Trinity County is one of those places where you don’t want to get lost. Tall trees. Steep hills. Narrow, winding roads with offshoots here and there, the kind of dirt roads that parents searching for paradise might say, I wonder what’s down this way… and then the family never returns. It always made me nervous driving with my folks back in there. As it should. You wouldn’t want to get lost up in there – there are people there who don’t appreciate unexpected visitors.

But this book doesn’t start in Trinity County. It starts back in civilization, in a safe neighborhood in Oakland, CA. In a normal home, a small home but big enough for a small family, mother, father, toddler, and grandmother. It’s a typical evening. Dad is grilling. Grandma getting ready to go out with a friend, planning to drop the toddler at another friend’s. Mom is puttering about looking for costume pieces for a skit she’s going to do at a professional conference. Are they here? There? Oh, maybe they’re in the basement. She pokes around, finds a box of miscellaneous stuff, digs through, finds a purse that isn’t hers. Weird.

It contains a wallet that isn’t hers.

The wallet contains Stephanie Bryan’s ID card.

Stephanie Bryan didn’t live in Trinity County either. She’d probably never heard of it. She lived in a big house in Berkeley, a few hours away, with her mother and father and all her brothers and sisters. She was a quiet 14-year old who liked to read. The kind of girl whose mother could set a clock by what time she arrived home from school. This wasn’t a latch-key kid. This was the 1950’s, back before kids returned home to empty houses, entertained themselves and reheated dinner before mom and dad got home – although was that pre-latch key world really true for most kids? Or did we just think it was because those were the families in books and on TV?

It was true for Stephanie’s family, anyway. And when she didn’t arrive home by 4:15 – 15 minutes later than expected – her mother knew something was wrong. She began calling her daughter’s friends and calling the school. By 6 pm, she was worried enough that she didn’t meet her husband at a friend’s for their evening out. He returned home to find his life had changed: Stephanie was missing.

Stephanie should have been safe enough. She walked most of the way home with a friend from school, another girl her age who was taking lessons at a hotel with tennis courts near Stephanie’s home. The two girls dropped by the library where Stephanie checked out two books, stopped at a pet store where she picked up a pamphlet about parakeets, then treated themselves to fresh donuts to eat as they walked. They remained together until they reached the parking lot of the hotel, where the friend left for her lesson. Stephanie just had one short walk left on her own, a tree-lined path through a small woodland, letting out right by her house. 100 feet. Five minutes, maybe ten.

Around 4:30, phone calls started coming in to the local police – motorists reported a car that swerved over to the side of a busy road heading out of town, a man in the car seemed to be beating a girl. The witnesses were conflicted on the details, describing different colored cars, different makes, did the man have bushy hair, thin hair, a moustache? Did the girl have long hair, short hair? Was she in the front seat, the back seat? But they all agreed: the car had swerved through traffic and the man was beating the girl. It had upset them enough to call but not so much that they risked navigating through the busy traffic. It’s hard to stop when other cars are going so fast.

The Bryans called the police. The usual circus began: crank calls, con artists, the mentally ill, psychics. Well-meaning witnesses imagining things, thinking – hoping – they had seen Stephanie alive and walking around. The FBI became involved. Ransoms were prepared and not picked up. The signals gotten fainter and fainter until… nothing…

Until, in Oakland, a wife found Stephanie’s ID card, her wallet, her purse in the basement, mixed in with things of her own. Her immediate impulse – oh my gosh, this belongs to that girl! – carried her back upstairs where she passed the purse around to her husband, her mother in law, a friend who had dropped by. The friend said, Better call the police. So she did, only then wondering – how did these things get in our basement? Her husband, still grilling, reminded her – you remember, honey, we thought we heard that noise that night, like someone in the house, like the screen door to the basement scraping. Oh, but that had been their bird, who had been flying loose in the house that night, hadn’t it? Had it?

Questioned by cops, the dad says he was out of town the day Stephanie went missing. Left that morning for their cabin in Trinity County, hours away, wanted to get there before dark, open up the cabin for the season before his brother and sister-in-law arrived that weekend. He described a route that went nowhere near Sacramento, Berkeley. While he’s talking to the cops, they interview his brother. Then they point out: you told your brother you stopped in Sacramento. Oh, that’s right, he forgot: he stopped at the land office as a favor to his brother. He describes the land office, draws a sketch of it. He signs permission to search his home – he has nothing to hide, he says. His basement has a dirt floor. Two feet down in the dirt floor, they find Stephanie’s library books. Her notebooks from school. Her glasses. Her bra.

His wife, advised of these discoveries, does not say, “What? What the heck? I don’t understand.” She says, “He could have done it! He must have done it if they found that stuff in the basement!” She then retracts that and hires a lawyer for him. The lawyer advises him to correct his statement to the police: actually he hadn’t stopped by the land office in Sacramento; he had tried to find it, had driven around, lost, had gotten gas. Had given up – it was already getting dark. Suddenly his alibi’s timeline doesn’t look so good. Cops are already retracing his route up the main highway to Red Bluff, checking out diners where he said he stopped to eat, then up the narrow state road into the woods where his cabin lies.

The newspapers report his route, asking for witnesses. A man steps forward: he hadn’t realized earlier but he had found one of Stephanie’s school books a few days after she went missing, off the road about the distance you could fling it through the open window of a speeding car. It’s one of the roads the dad had mentioned driving down, on his way back home at the end of his weekend in Trinity County.

They find Stephanie’s body, buried there, in a shallow grave (as the title says) near his cabin in Trinity County.

It’s a frame-up, he cries. His wife’s friend – the one who had been there when she found the purse – he did it, he framed him. His wife stands by him but refuses to accuse the friend – actually the husband of her best friend. I couldn’t do it, the dad cries, I have TB, they’ve removed part of my lung, I don’t have the stamina. He seems to care nothing about the girl who had been killed, about her family. All he cares about is himself.

What is it about these crimes? People often talk about the impact of these kinds of crimes on the community. A young, pretty white girl disappears – or maybe a white boy – not the kind of kid to run away and suddenly the community looks sideways out of their eyes at each other. Parents walk their kids to school. People start locking their doors. It hits the national press, becomes a big story for a little while, and then again on anniversaries, on birthdays. Things will never be the same.

Yet this was the 1950s and things did got back to being the same, “normal”, just as things are getting back to normal now that Covid is “over”. People in “safe” neighborhoods started leaving their doors unlocked again. Kids starting walking to school by themselves again. Parents started trusting their children again.

Until the next time. Just as we’ve stopped masking and using hand sanitizer and staying home if we’re sick, as if Covid were truly “over” and a Bird Flu Pandemic – or whatever will be the next pandemic – were not just around the corner, as mother nature tries to rebalance the earth, correct for an overabundance of humans who are building nests where they shouldn’t, consuming resources that other species need, endangering the whole.

This book is masterfully written, starting with the red purse. Then introducing Stephanie. Then cutting back to the investigation. Then back to what Stephanie’s family is going through. Scrolling back in time, to describe the child who grew into the man who took Stephanie’s life, other killings that took place at the cabin up in the Trinity. Following the police and the FBI as they retrace the trail from Oakland to the cabin in the woods, meeting witnesses, discovering the defense had gotten their first and told them not to talk to prosecutors. The story moves and is moving.

But you never, from the start, doubt who the killer is. He’s that guy next door, the skinny quiet guy, who could never do such things.

Great book, the author won the Edgar for nonfiction for another of his books. He’s a Mercury News guy – if you haven’t discovered Mercury News, check it out online – it always has interesting stories, interestingly told.

If you like true crime, this book is better than most.