Always Watching

was touched and saddened by her courage.
    Robbie was still talking. “I told her I’d call the cops and report her as a runaway. She was pissed off, said she expected better from me. That’s when I got mad and told her she wasn’t as smart as she thought, and I walked away. I looked back from the road and saw Aaron go after her, but I didn’t follow.…”
    I held my hand over my mouth, waiting for the rest of the horrible story.
    “I thought he’d talk some sense into her.” His voice was strangled with emotion. He paused, caught his breath. After a moment, he continued. “Later, I’d cooled off and felt bad. I thought maybe she was right—we should try to leave with you. When I came back, everyone was still on the reflection walk, and I couldn’t find Willow. Then I walked around to where we’d been digging…”
    “Oh no. The outhouses…” I remembered now. The men had been digging holes behind the new cabins. That’s what Aaron had been working on that day.
    He nodded. “One of the holes was filled back up. I grabbed the shovel and dug as fast as I could, got down to one of those forty-five-gallon drums we’d used for paint.… I pried off the lid, and I could just see the top of her head.”
    Tears streamed down my cheeks. Robbie was staring at Brew, his face expressionless, like he had to disconnect from his words to be able to speak them.
    “I tried to feel her pulse. But she was already cold, and there was blood in her hair—” Robbie’s voice broke, his shoulders stiff and his neck tight with the effort to rein in his emotions. “Her nails were torn and her fingers all bloody. The back of the lid, it was scratched. He must’ve hit her, with the shovel or something, to stun her, but she was still conscious when he put her in there.”
    “My God.”
    Robbie was talking fast now, trying to get it all out. The horrible truth finally bursting free. “I was going to call for help, but none of you were back yet, then Aaron came around the corner. I told him I was going to the cops. He said if I broke up the group, he’d have to punish me by taking away something that I loved. I knew he meant he’d hurt you or Mom. He said he didn’t want to do it, but that the Light would make him, like it had with Willow. It was her fault she died because she wouldn’t give him her vest. He had to protect the family.”
    It hadn’t been about the vest. He wanted her gone.
    Robbie said, “I told him he’d killed her. And he said no, he’d come back to release her.”
    He came back to release her. I couldn’t have known this story, but it seemed familiar, a hard knot of dread and fear in the pit of my stomach. I ran my mind over the words but couldn’t think of when I would have heard them before.
    Robbie was shaking his head, his hands fists on the railing. “He was so sick. You could tell he actually believed it—that it wasn’t his fault that she died.”
    I had no problem believing he’d convinced himself he wasn’t responsible for her death.
    “What did you do with her?”
    “He made me put the lid back on the barrel, then we filled the hole, and he made me dig a new one for the outhouse. I sat in the woods all that night, watching over her grave, just kept hoping that it was a crazy nightmare. She’s still there. I go there sometimes and tell her I’m sorry.…” He drifted off.
    I said, “What are you going to do? We can’t leave her there any longer.”
    “I know.” He shook his head, a quick angry motion. “I was worried about him coming after you—he stops by every couple of years, letting me know he’s keeping an eye on you, so I won’t say anything.” That’s why Aaron had let Robbie walk around for decades with this knowledge. He’d used me as the threat.
    “Is that why you told me that you saw her hitchhiking down the road?”
    He nodded. “I wanted you to drop it. But you’re already in danger now, and getting him arrested is the only way to keep him away from you and Lisa. I’ll talk to the cops.” He searched his pocket again for phantom cigarettes. Brew looked at him with concern, his nose twitching, sensing the anxiety in the air.
    “We can go to the police now. I’ll take you.”
    “Okay, let’s do this. But I’ll follow in my truck with Brew.”
    *   *   *
    As we walked back to our vehicles, we didn’t talk much, but I could feel the first tentacles of healing, a subtle shift. So much made sense now. How he’d changed when we got home,