On the night of June 11, 1994, a couple was driving home on Highway 50 through the Sierra Nevada mountains when the woman spotted a figure on the shoulder. A woman in torn, dirty clothes, arms up, waving. Pointing down toward the edge of the road like she needed them to look at something. The husband hit the brakes and backed up, but when the headlights swung back around, there was nobody there. They searched the shoulder for ten minutes with flashlights and found nothing. No footprints. No tracks. No sign that anyone had been standing there at all.What they did not know was that forty feet below that exact spot, hidden in the trees at the bottom of a steep embankment, a car had been sitting there for five days.Christine was 24 years old and had a 3-year-old son. On Monday, June 6, 1994, she loaded up her car at her family's place near Sacramento and told her father she was heading to Nevada for a fresh start. He stood in the driveway and watched her pull out, her son strapped into his car seat in the back. That was the last time he saw her.When Christine never arrived and stopped answering her phone, her father filed a missing persons report and started driving Highway 50 himself, stopping at every shoulder and parking lot, hoping to find her broken down somewhere. Investigators traced her to a gas station stop in Placerville on Monday afternoon. A clerk remembered her. Remembered her little boy in the back seat, playing with a toy car. After Placerville, there was nothing. Christine and her son had simply vanished somewhere on that mountain road.Four days passed with no trace. Then on Saturday night, the couple reported the figure they had seen on the shoulder. Officers searched the area and found nothing. They told the couple it was shadows and exhaustion. The woman who had seen the figure could not let it go. She made her husband find a payphone and call the police, because she knew what she had seen and she knew someone was out there.The next morning, a deputy who knew about both the sighting and the missing woman drove back out to that curve and walked the shoulder slowly. Six feet from the edge of the road, he found a small toy car lying in the gravel. A few feet further, a highway mile marker was lying flat, the metal bent and scraped. He walked to the edge and looked down. The brush was broken wide open. A trail cut straight down through the trees. He worked his way down the embankment and found Christine's red sedan forty feet below the road, completely hidden from every car that had passed above. Christine had not survived the crash.He made himself walk around to the back of the car. When he looked through the glass, he saw movement.Christine's 3-year-old son was still strapped into his car seat. He had been there for five full days without food or water. Barely conscious, lips cracked dry. Doctors said one more hour and he would not have survived.The spot where the woman in torn clothing had appeared on the shoulder was directly above where the car had gone off the road five days earlier. She had been pointing straight down at the location of the car. The woman on the shoulder was never identified. No explanation was ever found for what the couple saw that night. Some people say it was shadows and exhaustion. Others say a mother does not stop trying just because she is gone.

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