They found the girl the second time they were in the state forest that fall. It was, Joe thought later, exactly like what happens on those true crime shows when the voiceover turns somber and describes how a jogger or a hiker or a dog-walker unwittingly makes a gruesome discovery. Except they weren’t hikers, he reasoned, just a couple of people out walking who paid no attention to trail markers. And she wasn’t gruesome. He thought for a long time afterwards that the people who wrote the true crime scripts were liars. They never said how the bodies sometimes—girls especially—could be undamaged, beautiful even, cradled in grass or protected by overhanging rocks or tree roots, like this one was. In all the news clips he watched after, in all the articles he read, no one ever mentioned how…nice she had looked (though he felt a pang of guilt even as he searched for the right word to use), her face blank as copier paper, her skin uncorrupted. And surely someone, he thought, would have been comforted to know that.
The first time they were in the forest, Shelly, in her third semester of her BFA program, was constructing what she called a “modified Merzbau renegotiated in still photography”—something she explained as a cross between “a Skoglund and a Switzer,” without the elements of “misery and erotic tension.” What this meant to Joe was that she wanted to dump leaves over every available surface in her studio and take pictures of them. He spent hours collecting thousands of leaves with her, pressing them into special ledgers of poster board and tissue paper. Shelly would examine each leaf individually from the bunches Joe brought her, holding them up to tree trunks or boulders, searching for torn edges or insect holes in the fibers. Then she spent the next few weeks pinning them to the walls and spreading them over her work table, chair, computer screen, bookshelves. She photographed the room in sections, showing Joe the pictures taken in varying light and from different angles. The black and white ones, taken at dusk as the failing sunlight filtered through the dirty glass of her window, bothered him the most. He could recognize the forms of familiar things beneath the leaves—the edge of a book or the shape of a framed photograph—and felt a sense of disquiet, as though each object disliked being buried and was about to shake itself free. Shelly said she wanted to convey a sense of natural tranquility within a space meant for human ingenuity and industriousness. For Joe, the images suggested intrusion—an invasion from the outside world into a private place. But he didn’t tell her this. Instead, he plugged her exhibition during his late-night slot at the university radio station, promising his unseen listeners (all three, he joked to himself) the most innovative art extravaganza since the Salon des Refuses. Shelly had suggested the comparison.
This time in the forest, Shelly was looking for rocks. Not just any rocks, as Joe quickly discovered when his first few offerings were rejected, but flat, circular pebbles, no bigger than quarters and no smaller than dimes. So Joe shuffled about, pushing aside decaying leaves with the bruised toe of his combat boot, looking for stones that reminded him of coins, when he thought he saw the naked legs of a mannequin sticking up from a hollow between the trees.
He shouted “Hey Shell! I see something you can use! Over here!” and began to pick his way towards the form. He couldn’t remember, even in the minutes immediately after, when he realized the body was not artificial, not made of wax or molded plastic. Shelly’s soft litany, “Oh, God, oh, God, oh my God” sounded like a transmission in the back of his brain, its change in frequency anchoring him as her words grew louder and closer together until finally she said no words at all but merely whined, her gloved hands pressed against her mouth, muffling the noise. Joe put his arms around her, pressing her to him in a botched bearhug, and said “Don’t look. Don’t look at it!”
But she did look, Joe half-supporting, half-swaying Shelly until she stopped making any sound at all. Her hands dropped from her face. Her eyes were wide and empty, frighteningly devoid of expression. He felt the urgency in removing her from the scene, of physically separating her from the girl before some strange and irreparable damage occurred in Shelly’s mind. If it hadn’t already. He moved himself in front of her to block her view, and placed his hands along her jawline so that she couldn’t turn her head from him.
“Listen,” he said, his voice harsher than he intended as he tried to mask his own terror. “We need to leave now. We need to call someone. The police—” And as he said it, he pictured his phone, resting in the wireless charger in the center console of his car; he had neglected to grab it when they parked at the entrance. Shelly’s phone would be buried beneath a stratum of cosmetics, candy wrappers, charcoal pencils and Kleenex in her vegan-leather purse, shoved underneath the passenger seat.
