Through this new lens, the disappearance looked entirely different. The honeymoon location, the remote national forest falls, and the early rainy season: all conditions that made drowning plausible. Someone had helped choose the site. Someone experienced in making things look exactly as terrible as nature sometimes made them.
The laptop was another thing nagging Dellray. Ryan’s work laptop had been in the B&B cabin with their other possessions. It was preliminarily examined and returned to Meridian Systems—logged in Dellray’s own 1994 case file. The routine company property recovery had probably worked to Aldridge’s advantage.