The Killer

I always wondered who my father really was. As a boy, I imagined he was great at playing catch, building sandcastles, flying kites. A stern-voiced, soft-hearted man like Frank the mechanic maybe, or my math teacher Mr. Wilson. One thing I knew for sure, he wasn’t a killer.

Born in Millville to a poor single alcoholic mother from a long line of poorer single alcoholic mothers, my father left home at age twelve to live in an abandoned rail car under the Pontiac Street bridge. The rusty and dilapidated steel frame was more hospitable than his mother’s arms had ever been, and equally as cold on winter nights.

In his teens he was arrested for theft, assault, a few minor offenses. He spent his late twenties living in a hippie commune reading books on quantum mechanics and searching for the meaning of life. It was at this hippie commune he met my mother.

My mother was a tall blonde that could have been mistaken for Jan Brady late into her forties. Quiet and reserved, she spent most days sketching under a willow tree and tending to the commune’s garden. It was under this willow tree my parents fell in love, and I was later born.

Fast forward eighteen years. My mother had just passed and I was living off the $20,000 payout from her life insurance policy. My father had become a devout alcoholic working odd jobs to get by, and illegally camping along the river bank for the seventeen years they’d been divorced.

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That’s when the girls started disappearing. Nine, to be exact.

It was the summer of 1985. Every other week another young girl seemed to vanish out of thin air. Some on the way home from the pool, others just before dinner from their own backyards. The only evidence they ever found was a size 16 wide boot print that led them nowhere.

For months, news crews, detectives and curious onlookers descended upon our small town, determined to search every inch of every field and farmhouse until the missing girls were found. There were interviews, weekly town meetings, even a seance from a local psychic who claimed the girls were buried outside an abandoned wheat mill.

My father was named as a suspect shortly after the fourth girl disappeared. He had been spotted not far from where the girl was last seen, behind the baseball fields off Derby Road. Drunken and disheveled, he was taken in for questioning looking guilty as sin.

During the interrogation it was revealed my father had a young woman's red hair barrette in his possession. He claimed it belonged to my mother and it was all he had to remember her by, and that on the day of the girl's disappearance he had been passed out drunk in the visitor's dugout of field three.

Without any solid evidence they were unable to charge him with any crime and he returned to his campsite that night. The investigations continued late into the fall but the girls never turned up and the town eventually moved on.

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My father passed away on the morning of August 27, 2017. I received a call from the local sheriff who asked me to come down to the morgue to identity his body and collect a few belongings found near his makeshift campsite.

As I went through the box of old t-shirts, men’s hygiene products, a small black notebook of poetry and one red hair barrette, the Sheriff handed me a sealed envelope with the words ‘For my son’ on the front. “Take your time,” he said as he made his way to the dimly lit exit.

At first, I was not sure the envelope was for me as my father had never addressed me as his son. Was this the moment he would finally express his love to me? Apologize for abandoning me and his mother? Look to reconcile?

As the sheriff’s footsteps echoed off into the distance, I opened the envelope to reveal a neatly folded piece of paper that read: “The right thing to do is turn yourself in.”

I folded the note in half and breathed a sigh of relief as I knocked the dirt from my size 16 wide boots. They never did find the killer.