Courtney
We search all day through the woods. I don’t know how many miles we cover, but it’s not enough. Because we have to be so diligent
in our search, we don’t cover as much ground as I’d have expected, as I’d have hoped. The forest is dense and covered with
things like branches and leaves that we have to sift through to make sure we don’t miss anything, that something isn’t buried
beneath.
As time goes on, what little hope I had of finding Reese wanes, and I resign myself to going back to the cottage with nothing—with
no news, good or bad—when I hear a voice carry from fifty or a hundred feet away.
“There’s something over there.”
My back arches. I stand upright, turning to look, tenting my eyes with my hand to block out the lowering sun. I follow the
direction of a man’s hand as he points to something in the distance, seeing the wispy strands lift up from the grass in the
breeze.
Without thinking, I start to run, a clumsy, desperate run, my feet kicking up dirt. I call out, my heart racing, my vocal
cords tightening so that it comes out shaky and strained, “What is it? Is it her? Is it Reese?”
On the way, I step by accident into a shallow pit in the earth, my ankle turning. I fall and land on the ground on a hip, grunting; someone reaches out to take me by the elbow and help me to my feet, and I keep running, past trees and over fallen logs.
A group of volunteers forms a circle around it and from the looks on their faces, I know.
“Is it Reese?” I ask again, already starting to cry.
It’s her. It’s Reese. She’s dead.
I stop just short, stumbling, taking in the vacant, glass-like eyes, the dried blood smeared on the dirt and across what’s
left of the flesh, though it’s been sloughed off and torn away, flaps of skin lying beside the body in the grass.
The head has been detached from the body.
The bushy tail resembles human hair.
Whatever it is has been dead for days, its body hollowed out by maggots.
It’s an animal, a fox or a coyote, though it’s hard to tell, because parts of its body are missing, carried away by scavengers.
All I know for sure is that it’s not human.
It’s not Reese.
My legs give and I fall to my knees in relief.
But it’s temporary, because we still don’t know where she is.
I make my way out of the woods, feeling frustrated and berating myself because we didn’t find anything and wondering if there
was something I missed.
“We wanted to see how you’re doing,” Joanna says, coming to me. She and Sam hang back as everyone else starts to leave, while,
around us, the people in charge, the incident command team, pack up supplies, like first aid kits, water, maps.
I feel demoralized. Beaten down. Any hope I had of finding Reese before the search began has been reduced, and I imagine how,
in the next few minutes, I’ll have to walk into the cottage and tell Elliott and the kids that Reese is still gone.
“I don’t know,” I say, shrugging. “Not great.”
Sam and Joanna exchange a look. It isn’t pity, but more like empathy because they’ve been where I am; they’ve been in my shoes.
I don’t have to tell them how I’m doing because they know. Joanna looks back, the expression on her face mirroring mine. “I
can’t think of anything worse than what you’re going through right now,” she says, and I feel thankful that she doesn’t try
to fill me with empty promises or false hope, but that she instead asks for my phone, plugging her own number into my contacts,
in case I need anything, in case I ever want to talk.
“We live on Found Lake Road,” Sam, beside her, says, his own voice gentle, subdued, and my eyes leave Joanna’s to go to him
as he offers a small, sad smile, his own eyes reddening as I imagine, in his mind, that all day as he searched for Reese,
he spent reliving the day Kylie disappeared. “It’s the only home you can see from the street, with a brown picket fence. Can’t
miss it. You’re welcome anytime.”
Tears prick my eyes. “That’s kind of you, but I wouldn’t want to intrude.”
“You wouldn’t be,” he says, gazing softly at Joanna, who stares back, reaching for his hand, giving him the same sad smile
he just gave me. “When we were going through this, we didn’t have anyone. Lots of people were sympathetic, but no one really
knows how it feels to lose a child until, God forbid, it happens. The least we can do,” he says, bringing his eyes back to
mine, his moist so that I feel overwhelmed with gratitude for them, but also sad for their own grief, “is lend an ear.”
Detective Evans walks me to my car when we’re through. I don’t know what time it is or how long we’ve been out here, but long
enough that above us, there are signs of darkening, sapphire and eggplant purple overtaking the once-azure sky.
“You were right,” I say to him as we walk.
“About what?”
“That we wouldn’t find anything.”
