“If she had no history of running away, why would they be so confident that was an option?” Dean asks.
“They said because of her age and the fact that her friends admitted to arguing with her, it put her in a prime situation to want to get away. Letting her go somewhere like the park gave her an inflated sense of independence and self-reliance, so she felt she could go off on her own and let off some steam. Or maybe even make people feel guilty and miss her. That age is impulsive and irrational a lot of times. They feel so grown up and also feel they’re completely invincible. But they’re still very much children. Most don’t have the capacity to think their way through being out on their own. So, they spend a day or two drifting around, then they go home.”
“So, they told you to wait,” I say.
Both parents nod.
“That was all they said. Just to wait. It was literally all the help they would give us,” John says. “Just wait and she’ll show back up on her own. But she never did. We’re still waiting.”
“How has the investigation progressed since then?” I ask.
“They did a couple more searches in the few months after she went missing. They interviewed the girls. They found as many security cameras in the area as they could and watched them to see if they could see her leaving or catch her with anyone. We asked them to search Vivian’s and Allison’s homes,” Misty says.
“Why would you ask them to do that?” Dean asks.
“We were desperate. We were trying to think of absolutely anything we could that might explain where she had gone or what happened. We thought maybe she was hiding out at one of their houses. I know it sounds ridiculous. Of course, their families would notice, but we were grasping at straws.”
“Did they search?” he asks.
“Yes,” Misty says. “Both families were completely forthcoming and let the police search every inch of their homes. Of course, there wasn’t a trace of her. And there hasn’t been since. As I said, when we heard about the murders at Arrow Lake, there was some hope. We thought finally there were going to be answers. They weren’t the ones we were hoping for, but there would be something. We would finally know what happened and be able to move forward.”
“Are you absolutely positive one of those bodies isn’t Ashley?” John asks.
“Yes,” I say. “The motivation and method behind the murders was based on a very strong shared delusion between mother and son. They chose their victims based on their ages, and if they thought they would be compatible with Aaron, the younger son who drowned when he was little. The ages of the victims always closely coincided with what his age would have been at the time. To within a range of about two years. In one of her interviews, Laura Mitchell explained she always encouraged Aaron to have many different kinds of people as his friends, but they stayed in the same age group, so they were on the same level.”
“And there’s no way they were lying? Trying to get themselves out of other charges?” John asks.
“No,” I say. “First, it would be futile to try to lie about something that specific but also that easily provable. Second, they had already taken responsibility for the deaths. Laura cannot comprehend what happened. She still doesn’t believe she and Rodney murdered those people. She wouldn’t have the capacity to lie about it.”
He nods. “Then where do we go from here?”
Ten
He called her Thirteen.
She had a name, but he didn’t care. He never said it and he never let her say it.
Maybe one day she would forget it. It didn’t matter anymore, anyway. She didn’t need it. She hadn’t for a long time.
He figured he could call her whatever he wanted. She was his, after all. Wasn’t that how it worked? People named what belonged to them. As soon as she was in his hands, she was his. No one else who had ever touched her or held her or seen her face mattered anymore.
She was his.
She didn’t want to respond to it. He could tell every time he said it. But that didn’t matter, either. Some things took time to get used to. She was strong. A fighter from the very beginning. It might take her longer to respond, but she would. One day, she would accept it and no one would ever know her as anything else ever again.
Thirteen.
Eleven
Usually, in an investigation like this, the first step would be to collect all the available information from the media, primary sources who were involved at the time, and anything the police were willing to provide. Dean had already gathered up everything he possibly could, and Ashley’s parents filled in a lot of the blanks with the information they collected over the years.
The police won’t provide us with the files, citing a still-open case. That makes me angry. Clearly, they aren’t doing anything to justify calling it still open. They turned off the display of concern a long time ago, and other than having her name still on their website as a missing person, there doesn’t seem to be any sort of progress being made on the case. But they still wouldn’twon’t hand over the information.
Which means Dean and I have that much more ground to cover.
The next day, we’re back at my father’s house, searching for the friends Ashley was with the day she
