MOST MORNINGS, the sky was still black when Mickey Bryan made the short drive from her house on Avenue O, through the small central Texas town of Clifton, to the elementary school. Sometimes her car was the only one on the road. The low-slung, red-brick school building sat just south of the junction of State Highway 6 and Farm-to-Market Road 219 — a crossroads that, until recent years, featured the town's sole traffic light. Mickey was always the first teacher to arrive, usually settling in at her desk by 7 a.m. A slight, soft-spoken woman with short auburn hair and a pale complexion, she prized the solitude of those early mornings, before her fellow teachers appeared and the faraway sound of children's voices signaled, suddenly and all at once, that the day had begun.
One morning, Mickey did not show up for work. It was a Tuesday in the fall — Oct. 15, 1985 — and the air was damp from a heavy rainstorm that rolled through town the previous night. Mickey's classroom was dark when a fifth-grade teacher, Susan Kleine, walked by at 7:15 a.m. She stopped, puzzled, and looked inside; she tried the door, but it was locked. At first, she figured her fanatically punctual friend was running off photocopies on the other side of the building, but by 8 a.m., there was still no sign of her, and Kleine hurried to Principal Rex Daniels's office. “Did you forget to call a sub?” she asked him, bewildered. “Mickey's not here.”
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