WARREN, Mass.— It is another hot summer day on Comins Pond. A pudgy boy thrashes about in the shallow water, tormenting a pair of terriers while his mother patiently looks on from the beach. A trio of anglers sifts for fish through some tall reeds. A set of swings sways lazily in the wind.

But there is nothing peaceful about this scene to John Bish. Two years ago his 16-year-old daughter Molly vanished from the beach on a morning just like this.

Since his daughter disappeared on June 27, 2000, the parole officer has visited the pond many times, recreating, again and again, what he thinks happened that morning. First, Bish waits at a nearby car wash where he suspects the abductor was idling until he saw the family car pass by. He waits as long as it would have taken Molly and her mother to reach the deserted pond, where Molly would ready herself for her shift as a lifeguard.

He eases the car into drive, and heads right instead of straight, curving around to a cemetery behind the swimming hole. He parks his car in a back section of the cemetery, and trudges down a path and leading down a steep hill to the beach. Then back to the car he heads, leaves the cemetery, and finally reaches Route 19, the abductor's supposed escape route, according to police.

"Eight minutes," John Bish says of the amount of time it might have taken for someone to make his youngest child disappear, probably forever. "It only takes eight minutes."

Molly Bish disappeared before Danielle van Dam, Chandra Levy, and Elizabeth Smart, three other missing girls who, for whatever reasons, captured the media attention of the nation. The cases are different on the surface: van Dam's body was found and her neighbor is now on trial in San Diego for her murder; Levy's remains were recovered in a Washington, D.C. park, but her killer remains at large; And Elizabeth Smart is still missing. As each case has unfolded, the Bish family has empathized, witnessing the anguish from afar, grappling with Molly's loss while retaining the hope that somewhere somehow, she might still be alive, more than 730 days later.

The Man in the White Car

After Molly said goodbye to her mom that morning she gathered the tools of her trade—a police-issue radio and a first-aid kit—and placed them with her backpack, lunch, and sandals near the beach. It was a few minutes after 10. When police and her family gathered on the beach three hours later, these items were the only sign of Molly they found.

Molly's mother Magdalen Bish, who is known as Magi, always starts the story on the morning before, June 26. Instead of dropping her daughter off and leaving, as usual, Magi Bish lingered at the beach while her daughter set up. A man smoking a cigarette was sitting in a white sedan in the parking lot, out of view of the lake and without any seeming purpose, and she wasn't about to leave her daughter there alone.

"I guess it was sort of a mother's instinct," said Bish, an energetic elementary school teacher with a warm smile. "I felt uncomfortable. He had this cocky look. He just kind of stared at me. I said 'I can't leave Molly here with this guy here.'"

When Magi Bish returned to the parking lot, she exchanged glances with the man, and then pretended to look for something in her car until he drove away. She forgot about him until her daughter disappeared the next day. "Molly was gone," she said. "And all I could think about is that man in the car."

Two hundred years ago, General Henry Knox carted cannons bound for George Washington's army down a road that led through the pond. In the 1900s, it became a rock quarry, reaching down some 100 feet into the earth. Its final incarnation, thanks to a few tons of concrete that raised a barrier on the side facing the parking lot, was the recreational pond that remains today. That's where the search for Molly began.

A profiler sketch of the alleged abductor.

The first place anyone looked was the water. Molly's older brother, John Jr., was the first one in. A lifeguard for two years there himself, he stripped his clothes off and dove. "I know all the land and everything out there," said the 22-year-old, his eyes welling with tears. "It's probably one of my worst memories."

After a day of searching, it was clear the pond, which would later be swept by the same sonar equipment used to look for John F. Kennedy, Jr.'s plane, wasn't the answer. Molly was nowhere. The Bishes lay awake all night, thinking about how the three-sport athlete and star student wouldn't have run away and how she had no known enemies. The insomnia would be a constant as police sifted through suspects and leads in the weeks that followed. "We didn't sleep for days," said John Jr.

"I don't know if we really fully any of us sleep anymore," added his sister, Heather, 25.

The next day, bloodhounds brought in from New York trailed Molly's scent up into the woods behind the beach. Anchored in a hill that rises behind the pond, the foliage there thickens until, about 30 feet back, a person could crouch undetected in the brush and observe the beach below. A main path forks at a stand of pine trees, one continuing around the beach, the other leading up to a cemetery. It's this path the bloodhounds followed, and this path that police say Molly Bish and her abductor followed that day.

The scenario is this: Molly's abductor sat in wait for the teen back in the pines. Familiar with her schedule, and the activity at the beach, he crept down as Bish prepared for the children, who were to arrive at 10:30 that morning. Maybe he asked her for help. Eager to use her newfound lifesaving skills, she might have followed him from the fringe of the beach, down the path carpeted with leaves and pine needles and, ultimately, to the cemetery where his car was parked.

