Early June
From a distance you couldn’t be sure how old the girl might be—sixteen, twenty-six—no way to tell. She could have been any of a hundred, a thousand displaced and forgotten young women who wander around the shabbier streets in America’s cities. Only this wasn’t the city, unless you believe Picketsville, Virginia, population sixty thousand, more or less—lately, less—qualifies as urban. And she was not wandering. She stood perfectly still, staring at the earth at her feet. The usual accumulation of leaves and plants seemed askew, unnatural in their arrangement, and recently turned dirt lay in places where it didn’t belong. A stand of hardwoods, untouched for a century or more, filtered the early summer sunlight and softened the lines on her face, but not the anger in her eyes. She stood a little straighter, but her eyes never left the ground. Her lips moved as if reciting a private litany.
“We used to come here back before all that. Like, we had picnics over by that old spring. A long time ago and what was I? Six or seven—maybe a year away from the hell you put me in. I don’t know, maybe I don’t remember things so good anymore. Too many of my days are out of focus because of all that shit you shoved in your body and mine. There’re things that I can’t pull out of my head anymore.”
A vehicle sounded its horn from the road fifty yards behind her. The girl stopped mumbling and dropped a scraggly bouquet of wildflowers at her feet. She took a breath, wiped her nose on her sleeve, and walked away.
Sometime Later That Month
A breeze disturbed the otherwise sleepy afternoon. Andy Lieux decided to walk his dog in the woods by the old spring. This was a special spot, known to only a few, or so he thought. In fact, the small rivulet- and fern-laced area was a spot most of the long-term residents of Picketsville also thought of as their special place.
In the springtime, after the area’s scant snow melted and the rains came, the little mountain spring would gush and the low area beside it would become a marsh. Skunk cabbage and bluets and quaker-ladies would poke through the soft loam. By late May, the ground would dry a bit and the rank earthy aroma of the naturally composting detritus would abate. Ferns would poke through and unfurl their fronds, eventually to cover the entire quarter acre or so of the site. By late June the skunk cabbage gave way to a by-now impenetrable carpet of ferns that helped hide the smaller fauna from the ever-present predators—the circle of life. The spring water flowed at a more sedate pace, slowed by wild watercress lining its short course, into a larger creek ten yards away. There its crystal water mixed with the more turgid creek.
The dog drank noisily from the spring and, its thirst slaked, began its ritual zigzag exploration of the area, pausing here and there to mark its territory and occasionally pawing at the soil beneath the ferns in search of…who knows what? He snuffed here and there and paused at some newly turned earth. His nose twitched, he let out a small yip, and scratched at the one place not covered with leaves, moss, or verdure of one sort or another. When a gray-green hand surfaced, Andy pulled his dog off, and at that moment Picketsville, Virginia, would have another murder for the sheriff’s office to solve. Two murders, actually, but that would be discovered later. Identifying the remains of Ethyl Smut and finding her killer would be problem enough.
Too many people believed she deserved it.