My phone rang earlier tonight, and Dana Barfielde was on the other end, pleading for help. Her 17-year-old niece, Angelica Watson, disappeared on Saturday and hasn't been heard from since. We ran a brief in today's paper with Angelica's picture, but her family was asking for more. "You have to do a story on this, please," Dana said. "We're so scared."

Angelica is learning disabled. She reads on a third grade level and doesn't have many friends outside of her family. She's a sweet girl, loves little kids and is extremely trusting. Too trusting, probably.

Her family said she spent most of Saturday on one of those ever-popular -- and ever-dangerous -- party lines. Party lines have been around forever; they're free and easy to use and serve as a substitute for poorer kids who don't have computers or Internet access. Teens call in and wait to blab away to several others at once, or they can opt to have private chats with someone who piques their interest. Predators can also call in and prowl for fresh prey. (Simone, you might recall, did a nice expose on the party line phenomenon in 2006.)

In Angelica's case, her family said she seemed to be talking an awful lot to older men who sounded sexually aggressive on messages they left for her. She ran out of her Olney home without saying a word to her mother, other than to say that she was bored. Dana believes her niece ran off to meet one of the men from the party line, thinking she could return home after a secret rendezvous.

But she never made it back, and now her family is forced to sit around and pray, cry and openly wonder if Angelica is being raped in some madman's basement or lying in a ditch somewhere.

So I agreed, of course, to do a longer story, which you can read here. You hope that the story will trigger someone's memory and lead to a lucky tip. But it's hard to predict how this case will play out. There have been missing person cases -- even ones that involve party line encounters -- that have happy endings, although the resolutions are sometimes measured in months and not days. Unfortunately, there are an equal number of cases that end at crime scenes, with more tears being shed.