Sonoma County

Sonoma County is the setting for the search for Polly after her abduction and the discovery of her body. The county’s role in the story is measured both by the vast public effort to find her and by the way the case magnifies Jessica’s fear that her own encounter with the kidnapper had somehow invited the tragedy.

Setting and the Abduction Case

The kidnapping rapidly became one of Sonoma County’s most notorious crimes. When Jessica’s parents tried to report what she knew about a man, a park, and a sleepover, nearly an hour passed as they drew the story out of her and sorted the relevant details from her distressed talk about other subjects. Reaching someone at the police station took another two hours: calls from eccentrics, pranksters, and psychics were already complicating the response to Polly’s abduction.

Forty-eight hours later, two police officers interviewed Jessica. Although she did not know the man’s real name, she had a cassette he had given her, still inside her school backpack. The officers collected it as evidence, giving Jessica a tangible connection to the investigation even as she feared that the police would come to blame her for having encountered the kidnapper first.

Search and Discovery

The investigation expanded into a county-wide search. More than four thousand people combed Sonoma County calling Polly, while a black-and-white version of her school photograph appeared across California on walls, trees, and telephone poles. For a time, the story seemed to occupy the whole country’s attention; for Jessica, that public fixation made the feared possibility of being exposed as responsible feel increasingly imminent.

The search ended with Polly’s discovery in a shallow grave behind Highway 101. The killer, however, was an old man whose resemblance to the figure Jessica had associated with the wanted poster proved to be an effect of imagination or light. The discovery resolved the question of what had happened to Polly, but it did not immediately dissolve Jessica’s private sense of connection to the crime.

Jessica’s Connection to the County

Nearly a year later, an padded envelope from the police station in Petaluma arrived at Jessica’s home. She believed it contained the cassette, but her parents took the package before she could check; she never saw either the tape or the envelope again. The unexamined package leaves the investigation’s material trace in the household while withholding any confirmation of what became of the evidence.

When Jessica turned fourteen, she understood that the man had not been seeking her and had taken Polly instead, and that the two events had coincided by chance. Even so, for the remaining years of her childhood she continued to feel that Polly’s fate and her own encounter were linked by some deeper force. Sonoma County thus anchors a public search and a private aftermath: the case is solved in its most basic facts, while its emotional meaning remains unsettled for Jessica.