II. Three Weeks Before I Arrived Home

Three weeks before I arrived home, I got a letter in the mail informing me that I would be called as a witness in the trial of three kids from my junior high class. The youngest of the three has admitted to a college friend that she had seen a dead body once, and eventually the whole story came out.

People should not tell these kinds of stories at two in the morning in the communal lounge of a dorm at a large state college. Because someone is going to know someone else whose dad is a federal prosecutor.

State troopers pulled Lona McIntyre out of a mid-term exam and she hasn’t seen her classroom since. Within a day she had spun an astounding but not entirely unbelievable story about a student in her junior high class whose sister had gone missing and stayed that way. The other student was arrested – picked up quite literally off the street where he had been living for five years. His best friend from high school – a career FBI agent, as it turned out – was also implicated in Lona’s story, and he was brought in for questioning.

By the time the time I heard anything about the story, all three were on trial for negligent homicide and obstruction of justice.


I was received the summons and things started to slip. I could see the hand covered in dirt, the skin color at once bleached and ashy. I couldn’t shake the oppressive smell of fresh earth and the first hint of what I later realized was decomposing flesh. I had effectively walled off all the sensory information about what I had seen. I wasn’t tortured by it, wasn’t in therapy, wasn’t really experiencing the information in any meaningful way. But it was obviously there, because the doors had opened and now it was pressing down on me like a brick wall with no mortar. I couldn’t hold it back.

Your emotions aren’t what you expect at this moment, one I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. You think you’ll be solemn and thoughtful and composed, but it’s messier than that. I feel responsible, sick, confused, terrible, and stupid. I didn’t know it was her. I didn’t even think it was real, couldn’t believe ordinary kids from an ordinary town had stumbled on – let alone created – an actual victim of a heinous crime. It seemed ridiculous. We thought it was thrilling, just a few years before, when Rif Gardner stole money from the closet of his senile aunt down at Ben-Gay Manor. Nobody was killing siblings and burying them in dirt.


The events of the day remain sketchy, only the incident itself, with the bundle of sights and smells have sharpened since I read the words on the yellow piece of paper notifying me that I was a witness in a trial in Westover County. When I saw the names of the people on trial, it was like I fell backwards, chair and all, and just kept falling.

I guess I was trying to get back to the spot where I had received this oppressive weight. I wanted to give it back, rebury it in the half-dug wall of dirt partway down the mountain-hill behind the old school. I think I wanted something from that wall of dirt because I felt like it owed me now, after a month of hauling around its tonnage. I didn’t know what I thought I would get from it. I was pretty fucked up by the time I mustered the strength to go to the school.


The building’s gone now, weirdly covered over with the kind of grass that doesn’t normally grow in Elgin. Creative horticulture, or the unique conditions created by razing an asbestos-laden monstrosity meant that the new groundcover was spongy short grass like you’d find on an English soccer pitch. It flexed under my feet and made me feel like I was walking on an engineered surface, Astroturf or new playground. The old building loomed over the road like a bent-back vampire, poised to strike. As you passed in a car, it looked menacing, and if you had the misfortune to walk into it, the effect was heightened by angled walkways and a final staircase. You didn’t enter the building, it ate you.

Now the low stone wall that started this effect was all the remained. The short, neat grass curved smoothly from the wall and continued to the rusty fence that separated the property from the craggy drop behind. As I sat in my hospital bed, thinking about the fourth doctor I had seen (the first one whose name I remembered), I realized that the I couldn’t satisfactorily explain to myself how I got to the school, got over the fence, and began to tumble toward the train tracks and creek bed below. Surely, the body had been found and the wall had been tramped under a hundred beat cop, forensic team, coroner and detective shoes.