“We need to call the police and then we need to lead them here and show them.”
Shelly tried to shake her head and Joe tightened his hold on her jaw. “No. Shelly, listen! We have to. We have to get back to the car.”
“I don’t know where we are, Joe!” Shelly burst out. “I don’t know where we are! We’ll never find it again!” Her words surprised him—he didn’t understand the sentiment. His grip changed from a restraint to a clumsy embrace, and he cradled her head in his arm. She was crying hard.
“Ok, then, listen,” he said desperately, a convoluted plan half-formed and rose to the surface of his brain. “We’ll do it this way: You go. I’ll stay here. You go, and as you go, you can leave markers on the way, you know, broken branches or the stones—something. Anything will work! We aren’t that far in; you ought to be able to reach the entrance pretty soon. Go to the parking lot. Get your phone, call the police. Then bring them back here. Start calling for me when you get into the woods. As soon as I hear you, I’ll shout. We can find each other that way. You don’t have to come any farther. When I shout, the cops will hear, and they can come. Then I’ll join you.”
She said nothing, just pulled away from him and stared. The blank expression had returned.
“Please go,” he said, pulling his car key from his pocket and pushing it into her hands. “Just go! Now!”
He watched her as she took off, scrambling awkwardly but fast, oblivious to the branches that scraped against her and the uneven earth she stumbled over. He knew she wouldn’t take the time to leave markers behind her. It didn’t matter. He assured himself that as long as she called out, they’d be fine.
Once she was out of sight it occurred to him that whoever did this might still be nearby. He might have just sent Shelly running straight into him; the thought froze him and he clenched himself tight, straining hard to listen. He heard no movement—no screaming. Nothing. The girl had been left here recently, Joe thought—there weren’t a lot of leaves or sticks or insects or anything like that on her so she couldn’t have been brought here very long ago. Maybe an hour? Less? Maybe the person who brought her here was still so close he could see Joe, was watching him right now. Joe looked around wildly but didn’t see anything. Wind moved the tree branches above him, something rustled in the undergrowth nearby and for several seconds Joe held his breath. But nothing happened. Squirrel, he thought. Rabbit. He suddenly felt the need to relieve himself. He looked around for a place to go and then remembered the recurring lesson of every forensics show he’d ever seen: that because this was a crime scene there was probably evidence--footprints or fibers or other things he couldn’t think of--all around him, and if he moved, he might destroy it. He looked at the leaves and dirt and rocks on the ground. He couldn’t see anything. That’s why it’s called trace evidence, he reasoned. He and Shelly may have compromised it already just by walking through here and finding the girl. The girl didn’t look bloody, but what if there was blood on the ground? What if he had walked through it? What if they found his shoe print in this girl’s blood---wasn’t that about the most damning thing there was? He found himself involuntarily examining the sole of each of his boots. The carnival frenzy of his thoughts reached a crescendo as he imagined himself strapped to a gurney in the state penitentiary, undergoing lethal injection for a murder he knew nothing about, all because he, like the girl, had stumbled into the wrong place at the worst possible time. He knelt down and balanced on his haunches, the squat a compromise between the vertigo he had been feeling and his overwhelming desire to sit down. He cried then—for himself, for the girl, for Shelly and her blind flight for help that would arrive too late to help anyone anyway.
After this burst of grief had left him trembling and unsteady, Joe wiped his face with the sleeve of his coat, made himself quiet and allowed himself to dimly wonder who she was. He read news reports and public service announcements for a segment of his show, but he hadn’t read anything about a missing girl. He wondered if she was not local; either that, or she hadn’t been gone long enough yet to be considered missing. From where he was crouched, he could see that she was pale and young. It was too much for him to try to look at her face, so he stared instead at her feet. They were very clean, with no leaves or dirt on the soles. Obviously she hadn’t walked here—not barefoot, anyway. He didn’t know why he noticed, but she had no polish on her toenails. Shelly always had polish on her toenails. Usually dark red: the bottles labeled: “sanguine”, “carmine”, or “incarnadine,” names he now realized were all vaguely violent. He had watched Shelly put fresh polish on just last night. A large black fly landed on the arch of the girl’s right foot and Joe closed his eyes tightly and willed it to go away. When he opened them, the fly was gone.
