Grace and Lauren both slept all the way from Copper Mountain to Golden.

For the forty-eight hours plus we’d been up skiing I had managed to avoid-almost completely-the media saturation coverage about the girl who had disappeared on Christmas night. Lauren had told me a few new things, but with concerted effort on my part I knew almost nothing about what had transpired while we were gone.

And I was proud of it.

But as I-70 bent to follow the final contours of the Front Range, and as the beige winter haze of the Denver metropolitan area became visible in the distance, it was clear that my brief holiday was coming to an end, and I decided, reluctantly, to reenter the real world. I killed the Otis Redding CD and tuned to KOA, a Denver AM station with enough brash watt-power to push its often dubious signal up into the crevices of the Front Range foothills. I didn’t have to listen long to hear an update-“the absolute latest on the tragedy in Boulder”-that informed me that the girl, Mallory Miller, was still missing and that the Boulder Police continued to refer to the event as a “disappearance,” not a “kidnapping.”

Fifteen minutes later, as I drove Highway 93 just shy of the entrance to Coal Creek Canyon, Mallory Miller’s father-his first name was William-came on the air-LIVE!-with a plea for his daughter to come home, or for whoever had her to release her, or both. Whatever the problem is, he told his daughter, we can solve it.

His plea was poignant, but I didn’t hear too much of it. I was distracted by something else: his name.

Gosh, I was thinking, I once knew a guy in Boulder named Bill Miller.

Details dribbled out the way they inevitably do.

I’d continued to learn a few things from my conversations with Lauren. She wasn’t due back in her office until after the first of the year but was staying in touch with her colleagues daily. According to my wife the detectives working the case were apparently split into two camps during those crucial early days: those who believed that Mallory had run away and those who believed that she’d been abducted. Not surprisingly, public opinion was divided along the same fault line.

Lauren’s reading of the shifting winds within law enforcement was that the runaway viewpoint was prevailing.

TV and newspapers provided background. Hour after hour of background. Given the paucity of public facts, way too much background. But apparently that was only my opinion. Four thousand reporters and camera people and producers can’t be wrong.

Right?

Mallory lived in the Twelfth Street house on the Hill with her father and little brother, Reese, who was twelve years old. The Millers were separated; the children’s mother had moved away from Boulder when the children were much younger. The police had been in touch with Mrs. Miller-apparently, and surprisingly, the media had not-and were confident that she could add nothing pertinent to the investigation of her daughter’s disappearance.

What was known publicly about the Christmas-night events in the Miller household?

On Christmas evening Mallory had been home by herself. The Miller family had been invited to a holiday dinner at a friend’s house, but Mr. Miller and Reese had gone to the celebration alone after Mallory complained about a stomachache. Mr. Miller had offered to cancel the plans, but she had insisted that they go on without her.

The physical evidence in the Miller home sounded screwy. Although a casement window near the back door was unscreened and unlocked, the family maintained that it had been that way for as long as any of them could remember. The police were not convinced that the rear window had been used to gain entry to the house, and there were no other possible indications of forced entry.

A trail of tiny blood drops ran from Mallory’s second-floor bedroom down the stairs. The drops stopped abruptly a few feet from the door that led into the family room/kitchen at the rear of the house. Although DNA testing on the drops was pending, initial examination of the blood indicated that it was probably Mallory’s. The upstairs bathroom that Mallory shared with Reese was a mess, and reportedly Reese had told the police that the mess was severe, “even for her.”

Did the blood drops and the messy bathroom constitute evidence of a struggle? It depended, apparently, on whom you asked.

The record of incoming and outgoing phone calls indicated that Mallory had likely been home from the time her family left for dinner until the last time her father had called to check on her about ten minutes before nine. He had called a total of four times during the few hours that he and his son had been away from their home. Mr. Miller and Reese arrived back home at 9:20 or so.

Mallory had left a note on the kitchen counter thanking Santa Claus for a great Christmas. The note said she’d already gone to bed so that she could be fresh for their ski trip the next day.

In the note, Mallory didn’t make mention of her stomachache.

Both Mr. Miller and his son agreed that the note had been written hurriedly. Mallory, known for flowers and hearts flourishes on all her correspondence and many of her school papers, and for generous helpings of XXXs-kisskisskiss-to accompany her signature, had signed the note with a single cursive M instead of her usual florid, all lowercased “mallory,” or her self-deprecating, ironic, all lowercased “mall.”

Reese retired to his room, and Mr. Miller closed up the house, turned off the lights on the Christmas tree, and was in bed before ten.

The next morning, Bill Miller went into his daughter’s room early-he said 4:30-because the Millers were planning to drive all the way to Steamboat Springs the next morning and Reese had insisted that he wanted to be in line when the lifts opened to try his new Christmas snowboard in some fresh powder. But Mallory wasn’t in her room. Since she hadn’t actually made her bed since mounting a brief public-relations campaign to extend her curfew the previous summer, there was no easy way to know if her bed had been slept in.

Her clothes for the ski trip were neatly packed in a duffel on the floor.

Mr. Miller’s initial suspicion was that his daughter had snuck out the night before-it wouldn’t be the first time-and for some reason hadn’t been able to sneak back in before dawn. He guessed she had fallen asleep at a girlfriend’s house, and was about to phone her closest buddy, a girl named Kara, when Reese noticed the trail of blood that seemed to start in the hallway between her bedroom and the bathroom they shared.

While Bill Miller was searching for Kara’s phone number, it was Reese who called 911.

Mallory’s teardrop-shaped backpack, which according to her good friends, Kara and Tammi-they were both more than willing to be interviewed by anyone with a camera-functioned more as a purse than a book-bag, wasn’t in the house. Missing along with the backpack were Mallory’s cell phone, her wallet, and her school planner. The school planner was important because Mallory apparently used it as an all-purpose notepad. It was where she was most likely to jot down friends’ phone numbers, weekend plans, and any musings about current romantic infatuations. The girls also assured police that Mallory kept a diary-they’d both read parts of it, though not recently-but it was never located.

The absence of the school planner and the diary meant that detectives were missing a treasure trove of information about Mallory’s current life. The cell phone was crucial because the memory contained the numbers of everyone Mallory considered significant.

The neighbors across the street, the Crandalls, reported that they saw a man “loitering” on the Millers’ sidewalk early that Christmas evening, before the snow had started falling. He was bundled up against the cold, they said, and walked back and forth down the block. They couldn’t provide a better description.