Though some of her young swimmers noticed Molly was not there when they arrived at 10:15, three hours would go by before police decided her disappearance was suspicious and launched a full-scale search. If the abduction took only eight minutes, as Josh Bish posits, his daughter could have been anywhere by then. And after two years of investigation that cost the state police more than $1 million, dozens of suspects, and more than 5,000 leads, she could still be anywhere.

But just who could have brought her there? The smoking man in the white sedan remains at large. And suspects, including Molly's boyfriend at the time (he later passed a lie detector test), have come and gone without any arrests. (Law enforcement officials would not comment for this story.) So the Bishes, to their dismay, have had to learn to live with the doubt as well as the grief.

'We have to learn to live without her'

Molly Bish's disappearance was big news in the central Massachusetts town of Warren, home to 5,000 people, a small strip of stores and clusters of one- and two-story homes fringed by factories (vacant but for a fabric company that makes the felt used on Kermit the Frog dolls).

The living room in the Bishes' modest one-story house is dominated by two large pictures on the mantle. One is an informal photograph of Molly, the other a painting made from a school photo. In both, she is beaming, full of life. Her nickname was Tigger, because she never stopped going.

Molly's family and friends are offering a $100,000 reward.

Magi Bish grabs a remote and turns off Court TV, which is televising the trial of David Westerfield, accused of abducting and killing 7-year-old Danielle van Dam in February, 2002. She's wearing dragonfly earrings, a dragonfly pendant around her neck, and a brooch of the same sort is pinned to her chest: The creature was her daughter's favorite.

"Every time we hear about a case like that we almost relive Molly's case," says Bish, her voice wavering. "You want an answer. You don't really win. [Danielle] came home but not how you want. Somehow you have to prepare for that."

For the past two years, the Bishes have studied other families as they made their way onto the front pages, and into the talk show studios. The cases are almost as hard to deal with as their own. Magi Bish says she cried for 20 minutes in the bathroom when Chandra Levy was found.

"I knew now that her parents' hope was gone and that they had to deal with this reality that there really are bad people out there who are hurting our women and children," she says.

Statistics, facts, analyses: These are the kind of details that John Bish gleans from other cases. 74 percent of abduction victims are murdered within three hours. 91 percent within the first day. These are the sort of things one can calculate, while his family's grief, it seems, cannot be totaled.

"For us to be sitting here two years later and still not know what happened to Molly... is beyond belief," Bish said calmly. It's clear two years of doubt and dread have steeled him. "We have to learn to live without her," he says. "After two years, there's a finality that seems to be setting in. The 'shape of hope' changes."

That hope, of course, would be quashed if Molly were found dead. But no matter how terrible a death could be, the finality would be some consolation for her father. "They told me they thought she had drowned," he says. "I couldn't believe it. But as we sit here today, that would be a lot better. That would be a very bad very tragic situation, but this is horrific."

Loss Becomes Motivation

Like other families that have lost children to uncertain circumstances, the Bishes have turned their suffering into motivation to help prevent any other children from disappearing. Magi Bish has a message she wants to get out: child abduction can happen anywhere.

"It's hard to believe this sort of thing could happen in such a small, rural community," she says. "But it did happen here. It happens in affluent neighborhoods. It happens in suburban homes. It happens in the cities. Something is wrong. I've often said you can lose your keys, you can lose your glasses, but how, in America, do you lose your child?"

Carmen Fontana, the case manager for Molly Bish at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, has helped the Bish family spread the word about their daughter, working with shows like America's Most Wanted to get national TV coverage, and keeping the case highlighted in police departments around the country. But like the six other full-time case managers at NCMEC, each with 350 to 400 cases, Fontana says he can only do so much.

"We try to get each kid as much publicity as we can but it's possible to get all of them out there," he said.

Much of the work toward finding Molly, then, has fallen to the Bishes. The experience, they say, has spurred them to help others avoid such a loss. Through their foundation, they have sponsored distribute child identification kits, which hold vital information such as fingerprints and photos that can help find a child when they go missing, to local schools. To date, more than 22,400 kids have been catalogued.

For the Bish family, helping others also means granting interviews, planning memorials, holding fundraisers, and just sharing stories.

As a theme for a memorial held the evening of the anniversary, the couple settled upon the theme "Whispers of Hope." At a celebration on the town green that evening, they were joined by a crowd of more than 200 to remember their daughter, and to redouble efforts to prevent other children from disappearing.

Whispers, said a local pastor, can develop into full voices, which, when collected en masse—like the voices of the high school students, local residents, and visitors in attendance that evening—can grow into one great cry of grief, acceptance, and devotion.

Seated in the first ring around a gazebo were the Bishes, smoothed by two years in the spotlight, regal almost in their fragile condition. And, as a singer's gentle voice rose from the pavilion, John Bish rose steadily, a dove between his clasped hands. Whispering softly to the bird, he looked ahead through the crowd and swung his arms towards the heavens, freeing in a fluttering release not just the bird, but the hope, love, and loss shared by all his family.