Dave Krupa

But month after month after month, she didn't.

The detectives seemed to have run out of new avenues to investigate, and the case grew cold.

As for Carrie's teenage son, Max, he was tired of waiting.

He was about to do something on his own to find the answer.

Max Farber and his grandmother Nancy were trapped in this constant anxiety, week after week after week, helpless to do anything at all but worry.

They were expected, somehow, to go on day after day as if the more mundane things of life mattered any more at all, the way they used to.

A Herculean endeavor for a high school freshman in the spring of 2013.

Carrie had been gone for half a year from their historic farmhouse in Little Macedonia, Iowa, when one day Max Farver opened his Facebook account and his stomach flipped.

There was a message, a name really, that was all.

And it had to be.

And that's what it said on the Facebook post.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But then Max summoned up all his nerve and tried something.

He pulled out Facebook, then Messenger, found his mom's page, and sent her a one-word message.

All it said was, Hi.

And then he waited.

Waited for hours.

No answer.

It wasn't until the following day that he opened it up again and