AN HOUR LATER, HELEN and I are standing in the middle of the woods behind a new subdivision. I look at her, feeling a bit hopeless.
“So” I ask for the second time that day, “where do we start?”
Helen’s expression mirrors my own. Gladys was only able to narrow down the phone’s location to a square half-mile.
The rest would be up to us.
“Tom,” Helen says after a minute, “I need you to think. Did you hear anything in the background of that call that might help narrow down where she was?”
“Not really,” I reply, searching my mind. “She was running, out of breath.”
“Did you hear anything like a car or a train whistle or even a bike bell?”
I shake my head.
“OK, then,” Helen says, looking around. “We’ll have to do a grid search. We’ll start here and walk in opposite directions for 100
