There are folks in Keene, New Hampshire who remember September 1963 as the coldest September in history, with temperatures barely topping 20 degrees on the thermometer.

There are others, however, who might recall another event – one that had old-timers’ tongues wagging nonstop in barbershops, bars, and bingo parlors for years on end.

For that was the month that James Riley, 8, mysteriously disappeared while walking home from school. In this tight-knit community of 18,000 souls, this opened old wounds from 15 years previous – almost to the exact day – that another 8 year old boy, one Bob McArdle, had also disappeared under the same circumstances. Bob’s mother, nurse Mary McArdle, never recovered. Found pacing back and forth in the cold and the rain off of Route 12 three days after the loss of her son, she was duly institutionalized.

“Poor Mary,” the townsfolk sadly noted. Her sister had vanished when Mary was only three years of age. Eight years after, her mother Anne also disappeared.

For three years, Mary spent her time in the sanitarium receiving weekly electro-shock therapies. But the only words that ever passed her lips, spoken as if like a mantra, were “The necklace. It was the necklace, it was the necklace …”

Bob McArdle was never seen again.

And so it was the memory of the tragedy of Mary McArdle that was in people’s minds when young James Riley never made it home from his school three blocks away that freezing September afternoon. James’ mother, Sarah Riley, issued a single heartfelt plea to a gathering of citizenry, reporters, and police officers: “Please, find my son.”

Two days passed without any luck. And then something very strange happened.

Mary McArdle’s older brother reported that she had not shown up at church, and was not answering her phone. An avid churchgoer, Mary had never missed a service; her brother called and asked if the police could check on her at her house and make sure she was alright.

When the police knocked on her front door, no one answered. Investigating the perimeter of the house, they found that the back door was slightly ajar. No one seemed to be home. They let themselves in and began to search the two-room cottage. And when an officer opened the door to Mary’s bathroom, it was then that the general strangeness of the situation suddenly turned tragic.

For there, in her claw-footed bathtub, they found the body of young James Riley. He had been drowned, and was still clad in the clothes he was wearing when he disappeared. Mary was nowhere to be seen. There was only one clue in the claustrophobic room, and it was five words, scrawled haphazardly on the mirror with a tube of bright red lipstick: “IT IS NOT MY SON.”

Mary McArdle, like her son Bob fifteen years previously, was never seen again.

… to be followed, again, shortly …