Tammy Raynes clearly remembers the last few hours she spent with her sister. They were at the annual Atlantic National Exhibition in Saint John.
Tammy, 14, was on court-ordered restriction, so she had to leave Exhibition Park a few hours earlier than her sibling, who was nearly two years older.
Together, they walked to a bus stop and then they parted. Her sister said she was going to stay to watch the fireworks. That was nearly 25 years ago, and Kimberly Ann Amero hasn't been seen since.
"I was the last one who saw her," Raynes says as she sits at a table in Saint John, across from her older brother Ed and sister-in-law, Denise Amero.
Her baby face awash in freckles, Kimberly Ann disappeared on Sept. 3, 1985, two days before her 16th birthday.
At this point, she is presumed dead. What happened to her is a mystery that neither the police nor her family has been able to solve.
"We were best friends," Raynes says. "If she was going to run away, she wouldn't have kept it a secret from me.
"And the way Kim's personality was, if a stranger had grabbed her and tried to pull her into a car, she would have chewed their face off.
"We were street-smart kids."
On Sunday night, Kimberly Amero's siblings and friends will gather at 7 p.m. in King Square and march down King Street to Market Slip, where they will hold a candlelight vigil in Kimberly's memory, and in the memory of all missing children. For two hours, there will be songs and prayers, and a video tribute to Kimberly will be shown.
"I want to bring awareness to all missing children," Tammy Raynes says. "I want the community to realize this does happen in their backyard, and I want parents to realize that it is not always a runaway.
"I want them to pay closer attention to their kids."
For more than two decades, police have investigated the disappearance off and on. Recently, the RCMP and the Saint John Police Force followed new leads and came up empty.
Ed Amero, who has taken up the search himself at times, says both police agencies have told him they consider the case closed, unless new information is uncovered.
Over the years, police have used cadaver dogs and called on forensics experts while trying to find an answer to Kimberly's disappearance. In an attempt to help, some of her family members have provided DNA samples and turned over her dental records. Several sites have been excavated in a search for her remains, including an area described by a man who claimed to have psychic visions. And, in the last six months, at least one individual has been brought in for questioning, but there has been no resolution.
For her family, meanwhile, there is only sadness and desperation.
Ed Amero was 17 when his little sister disappeared and he has been frustrated now for nearly a quarter of a century. From Day One, he says he and family members told police she would have never run away. She was happy and looking forward to her birthday.
He can't help but think that, maybe, if they had acted faster "?
"In 48 hours, you know where somebody could take a kid," he says. "You could be in Newfoundland and Labrador or northern Ontario, far, far away.
"And then it's too late."
Kimberly was five-foot-six, weighed 115 pounds, and had dark blond hair and blue eyes.
On Sunday night, Ed Amero will speak at the candlelight vigil in honour of Kimberly.
Soon, he hopes to set up a fund in her memory to benefit the families of other missing children.
There have been times Amero has braced himself, feeling the police were close to solving the mystery. Each time he has been let down.
He believes that somewhere out there, perhaps still in Saint John, there is someone who was involved in her disappearance.
It breaks his heart, but until her case is concluded, he will keep searching for Kimberly.
Based on a tip, he went to a site in the Upham area last fall and searched for his sister's remains.
"Picture what's it's like to dig a hole, thinking your sister is there," he says. "Every time the pick hit the ground, I thought, 'Please don't let her be here. Or please don't let me hit her bones.'
"It is the worst thing I've ever had to do in my life. It was a nightmare."