BRATTLEBORO-Marble Ace Arvidson was 17, a senior-to-be at Brattleboro Union High School, when he left a note on his bedroom door at his foster home at 503 Marlboro Rd. — the red house beside the Chelsea Royal Diner — on the afternoon of Aug. 27, 2011, the day before Irene hit.
One roommate had seen him that afternoon. Another heard a knock, then heard Marble talking at the door with a man whose voice he didn’t recognize, in an exchange friendly enough that the two seemed to know each other.
Marble wrote his note, stuck it to his door, and left with the man. Marble was 6 feet tall, 165 pounds, with shoulder-length strawberry-blond hair, and he was dressed the way he liked to be seen: black button-down shirt, black pants, and the black hat from Guatemala he wore nearly everywhere.
“He always wanted to make a statement,” his aunt, Trish Kittredge, said years later.
The note said he was out with the “Gremlin Hoard” and would be back soon — his family remembers it as 20 minutes, or 30. He marked it 2:17 p.m. He had a date with his girlfriend at 4 p.m.
He never came back.
No one treated it as a disappearance until the next day. And by that time, the storm had the state’s full attention.
“By then, the river had breached at that point, and roads were being washed out, power lines were down, and the whole community was in crisis — not just this family,” Kittredge said.
Irene swallowed the case almost before it began.
Search crews, road crews, and police were already stretched across a state of washed-out bridges and cut-off towns.
Volunteers who might have combed the woods off Route 9 were pulling debris out of the Whetstone instead. Kittredge herself was a command sergeant major in the Massachusetts Army National Guard, called to active duty for the storm; when her nephew went missing, she was granted leave to go look for him.
She ran the search out of a tent in the Chelsea Royal’s parking lot, a few hundred feet from the door Marble walked out of. Kittredge had at the ready a banquet table, with grid maps, yellow sticky notes marking cleared ground, a box of orange vests, and a station wagon full of posters.
Each searcher got a map, a whistle, a camera, and a briefing before they went out. They walked riverbanks and logging trails; a canine team joined in, and riders took ATVs up the four-wheeler paths and through the back lots off Route 9. Strangers arrived to hand out hugs along with flyers.
“We’re doing cursory searches, so we are looking at the path of least resistance,” Kittredge said that September. “We don’t have any information about where he likely walked off to.”
The unfairness of the timing was not lost on anyone standing in that parking lot.
“Human life is worth more than mud, and I’ve got kids,” said Tina Fisher of Halifax, who came with two daughters to take posters. “If one of mine went missing, I’d want someone out there looking for them.”
Fifteen years later, Marble Arvidson, now 32 years old, has not been found.
The man who came to the door has never been identified.
Vermont State Police (VSP) logged several unconfirmed sightings, the last of them in Brattleboro in April 2012; nothing since has held up.
When detectives took a fresh run at the case in 2021, Brattleboro Police Det. Lt. Jeremy Evans — now the police chief — said that what makes the case unusual is that there is nothing to pull on at all.
“Just boom, and he was gone,” Evans said.
The case remains open with Brattleboro Police and the VSP. Marble Arvidson is listed with the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, aka NamUs. A reward for information leading to his location stood at $10,000.
On Aug. 27, the anniversary of his disappearance, the VSP posted an appeal on Facebook for information that could help find him.
“Marble is an avid hiker and reportedly took his hiking boots with him,” the post read. “It may be possible that Marble became a victim of Tropical Storm Irene as this major storm hit on the same day Marble was last seen.”
His mother, Sigrid Arvidson, has said for years that the flood took the coverage her son’s disappearance should have had, and that assumptions about him — a foster kid, a boy, a young man with his own struggles — have never helped the investigation.
What she has asked of anyone who knew him is simple: Don’t decide in advance that what you remember is nothing.
“I’m his mom, I want to find my boy and miss him. I love him,” she said. “He deserves to be found.”
Anyone with information is asked to contact the Brattleboro Police Department at 802-257-7950 or the Vermont State Police’s Westminster barracks at 802-722-4600.
This News item by Virginia Ray was written for The Commons.