RICH SQUARE — Nearly a year ago, Daniel Moses disappeared from the family home in tiny Rich Square, his air-conditioner running, his cars parked in the yard, his barbecue tools still on the backyard grill.
Nothing seemed amiss that day in June other than this: On the same day Moses vanished, a fire broke out in his bedroom, burning it to blackened beams.
Since then, his sister Sheila has started and finished each day haunted by the idea that her big brother is dead somewhere, waiting to be found.
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He had no enemies or mental illnesses that anyone knew. At 60, a retired truck driver who’d moved home from New York, he had a bad back and rarely got up to answer the phone. If you knew Daniel, you likely admired the chicken and sauce he sold out of his house. People called him “The Barbecue Man” around Rich Square, a town about 100 miles northeast of Raleigh in Northampton County.
You can only guess at whether Daniel met random violence or lived with a secret.
But somebody knows what happened.
Sheila Moses knows someone knows. And she wants that person to realize that her 86-year-old mother has never buried a child before, never even had one in trouble, and she doesn’t deserve the heartache.
“She keeps saying, ‘Where is my child?’ ” said Moses, who lives in Atlanta. “It happened in a town with 900 people. With one stoplight. People should be asking, ‘Are we in danger?’ ”
Last summer, Capt. D.M. Harmon of the Northampton County Sheriff’s Department said evidence is too scanty to call the disappearance anything but a missing person’s case. The fire, while suspicious, can’t be definitely linked to Daniel’s flight.
Sheila doesn’t buy it. It’s not a coincidence if an isolated tin-roofed house, surrounded by cotton fields, passed by roughly one pickup truck per hour, burns down on the same day its sole inhabitant flies the coop without a word.
Neither does it make sense that a 60-year-old man with a bad back and modest retirement income could stay missing and alive for 10 months without his car, or without leaving any bank-card tracks.
Investigators blamed the fire on bad wiring. But, to Sheila Moses’ mind, somebody set that fire and did it to hide what was done to Daniel. His mother still lives next door, but the family was out of town for the weekend at a nephew’s graduation. Somebody knew Daniel would be alone, his sister figures.
A call to Harmon’s office went unanswered this week.
Sheila Moses said the State Bureau of Investigation is now helping with the case, and she has since hired a private investigator. The detective she hired found a girlfriend of Daniel’s in Wake County, his sister said. But the girlfriend wouldn’t talk to him.
So Sheila Moses keeps picking at the case, hoping to pry something loose. She writes young adult fiction for a living and based one of her characters on Daniel: an older brother who moved away to the big city, just as he did.
Daniel took Sheila to New York for the first time. He brought her to her first movie: “Sparkle,” starring Irene Cara. He took her to her first Chinese restaurant.
He showed her a world larger than Rich Square, and now he’s lost in it, alone.
