When I was seventeen my mother vanished without a trace, during the summer of 1996 in Cedar Hill, Missouri.

I've never told anyone what I experienced three weeks after her disappearance. The news stories showed bits and pieces, but I've never so much as uttered what I'm about to tell you to reporters, the police, or any of the countless doctors I've seen over the years.

I'm not exactly what you'd call a "model citizen," and my lucidity has been brought into question more than once throughout my life. I don't expect my recounting to "set the world on fire" as they say. Nobody believes an aging addict with a violent criminal record and various diagnoses.

Even still, it's time.

She had me when she was nineteen, so when my mom disappeared, she was only thirty-six. It's an odd feeling -- outliving a young parent. As I'm sitting here now, I'm older than she was at the time of her disappearance by seven years.

She and my father never married and split up not long after I was born, but they remained close friends. She was a hairdresser in Saint Louis, and the town of Cedar Hill -- where my father lived -- was about forty minutes outside of the city limits. the distance wasn't anything crazy for joint-custody parents by any stretch of the imagination, but my mom; Lori as everyone called her, wanted to get away from the bustle and the crime of the city anyways, so we ultimately moved there, just a few miles away from my dad.

It didn't take long after we moved in for people to take to her. She was that way, my mom. Everyone seemed to just light up when they saw her, and she'd reciprocate with the most genuine warmth you could ever find in a person. It was infectious.

I still wish to this day that I'd inherited, or at least learned to emulate that part of her -- one of the many things that I've come to miss so dearly.

She'd met a man named Jack and got engaged to him after only six months of dating him. Jack hated me from the start. I had poor grades and would fight in school and all of that. I'll admit that I was no prom king even then, but it was more than that with Jack.

I could have been captain of the varsity football team with straight A’s, and he'd have still hated me. It turned out Jack had a penchant for jealousy and was known for it by people he'd grown up with within the town over the years. It seems even he was even capable of being jealous of a mother’s love for her own son.

I'd hear some of the other women gossip about it at my mom's salon when she'd step outside to smoke, and they didn't know I was in the back. That and his... odd religious beliefs.

People didn't seem to know what a nice, pretty woman like her was doing with someone that held such a tepid reputation from the community, but my mom seemed to always go for the oddballs.

She always was a spiritual, but religiously promiscuous person; her parents and sister died in a car crash when I was just a baby, and she took it hard. As far back as I could remember she would sometimes cry about it when she'd have one-too-many glasses of wine, or when she thought she was alone. She'd always go to random different churches of various denominations, but I really think she was just desperate to find something that made her feel some sort of comfort about her loss.

About three days before her disappearance, I'd heard her and Jack fighting in the living room. My room in that house was in the basement so was muffled, but it was something about some kind of church meeting. I think it was something about them breaking some rule or something, but I couldn't be sure.

I've tried and tried to dig into my memory and make the words clearer as to what was said, to the point of mental anguish, but they never do. They fought a lot during that time, so I just tended to tune the arguments out. Ultimately, the police never connected it to anything of importance in the case.

She seemed troubled the next two days after that. She and Jack seemed to be getting along just fine on the surface, but I couldn't help but notice her agitation -- even as 'in my own head' as I was at that age. I could tell she hadn't been sleeping and was chain-smoking her Marlboro Menthols -- something she normally only did as an "after work" ritual in our garage.

She kept looking out of the windows like someone could have been coming to visit at any moment, but they never did.

The morning she disappeared, she said something to me at breakfast before she went to work at her Salon --- the last place anyone in the public would ever see her alive again. She looked terrible and I could tell she still hadn't slept the night before, yet again. Jack had to deliver a load to Kansas City with his rig that day, so he had left early in the morning.

As she was washing our plates in the sink, she asked me, "Are you happy here, Kyle?" I didn't know what to say to her at the time, so I said nothing. I hated that town and I hated Jack, and she knew that. I told her to leave him countless times.

She said, " Today your grandma told me she'd love for us to come stay with her and your grandpa back in Chesterfield." Her voice was breaking up and I could see her shudder a little at the sink. She was crying.

I reminded her that I never met Grandma and Grandpa and that they'd been dead since before I was born. I asked her if she was okay, and she said she was and that she was just tired.

Afterward, I stood up to go to a friend's house, the last thing she said to me as I was heading out the door was, "After all these years I finally found a way through, Kyle. I have something to show you later. I love you, son."

It wasn't the first time she'd gotten wrapped up headfirst into some obscure religion looking for answers, so I just told her I loved her too and left.

And that was what I told the police was the last time I saw her alive.

I lied when I told them that.

Within a 15-minute window, in between clients at her salon, between 11:15- 11:30 AM, she was just gone. No trace whatsoever. Her lunch was still sitting in the microwave when the police arrived to search for any sign of fleeing or kidnapping, anything at all that would give them an indication of where she might have gone. They never found any evidence of distress or any sort of planned runaway, other than what I'd told her she'd said that morning.

My first thought, one that was shared with her close friends, was that Jack was behind it, but his alibi was rock solid. He also apparently seemed genuinely distraught and concerned for her well-being when the police questioned him, and he was ultimately dismissed as a person of interest.

The bastard changed the locks to our house on me the very next day. He wouldn't even let me into it to get the rest of my stuff, so I went to stay with my father on his farm just a few miles away.

As days, then weeks went by, we began to lose hope. A serial killer and rapist that went by the name of Walter Kyper was discovered to have been passing through the area right around that time, and the news and police seemed to be heavily leaning towards him as the cause.

I couldn't shake those last words she'd said to me though...