He says nothing to that. Instead, he says, “We asked around about that boy you mentioned. The one Reese made friends with,
with the snake tattoo.”
“And?”
He stops walking and turns to face me. “That boy isn’t a teenager, Mrs. Gray. He’s twenty-four. And he hasn’t shown up for
work in two days.”
My jaw slackens. Twenty-four. He’s an adult. A grown man. Reese is seventeen. I don’t know what the age of consent is in Wisconsin,
and I don’t know that they did anything more than flirt, but I do know that that seven-year age gap is almost half of Reese’s
lifetime. By the time I was twenty-four, Elliott and I were dating, if not engaged. I had gone to college and graduated and
started my career.
Reese is in high school still.
“There’s something else,” he says.
“What?”
“The medical examiner determined a cause of death.”
My body grows stiff. I tie my arms into a knot against my chest, bracing myself. I want to know, but I’m afraid to know. “What
is it?” I ask. “How did they die?”
“Blunt force trauma,” he says. “We found multiple skull fractures and crush wounds on both Mr. and Mrs. Crane’s heads. Mrs.
Crane had a severed spinal cord, and Mr. Crane’s aorta had been lacer—”
“Stop,” I say. “Please. Just stop.”
I close my eyes. It’s too much. Too many details.
I don’t want to know anymore. I press my hand to my mouth, trying not to picture someone hitting Emily in the back so hard it severed her spinal cord—cutting off contact between her brain and the lower half of her body, meaning that if she had lived, she would have been paralyzed—or Nolan so hard that his aorta, the largest blood vessel in his body, tore.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “If it helps, we can assume their deaths were relatively painless. The disruption of brain function
means that Mr. and Mrs. Crane didn’t feel pain, even if they didn’t die right away. They would have lost consciousness quickly.”
It doesn’t help.
I imagine them dying a slow death.
Of them lying on the cottage floor, paralyzed and bleeding out.
“Did someone break into the cottage that night or were they let in?”
“The door wasn’t broken,” he says. “It appears that someone either let the killer in or that the killer was already there,
in the cottage.”
I nod, my throat tightening. “What killed them?” I ask. “The object,” I say, when he says nothing. “What is the blunt object
that killed them? Do you know?”
He nods, though it takes a second for him to tell me.
“A baseball bat.”
I wince as he says it, seeing someone, some shadowy, ambiguous shape standing behind Emily that night on the screened-in porch,
the bat hoisted over a shoulder. I see him hitting her so hard with the bat—putting his whole body into it—that Emily’s spinal
cord severed, that her legs gave completely out, losing function; I see her buckle and collapse onto the floor, and I wonder
if the injury to the head came next, after she was already incapacitated and lying on the ground, or if that came first, and
if she was already bleeding and losing consciousness when she was hit in the back.
There is a bad alkaline taste on my tongue all of a sudden.
It doesn’t matter how it happened. Either way she’s dead.
“How do you know it was a bat? How can you be certain?” I ask.
“We found the bat,” he tells me. “It was just outside the cottage, a black and teal alloy bat. A Louisville Slugger. It had
blood on it still.” He’s quiet a minute, letting me process that. Then he says, “We compared the blood to Mr. and Mrs. Crane’s
blood. It was a match. There were prints on it as well. We’re running those now.”
I nod, despite knowing the bat will have all sorts of prints on it. Wyatt’s, Reese’s, Elliott’s, mine. The police won’t be
able to glean anything from it, because every single one of us touched the bat that night.
It’s dusk by the time I get back to the cottage. Over the last few minutes, the sky went from a medley of colors to a dark,
saturated inky blue. As it did, a million glittery stars came out to dot the night sky, which is clear and moonless.
We don’t see skies like this back home. Under different circumstances, it would be magical. I’d stand in marvel, taking it
all in, never imagining there could be so many stars in one sky.
But tonight the darkness scares me, a creeping-up, closing-in sense of blindness, a blackening out of the world around me.
I pull onto the gravel drive and park behind the police officer whose car is on, the engine idling with the window closed.
In the side mirror, I just barely make out a reflection. The eyes, when they look back, are different than before. This is
someone new, and though I can’t see his whole face, I can assume from the width of him and the height of his head in the front
seat, just barely skimming the ceiling of the car, that it’s a man.