Before She Disappeared

The Mattapan neighborhood isn’t what Frankie expected. The buildings are run-down and half abandoned, and newspaper articles suggest the neighborhood is rife with crime and violence. Instead, it is peaceful with people involved in everyday activities. They stare curiously at Frankie, who is white, and a few are openly suspicious.

Frankie’s first stop is a bar called “Stoney’s,” where she hopes to get a job. Frankie is recovering from alcohol addiction, but working in a bar isn’t especially triggering for her. Stoney, the bar owner, needs a bartender, but he is hesitant to hire a white woman. Frankie talks her way into getting the position and a room over the bar with a feline roommate named Piper.

Frankie’s next destination is Angelique’s aunt’s home. On her way there, she reflects on her history. She isn’t used to cities; most of her life was spent in the country and California suburbs. When she was growing up, children didn’t worry about their safety. When Frankie was in high-school, several girls her age disappeared. Their killer wasn’t caught for 10 years.

Frankie’s father was addicted to alcohol, and as a young adult, Frankie became addicted to drugs and alcohol too. She was saved from that life by her late boyfriend Paul for a time when she lived an ideal suburban life that she hadn’t believed she would ever want.

Frankie visits the home of Angelique’s aunt, Guerline Violette, and her brother, Emmanuel Badeau. Angelique and Emmanuel immigrated to Boston a decade earlier after the earthquake destroyed Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Frankie explains that she is a volunteer who has found 14 missing people in the last five years. She persuades Guerline and Emmanuel to trust her and goes over the background of the case.

Nearly a year earlier, Angelique went to school one day and never came home. There was no sign of violence, no boyfriend, and no sign that there had been anything wrong before her disappearance. The police have reached a dead end and have no new leads.

Returning to Stoney’s, Frankie meets Viv, the bar’s cook, and asks what she knows about Angelique’s disappearance. Viv asks whether Frankie is a social worker or some kind of white savior. Frankie denies both, and Viv tells her that Angelique was too good a student to be involved in drugs or gangs. Viv suspects Frankie of racial prejudice regarding gangs, but Frankie points out that gangs aren’t exclusive to minority groups.

Viv mentions that things are tough for immigrants, especially the “ten-year-Haitians” (37), refugees from the earthquake. Their visas are running out, but they have established lives here, and Haiti is no longer home, especially for kids like Angelique and Emmanuel, who hardly remember their home country. The issue is complicated by the fact that mass-deportations would damage Boston’s local health-care system, where nursing is heavily dominated by Haitian immigrants.

That night, going to bed, Frankie thinks of Paul asking her why she searches for the missing; she never had an answer for him. He tells her it is because she is an addict.

Frankie makes contact with Ricardo O’Shaughnessy, the Haitian Liaison Officer for the Mattapan district. Initially, he is suspicious of her; Angelique’s family has suffered enough, and he assumes she is looking for a reward or payment for finding Angelique. As she gains his trust, she realizes that he cares deeply about the neighborhood, Angelique, and her family. Reluctantly, he gives her the name of the lead detective on Angelique’s case—Dan Lotham.

Frankie goes to Angelique’s high-school and searches the school grounds, where she finds a place in the shrubbery where students hide their contraband. She guesses that Angelique hid her backpack there on the day she disappeared. The front door of the school is closely watched, but there is a side door, which she guesses students probably prop open between classes then fetch their contraband items and bring them inside. This system would make it easy for Angelique to walk away from the school unnoticed.

Detective Dan Lotham finds Frankie studying the grounds. He confirms her conclusion, adding that Angelique left behind her school clothes and cell phone before she disappeared. To Frankie, the phone suggests that Angelique must have owned a cheap burner phone that she used for her personal contacts.

Frankie notes that the Boston PD has extensive resources to track missing persons and applied every system and technology at their disposal to Angelique’s case. She sees that Detective Lotham, like officer O’Shaughnessy, cares very much about the missing girl and her family.

When school lets out, Frankie identifies Angelique’s best friends, Marjolie and Kyra. From them, she learns that Angelique cared about other people and was fiercely loyal to her friends. She came back to school the previous year acting reserved and preoccupied although the girls are sure she hadn’t met a boy. Frankie senses that Angelique’s friends and her brother are all keeping secrets from her, yet they clearly all love Angelique and want her back. Thinking about what she has learned, she notices a young Black man staring at her from across the street.

That night, Lotham drops into Stoney’s while Frankie is working. Frankie suggests that Angelique might have been recruited by one of the many gangs in the neighborhood to act as a lure or decoy in one of their conflicts. However, if that were the case, she should have come home afterward. Lotham points out that Angelique would have showed up on security footage somewhere. Sex trafficking is another possibility. Lotham counters that human trafficking has become an online enterprise, and the PD human trafficking unit probably would have spotted Angelique if she had appeared on one of the common sites.

Frankie tells Lotham that since Angelique’s friends ruled out a new boyfriend, and the more sinister explanations have been largely ruled out, she is going to focus on new female friends in Angelique’s life and on finding out where they might have met.