Barefoot In November - William Farrell

Is it possible to vanish without a trace? What elements would have to be at play for this to happen? What outside influences?

At a time when technology can track our every movement, a forty-four-year old woman, Moira Dugan-Donnelley, has a stroke on the frigid streets of Chicago very early one November morning. She lies alone in the cold for several hours before discovery.

She has not been assaulted, but she has been robbed of her identification.  Her coat, purse, hat and boots are removed by a homeless person who leaves behind her own ratty shoes and coat.  Moira is eventually discovered and rushed to the hospital, where she is assumed to be homeless, and possibly mentally ill. The tattered and noxious odor of her clothing outweighs other bodily signs of good grooming; being found in her bare feet in winter suggests mental illness. She has no identification but found in the pocket of her sweats is a rumpled slip of paper with the letters Sonj… written in script. Moira is in a coma and the hospital staff takes to referring to her as Sonja.

On the day before this incident, Moira and husband, Paul, had a nasty argument as he was leaving on a five-day business trip to San Francisco where their daughter, Soupy, is a college freshman. The first two days, Paul takes some free time to visit with his daughter. He makes several unsuccessful attempts to reach Moira to apologize, and thinks she is giving him the silent treatment. When he coaxes Soupy to text her mother and she is ignored, Paul knows something sinister has happened. He cuts the trip short and returns home.

Meanwhile, with no family or friends to speak for her, Sonja’s story goes cold, and she drifts into the category of another uninsured homeless person. As Sonja’s story fades, a surgical team, a neurologist, and assorted support staff are mobilized by an aggressive pharmaceutical executive who sees an opportunity to perform some risky experiments in the interest of science. The objective is to bypass the red tape and duration of FDA approved trials, thereby reducing the time and cost to bring these new therapies to market. Despite five days of local news coverage, no one has claimed Sonja as family…making her a perfect candidate for experimentation.

At first, the detective assigned to this Missing Person case thinks it’s a marital spat sparked by abuse or infidelity. But after interviewing friends and neighbors, the detective becomes sympathetic. Unfortunately for Paul, the sympathy is short lived. The detective learns some things that make Paul look guilty of foul play.

At the same time, Soupy has come back to Chicago and mounts her own independent search. She determines that her mother was doing some research at the Art Institute of Chicago, and she follows clues that lead to a private email account in which the exchanges make it crystal clear that her mother was having an affair with a young art student. She decides to confront him in a public place.