Finding Melissa

“Newspaper clipping, June 20, 1990. On Sunday two and a half year old Melissa Warren disappeared while her parents were tenting at a campground near the North Thompson River. Search parties failed to locate the little girl’s body in the dense bush around the campground. The proximity of the river raised the possibility that she had been swept away by the rushing water, still high from Spring run-off and flooding. ‘She’d sometimes wake up before the rest of us,’ her distraught mother explained, ‘but we were careful to put her in the back of the tent...she had to climb over the rest of us in our sleeping bags,’ she sobbed. ‘I don’t know how she got out. When we woke up she wasn’t there!’

Twelve years after the unexplained mystery of her sister Melissa’s disappearance, Clarice Warren still deals with the aftermath. Her dad is gone now leaving her with a mother who can’t forgive her for surviving. She had always thought that her mother’s favourite was her little sister – and nothing has changed now. Melissa still gets 100% of her mother’s attention even twelve years after her disappearance. Her mother can’t give up hope that someday Melissa will come home. Since Clarice can’t get her mother’s loving attention by being a good daughter – maybe being a “bad girl” is the better approach.

In another town, a young girl still has strange dreams that she can’t explain – about people who mean nothing to her.  She has lived with her aunt Rosie ever since her parents abandoned her as a baby. She doesn’t remember any of her life with her parents – she only remembers feeling “safe” with Aunt Rosie. She has always been isolated and sheltered but now her life is about to change and she is going to have to learn to be with other people and away from the cocoon of safety she has always known. Maybe that is why the bad dreams have returned.