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As much as I'd love to be wrong; I don't believe Shy'kemmia is alive.

If Shy-Shy Pate ever comes home, her bedroom awaits with her Mickey Mouse pillows, teddy bears and favorite doll, the one that cries.

Every day, her mother says a prayer that most mothers never utter.

"I thank the Lord every morning that we haven't got a phone call telling us she's been found dead," Veronica Pate says.

Through all the Christmases, all the birthdays, for more than eight years, Pate, 41, has held on to hope that her youngest child will reappear as abruptly as she vanished.

"I feel in my heart that she's still alive."

It was twilight in the Middle Georgia town of Unadilla, and Shy-Shy was walking along Crumpler Avenue, her own street, the last time anyone recalled seeing her. She was wearing a neon-green Braves jersey with red lettering, jeans and white K-Swiss tennis shoes. She was 8, and within hollering distance of home. That was Sept. 4, 1998.

Shy-Shy had planned to tag along with her oldest sister, Laswanda, to a high school football game in Vienna that evening. Laswanda, who was 17 and on the drill team, decided to gas up her Pontiac, then swing back to pick up her little sister.

Shy-Shy waved at Laswanda as she drove past. When she returned, Shy-Shy was gone.

"I was just going to get the gas and come back and get her," says Laswanda Hickey, now 26 and married. "I wish I would have stopped."

Shy-Shy's disappearance has frustrated investigators from the Dooly County Sheriff's Office up to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

"Hundreds of interviews," said Gary Rothwell, special agent in charge of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation office in Perry, recounting law enforcement efforts. "Substantial FBI involvement. Every conceivable lead." And nothing.

Shy-Shy, whose full name is Shy'Kemmia Shy'Rezz Pate, is one of 78 Georgia children listed with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, according to mid-January figures. Some are runaways, some were taken in custody disputes, some are lost, and some are like Shy-Shy, snatched by an acquaintance or a stranger. All are believed to be in danger.

"We certainly don't want to remove hope from the family members or take energy away from the investigators," says Stephen Emmett, FBI spokesman in Atlanta.

Because you never know. In 2002, Shawn Hornbeck, then 11, was abducted while riding his bike in a St. Louis suburb. He turned up not far from home last month -- alive, the alleged captive of a pizza parlor manager. Elizabeth Smart, 14, was abducted in 2002 from her Salt Lake City bedroom, then found nine months later in a nearby suburb where she lived with her captors.

"Those cases give you pause and challenge the conventional thought that after a certain period of time that the worst has occurred," GBI agent Rothwell says.

Ever since the news broke about Shawn Hornbeck's safe return, Veronica Pate catches herself wondering even more about Shy-Shy.

"Is she living up under our nose?"

For days, even weeks, after Shy-Shy vanished, law enforcement officers and citizens searched -- on foot, in four-wheelers, in helicopters, with dogs. Says Dooly County Sheriff Van Peavy, "We probably turned every stone within a five-mile area of Unadilla." Over the years, tips have dribbled in.

"I got a call here about three years ago from Las Vegas, Nevada," Peavy says. An anonymous man said someone had moved in down the street from him with a girl who looked like Shy-Shy. The man gave an address. The FBI checked it out. But, says Peavy, "It came to nothing."

Last summer, a farmer was scouting some land he had rented when he noticed a mound at the edge of some woods. He wondered if it could be a grave. He called the sheriff. The sheriff called the GBI, and officers started digging. They found not a body but hard, red clay.That was the last tip.

"We have no leads, no tips, no anything," Peavy says.

All he has is hope, he says. "I've always had the feeling that she will be found, somewhere." Alive? "Yes, ma'am."

Shy-Shy's street, Crumpler Avenue, is n't the best street in Unadilla. Her mother lives in public housing directly across from what was a nightclub until 2002, when its owners were robbed and shot to death. Nearby, men hang out drinking and playing cards beneath a pecan tree when the weather is warm.

The curtains at Veronica Pate's apartment are pulled shut. A fat pink bow hangs on the door, a puff of optimism for Shy-Shy's return.

Pate is a single mother of four. Shy-Shy, who had asthma and needed at-home breathing treatments, is her baby. An outgoing child, she loved church, school, skating and clothes. She was wearing hair extensions when she vanished.

Since then, Pate has battled depression and fear so paralyzing that at times she can't will herself to leave her apartment.

"I have found myself sitting in a corner crying, didn't know why I was there," she says.

Antidepressants, prayer and telephoning family help her cope, says Pate, who works as an inspector at a clothing factory in Unadilla.

She felt a surge of hope when she turned on the television news last month and learned about two missing Missouri boys, including Shawn Hornbeck, found alive and returned to their families.

"Maybe my daughter is living like that," Pate says. "Scared to tell anybody because she didn't want to get hurt."

Hope is what anchors Pate to her home -- hope and fear.

An electrical fire forced her out of her apartment a few years ago, and she moved back in as soon as it was repaired. Shy-Shy's bedroom wasn't ruined, but smoke damaged her things. Her mother washed them, restored them. The pillows, the bears, the doll that cries. "I'm afraid to move," Pate says.

She holds on to her dream that whoever took Shy-Shy will return her. Or that somehow her daughter will find her own way home. "I don't want to be nowhere where she can't find me."