Page 21 of Home Is Where the Bodies Are

There’s a long pause between the two of them. And the only sound is the buzzing cicadas, the squeaking bats, and water moving through the twisted creek.

“Tell me what happened,” Mom says. Although she’s normally calm, the way her tone rises and falls tells a different story.

“The less you know, the better.”

There’s shuffling offscreen. Shoes trudging through mud. The camcorder is suspended, aimed up at the night sky. The little dead girl disappears and a moment later Dad is onscreen. It’s a close-up of him, as he’s holding the video camera.

“Jesus, Laura. This thing is still on. How do you erase it?”

“Hit the Rewind button. I’ll have to record over it,” Mom says in a panic.

Tears cling to his eyes, but they don’t escape. There’s a look of confusion on his face as he fiddles with the device, and then the screen goes black.

June 15, 1999, is in the past again.

But I know it won’t stay there.

TWELVE

BETH

A burst of air escapes my mouth as I try to catch my breath, reeling from what I just witnessed. I don’t think I breathed at all while the tape played.It’s real, I keep telling myself, although my mind is rejecting that notion, instead registering the video as fiction, as though I’d just watched a movie. But I know it’s real. Because I know the girl in the video. The little dead girl. The one that’s been missing for more than half of my life.

Her name is Emma Harper. Well, I guess itwasEmma Harper. She was twelve when she disappeared. She was our next-door neighbor, the younger sister of my high school sweetheart, Lucas. Everyone looked for her when she went missing the summer of 1999. We searched high and low for days, weeks, months. Even then, her family didn’t give up. In those early days, when she’d first gone, we combed the local nature trail, an abandoned railroad track without the tracks that runs six miles between the Grove and Clinton. We searched nearby towns: Darien, Delavan, Sharon, Elkhorn, all of them. Flyers with her sixth-grade class picture were plastered on trees, telephone poles, and front windows of local businesses. But Emma was never found. And no one knew what happened to her... I can barely finish the thought. No one knew what happened to Emma Harper, except my parents.

On the day she went missing, there was a carnival at the park in the center of town. They called it Groovin’ in the Grove. My mom was the event’s lead organizer. She wanted Allen’s Grove to shine because that was how she saw our town, like coal before it’s compressed and heated enough to form a diamond. There were games, vendors, food fried and double fried, farm animals, even a few janky carnival rides. TheDukes of Hazzard-themed bar called Boar’s Nest that sits kitty-corner to the park, across Highway X, had live local bands and drinks flowing all day for the adults. It was the biggest event this little town had ever seen.

Groovin’ in the Grove was a fundraiser for the park, so they could purchase playground equipment, picnic tables, and a shade shelter as well as provide ongoing maintenance. People from surrounding towns showed up, at least five hundred, tripling the size of our town’s population. And sometime that day, June 15, 1999, Emma went missing. The police figured some creep slipped through the crowd, and with all the noise and excitement, they were able to kidnap a child in plain sight. No one noticed. It wasn’t the first time it’s happened, and it certainly wasn’t the last. But it was the first time it had happened here, and it left a stain on the community that could never be removed.

The Grove was a place where children could ride their bikes past dark, play ghost in the graveyard in the woods, hike the nature trail, swim the crayfish-and-leech-infested creek, and even trespass on farmland without the worry of farmers shooting at them. Parents expected their children to return home in one piece. Because children didn’t go missing in a place like Allen’s Grove... until one did.

I remember everything changed after that day, not only for the town but for our family. I’d always believed Emma’s disappearance hit too close to home, just across the street, or that my mother blamed herself for planning the whole event. I never in a million years would have thought my parents had anything to do with it. After all, they searched for her, alongside Nicole, Michael, and me. Shoulder to shoulder, we all walked the nature trail, the fields, and the wood. We hung missing person posters and made phone calls. We did everything we could. I remember their reassurances: “Don’t worry, we’ll find her.” The very thought of what they’d said sends a shiver down my spine. Mom even donated part of the fundraising money from the event to Emma’s family. The park got its swing set, monkey bars, slide, shade shelter, picnic tables, basketball court, and several flower beds. But the Harper family never got Emma back, and they never found out what happened to her.

There they are again... those words... right at the forefront of my mind.

Your father. He didn’t disappear. Don’t trust.

Disappear... That sticks out even more now. Maybe my mom wasn’t offering hope that our father would return. Maybe it was a warning. Did Dad do something to Emma? Had he lied to Mom about it being an accident? Is that why she left me with those cryptic final words?

My eyes flick to Nicole. She’s frozen, hand on the remote, shoulders tense, eyes wide. I saw her like this once, the first time she overdosed. But she’s not dying, I remind myself. Still, this is life-altering. How she sees the world is perishing. Michael is frozen too. Nothing on him moves, not even a blink or a twitch of an eyebrow. But there’s a sheen to his eyes, like he’s holding his emotions in, trying to keep them caged.

“That... that can’t be real. It must be some prank Mom and Dad were playing,” Nicole says. “Right?” Her eyes are still wide, but now they’re staring right at me.

“Did either of you know about this?” Michael asks. He studies our faces, like he’s waiting for one of us to reveal a tell.

I shake my head, unable to utter a single word.

“You think it’s real?” Nicole asks.

“Of course, it’s real. That’s Emma Harper on that tape, and that’s the day she disappeared.” Michael gestures to the TV.

Even though it’s a blank screen, I can still see the image of her lying in the mud, covered in blood. Her lifeless eyes staring into the lens of the camera, while insects crawl over her porcelain skin. How could Mom take this secret to her grave? How could she bring Emma’s family casseroles, invite them over for dinners, go on daily walks with Susan to search for her daughter, all the while knowing she was dead?

Nicole stands abruptly. “I don’t believe it,” she says, pacing the living room. Her footsteps are as heavy as the past.

“You saw it with your own eyes,” I finally say, trying to convince myself more so than her.

Michael shakes his head and gets up from his seat, disappearing into the kitchen.

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