His name is on the bedroom door, but Michael Dunahee has never slept here.
His favourite toys, stuffed Smurfs and Ninja Turtles, sit neatly on a bed covered in Batman sheets. Christmas and birthday presents that have accumulated since his disappearance are stacked unopened in a corner.
Nine years ago yesterday Michael vanished from an elementary school playground on a Sunday afternoon in one of Canada's more puzzling cases of child abduction.
He was 4 at the time. Six years later, his parents Crystal and Bruce, along with his sister Caitlin, moved to this two-storey home in a working-class Esquimalt neighbourhood. There was never any doubt about what would happen with the room across the hall from Caitlin, who was six months old when her brother disappeared
"It's Michael's room," Mrs. Dunahee said.
She has set up the family's computer in one corner, under a poster that reads "missing" and shows her blue-eyed, blond son holding a trout. Millions of copies of the poster have been distributed throughout North America. The same photograph is framed in the Dunahees' living room, surrounded by family portraits.
On the nightstand in his bedroom, there is another picture of Michael, fishing with his grandfather. A baseball cap, emblazoned with his name, hangs on a hook. The drawers of the bed hold a jumble of trucks, action figures and games. His toys so far offer the only physical clues in the case -- police lifted his tiny fingerprints off them.
Michael would be a teenager now and police are no closer to solving his disappearance today than they were the day his parents frantically started searching for him at the Blanshard Elementary School playground.
"You just can't shut it out altogether," said Mrs. Dunahee, a 38-year-old redhead whose blue eyes mist over as she reconstructs yet again her last few minutes with her son. "The not knowing. Until it's finalized, it's always going to be there."
The day Michael vanished started out as a typical family outing. Mrs. Dunahee was playing touch football in a women's league while Mr. Dunahee and the children went along to watch. Michael wanted to go to the adjacent playground.
Mrs. Dunahee tied the blue, red-trimmed hood of his jacket around his face before heading toward the football field with her husband and baby daughter.
"It was a matter of five minutes," she said. "We turned back and he was gone."
It's been nine years, but the police casebook remains open, tips still flow in to police, and events are held annually in Michael's memory.
"It's always front and centre with us," Mr. Dunahee said. "We're waiting for him to come home."
The boy's disappearance sparked the biggest investigation in the history of the Victoria police force. The "Michael file" fills three filing cabinets in the major-crimes unit and has generated 10,714 tips and calls from more than 500 psychics.
Police reconstructed the day of his disappearance, when an estimated 30 to 50 people were at the football field and playground area. They interviewed more than 1,100 people in the neighbourhood and conducted door-to-door searches of homes in the area where the boy disappeared, looking in refrigerators, freezers and crawlspaces. A Vancouver businessman posted a $200,000 reward for his return.
Television shows America's Most Wanted and The Oprah Winfrey Show have both profiled the case, sparking unsubstantiated sightings of Michael around the world in Canada, the United States, Australia, and Asia.
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and Britain's Scotland Yard have been consulted. Computer-enhanced imaging has provided photographs of what Michael would look like as he grows older.
Sergeant Don Bland, who has been involved in the case from the beginning, returned after a few days off earlier this week to find four messages on his desk about the disappearance. In the past two months, police have checked tips that Michael was living with families in New Jersey and Saskatchewan. Both were unfounded.
"You can never put it away," Sgt. Bland said. "The bottom line is we've got nothing. There's no witness who saw him go missing. There's no vehicle involved. . . . It's almost like he was taken off the ground and transported in some alien ship."
Police believe Michael was abducted by a stranger -- a male child molester -- although abductions of children by people they do not know are rare. Last year in Canada, 60,360 children were reported missing, according to the RCMP Missing Children's Registry. Most were runaways who returned home within 48 hours. Of the 410 abducted, 358 were abducted by a parent while 52 were abducted by strangers.
Mrs. Dunahee is certain that "someone knows -- one person can't keep quiet that long. Just tell us. Put the nightmare to an end."
Mrs. Dunahee, who keeps the Michael Dunahee Search Centre hot line on her home answering machine, is hoping the person responsible for her son's disappearance will come forward after all this time. "Lift the guilt and tell us," she said. "It must be a burden for them too. Tell us where our son is."
Mrs. Dunahee refuses to change the phone number even after receiving crank calls, including one from a boy pretending to be her son. Michael, who was just shy of his fifth birthday when he disappeared, knew his own phone number.
Last week, 300 people took part in an annual fundraising run in Michael's name for missing-children organizations. An annual baseball game is held every summer and a service is held at his church on the anniversary of his disappearance.
Mrs. Dunahee was standing in a registration line-up at Michael's run several years ago when a woman turned to her and said: "Haven't they given up yet? Haven't they got on with their lives?"
"How would she feel if it was her child?" Mrs. Dunahee asked. "You can't just give up and move on. We have moved on but we haven't given up."
The family has moved twice since their son went missing but have always stayed close to the old neighbourhood.
Mrs. Dunahee left her job in an insurance company and runs a small family restaurant. Mr. Dunahee, 38, a roofer when Michael went missing, now works as a shipyard labourer.
Michael's disappearance affects how the Dunahees have raised Caitlin, a chatty Grade 4 student who wears nail polish and collects Pokémon cards. It was difficult for the couple to let their daughter play on her own as she grew older. Caitlin puts the names, phone numbers and addresses of all her friends in a thick address book that her mother keeps by the phone.
While she continued the search for her lost son, Mrs. Dunahee found her birth mother. Two years after Michael disappeared, Mrs. Dunahee hired an adoption agency that traced her to California.
Mavis Jenks says she never lost hope she would meet the child she gave up for adoption in Victoria nearly four decades ago.
Now Mrs. Jenks, 58, is searching for the grandson she never met. She visits Crystal for two weeks every year during the anniversary of Michael's disappearance.
"I like to be here for Crystal," said Mrs. Jenks, who wears a T-shirt from one recent annual run with a photograph of Michael and a picture Caitlin drew of her and her brother together in a playground. The slogan above the drawing reads: "Keep the Hope Alive 1997."
Mrs. Jenks, who has three grown children from her marriage in California, was reunited by phone with her birth daughter and told of Michael's disappearance at the same time.
Shortly afterward, she saw his photograph for the first time. It was on a missing-children's poster in a shopping centre in Orange County near her Tustin home.
Now she keeps the poster of her grandson taped to her car window in California.
"God brought us together again for a reason," Mrs. Jenks said.
"The answer's out there somewhere," Crystlal said. "It's just a matter of time before we find it."