But Kerri Ellen did not say the words aloud. Jammed into a MINI Cooper with four other community college kids, she wouldn’t let them know how shaky she felt as they pulled into the church parking lot where the search-and-rescue command center was set up. To her friends it was all new, the muddle of cop cars and ambulances and TV vans and tables and tents, the swarms of state troopers and sheriffs and borough officials and firefighters and volunteers, the blare of megaphones and the yammering of a helicopter overhead. But to Kerri Ellen it was entirely too familiar, even though this was not a ragged stretch of highway amid used car lots, storage lockers, furniture outlets and fast food eateries—such as the Burger King her sister had been walking to. This was a rich neighborhood. Here, Kerri Ellen looked around at McMansions bigger than barns, each with its own vast Chem-Green lawn beneath forested hills. Kinda different than the trailer park where she lived, out along Route 109. Yet here were the search dogs in their orange capelets, and the feeling here was just the same as—then.