He had to see if the fly had settled somewhere else on her body. If it had landed on her face, he thought absurdly, he would scream. He raised himself high enough to peer over the rocky mound that otherwise obscured her face just long enough to check, before he sank back down. He saw strands of hair, once dyed an electric blue but now faded and growing out to reveal a light brown. He thought she may have been an artist, too. Joe considered lots of people artists, even ones who weren’t actually making art, like Shelly. He met artists all the time—the world was full of them. Sometimes he could tell by their clothes or their haircuts or tattoos or body piercings, but usually he would determine this by the way people talked, or the things they talked about. One thing all artists had in common, he thought, was that they were always trying to transform the world. They were always trying to conjure things that weren’t there before, always trying to have experiences that would alter the way they understood reality. He tried to imagine what this girl had experienced; if she had understood what was happening to her while it was happening. What was it like to know that? This struck him as so intensely private that he recoiled from the thought, the sense of invasiveness so strong he felt ashamed for being near her, and for his part—however unintentional—in what had happened to her. In what was happening to her now.
He remembered a visit he and Shelly had made, not long ago, to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. One of the galleries was devoted to Marcel Duchamp, an artist Joe had heard of but knew little about. Joe was mildly interested in some of the pieces, like the series Nudes Descending a Staircase. He thought the three paintings were a visual representation of the bionic sounds Lee Majors made as the Six Million Dollar Man on the late-night TV Land reruns he and Shelly sometimes watched, but he stifled his laugh, because he knew Shelly would not appreciate the comparison. Other works, like the urinal with the words “R. Mutt 1917” written on it, left him cold. But then Shelly motioned to a pair of doors in an antechamber, and encouraged Joe to go look at them. She wouldn’t say anything more.
The doors were made of old wooden planks and hobnails, surrounded by a pretty brick doorframe in a stucco wall. Although it was an improvement over the urinal, Joe didn’t think much of it. As he approached, he noticed two small peepholes in the wood. When he looked through them, it was as if a tiny electric current had surged through to his heart, through his diaphragm, and down to the soles of his feet. He could feel the skin on his arms constrict and his hair stand up. A naked woman lay on the grass with her legs spread apart on the other side of the door, her crotch toward him and her head out of view, her arm outstretched over the edge of a cliff, her hand clutching a lighted lantern. In the background an illuminated waterfall flickered, conveying a sense of movement. Joe’s breath caught in his throat—he had not at all expected this. This is what it’s like to discover a body, he thought. It was horrible, exciting, even shamefully erotic. The thrill was terrible. Transformative. He felt it for hours after.
Transformative. The sounds of voices echoed. He remembered too late he was supposed to shout but he couldn’t and it didn’t matter now anyway. He could see boots, shoes, pant legs approaching. Voices, different voices. That black fly on her foot. Hands on his shoulders, lifting him up. Asking him questions. Firm, but not unkind. The sound of his own voice answering. Another pang of shame followed by nothing as he wiped his face with his sleeve again. Two cars and a van through the trees on a gravel road they had not noticed, a second van driving up, braking. Shelly beside it, calmer now, talking to an officer who took notes. The scene was being secured, men walking past him to wrap tape around trees. That girl behind him. Was she still on the ground? Did they move her? Cover her? So many more people now, looking at her. The body behind the door. How many people look at that? Hundreds of thousands. A million millions. He wanted to look again, to see if someone was doing right by her, but he did not dare now. Instead, he looked up at the sky.
The failing sunlight fell through the branches of the trees. It was beautiful.
