The cutline under the picture read, “Summer Dawn Macklesby at the time of her disappearance. Summer has been missing for almost eight years.”

She was a tiny infant in the picture, perhaps a week old. She had a little lace bow attached somehow to a scanty strand of hair.

Though I knew it would make me miserable, I found myself searching for the child’s name again, in the column of text. It jumped out at me about halfway through the story, past the mother of three who’d been gunned down at an automated teller on Christmas Eve and the engaged convenience store clerk raped and knifed to death on her Thanksgiving birthday.

“Eight years ago this week, Summer Dawn Macklesby was snatched from her infant seat on her parents’ enclosed front porch in suburban Conway,” the sentence began. “Teresa Macklesby, preparing for a shopping expedition, left her infant daughter on the porch while she stepped back into the house to retrieve a package she intended to mail before Christmas. While she was in the house, the telephone rang, and though Macklesby is sure she was absent from the porch no longer than five minutes, by the time she returned Summer Dawn had vanished.”

I closed my eyes. I folded the paper so I couldn’t read the rest of the story and carried it to the recycle bin and dumped it in as if it were contaminated with the grief and agony implied in that one partial story.

That night I had to walk.

Some nights sleep played a cheap trick on me and hid. Those nights, no matter how tired I was, no matter what energy I needed for the day to come, I had to walk. Though these episodes were less frequent than even a year ago, they still occurred perhaps once every two weeks.

Sometimes I made sure nobody saw me. Sometimes I strode down the middle of the street. My thoughts were seldom pleasant on walking nights, and yet my mind could not be at peace any more than my body.