Two days before she vanished, Nancy Guthrie was sitting at her living-room mahjong table with some of her closest friends, a log burning in her fireplace. At 84, she was as competitive as ever as she squared off against younger women she had taught how to play.
Before they said goodbye on the afternoon of Jan. 30, Ms. Guthrie checked with one of the players, Anne Burnson, making sure that they were still on to watch church at a friend’s house on Sunday. Their ritual was to gather in the friend’s den and watch a recording of the Manhattan service that Ms. Guthrie’s youngest child, the NBC host Savannah Guthrie, had attended earlier that morning. They even had wafers and grape juice on hand for communion.
But Nancy Guthrie, always punctual, did not arrive at 11 a.m. on Feb. 1. Her friends texted, then called. They contacted Ms. Guthrie’s older daughter, Annie, who rushed to Ms. Guthrie’s home. It was empty.
Now, nearly two weeks after Ms. Guthrie’s disappearance, which the authorities have said they are investigating as an abduction, her friends and family say they are refusing to give up hope of finding her alive.
Her toughness has always surfaced in difficult moments, like when her husband died suddenly in 1988, or when budget cuts threatened a vital public health service at the university where she worked, or even two days before her disappearance, when she insisted on walking to the end of her gravel driveway to get the mail, even if a friend had to help.
When they discuss Ms. Guthrie now, friends stop themselves when they accidentally use the past tense. “Nancy was — is,” they say.
With the search for Ms. Guthrie in its 13th day, her closest friends — some speaking publicly for the first time — are trying to avoid fixating on the ominous details. They know about the blood found on her doorstep, the masked figure with a pistol caught on her doorbell camera, the discarded black gloves found by investigators scouring the desert.
Still, they think of the woman who, just days before she disappeared, was speeding through a stack of books, celebrating her birthday with beignets and laughing at the card table.
“I keep thinking about every time I’d go in the kitchen door, and she’d be sitting there at the counter, just how her eyes would always light up as soon as she saw me,” said Ms. Burnson, who has been friends with Ms. Guthrie for 42 years. “That’s when you know you have a real friend.”
Born and raised in northern Kentucky, Ms. Guthrie attended the University of Kentucky, blazing a path as a college journalist decades before Savannah Guthrie would become a morning-show fixture on NBC. Nancy Guthrie, then Nancy Long, covered fraternity and sorority life as the society editor of the student newspaper, penning a column called Social Whirl.
She and her husband, Charles Guthrie, met on a blind date at a basketball game, Savannah Guthrie has said on her show. They married in 1963, and the family moved to Australia, where Mr. Guthrie worked as a mining engineer.
They moved to Arizona and bought a low-slung home in 1975 in the cactus-studded Catalina Foothills just north of Tucson, a home Ms. Guthrie has lived in for more than 50 years.
She taught Bible study classes, with friends saying she had a special ability to make the lessons applicable to everyday life.
“She’s been a mentor and a teacher and someone that’s really quietly shaped the lives of countless people here,” said Vicki Edwards, 68, who became close friends with Ms. Guthrie after meeting her at one such class in 1987. It was her den where the friends watched their Sunday services.
In 1988, Mr. Guthrie died of a heart attack, what Savannah Guthrie called a “stark dividing line” in the family’s story. She was 16 at the time.
Nancy Guthrie had never worked full time outside the home, but she landed a job at a small business newspaper, The Daily Territorial, eventually parlaying it into a career at the University of Arizona, which Savannah Guthrie attended, spending college close to home.
In the 1980s, Nancy Guthrie also brought her own mother and her older brother, Pierce, who had Down syndrome, into a guesthouse on her property.
Ms. Burnson, 66, a retired teacher who has known Ms. Guthrie for more than half of her life, recalls how Ms. Guthrie came to her home one night in 1996 after Ms. Burnson’s husband died. Ms. Guthrie told Ms. Burnson to sit on her lap and consoled her.
Colleagues who knew Ms. Guthrie from her time at the University of Arizona said she was a skilled communicator who never chased publicity. When funding cuts threatened to shut down a poison-information center in the mid-1990s, she plunged into a campaign to gather 20,000 signatures and urge Arizona politicians to save it, according to Jacqueline Sharkey, a former colleague who organized the effort. It succeeded.
Ms. Guthrie left her job at the University of Arizona in 2007, and spent several years afterward serving on an advisory committee for the journalism school. Dave Cuillier, a former director of that school, said that Ms. Guthrie kept him “in check.”
“She was quick to correct me,” Mr. Cuillier said. “She was just one of those people who you really appreciated getting to work with.”
For much of her time in Arizona, she embraced the outdoors — playing tennis, hiking and joining spin classes. She enjoyed cooking for friends and eating out, and would sometimes see movies at an art house cinema.
But as she aged, things became more difficult. She told one friend, Kris Federhar, that she no longer felt comfortable going to a movie theater up a flight of stairs, only half-jokingly referring to it as a fire trap. She had a pacemaker and relied on daily medication, and she began using a cane and powerful hearing aids. In recent years, she often stayed at home, where she kept the windows open in the summer, wrote in her journal on her patio, played Wordle and read books that publishers had sent to Savannah.
But she was still sharp, friends said, and rarely complained about her back pain or other problems. And she still had a buzzing social life, never missing a monthly book club meeting.
On Jan. 26, the day before her birthday, Ms. Federhar dropped off a balloon and treats on her doorstep. The next day, Ms. Burnson, who has family roots in New Orleans, set out some nice crystal, cooked shrimp and grits and made beignets.
At the mahjong game two days before her disappearance, Ms. Guthrie was dressed casually on a chilly day, laughing with her friends and, as usual, playing strategically.
The next evening, Ms. Guthrie had dinner and played games with her daughter Annie and her son-in-law Tommaso Cioni at their home before Mr. Cioni drove her back to her house.
Hours later, her doorbell camera captured the masked man at her door.
Messages Ms. Guthrie appears to have posted on the neighborhood app Nextdoor in recent years showed that she was keenly interested in the desert, and wondered whether javelinas would eat her periwinkle.
She wrote four years ago that she was interested in buying a doorbell camera and asked about the best brand. She did not indicate she was concerned for her safety. She said she just wanted to see what animals might wander by at night.
Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs reports for The Times on national stories across the United States with a focus on criminal justice.
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