My name is Adam Verden. I was six years old when I first dared to wonder aloud why I had

never met my grandmother, Audrey. Every Friday at school they sent us home with the cafeteria's

lunch menu for the following week. At the bottom of one of these they'd added a note that

grandparents day was coming up the day before Thanksgiving.

Where does grandma live? I asked my father at the dinner table that night. And he told me that

grandma lived in Canada and led a very simple life on a farm without a phone. I'd received a

birthday card from her two years before in 1974, but not since. One day my father said she'd visit

or we'd fly out. But as the years went on and only one more birthday card ever came,

signed with just my grandmother's name and nothing else. I detected an unwillingness on my father's

part to ever mention her. He was a great man in many ways, but he could be severe. He was a

television director and to me he always seemed to come home under great stress. I learned not to

challenge him. Here's all I'd managed to glean about grandma Audrey. She'd given birth to my

father when she was very, very young and had married again after her divorce from my grandfather,

a sailor. My father had run away from home when he was sixteen and never looked back.

For all my childhood, my mother seemed to silently follow his lead and revealed almost nothing

about the woman either. Even those two birthday cards were presented to me without envelopes.

And so I never saw the address they came from.

Okay, I want to go back and establish the timeline of your visit to

530 Lambroad. You'd said initially that you got there about half past two. Is that right? Yeah.

So, take me through, describe to me what you saw as you approached the property from the time you

turned off the highway. From the 5th I got on Lambroad for about a fifth of the month and then it

diverted to the left and right. I went right, I went down a path, it was gravel kind of through some

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