One of the uncomfortable moments in a newspaper reporter’s life is when you’re out somewhere, say grocery shopping at Giant, and a reader approaches.

“I liked your story about my mother,” the reader might say.

When this happened to me, I braced because I could hear a “but” coming.

“I liked your story about my mother, but she and my dad were married in 1937, not 1932.”

I usually apologized for the error and promised to submit a correction. Later I grumbled an excuse to myself: “Well, that’s what your brother told me.” These encounters didn’t happen often, but each one was painful. I hated making mistakes. Still do.

I bring this up now, with a new book on the way, not because the book has a mistake in it (I hope not), but because it has a big hole in it. I never figured out what happened to Elvira Corder, one of the main characters. Despite great effort, I had to confess to readers that I just don’t know how her life turned out. I listed several possibilities but no conclusion. I was left with the hope that readers really do enjoy a good mystery.

My fear is that someone will confront me about this, like the reader at the grocery store. I imagine being at a talk or a book signing and someone says, “I know what happened to Elvira. She moved to Philadelphia, got married, and had another child.” And they would say this as if everyone but me knew it to be true, and that I would have known it too if I had just worked a little harder.

In this nightmare, I imagine that I check later to learn that the stranger was correct, that Elvira lived another 30 years in Pennsylvania. I had missed it.

I don’t think this will happen. I did a lot of looking, and I had a lot of excellent help. I documented almost every significant milestone in every member of Elvira’s family except her. I marked the deaths of her father and stepmother, the marriages of her brothers and the births of their children, the sale of the family farm, the relocation of two of her brothers to neighboring Loudoun County, and finally their deaths and burials.

To do this, I scoured online databases, such as Ancestry and Family Search. I found a descendant, but he knew nothing about Elvira. I hired two professional genealogists to put their skills to work. Nothing. We found no record of residence, birth, adoption, marriage or death associated with Elvira. We found no tombstone that marks her burial. After her kidnapping in Maryland in January 1880, it was as if she had been erased.

Once when I was talking to a man who had researched Arthur Jordan’s family, he said that Henry Jordan, Arthur’s father, appears in the 1860 census, then disappears. “We assume that Henry died sometime after 1860,” he said.

I believe that this is the best explanation for Elvira’s absence, that she died, probably early in 1880. Was she murdered, as Arthur Jordan, her lover, was? That is part of the mystery.