Before they disappeared into the mountains — before they broke the foremost rule of womanhood: Keep the children alive — Becky and Christine Vance lived together in Colorado Springs in the Windmill Apartments, a modest complex with a heated outdoor pool that looks like a large Days Inn. From the parking lot, you can see Pikes Peak rising from the plains like a mirage or a matador’s cape. The Vance sisters, as adults, did not go camping, nor had they ever climbed Pikes, though they had taken Becky’s son to the North Pole, an amusement park on its northeastern slope where you could ride the Candy Cane roller coaster and visit Santa’s Workshop.

The Vance sisters had lived together their entire lives except during two stints, each lasting less than a year, when one of them tried to move out. Becky was born in 1980, Christine in 1982, but Christine’s friends (Becky didn’t have friends) considered their relationship to be like that of twins. “You know with twins how there’s one that’s kind of more in charge?” one of those friends said. “Becky kind of seemed, like, more alpha.” Both sisters inherited their mother’s thick black hair, almond skin, and dark eyes, though Becky was leaner and taller, and she felt a peculiar, almost gladiatorial duty to protect her sister. This started, as far as anybody could tell, when Becky was 5 and Christine was 3 and their mother abruptly left their father, taking her children with her.

Seven years later, their mother remarried and the girls acquired a stepsister. Trevala, who was rowdy, blonde, and emotionally porous, was two years younger than Christine. In high school, those two hung out a lot, Christine accompanying Trevala as she stirred up conventional trouble — smoking weed behind the arcade, hooking up with boys in the utility elevator. Becky didn’t join. Becky worked at Papa Johns after school, then came home. Becky earned perfect grades, stood with perfect posture, kept her chin tilted up, and rarely spoke. At first, Trevala found her reserve intimidating. “Just the mysterious privateness of her,” Trevala told me. Becky “gave off this aura: ‘I’m not going to talk to you until I trust you. You better not be on my bad side.’ If you were on Becky’s bad side, you were on it for a while.”

The three girls shared the basement of the Vance family home, a ranch house on a leafy, modest Colorado Springs street. After graduating from Mitchell High School, Becky and Christine kept living there, working at Sears (Becky) and Taco Bell (Christine). In their early 20s, both sisters took jobs at Atmel Corporation, a semiconductor-manufacturing plant, in one of those clean environments where you have to wear a white smock, white shoe covers, a mask, and a hair net.

The PPE suited Becky. She didn’t want to be known. Christine, too, often met the world with what she called her self-protective “wall,” but she sometimes let it down, and when she did she was vulnerable and funny. Some days, after work, Christine would drive a friend home and they’d sit in the car, sing rock ballads, and cry. Other days, she got drinks and chicken quesadillas at the Hatch Cover bar. Christine’s friends respected her relationship with Becky. “She was gonna be there for her no matter what. She’s like, ‘That’s my No. 1. My sister is my No. 1, and I’m gonna support her, always, forever,’” Meagan Phillips, one of Christine’s girlfriends, told me. Meagan had two kids, a husband, a dog, and a mind of her own. She worried about Christine. Christine was so hard on herself — about her weight (she was listed on her driver’s license as 205 pounds), her attractiveness, her failure to quit smoking, her treatment of others. Was she kind enough? Did she deserve to be loved? “I would have to reassure her,” Meagan said. “Like, ‘Dude, you’re such a good person. Wait, you’re so beautiful. Just let people love you.’”

Becky and Christine’s mother worked a few different jobs: in the commissary at an Air Force base, then at a gas station and in retail. Their stepfather, Edward Kaskewicz, stayed home, where he drank (too much at times) and cooked: calzones, beef stew, baklava, and, on Halloween, Kitty Litter Cake. “Becky was really close to her mom, like, very, very, very, very close,” Trevala said. Their mother, Son Yup Kaskewicz, who’d emigrated from Korea as a teenager, was, like Becky, quiet and careful. She saved her loose change and gambled only that much at the casino in Cripple Creek. Still, she wished Becky would go out sometimes, make some friends. Then she got sick in 2006 — cancer, caught late. She died in 2007. Becky took her death hard. She felt guilty she hadn’t spent more time with her. She felt guilty she hadn’t given her mother a grandchild.

