The Lauren Spierer Mystery, Unraveled
Where is the missing IU student?
Dozens of intriguing six-word essays peppered the Indiana Statehouse lobby on Monday, penned by anonymous Indiana students and parents speaking to the best attributes of a number of Hoosier teachers. The brief and sometimes emotive and/or hilarious posts came from all corners of the state.
At the end of the year, when our attention was diverted by Christmas, the new owners of our town’s Dairy Queen bulldozed the restaurant’s storage building, which had begun life in 1852 as a house of worship for the Christian Church. It was a modest structure, the Christians not anticipating a wild burst of growth. After they vacated it in the 1870s, it served as a workshop for the town’s tinsmith, a hatmaker’s space, a candy store, a private home, and finally a plumber’s shop, before Pop Logan opened the Dairy Queen in 1953 and used it for storage.
Some children aren’t satisfied with their names, but I always liked mine: Deborah Lynn Dorman. Or Debra Lynn Dorman—I was never sure, as my birth certificate says “Debra,” and somewhere along the way I decided to use the biblical version because it sounded more romantic. My mother waved away the inconsistency, saying I mattered to her far more than what I was called. Either way, the name had a melodic cadence, and I was proud to say it out loud. And unlike my given name, my surname was certain. Dorman.
Every spring, I take my shoebox full of tax receipts to Steve Blacketer in Plainfield. I met Steve 31 years ago, and he has done my taxes ever since, keeping me out of jail. Besides a bureaucrat or two at the IRS, Steve is the only person who knows how much my wife and I earn each year. People tend to be secretive about their income, and I’ve never understood why. It is a fairly simple matter to look at someone’s home and discern how much they make. I don’t mind telling you I make somewhere between $10,000 and $150,000 a year.
On an overcast day this past autumn, I sat across a table at a downtown sandwich shop with my niece Wendy, sobbing. She was there to provide a shoulder and cajole me into eating the chicken-noodle soup that had become my staple since being diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer a few weeks before.
Have you ever thought about the march of progress? For many millennia, our ancestors lived much the same way. You could die, be brought back to life 10,000 years later, and discover nothing had changed. Food was still wormy and rancid, tools were still made of rocks, folks still walked everywhere, and the Cubs were still losing. Then, a rapid series of developments dramatically increased the rate of human progress: the domestication of animals; the forging of metals; the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture; the emergence of written language, eventually followed by the printing press, which permitted the dissemination of ideas, which inevitably led to the computer chip, which culminated in our generation’s greatest invention, the battery-powered pepper-grinder.
One of my first writing gigs was a magazine column called “Perspicacity.” Nobody, including me, knew what this meant, although the dictionary defines “perspicacious” as having acute mental vision or discernment. My job was to apply such selectivity as it related to new stores, i.e., discover them and tantalize readers with a sparkling yet reliable description. I don’t know if I came to love shopping because of the column or loved the column because of shopping, but since 1979 I’ve enjoyed the quest.
