It hadn't yet begun raining when a teenager named Marble Arvidson pinned a note to the door of his bedroom in a foster home, saying he'd be back in half an hour.
By the time he was reported missing the next day, police officers were overwhelmed by the deluge wrought by the remnants of Hurricane Irene, the state's worst natural disaster in generations.
And so, a year after that last Saturday in August, the friendly but guarded 17-year-old with long blond hair, a lanky build, an unpredictable temper and a penchant for black clothing remains missing in what may become Irene's most enduring mystery.
"I want to assume he just chose to leave and he's just somewhere else," said Dan Nichols, 18, a friend from the streets of Brattleboro. "He's most likely gone far, because lots of towns around here know about the situation. There are missing persons posters everywhere."
Did he get high at a favorite hangout, slip on a rock, get washed away in a raging stream? Did he commit suicide? Was he abducted and killed? Or did the near-adult cleverly decide the coming storm was a golden opportunity to slip out of his hardscrabble life and quietly build a new one?
Authorities and those closest to him simply don't know. They're left only with what little they know about a visitor to his door before he disappeared and the details of the life that led him to the red clapboard house at state Route 9 and Sunset Lake Road.
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Marble's extended family is from western Massachusetts, but he was born in California. His mother, Sigrid Arvidson, thought the name would be whimsical and attention-getting.
"It's got that ring to it; it's a strong name and stuff," she said. "I loved marbles."
She and the boy moved back to Massachusetts when he was 1; she was escaping an abusive relationship and struggling with alcoholism.
Marble's great-grandparents raised him until he was 5 or 6; then he began spending time with his sober mother, eventually living with her again full-time. In 2001, she moved to a house in the country in Halifax, Vt., where she also found better schooling for Marble.
In early adolescence, the boy began working with a male mentor, meant to provide a role model he didn't have.
That lasted until he was 14, when an adolescent power struggle about cleaning his room and other restrictions on the life of the growing teenager erupted into violence. He took a splitting maul to the outside of the house, smashing the porch and parts of the foundation, causing about $3,000 in damage, his mother said.
Marble then went into traditional foster care. His third and final placement was the red house in West Brattleboro, a neighborhood in a town of about 7,500 in southeastern Vermont known for its hippie culture and left-wing politics.
Still in the custody of the Vermont Department of Children and Families, Marble lived with a mentor â€" a legal guardian in his 20s â€" along with another teenager and that teen's mentor.
He would hang out by the regional transportation center, situated near a stream called the Whetstone Brook. When last seen, he was about to enter his last year at Brattleboro Union High School, where he was making Bs and thinking about college.
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