A Murder in Mayberry

Part 2/4) The Final Mission

Here's an explanation and an update to this point in the story on what the Wild Bunch called their "Final Mission":

Izito traveled all over the world searching for answers. He was famous in the world of crime-solvers as a man who always got his man, a finder of missing people and the people who stole them. He might not always find the missing person alive, but he almost always found them. He found closure. He might not always get the bad guy, but he was always looking under every rock. Many times Izito and his team solved seemingly unsolvable cases and were heralded as heroes. There were also times he and his team, with no fanfare or notice at all, put a stop to injustices they encountered along the way. Izito appeared everywhere solving missing persons cases, but there was one important case he never solved. One person he never found, though he looked for forty years.

Forty years ago, Izito's mother vanished. He knew she met foul play because she would never desert him. He was all she had. She was so proud of him. Her last words to him before he left for college to study law were: "Be brave and remember, you can't save everybody. Now, go be my hero." Izito was "her boy" even when he wasn't a boy anymore. He had to find her. He had to know what happened to her. He had given up hope of ever finding her alive. He just prayed to God, if He was listening, that whatever befell his mother was swift, and that she did not suffer. He imagined the worst and the worst for him was a long lost grave never found or her bones lying in a culvert as traffic zoomed past unaware.

Before his move South, Izito's search centered around Boston since this was his mother's last known sighting and her home base. Despite countless interviews and inquiries and database searches, and old record dig throughs and countless contacts contacted, there were few leads. Izito chased a lot of wild gooses over the years and found other people's missing moms and sisters and sons and daughters in the process, but he did not find his mother.

He decided to expand his search to other areas his mother lived in over the years. He searched cases from the coast of California to Seattle, Washington but he could find no trace of her. Then one day, Izito was looking through a box of her belongings and found the necklace. It was a necklace with a charm on it in the shape of the state of North Carolina. His mother's hometown was in North Carolina. He knew she returned there briefly the summer before her disappearance to settle her father's estate, but he never thought to look there. She never spoke of the small town she was from, she never seemed nostalgic about her childhood or her time there. In fact, she never talked about her hometown, even though Izito was born there too. Odd, thought Izito when he looked at the necklace. His mother always spoke of the places she traveled, "her adventures" she called them, but she never talked about her hometown.

When Izito explored retirement options, he was not ready to completely retire yet and the Riverview Retirement Community seemed like the perfect option. He could still work with contacts in Washington and continue to search for his mother. Riverview was on the outskirts of his mother's hometown, Mount Airy, and though he knew he would not find her there, he somehow felt it was karma for him to return to where his mom began.

If there was one thing Izito believed in, it was karma.

Izito's friends joined him. It all ended up for the best because as Mr. Cropps's and Lacey's health declined, it turned out the group needed Riverview as much as they needed to be together. The search for Izito's mom gave them a purpose that Shiela, in jest, but lovingly named - their final mission.

Several years passed and Izito and his team kept helping with the occasional missing persons case while still searching for his mother and following stray leads. One day he caught a break. He went to the clerk of court in nearby Dobson to research the deed to his grandfather's house. There, a clerk in the clerk of court's office - a precocious, chatty, gray-haired lady who had a steel trap mind and was there forty years ago when Izito's mom came to sign the deed, said she remembered Izito's mom. She recollected that Izito's mom, Naomi, had been with a friend that day. She was with her friend, Beatrice Livengood. And, if that was not enough, she remembered more about Naomi. A fascinating piece of history, she called it, and the most excitement the town had seen before the recent discovery that Randall Michael Wall was a serial killer. She was surprised he'd never heard about it, but then the clerk remembered that Naomi had a different name when she came to sign the deed. Maybe that's why you never knew it was her, she told him. She was the babysitter. The babysitter when the baby got stolen. Then she looked at Izito and said, "Oh my gosh, it's you, you're the other baby, you're her baby boy, the one left behind."