Free No Coming Back by Keith Houghton Page B

revealed no land deeds or insurance policies , but I did find a photocopy of his Last Will & Testament in a manila wallet. It was positioned on top of the dog-eared paper clutter, as if deliberately put there for me to find. Heart thudding, I pored over its contents. The will was signed and dated the year my mother walked out. The legal jargon was of no interest, so I skipped straight through to the beneficiaries section, too realistic to be hopeful ; I knew my father wouldn’t leave me a crust of bread if I were starving .
    One beneficiary: the holy building directly across the street from the house on Prescott. The Harper Community Church. My father’s beloved obsession, and the one thing in his life aside from Aaron that he loved unconditionally.
    I grew up in its shadow, and its legacy lives with me still.
    A snowdrift has barricaded the garage doors shut. I get to work with the shovel, chopping at it like a mad axman. The effort of clearing the concreted ice warms me up a little. No strength for it earlier.
    Images of Jenna’s skeletal remains play on my mind:
    This morning, as we headed down off the mountain and into town, I asked Krauss: “What happens next?”
    Her expression was solemn. “Once they recover all the bits and pieces, they’ll send them to the ME’s office over in Duluth. Run tests to determine the exact cause of death. Don’t be surprised if they come back inconclusive. Eighteen years is a long time to be under the earth.”
    “Blades and bullets leave marks on bone.”
    “They sure do. But you can’t tell from a skeleton if the person was asphyxiated or even had their throat cut.”
    Krauss’s comments should have spooked me, but they didn’t. In my head, I have played through all the scenarios of that fateful night, time and again until I am left dizzy and directionless. As a species, death fascinates us. When we’re young and healthy we can only conceive of death happening to somebody else. But there’s no discrimination. Death has no favoritism. Sooner or later it’s our turn to take a bow.
    During long, lonely nights in my cell I thought about Jenna being abducted, bludgeoned unconscious, bundled into the trunk of a car, taken somewhere remote, raped and beaten, then fatally stabbed or shot before finally being buried in a shallow grave out in the woods or dropped to the bottom of the lake.
    I have held her hand and walked through every step with her in meticulous detail. Every heartbeat. Every breath. Every scream. I have changed the locations, the circumstances, the variables. I have seen her bleed, her bones break, her eyes glaze over. No matter how many times I rewind and run through it again but with different setups, the outcome is always the same:
    Jenna dies every time.
    The truth is, I have a preoccupation with Jenna’s death and I can’t escape it. It’s coiled up in my DNA. It’s all I’ve known. It’s par t of me.
    About a year into my sentence, my psychiatrist assured me:
    “Repeatedly going over events beyond our control is a perfectly normal predisposition.”
    It explained my craziness, or made it less alien. She went on to tell me it was healthy, restorative. Over the preceding six months she’d worked hard at unraveling my layers of complexity, digging deeper than anyone else had done previously. She’d uncovered a vein of truth. The treasure was within touching distance and she had no intention of letting it slip back into obscurity .
    “The mind is a composite of realities,” she continued. “Replaying traumatic events and working through alternative outcomes is its way of compartmentalizing the incomprehensible. Reflection, analysis, and conjecture are all constructive functions. It shows that the mind is trying to come to terms, to deal with sudden loss or unwanted change. Think of it as a Band-Aid for the brain.”
    Speculating on Jenna’s death was healthy, it seemed, at least for me. Nevertheless, I spent sleepless nights worrying over the days