Here’s where it all moves beyond weird, Chief. No sooner has the smoke cleared after that shootout in Sheriff Truman’s office, with the Double fading away, and something black and spectral floating out of its body and up through the ceiling—don’t even get me going right now on that oddball Cockney kid with the green glove—than the lights go out and you and Cooper, apparently, “apparate” to the basement of the Great Northern Hotel. After a brief exchange, Cooper vanishes in the dark down a long corridor that isn’t actually there, the lights come back on, and you’re left standing with the Horne brothers in a boiler room.
And, for the second time in the past twenty-five years, Special Agent Dale Cooper disappears from sight, sound, and the world as we think we know it.
By the time you get back to the sheriff’s station, Diane Evans, Cooper’s longtime former assistant (whose mind-altering disappearance-and-doppelganger journey calls for, wouldn’t you agree, an exhaustive investigation of its own at some point), who was seen by more than twenty witnesses emerging from a holding cell in the basement only minutes before everything hit the fan in Truman’s office, has also now, without anyone in that crowded room noticing—including yours truly—once again disappeared without a trace.
So when you jetted off back to Philadelphia later that day and left me to cover the aftermath of what went down in Twin Peaks—my first visit; charming place, as you’ve always told me, but to be honest, Chief, I’m a big-city girl and always will be—and to mop up, to quote Albert, this “gargantuan multidimensional clusterfuck,” I decided to nose around a bit.
This happened today, Chief, just a few hours ago. Up to the minute.
Earlier this morning, while perusing past editions of the Twin Peaks Post—outstanding small-town paper, conveniently preserved on microfiche—for more than the fun of it, I went back to look up the occasion of the first Cooper disappearance from Twin Peaks. Sure enough, the intrepid Post reporting staff, expertly trained by their late editor Douglas Milford, featured his sudden and unexplained departure on their front page, along with pained and puzzled quotes from Cooper’s pal Sheriff Harry Truman, about how strange and confusing the whole business was.
You know what else I discovered, Chief, in that same article, a few sentences later? This:
“Agent Cooper had come to town a few months earlier, to aid in the investigation into the disappearance, still unsolved, of local teenage beauty queen, Laura Palmer.”
Let me repeat that phrase for you: “still unsolved.” No mention of “murder,” “wrapped in plastic,” or “father arrested for shocking crime eventually dies in police custody of self-inflicted wounds.”
It’s right there on the front page: Laura Palmer did not die. So, fairly certain I’ve not misplaced my own mind, I go back and check the corresponding police records. They tell me this: Laura Palmer disappeared from Twin Peaks without a trace—on the very same night when, in the world we thought we knew, it used to be said she’d died—but the police never found the girl or, if she had been killed elsewhere, her body or made a single arrest. In every subsequent mention in an edition of the Post, the case is still listed as an open and pending investigation.
And when I spoke to our good friends at the sheriff’s office about this, they all got a slightly dazed and confused expression on their faces when I brought it up, as if they were lost in a fog, having trouble recalling, unable to fully wrap their minds around something that happened so very long ago.
Until finally they said, each and every one of them, “Yeah, that sounds right. That’s how I remember it.”
I started to examine the public records on the rest of the Palmer family. Their daughter’s disappearance dominated the local news for weeks. The same set of suspects was identified and questioned—Jacques Renault, Leo Johnson, Bobby Briggs, James Hurley—as those who were known to have been among the last to see her. No useful information came from them, and no arrests were initially made. The next day, Ronette Pulaski—the girl who was abducted and nearly killed along with Laura, and who had apparently still been taken captive—escaped and ended up in the hospital after being found wandering along a railroad trestle, just like “before.” But she also testified that Laura had wandered off into the woods before she and Leo and Jacques entered the railroad car.
Laura was never there.
After a while, with a complete lack of tips, leads, or sightings to move an investigation forward, the Laura Palmer story began to fade. Within a month it had gone cold; another “missing person” story with no clear resolution. As mentioned, I did find a few stories in the Post about Agent Cooper coming to town to investigate Laura’s disappearance—there are not many details to speak of, and he didn’t stay long—and nothing much beyond that. (As soon as I return to the office, I intend to look into whether any of Cooper’s files or tapes that are still in our possession support this alternate version of events.)
I kept moving forward, searching for more information about the Palmer family. The following year, on February 24, 1990—the one-year anniversary of her “disappearance”—Leland Palmer committed suicide. Alone, with a licensed handgun, in his car, parked near the waterfall by the big hotel. The usual outpouring of shock, grief, and “we never saw this coming” stories appeared in the local press. The act was generally attributed to “a father’s overwhelming grief about the unresolved disappearance of his only child.” Checking police records, I found that there were at least three visits paid to the Palmer house during that intervening year—all by Sheriff Harry Truman—but no further details about the reasons for them are available, and neither is Sheriff Truman.