Missing Girl Since 1990 A father looks over his daughter’s yearbook after 22 years and sees something he never thought possible. In Cedar Falls, Iowa, a small town in the Midwest, it was spring 1990. Most people still kept their doors unlocked, and everyone seemed to know everyone else. Emily Harper, 16, was a smart student who sang in the chorus and was a regular at basketball games, where she sold tickets. Richard Harper, her father, was a mechanic who operated the neighborhood car shop and loved her. Emily dreamed of going to Northwestern to study journalism, and she filled notebook after notebook with stories she thought may one day get her a job at the Chicago Tribune.
Emily went to a school fundraiser at the community center on a warm May night. A few of her classmates remembered seeing her talking beside the soda machine and giggling as she wrote something in her yearbook. It was time for her to go home around 9:30 p.m. She never got there.
At first, the town thought she had gone to a friend’s house. But by the next morning, they were scared. Richard told the Cedar Falls Police Department that she was missing, and they quickly started looking into it. Telephone poles were covered in flyers with Emily’s school picture on them. Her tale appeared in local news outlets. There were a few leads, like a sighting at a petrol station or a probable glance on a country road, but nothing stuck. Within weeks, the search quieted down, but Richard kept asking questions. For years, he drove down country backroads, stopping whenever he saw an empty barn or shed, just in case.
The Harper house got quieter as time went by. Daniel, Emily’s younger brother, went to college in Ohio. Richard and Linda got divorced in 1995 because they were both too sad to stay together. In the early 2000s, Emily’s case was just a cold file in the county sheriff’s office, along with other missing persons cases that had not been solved. But Richard wouldn’t let go. He bought a tiny cake for each birthday. He always put a present under the tree on Christmas. And every so often, he took out Emily’s old yearbook, which was the last real thing she had from her teenage years.
Richard sat alone at his kitchen table on a cloudy March afternoon in 2012. He had a mug of black coffee and the old yearbook he had brought with him through every move and grief. The cover, which used to be vibrant, had faded to a dusty navy color, and the spine was frayed at the corners. He didn’t understand why he had taken it out again. It could have been habit, remorse, or that peculiar glimmer of hope that wouldn’t die even after 22 years.
He gently turned the pages he knew well. The picture of the choir group. The cheerleaders. The blurry black-and-white pictures of silly classmates at lunch. He had dog-eared Emily’s senior picture from the many times he had traced her smile with his thumb.
But this time, something made him pause.
There was an extra sheet folded into a tight square and tucked between two sheets. It was so flat that it must have been missed earlier. It wasn’t in the yearbook itself. He felt his heart race as he let it go. The paper was thin and yellowed a little around the edges, as if it had been there for a long time.
He opened it up slowly.
There was a picture inside, but it wasn’t one he knew. It showed Emily standing next to a girl he didn’t know in front of the Cedar Falls water tower. Emily was laughing and had her hand partly up, like she had just smacked the camera away. The second girl was staring squarely at the lens with a weird intensity. The date on the back of the picture was April 28, 1990, which was less than two weeks before Emily went missing.
But that wasn’t what caused Richard’s throat to close up.
A piece of notebook paper that had been torn along the spiral edge was folded up with the picture. There were four words in Emily’s handwriting that were easy to read:
“Look here if anything happens.”
And then a number.
It’s not a phone number. This number does not correspond to a street address.
A number on a page.
147.
Richard’s hands were shaking as he flipped through the yearbook, quickly counting the pages with his thumb pressed tight into the borders. Pages 145, 146, and 147.
In the top right corner of page 147, which he must have seen a hundred times, there was a small note written in blue ink that was virtually impossible to detect against the dark background of a class photo collage.
Two letters. And a sign.
J.R. — Ω
Richard looked at it, and his heart raced. He had no idea what it meant. Not yet. He understood, in a sense that went beyond reasoning and went straight to the bone, that the comment was a hint Emily had left for him. And it has always been there.
The air around him seemed electrifying for the first time in years.
His chair tumbled over when he jumped up so quickly.
In the silent, dusty corners of his existence, where grief had dulled him, something had changed.
Emily hadn’t just vanished into thin air.
She had given him clues, and he had just found the first one.
