him. Volunteers and professionals combed the woods near the park, then expanded their search to remote areas around town-ponds and culverts and abandoned houses. While the search for the boy-or his body-went on, police began to learn more about the man in the sketch. A woman came forward four weeks after the disappearance and told police her nephew-seventeen-year-old Dante Rogers-liked to go to the park Justin had disappeared from. She also said he had been acting strangely since the boy’s disappearance, and had even started collecting newspaper articles about the case. When the police investigated Rogers further, they found he had once been arrested-as a juvenile-for improper contact with a child. They took him into custody, where he denied his guilt.
That summer had remained hot. For the six weeks after her uncle’s disappearance, the Midwest baked under record heat. The search parties tailed off. Then the weather broke. The temperatures cooled and the area was soaked with several days of heavy rain. Hoping the weather change might aid the search, the volunteers looked again, starting in the woods near the park. Apparently, the recent rain had disturbed the earth enough to reveal the skeletal remains of her uncle, who had been buried in a shallow grave in the woods near the park, not far from a walking path. Police charged Dante Rogers with the second-degree murder of Justin Manning.
As long as Ashleigh could remember, she had asked her mother to show her the place where the crime had occurred. As a child, Ashleigh couldn’t articulate why she wanted to see that spot. She just knew she felt curiosity about it. Only as she grew older did she feel she fully understood the fascination that place held for her.
It was simple, really: everything for her family had changed that day in the park. If her uncle hadn’t been killed, if her mother hadn’t been there…who knows how things would be different? Would her grandfather be less distant and cold? Would her mother be stronger and have a more fulfilling life?
Her mom took her to the crime scene once and once only. Ashleigh was nine and had been bugging her mother to take her there. Her mother always refused. She didn’t give Ashleigh good reasons for not doing it-she just flat out refused. But one day Ashleigh asked, and her mother-somewhat reluctantly-agreed.
“I’ll show it to you,” she said. “But then that’s it. I don’t want to hear about it anymore.”
Ashleigh knew-even as a child-that she had probably just worn her mother down. Ashleigh possessed a rare persistence, a determination that she sometimes believed could chip away at glaciers if she set her mind to it.
But, looking back, Ashleigh wondered if her mom wanted to tell Ashleigh something by taking her to that place. Did she want-symbolically or psychologically or emotionally-to pass a torch to her daughter, even though she was only nine years old?
Whether her mother intended it or not, Ashleigh felt that is what had happened that day. Her mom rarely spoke of her uncle’s murder, but Ashleigh became fascinated by it. She went to that place in the woods as much as she could-sometimes once or twice a week. Ashleigh couldn’t say for sure why she went. She liked the isolation, the quiet, and the mystery. It was her place, a hiding place. And being there didn’t creep her out or scare her. What was scary about it after all? The body was long gone, and except for the occasional drug arrest or fight between teenagers on the basketball court, nothing dangerous ever happened in the park.
Ashleigh walked past the playground where she’d started her day. More kids were playing there than early in the morning. The swings were filled, the chorus of kids’ voices and screaming rose like a million crickets. It almost hurt her ears. Parents watched from the side, chatting with each other or else talking on cell phones. If they noticed Ashleigh at all-any of them-they likely dismissed her as a typical moody teen, sulking along the edges of the park in her dark T-shirt and dirty jeans. Ashleigh knew appearing disaffected had its advantages-people tended to leave you alone.
She easily found the path through the trees and started toward the place where her uncle had died. The growth was thick from summer, the trees a vibrant green, the mosquitoes and gnats swarming around her face and hands. She thought about Kevin’s words on the bus. She’d been pissed at him before, usually over some minor slight that only Ashleigh understood. She knew she had a tendency to lash out at people-especially those closest to her- and then later regret it. She never really
He was usually right about most things. So she wondered,
She reached her destination. She knew it because first she passed a tiny pond, one that the police had searched right away looking for her uncle’s body, and then the path opened up just a little, spreading out for about ten yards and becoming a small clearing. She knew Uncle Justin’s remains had been found just to the west of that open clearing, several yards into the woods where the undergrowth grew thick in the summer heat. The place looked like-nothing. She wondered every time she came how many other people trudged through here-bird- watchers, hikers, teenagers looking for somewhere to smoke or drink or fuck-without even knowing that someone’s life, a child’s life, had ended on that very ground. It seemed like something should mark the locale-a plaque or a marker or something. But the only plaque to her uncle was in the cemetery-a small, simple one. She never went there. If the soul was separate from the body, then what was the point of going to where the body was buried? More than likely, he was there in the woods-or his spirit was-if spirits or even God existed the way everyone seemed to believe.
Ashleigh sat on a stone at the edge of the clearing. It had a smooth top, perfect for sitting. The day her mom brought her here they didn’t do or say anything. Ashleigh expected her mom to want to pray or at least make some sort of statement about what happened, but she had kept her mouth shut. She stared at the ground, her lips pressed into an odd shape, and after about ten minutes said to Ashleigh, “Come on, let’s go home.”
As far as Ashleigh knew, her mother had never gone back to the woods. And as Ashleigh sat there in the clearing, listening to the chirps of the birds or the occasional distant shout from the playground, she knew she saw that as a weakness in her mother, this refusal to take things head-on and really deal with them. And Ashleigh believed her mom had done nothing to find out more about the man who’d shown up on the porch that night. She hadn’t pursued him or investigated him in any way, leaving the burden to fall to Ashleigh. And Ashleigh couldn’t help but judge her mother even as she tried to help her.
She clenched her fists, squeezed them as tight as she could until her fingernails dug into the skin of her palms. She believed the man who came to the door that night really knew something, and being so close to finding the key, so close to bringing home the answers her mother needed almost hurt-
She would do it her way. She’d find the answers everyone needed.
Ashleigh loosened her grip. When she was a kid and she felt this way-scared, nervous, alone-her mother told her to pray. It worked back then. She slept with a rosary under her pillow-one that had belonged to her grandmother-and fingered the beads when she heard noises in the house and couldn’t sleep. But that hadn’t worked for years, not since long before that man showed up in the night promising to return. Ashleigh still went to church. Her mom dragged her early every Sunday morning and every holy day, and they sat on the side near the front. Ashleigh went through the motions of the Mass, repeating the words and standing up and kneeling without even thinking about it. She suspected most people in the church were doing the same.
She believed her mom’s conviction, though. Her mom went through Mass with her eyes closed and her head down, and after Mass they never failed to go to the front and light a candle, slipping a dollar through the slot as a donation. When she was little, Ashleigh used to ask whom they were lighting a candle for, and her mom always gave the same response: “My brother.”
Ashleigh shut her eyes in the clearing. She heard the distant hum of a leaf blower, the rustle of the tall trees as the breeze picked up. But she kept her eyelids closed. She watched the weird starburst patterns that exploded on her retinas, shifting swirls of green and red. She mouthed one word:
“God.”
She felt nothing. She felt alone. She didn’t even feel connected to the trees and the grass. Did praying even matter? Did all the time she and her mom spent in church really amount to anything? It all seemed like a fantasy. And Ashleigh wondered if there had really been a man on the porch that night speaking to her mother. Had she dreamed it? A child’s dream? She’d never spoken to her mother about it, so how did she know it really happened?
“God?”
Nothing.
