Women Who Stay, 26

Chapter 1 ... Chapter 25

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By the time I got all of the boxes into my apartment, the Zipcar was already an hour overdue. I scraped its fender during my rushed return, antsy to dive into the treasure that was now mine. I planned to digitize each piece and create a searchable index.

A pot of coffee later, I had only finished laying out one box. I blinked at the snowstorm of paper covering my apartment. This would not be easy. I had 12 boxes, each holding 1-2,000 pages. The documents were mostly dry and transactional. They also were bizarrely organized -- a selection of company bank statements for 20 years (but only for the month of September) in one folder, and in the next, all the documents pertaining to the sale of a valuable antique doll in 1976. Categorizing the documents as I'd planned would be a terrifyingly slow process, and it was unclear if the resulting index would be useful.

But even in that preliminary overview, I found enough tantalizing morsels to string me along. For example, the Second Story bank statement from September 1993 showed that someone had made a cash withdrawal of $200 at 2 AM on a Saturday somewhere in Trenton. Antonio, out hunting?

If I looked up that date, would I know who he'd been with?

Yes, as it turned out. Likely Horace Pernell, whose disappearance had caused Brian Hart to make his initial report to the police. Which had led to a sketch of 'Cornelius Hemming,' and a passing comment that the man resembled the well-liked local businessman Antonio Robichaud. This led to the first request for a voluntary search of Hollow Hill Farm, which Janie refused.

We never covered that particular decision of hers to my satisfaction in our conversations.

"They had nothing," she'd scoffed when asked. "Why would I let strangers rip apart my beautiful home on a wild goose chase?" And then she'd distracted me with a little tidbit about how she wasn't even living there by that point, anyway.

The police hadn't had enough probable cause for a search warrant until 1996 -- not until Janie was ready. If they'd had this bank statement from September, would that have been enough? I stared in growing excitement at the boxes behind me.

How much information was I actually looking at?

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I spent four months on those boxes. By the end, I had enough evidence to convict Antonio of being the Hitchhike Hangman. I could trace him drifting through the state of New Jersey one estate sale at a time. I read his write-ups from the Bureau, both positive and negative. An accolade for his thousandth dwelling inspected. A reprimand for asking a coworker if he had ever drunk piss. His firing for, to my surprise, pissing on the same coworker's desk two months later.

The Second Story records were just as juicy. I knew the month Antonio stopped putting quarterly tax money to the side. I saw the relatively low retention rate for employees in his half of the business as compared to Janie's half. I also found the names of those workers. I could tell when he started getting lazy, mixing business and personal accounts, money trickling in and flowing out. And the pictures! I could tell when Jacob stopped breastfeeding, or Annabelle lost a tooth.

I bought a roll of butcher paper and mounted it to my wall. I built financial, family, and criminal timelines. I developed an enormous web of the people, places, and things surrounding the Robichaud family.

I stopped inviting friends over. I did nothing but read and think.

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Read on to Chapter 27