Miranda took the abduction particularly hard. Though her relationship with Ashley had drifted over the years, recently the two girls had grown friendlier. "Miranda stopped eating and lost weight," says her mother, Michelle Duffey, 34. Miranda spoke poignantly about Ashley in a local TV interview, and when the school dance team decided to stage a March 23 benefit to raise money to aid in Ashley's search, Miranda threw herself into choreographing a solo routine. Then she, like most people in town, began to relax her guard.

Two weeks before the benefit, on a day when school had an early dismissal, Miranda was scheduled to walk with a friend to the home of her dance coach Sharonda Garrett, whose four kids Miranda often babysat. When the friend called Duffey at work, asking where Miranda was, Duffey immediately phoned the school, only to learn that the second oldest of her four children had never shown up that day. At around 5 p.m. she went to the police. Within minutes two officers were assigned to the case. By 11:30 the FBI was on Duffey's doorstep.

From the start, friends and family dismissed the notion that Miranda had run away. Although she wears makeup and can look older than 13, they said she is neither flirtatious nor likely to be seduced by a strange man. "She would freak out if a boy touched her," says Garrett, recalling how Miranda once berated a boy so harshly after he snapped her bra strap that Garrett thought she was going to punch him. Swatman, who runs the Tuesday-night youth group that Miranda attended at the Oregon City Christian Church, says that any stranger who tried to grab her "would have lost a finger or eye."

Now in Oregon City "everyone is scared," says Miranda's best friend, Brock Ketterling, 12. "It feels like it's pitch black and dark and sad." Valenzuela-Garcia was so distraught that she lopped off her waist-length hair. "I just didn't know what to do," she says. "I couldn't cut off a limb."