Who was uploading a list about Nickey Huntsman in the middle of the night? And what was the “in-”? A place? A state of being? “In trouble”? “In hiding”? “In pieces”?
I spent the next six months digging through microfiche of small-town newspapers from the Pacific Northwest. I searched for “Jane Doe,” “unidentified child,” “runaway.” Nothing matched a “Nickey.”
Closed. Not solved.
I Googled it. Zero results. Not even a misspelling correction.
Here’s what I’ve learned: Some searches are not meant to end. “Searching for- Nickey Huntsman in-” isn’t a query. It’s a state of being. The hyphens are the space between what we know and what we refuse to forget. “In-” is not a destination—it’s the pause before the answer that never comes. Searching for- Nickey Huntsman in-
Ed dug up an old backup tape. Among the corrupted logs was one intact session from August 14, 1998. DeepSix, typing in bursts: > Searching for- Nickey Huntsman in- > No one else remembers her > She would be 14 now > In- the place where the highway bends > In- the last voicemail before the beep I felt the floor drop.
It began, as these things often do, at 2:47 AM on a Tuesday. Who was uploading a list about Nickey Huntsman
I have not found Nickey Huntsman. But I have found her absence, and it has a shape. It looks like a purple jacket. It sounds like a tape hiss before a voicemail. It feels like 2:47 AM on a Tuesday, clicking a dead link, and realizing someone, twenty-five years ago, was searching for her too—and never stopped.
I started calling her N.H. in my notes. A phantom. A state of being
That’s when I knew I’d found something. Or rather, that something had found me.
Nothing.