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Gone in the Dark

 One night, in 1970, an eighteen-year-old in Cedar Rapids received a call.

This woman, Paula Oberbroeckling, hung up pretty quickly and asked to borrow her roommate's keys. She needed to go somewhere--fast. She was wearing a light summery dress, and she was barefoot. She drove off, and she was never seen alive again.

Months later, people discovered Paula's body by a culvert. The wrists were bound. Stories circulated. Paula had been involved in a triangle with an unstable white guy and a black guy. Did the white guy kill Paula because he was jealous? Had Paula become pregnant--and had one of the two guys, uncertain about paternity, lashed out? Had Paula arranged to have an abortion from a back-alley figure? Had the procedure gone wrong? Was the crime scene staged so that the abortionist could run away?

A new book, "What Happened to Paula," suggests that the abortion scenario *might* be accurate, and that police incompetence and misogyny helped the abortionist to escape unscathed. But it seems we'll never know. Although cold-case officials today claim they are working on the case, it's hard to believe this. And many of the possibly-key players are now dead.

What makes the new book special is little details. Paula's family became upset when the light summery dress was labeled a nightgown in the media; the worry about the mislabeling is its own form of misogyny. ("If people think she went out in a nightgown, they'll make judgments about her....") The dress has a major role in the mystery: Given how invasive a back-alley abortion procedure would be, wouldn't you choose to wear several layers, if the impromptu clinic was your destination? Another detail I'll always remember: Women who were hidden in "maternity homes," in the sixties, might sometimes be allowed to go out in groups to see a movie. But if they went out for this reason, they would all need to wear fake wedding rings. (This was so that strangers would conclude, Aha, all those visibly-pregnant young women, flashing wedding rings, seeing a movie together.....have clearly left their spouses at home.....)

Another reason people like the new book is that it transcends true crime, in some ways. It even has a Janet Malcolm aura. The writer inserts herself into the story--often. And she draws connections between Paula and victims of Trump, victims of Kavanaugh; she sees echoes of Paula in the Kavanaugh-era victim-blaming we've all just lived through. In one passage, she recalls carrying her son in a bjorn while giving a man "the bird." (The man had harassed her, on a subway.) The man responds to the middle finger by stalking the writer and threatening violence--in public. After all this, the writer's first response is to blame herself. She feels responsible for inciting a certain behavior. It's only years later that she wonders: What's wrong with the country, a country in which my first thought would be I'm to blame--?

A great deal to think about. I'm sorry to have reached the end of this book.
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