Kate Crane watched a TV show and realized her father's murder was being reenacted on screen.
Part two of Kate Crane's story picks up after her high school years, when she escaped Baltimore by immersing herself in the 1990s D.C. punk and Riot Grrrl scene — bands like Bikini Kill, Team Dresch, and Spit Boy — which gave her a feminist political framework and a chosen community. Kate rented a room in a D.C. group house called Positive Force, founded by activist Mark Anderson, with structural issues so severe that guests had to jump from the doorframe to the toilet. By winter 1995 she had stopped showing up to her internship and spent three months mostly in bed, unable to eat or function — a major depressive episode that her punk community could not support. A psychiatrist helped her stabilize, and she moved into the home of Harold, a Baltimore eccentric with a Volkswagen-only repair business, a dog named Gypsy who ate green beans from the garden, and a house that proved a slow healing environment. Kate re-enrolled in college, reading Woolf and Conrad during a winter with plastic over the windows, feeling herself return to life through literature. She moved to Brooklyn in 1998, and in 2007 — at the 20-year mark of her father's disappearance — resolved that if no one else was going to act, she would. She called the Baltimore cold case unit, reached retired detective Donald Wooden, described as the Sherlock Holmes of Baltimore homicide, and he and Sergeant Roger Nolan agreed to reopen the inquiry. But a flood had destroyed the warehouse holding evidence from hundreds of cases, including Eddie's. A West Virginia medical examiner may have a skull that matched a reconstruction of Eddie, but Kate's letter went unanswered. The episode's emotional center arrives when Kate visits Harold's house on Ready Avenue for the last time and a stranger on the phone — Harold's friend from Curtis Bay — matter-of-factly tells her that local men used to boast about putting her father's body in a retaining wall. The episode closes with Kate's unresolved question: does she actually want to find what's in that wall? The tone is intimate and melancholy, with Dingman's narration building atmosphere through careful detail. The episode is the second of a three-part series.
