“I felt like accessorizing,” I lie.

My grandmother doesn’t talk about my mother. If I’m empty inside because she vanished, then Grandma’s full to bursting with anger. She can’t forgive my mother for leaving—if that’s what happened—and she can’t accept the alternative—that my mother can’t come back, because she’s dead.

“Carter,” my grandmother says, smoothly peeling back the conversation one layer. “Is that the baby who looks like an eggplant?”

“Not all of him. Just his forehead,” I clarify. “Last time I sat for him, he screamed for three hours straight.”

“Bring earplugs,” my grandmother suggests. “Will you be home for dinner?”

“I’m not sure. But I’ll see you later.”

I tell her that every time she leaves. I tell her, because it’s what we both need to hear. My grandmother puts the frying pan in the sink and picks up her purse. “Make sure you let Gertie out before you go,” she instructs, and she’s careful not to look at me or my mother’s scarf as she passes.

I started actively searching for my mother when I was eleven. Before that, I missed her, but I didn’t know what to do about it. My grandmother didn’t want to go there, and my father—as far as I knew—had never reported my mother missing, because he was catatonic in a psychiatric hospital when it happened. I bugged him about it a few times, but since that usually triggered new meltdowns, I stopped bringing it up.

Then, one day at the dentist’s office, I read an article in People magazine about a kid who was sixteen who got his mother’s unsolved murder case reopened, and how the killer was brought to justice. I started to think that what I lacked in money and resources I could make up for in sheer determination, and that very afternoon, I decided to try. True, it could be a dead end, but no one else had succeeded in finding my mom. Then again, no one had looked as hard as I planned to look, either.

Mostly, I was dismissed or pitied by the people I approached. The Boone Police Department refused to help me, because (a) I was a minor working without my guardian’s consent; (b) my mother’s trail was stone cold ten years later; and (c) as far as they were convinced, the related murder case had been solved—it had been ruled an accidental death. The New England Elephant Sanctuary, of course, was completely disbanded, and the one person who could tell me more about what had happened to that caregiver who died—namely, my dad—wasn’t even able to accurately give his own name or the day of the week, much less details about the incident that caused his psychotic break.

So I decided that I would take matters into my own hands. I tried to hire a private detective but learned quickly they don’t do work pro bono, like some lawyers. That was when I started babysitting teachers’ kids, with a plan to have enough money saved by the end of this summer to at least get someone interested. Then I started the process of becoming my own best investigator.

Almost every online search engine to find missing people costs money and requires a credit card, neither of which I had. But I did manage to find a how-to book, So You Want to Be a PI?, at a church rummage sale, and I spent several days memorizing the information in one chapter: “Finding Those Who Are Lost.”

According to the book, there are three types of Missing People:

1. People who are not really missing but have lives and friends that don’t include you. Old boyfriends and the college roommate you lost touch with—they’re in this category.

2. People who are not really missing but don’t want to be found. Deadbeat dads and mob witnesses, for example.

3. Everyone else. Like runaways and the kids on milk cartons who are stolen away by psychos in white vans with no windows.

The whole reason PIs can find someone is that lots of people know exactly where the Missing Person is. You just aren’t one of them. You need to find someone who is.

People who disappear have their reasons. They might have committed insurance fraud or be hiding from the cops. They might have decided to start over. They might be up to their eyeballs in debt. They might have a secret they want no one to find out. According to So You Want to Be a PI?, the first question you need to ask yourself is: Does this person want to be found?

I have to admit, I don’t know if I want to hear the answer to that. If my mother walked away willingly, then maybe all it would take is knowing I’m still searching—knowing that, after a decade, I haven’t forgotten her—to make her come back to me. I sometimes think it would be easier for me to learn that my mother died ten years ago than to hear that she lived and chose not to return.

The book said that finding those who are lost is like doing a word jumble. You have all the clues, and you’re trying to unscramble them to make an address. Data collection is the weapon of the private investigator, and facts are your friends. Name, birth date, social security number. Schools attended. Military service dates, employment history, known friends and relatives. The farther you cast your net, the more likely you are to catch someone who has had a conversation with the Missing Person about where he wished they could go on vacation, or what his dream job might be.

What do you do with these facts? Well, you start by using them to rule things out. The very first Web search I did, at age eleven, was to go to the Social Security Death Index database and search its index for my mother’s name.