One-Sentence Story: Cold Case

Untitled by Saul Steinberg

I’m at that frustrating stage now in my latest case where I just have to wait (it’s a very tricky investigation because the victim of the crime is a fourteen-year old female who was raped at a party, so she knows the perpetrator but she is too afraid to identify him because he—or his girlfriend—will definitely, as she says, “kick her ass,” and I only became involved after the victim informed the high school’s health services department, who notified the police, who, in turn, came to me) because unfortunately, after my initial interview with the main witness—the victim herself—the poor girl became so spooked that she ran away from home (the denial, the shame and the fear, are all, of course, typical reactions for an adolescent girl in the aftermath of this type of sexual assault), and although she’s safe, I hear—staying with friends somewhere—she will not even tell her own family where she is, so I have had to forge ahead with the few facts that I was been able to glean from the police (i.e., the date the assault occurred, the general vicinity of the party, and so on), and now that I have done everything I could think of to follow up on those few slim leads, all I can do is—like I said—wait, wait for the people for whom I’ve left messages to get back to me, wait to see if the police come up with anything new, and wait for the victim to return to her family, so in the meantime, I’ve decided to do the victim’s laundry, give her room a good cleaning, and reorganize her dresser drawers because the way I figure it, when she finally gets home she would probably like a fresh start of sorts, and besides, I need to do something to distract myself. 

by Nina Zolotow

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