The Vance sisters continued living with their stepfather, and he remained devoted to them — cooking, sewing, doing their taxes, driving them places. In 2008, Becky got pregnant. The father was Eric Burden, a big, steady, handsome guy from work with two kids from a previous relationship. Becky was fine with his divided attention, more than fine. As she told Eric, she did not want a partner. She did not want a co-parent. She just wanted a piece of her mother back.

Few people knew Eric was Becky’s baby daddy. Still, Eric told me, the day after the child was born, “I get a text from my friend: ‘Hey, congratulations.’ ‘Congratulations?’ ‘Yeah. Congratulations — she had the baby.’” Eric drove to the hospital. The nurses, he said, looked at him “like, You’re late.” But Becky hadn’t called. She hadn’t even named Eric as the father on the birth certificate.

Eric lived with his parents and his two young children: Ashton, then 2, and Emma, then 4. His mother, Marilyn, did day care professionally. When the new baby, whom Becky named Talon, was an infant, Becky started dropping him off at the Burden home on her way to work. Marilyn, practical and spry, found Becky’s vibe strange, withholding. But Marilyn could handle that. “At the beginning, she’d call and say, ‘You can have Talon this weekend if you want,’” Marilyn recalled. Then Marilyn started asking if Talon could come over, not to be babysat, just to be her grandson. Marilyn had strong feelings about caretaking. She had raised a son, Tracy, with cerebral palsy. “I had people ask, ‘Why didn’t you put him in a home or something?’” Marilyn told me. “I had an aunt — every time she saw my mom, she’d ask, ‘Does she still have Tracy?’ You know, we had him until he passed.” He was 20. “I’m like, That’s my child.”

Talon and his half-brother, Ashton, shared a birthday. They shared a bedroom at the Burden house. They shared a love for Super Mario Bros. Everything seemed so normal at first. Talon dressed up as a bear cub for Halloween. Talon started preschool. Talon played T-ball, then he switched to soccer. Talon learned the recorder with his fourth-grade class. Talon wore rectangular glasses over his soft dark eyes. His smile spread across his face like an open staple — a straight line, the corners turned up. Talon earned straight A’s. He loved computers. He got annoyed when his father told him they were just going to run one quick errand and then that one errand ballooned into half the day. He preferred spicy food, especially bulgogi — the hotter, the better. He told his mom when he got into trouble at school (which was not often, but he did throw a snowball in third grade). He was acutely attuned to adult pain. Marilyn has struggled with lupus for decades. One day when Talon was 5, Marilyn said, “I’m getting him ready for school, trying to put his socks on, and he goes, ‘Grandma, is there a day when you won’t hurt? What day will you not hurt?’” None of her children or grandchildren had ever asked her this. Even playing Super Mario Bros., Talon wanted to take care of adults. “He’d go, ‘Grandma, wait, let me get you.’ I’d be Luigi or whoever, and he’d put me on his back and carry me in the game. Because he knows the areas that I would not do so well.”

In 2018, Talon, Becky, Christine, and Becky and Christine’s stepfather traveled to Disney World along with Marilyn, Eric, and Eric’s other two children. They stayed in different areas of the park. But in what seemed like a step toward closeness, they managed to function as an extended family.

The following year, Becky and Christine’s stepfather died from liver failure. The Vance sisters’ parental protectors were gone. And in May 2020, Talon received his fifth-grade-graduation diploma through the window of his mom’s 2006 blue Hyundai sedan, as the pandemic had closed his school.

That August, Becky called Marilyn to tell her she’d quit her job. “I was like, ‘Okay?’” Marilyn said. “‘What do you plan on doing?’” Becky said she was going to work from home, and she never told Marilyn, or anyone else, any more. “I just think COVID is what broke the camel’s back,” Trevala said. “I mean, everybody felt this negativity — the politics, the economy, all of it. She became much more secretive. Much more secretive.”

For Becky, now with ample time on her hands at the Windmill Apartments, the florid world of conspiracy theories opened up — dozens of options to bind and direct your fears. Just log in to a truther website like, say, Expanding Awareness Relations. There, a reader like Becky could learn the deep state was indeed trying to control people through a CRISPR-altered parasite called the “liver fluke.” Big pharma — why would anyone........

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