning. The book was returned to
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: the Dunmore Parish Library in good condition. That detail lands
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: differently once you know the whole story. Karen had already
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: read it. She knew what was in it. She returned
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: it because that is what you do with a library book.
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: And then she placed it on hold again. And so
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: did her brother. And the universe of coincidence, that word implies,
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: does not quite cover what actually happened. Which was 40
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: years of two people refusing to stop. There is something
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: that resists clean resolution here. The mechanism of the taking,
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: the specific arrangement, the road travelled, the hands that passed
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: a child from one life into another, is not confirmed
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: and may never be. What Sylvia Norris knew, she kept
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: until she could not. What Roy Pitts knew, he kept
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: until he died. The gap in the record is real,
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: and it will likely stay that way. But Karen Bauer
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: knew her name. She had known it for eight years.
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: She had been walking toward this for eight years, and
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: so had David, and they met in Memphis in late
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: March of 2019, in a city that belonged to neither
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: of them 40 years. A hold slip, two names on
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: the same line. This show is made by Obermedia.