Who done it?

Its been 27 years since the crime was committed and the statute of limitations has surely passed, yet no one was ever found guilty and no one confessed.  It ranks right up there with the events at Roswell NM and Jimmy Hoffa's whereabouts.  Unexplained, mysterious.  The difference is, this crime was committed right inside my own house, by one of my nearest and dearest.  It remains a shadow of doubt hanging over all of us, a whisper of suspicion that raises its ugly head on occasion, whenever we gather together and alcohol loosens lips or rich food dulls the mental faculties.  Someone invariably brings up the past and the unanswered question teetering on the edge of everyone's tongue gets spoken outloud, and the accusation hurled, "I think YOU were the one who ate all the candy bars!"

It happened when I was 13 years old, and 13 was a really bad year for me.  We were dirt poor and times were really tough.  Suddenly I was a foot taller than everyone else my age and overnight I went from training bra to double D cups.  Traumatic!  As if Junior High isnt hard enough already, I also had to stay home each morning to babysit my younger siblings while my mother worked, cleaning the local movie theater.  I was chronically late to school because of this and the principal wasnt very sympathetic.  My aunt and her two obnoxious children had just moved out after living with my family for over a year while she went through a messy and costly divorce.  And to cap it off, my grandfather, to whom I was particularly close, died in May. 

After all we had been through, my parents decided we needed to take a vacation and get away from it all.  We couldn't afford much but we were going to go camping at Lake Powell in Utah.  We were going to take two big tents and stay in a campground at the lake edge.  In preparation, Mom and Dad began to stockpile supplies, knowing it would take a while to be able to afford all the equipment and paraphernalia we would need for the trip.  One of the "necessary" items we needed were a lot of candy bars, for the long road trip each way.  I think Dad bought somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty-five or forty candy bars, which he put into a brown paper bag and stored in the freezer awaiting the trip.  A couple months passed and after much hard work and saving, we were ready to go on our trip!

While we were packing all our clothes, goods, and equipment, Dad pulled out the brown paper sack from the freezer.  It looked impossibly small.  He opened it up and there, at the bottom of the bag were three small candy bars.  That was all.  He searched the freezer for a different sack because obviously that wasn't the right bag.  But there was no other sack full of candy bars in the freezer.  This had to be it.  All of us kids were in the kitchen helping pack, so he asked us if we knew what had happened to the candy bars.  No one spoke up.  Individually he asked each one of us again if we had eaten them or knew what had happened to them.  Still negative.  A familiar feeling of dread rose in my stomach and made me nauseous.  Dad started to get angry when no one would own up to eating the candy bars, and I know I was the prime suspect.  Being the oldest has its disadvantages at times!

Dad went around and around with me, alternately threatening and cajoling, trying to get me to confess or trip me up in my story.  Both of my parents pled with me to "just tell the truth", assuring me that no one would get mad if I admitted I took the candy bars.  I denied it bitterly and my parents admitted that, normally, if I had been the one who ate the candy bars, they surely would have found the wrappers lying around the house or in the trashcan in my room.  I wasn't a particularly devious child, nor a tidy one either.  Mom and Dad asked my cousins, who still spent a large amount of time at our house but they had no clue.  They asked other family members who visited often, but none of them had any explanation.  The more people denied knowing where the candy bars disappeared to, the more everyone wanted to know what had really happened. 

Could Dad have been mistaken about where he put the candy bars?  Could he have bought quite a few less than he remembered?  Could they have been thrown out by mistake?  Could one of us have eaten them while sleepwalking and not known it?  Could a thief have broken in the house and left everything else untouched but the candy bars?  The theories got wilder and more outrageous as time went on.

Eventually we let the enquiry fade and went back to our everyday lives.  But the mystery just wouldn't let go.  The longer we went without any reasonable hypothesis and the more ridiculous the suppositions that were offered up became, the more everyone wondered what really happened to the candy bars.  Who was the guilty party?  Soon, anyone innocently eating a candy bar in public risked being accused of being the thief.  Even friends and relatives who couldnt possibly been involved were grilled about their whereabouts during that time frame.  More and more people entered into the spirit of things and added their own lists of suspects including Sirhan Sirhan and Ted Bundy (apparently miraculously coming back from his execution unscathed just for a stash of candy bars) to my personal favorite solution, ala Murder on the Orient Express style, EVERYONE ate them.  To this day, no one has admitted to the crime and no one has been completely exonerated. 

I'm still the prime suspect.  I was the right age at the time to have done such a thing, whereas my siblings were on the younger side, although I wouldn't put anything past my brother Abe, no matter what age!  I may have done it, I may not have, I wouldnt confess now anyway.  To be honest, I hope no one ever does confess, it would be such an anticlimax to the great family joke this has become. What else would we have to tease and talk about around the big dining table at home when we gather together every couple of years over burritos and margaritas and reminisce over those terrible "good 'ol days"?