The last stone
Edition
First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition.
Publication Information
New York : Atlantic Monthly Press, 2019.
Physical Description
340 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm
Summary
On March 29, 1975, sisters Katherine and Sheila Lyons, age 10 and 12, disappeared during a trip to a shopping mall in suburban Washington, D.C. Three days later, eighteen-year-old Lloyd Welch visited the Montgomery County Police with a tip: he had seen the Lyons girls at the mall that day and had watched them climb into a strange man's car. Welch's tip led nowhere, and the police dismissed him as a troublemaking teen wasting their time. As the weeks passed and the police's massive search for the girls came up empty, grief, shock, and horror spread out from the Lyons family to overtake the entire region. The trail went cold, the investigation was shelved, and hope for justice waned. Then, in 2013, a detective on the department's cold case squad reopened the Lyons files and soon discovered that the officers had missed something big about Lloyd Welch in 1975. That same week, a young girl who had seen the Lyons sisters at the mall described a man who had been following her throughout the day. An artist had even produced a sketch: It looked remarkably like Lloyd.