For more than 15 years, Heather Lagaso searched for the cookbook. Internet sites, used bookstores and garage sales, all for a book that had no value in the traditional sense of the word.

But what is value?

Is a rock your grandmother gave you when you walked on the beach with her as a child worth anything? What about the glass you remember your father drinking out of each New Year’s Eve? Or the toy, doll or stuffed animal you played with as a child?

So it was with a cookbook published when Legaso was 10.

She considered it priceless.

“That cookbook was the first time in my life when something positive happened to me,” said Lagaso, now 39.

That’s how the search began.

***

She grew up in St. Helens with a father who was, for all the wrong reasons, the town legend. A 6-foot-1 logger and former Golden Gloves boxer, Bill Brown had been dubbed Wild Bill by judges, police and neighbors. His crimes, from disorderly conduct to burglary, filled four 3-by-5-inch index cards, the longest rap sheet in the town's history, according to the town’s former chief of police.

Classmates teased his daughter, Heather Brown. Parents wouldn’t let their kids play at her house. In 1988, his wife fled after yet another beating. She took Heather, then 9, and found refuge in her mother’s apartment. Brown came looking for them. He fled when his wife warned that she had a gun and was ready to use it. Brown drove to Heather’s school, spotted his daughter on the playground and mouthed the words “love you.” Police were looking for him, and he left St. Helens in a stolen truck and headed to Portland.

By nightfall, he’d be dead, shot by a Portland cop who had been sent to the report of a stabbing. Brown had stabbed a stranger during an altercation near Southeast 22nd and Hawthorne Boulevard. He fled into the neighborhood to hide from police. A cop found Brown, still armed with a knife, hiding in a backyard. When Brown lunged at the cop, the officer opened fire, killing Brown.

To help her daughter cope with the aftermath and their lives with the man, Heather’s mother drove her regularly from St. Helens to Southeast Portland’s Dougy Center. There, support groups help children and young people deal with death. Heather was a regular there for more than two years.

“It saved my life,” said Lagaso, who changed her name from Brown when she married. “I was angry at everyone. But I had a place to grieve and talk. It was at the center where I finally found peace and understanding.”

When the officer who killed Bill Brown retired, Heather came to the ceremony to publicly thank him for killing her father, telling the audience that his death allowed her mother and herself a chance at a better life, one she believed not possible if Wild Bill were alive. Her journey to that moment was featured in a 2008 series in The Oregonian.

During her time at the Dougy Center, the wives of the Portland Trail Blazers published a cookbook to raise money to benefit the organization. Kids helped sell the book, as did players and their wives by making appearances around town in 1991. Heather was one of several children from the center invited to Memorial Coliseum and brought onto the court at halftime to receive a giant novelty check for $30,000 to give to the Dougy Center.

“That moment is branded on my soul,” she said. “I felt so special. For the first time in my life, I was part of something good. My classmates saw the group photo from center court. I was like a celebrity. I made friends.”

The cookbook sat on a dresser in her room. But it was eventually lost in one of the many moves she and her mother made as they rebuilt their lives. She was in her mid-20s when she thought, again, about the cookbook. The Dougy Center, she learned, used to have one copy in the archives. But they lost it – and everything else in the center – in a 2009 fire.

“The years went by, but I never stopped looking,” she said. “My goal was to find that book for myself.”

In mid-August, while exploring the social media site Reddit, she saw a photo of the cookbook.

It belonged to Tyler Thursby, who lives in Arizona.

***

Days earlier, Thursby’s mother, who also lives in Arizona, called to tell him she’d found interesting things in the family home.

“My mom’s at the age where she’s going through stuff around the house,” Thursby said. “If she finds something interesting, she’ll show what she has. Some things are better than others.”

His mother told her son what she called a novelty cookbook from when they’d lived in Portland.

“I rolled my eyes,” Thursby said.

But he took the book home to show it to his wife when he saw the cookbook had something to do with the Blazers.

Terry Porter, Cliff Robinson, John Wetzel, Alaa Abdelnaby, Clyde Drexler, Kevin Duckworth, Jerome Kersey and Coach Rick Adelman were featured on the cover of this cookbook, created to raise money for the Dougy Center. The book featured recipes from wives of players and others in the organization. Among them: Gaynell Drexler's strawberry limeade, Mary Kay Adelman's holiday meatball and Kathy Sabrowski's wives lounge caramel corn.

“I was born in Portland and lived there until I was 7,” said Thursby, now 32. “My grandpa was big fan. I remember watching games with him on the TV. I’m still a big Blazer fan.”

Over a beer, Thursby thumbed through the cookbook.

“I’m active on Reddit,” he said. “I’m in the subsection for the Blazers. This kind of news would not get traction during the regular season. But now everyone’s looking for something to tide us over until the season comes around. I posted a photo of the cookbook. I got a few comments and then one from Heather.”

They exchanged messages. When he learned why the book mattered to Lagaso, he insisted on sending it to her.

“I had it for the novelty,” Thursby said. “What was I really going to do with it? Mailing it to Heather was an easy way to make someone’s day.”

When it arrived at her home, Lagaso studied it, remembering her old life and how far she had come all because of the Dougy Center. The search finally over, she knew the cookbook did not belong with her. Two weeks ago, she drove to the center from her home in Gervais and gave the book to the executive director to put in the organization’s library for all the children to see, a reminder that people have, and always will, care.

“It was an easy choice,” Lagaso said. “It belongs with them.”

--Tom Hallman Jr.

thallman@oregonian.com; 503 221-8224

@thallmanjr