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to him. She didn’t need to. She’d go to him after one of her blowups and say, “Kevin, about that thing earlier…I mean…I didn’t mean…I wasn’t exactly…” And then he’d laugh at her and she’d know she was forgiven.
    He was usually right about most things. So she wondered,
Is he right about this? Did I blow it by not getting the cops involved?
    Could this weird guy from the porch really be dangerous? Could he hurt someone—even Mom?
    She reached her destination. She knew it because first shepassed 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 outmore 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