Some stories seem so miraculous, it takes a while to comprehend what we are hearing. One such story was that of the August discovery of Jaycee Lee Dugard, 18 years after she was abducted at age 11 by strangers off the streets of Meyers, Calif.
Her pony-tailed smiling picture haunted investigators for nearly two decades. The leads had long gone dry, and her friends in the little South Lake Tahoe suburb of Meyers had likely forgotten how her voice sounded.
But for her mother and for her stepfather Terry Probst, who had tried to chase the kidnappers' vehicle on his bicycle and had lived under a cloud of suspicion, Jaycee was never forgotten.
In August, when 29-year-old Jaycee accompanied alleged abductor and father of her two daughters to a meeting with his parole officer in Antioch, Calif., that officer needed only to enter Dugard's name into a computer database to grasp the miracle of her existence.
Though kidnapped, kept in a backyard compound at Phillip Garrido's Antioch home, and forced to endure unspeakable abuse at the hands of Garrido, 58, and his alleged co-conspirator, wife Nancy Garrido, 54, Jaycee had survived.
The Garridos wound up in shackles and before a judge in Placerville, Calif. and are awaiting trial on kidnap and rape charges.
Locally we reveled in the discovery and celebrated her return.