" Today your grandma told me she'd love for us to come stay with her and your grandpa back in Chesterfield." Had she had some sort of mental break? and what about the part about "finding a way through" after all these years? It was just too odd; too unlike her.

Exactly three weeks after she'd vanished from the little salon she'd loved so much, I was sitting in my room at my father's farmhouse and heard a faint bristling in the yard from outside my window. I didn't think much of it as my dad's dog, Thunder, slept in a doghouse near the window. He always barked at strangers, so I figured it was just him.

But it wasn't long after, that the bristling turned to creaking and clambering on the side of the house, up past the gutters, and sounded like it was on the roof.

It sounded heavy, much too heavy to be a raccoon or an opossum. It couldn't Thunder either, unless he decided to grow opposable thumbs. "Could it be a bear or some kind? A black bear, maybe" I asked myself. Black bears weren't common in that part of Missouri, but not unheard of.

I was just about to get out of bed and let my dad know that we need to get our guns and go shoot whatever it was on the house when I heard something that chilled me down to the core of my soul... and froze me right where I lay.

It was the crying of a woman, followed by the creaking open of the window that led to the attic. I wish I could say that I was brave at that moment, but I wasn't. I just sat there in my bed, petrified; quiet as a mouse, unable to move so much as a muscle. The crying was muffled now that it was coming from the attic, but you could still barely hear it.

My father had taken my mom's disappearance particularly hard, and he was usually drunk and asleep not long after the sun went down, but I'd still hoped he'd heard something, and that maybe he had more courage than I was able to muster at the time, but never came. For what must have been several minutes I could hear the creaking of the boards in the attic above me... still, that sobbing she paced back and forth.

There was a shotgun in the hallway closet about thirty feet away, and if I was careful about crawling out of bed, I could get to it long before whoever she was could come down the attack stairs and open the door that was right outside of my room.

I was slowly removing the covers from my body, and she must've slipped and fell through this open cavity that was in between the walls because I heard her tumble down and crash right from the outer part of my closet. The house was old and there were lots of little places to fall through from the attic. I'd lose toys and baseball gloves and all kinds of things down in that little space, never to be recovered.

From the sound, even in my excited state, I knew that for someone to fall there that hard, they must've broken several bones and would probably die in there before too long.

But the sobbing resumed shortly after she came plummeting down into there. My closet door had been left ajar, and I could see the faint outline of a new hole in the plaster, where her foot must've kicked out during her sudden and unexpected descent.

The sobbing stopped, and then the head of my mother pushed its way through, the plaster in my closet. It was very dark, but I could still recognize the shape of her face. She looked badly emaciated, and her eyes didn't look right. They looked... almost lambent like a cat's or an animal's eyes in the darkness. She was just staring at me with her head jutting through the hole. She gave me a face that was filled with deep commiseration like she was sorry she'd let me feel so much worry and despair over those past three weeks.

As wrong and awful as it was, seeing my mom's face after I was almost certain that I'd never see her again... well, it's hard to fully describe how that feels, I wasn't thinking straight.

I began crying and just mindlessly asked, "Mom?" I had no idea what to say or how to process anything that I was experiencing.

She just started sobbing again, in that same way she had been the day she'd vanished. "I finally found a way through, baby," she said. Her eyes glinted like opals in the shadow.

I asked her where she'd been and told her that everyone had been looking for her for weeks. She just told me to come closer and that she had to "show me something."

"I said I had something to show you, remember?" she said. And then she repeated herself a second time with an identical tone, almost like she was rewound.

And then she repeated it again, and again.

On and on, until I couldn't take it anymore. I cried out to her to stop and told her she was scaring me. She stared at me with her mouth open, a silver ribbon of drool leaked out of it, and then she pulled her head out of the hole she'd made in the closet wall. I heard shimmying up to the attic from where she'd fallen, and then I could hear her crawl out of the window and jump off the roof, running into the woods.

I sat there for a while, I'm not sure how long, just trying to process what I saw. I eventually gathered myself and grabbed the shotgun, shook my dad awake, and told him that there had been an intruder, but I never told him who I'd seen sticking their head out through the hole in my closet -- out from the cavity wall. We called the police, and they did their best to connect it to my mother's disappearance, but in the end, attributed it to an indiscriminate attempted robbery.

Months went by without her ever turning up, alive or dead, and then a year. I signed up for the Army the day I turned eighteen, and my father killed himself while I was still in Bootcamp.

He'd called me, at what was determined to be just moments before he put the barrel of his shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. He told me, "I love you, son. Thank God you didn't see what she's shown me. Forgive me."

In 1999, her remains were found not five hundred yards into the woods, behind the house where she grew up with her parents and sister. She was nothing more than a skull and a handful of scattered bones.

I had been dishonorably discharged from the Army by then and was serving the first of a five-year prison sentence --- the first of two stents of a hard time I'd end up serving, and so Jack had what little was left of my mother's remains cremated, and still has them to this day.

I've just been released from the second sentence.

I've been staying at the motel near Jack's place for a few nights now. I've broken my parole, so there's no going back at this point. See, my mom's friends had said over the years that she was planning to leave Jack; something I wasn't even aware of at the time. I wonder if he knew that.

Even more, I wonder what he'd have done if he found that out...

Possessive, jealous Jack. Unable to even allow her to share her love even with her only son.

I've done a lot of research on that cult of his, and I wonder what he might've subjected her to he'd found out she would leave him. A spiritually desperate woman, willing to do anything to speak with her dead family again...

We'll find out tomorrow night when I pay him a visit.