Joel opened his eyes and the smooth ceiling which came into focus formed an appropriate transition from the swirling white of his recurring dream. He had to think for a few seconds about where he was while surfacing from the fog of sleep. The dream of the girl in the storm often proceeded waking up. It had been a brief encounter this time, with little detail surrounding the scene. Sometimes in his dreams, only her face was visible, floating within a sea of white. Other times he would see her whole form with the strange dark rounded shapes down low in the background. The one constant was the helplessness he felt when she disappears into the white-out. For Joel it feels like she has crossed a threshold where he is unable to reach her and there is no return.

Joel had been toying with the idea of having a sketch artist draw the scene from his description. He knew from experience that witnesses describing a scene in detail, often remembered things which were not readily apparent to them in an interview. Joel smiled at the thought of having the conversation with the artist. “Yes, I am having this recurring dream about a girl I believe disappeared 100 years ago in a snowstorm here in Detroit Lakes. I think she is trying to tell me something, can you help?

There was a police sketch artist in Minneapolis who Joel had worked with in the past, he figured once the artist finished giving him a hard time, he would eventually agree to help him. Joel hoped they would be able to use some type of Google collaboration tool to allow them to produce the sketch remotely. Not having to go back to the cities would save him valuable time.

The case was on Joel’s mind from the moment he woke up each morning until he collapsed into fitful sleep each night. It had a life of its own and he felt a deadline looming. The time constraint was not a tangible thing, it was a notion that circumstances and fate had conspired to place him here. The fact that the 100 year anniversary of her disappearance which was fast approaching was not lost on Joel and he believed there would be a small window of opportunity to learn the truth before her story was lost forever.