I traveled to South Bend, Indiana, last spring, to hear Elizabeth Smart speak.

It was a treat of a day, both the road trip and the chance to hear more angles on her ultimately happy story. You may also remember that we reviewed her book here.

But what about her parents’ story?

Bringing Elizabeth Home by Ed & Lois Smart starts a little slow. They repeated themselves a great deal in their early chapters. They talked about trials and tribulations. They talked about hope and prayers. They talked about answers to prayers, acknowledging that not all parents’ prayers are answered as happily as the Smarts’ were.

What I wanted to were day-to-day details of how they got through the unimaginably awful nine months in which Elizabeth went missing. And they finally got down to it.

In the early days of the crisis, family, friends and strangers rallied around them. They set up command centers. They donated goods. They searched, heading —

into the hills on those hot summer days, instructed to look for anything suspicious and to contact central command with any leads. The search turned up every hair clip left behind on the trails, Band-Aids, bits of cloth, berets, pieces of litter, and even a roll of duct tape. Anything that a young girl might have used — they found it.

As if not knowing the whereabouts of your daughter weren’t enough, Ed Smart endured brutal questioning by the police.

And through it all, Elizabeth’s little sister, the only eyewitness, stuck to her story of how the whole thing started.

Precious time slipped through their hands as the police pursued maddening details like: was the window screen cut from the inside or the outside? Is Elizabeth’s DNA anywhere in this Jeep? And where was the Jeep between the dates of XXX — XXX and why won’t the suspect say?

The cruelest moments of all were the ones where answers looked to be right around the corner —

We went to sleep that night feeling like there had been some progress in the case.

— only to come to nothing.

Even the most caring neighbors can sustain heroic search efforts for only so long before they have to get back to their own troubles. As the summer of Elizabeth’s disappearance turned to fall, the Smarts themselves turned to school schedules and normalcy, even if nothing at all was normal.

Then Mary Katherine remembered a few more details, turning investigators’ attention to a religious zealot intent on building a polygamous harem.

Lacking volunteers willing to join his mission, Mitchell resorted to kidnapping. Though he had set his sights on other young girls, his first real victim was our daughter.

We all know how it ended. But don’t you want to be there, witnessing the reunion scene between Elizabeth and her parents?

Photo credit: thor_mark  on Visualhunt / CC BY-NC-SA