My daughter was never in that car. That part is true and it is the worst sentence I will ever write.
But there was no body stolen from a morgue. There was no unidentified remains, there was no bribed official, there was nobody killed to make a hole in the world the right shape.
Here’s what actually happened, as best as four different sets of professionals ever put it together:
The car that burned on Highway 24 was Laura’s car. It was reported stolen from a lot in Dayton eleven days before the accident, and the man driving it that night was a thirty-four-year-old man named Dwayne Prine who had taken it from where Mark had left it, with the key in the console, in a place where Mark knew he’d find it.
Dwayne Prine died in that crash. He was a real person, he had a mother in Springfield, and I have written to that woman twice.
