Left for Garbage

and the police even suggested they might arrest her, along with me. Over the Internet, some people h ave called my wife ‘Monster Meg’.
    It doesn’t stop. I t will never end.
    The police took several items from our home, mostly from Deeley’s and Denise’s bedrooms, things that might help them to connect the dots. None of it mattered anymore to me , not after learning that my granddaughter had long been a bag of bones in a garbage sack left lying near a swamp. That’s got to be the hardest sentence I’ve ever said.
    It concerns some people that Deeley’s remains were found by the same guy twice - Harley Ray, a sewage employee. He was working that area in August and thought he’d seen something suspicious, but the deputy that arrived on the scene dismissed it as just another false tip. Had the police done their jobs, it could have spared a lot of good people their time and effort, those who supported us and helped search for Deeley over those next lost months. One of the first things I said in my first interview with the detectives was that they were curiously slow to respond to our initial report of Deeley being missing.
    Come December, Mr. Ray discovers the bag again. We didn’t get details right away, but when we heard that duct tape had been wrapped around Deeley’s face, I felt sick. When I heard there was a little heart sticker placed on the duct tape, supposedly over where Deeley’s lips would have been if her little lips hadn’t rotted away, I wished I were dead; more, I wished I’d never been born.
    The cops cordoned off the wooded area where she was found and combed through it thoroughly. They found pieces of Deeley’s little shirt and put it together. It must have been a new shirt that Denise had bought her after they left here. I’d never seen it before. It said, ‘Big Trouble comes in Little Packages’. It’s not true. It isn’t that she was ever any trouble, she wasn’t. They also found a hypodermic syringe and needle. Another piece of evidence, one that makes Margaret rant about the stupidity of the police but doesn’t affect me the same way, is that they delivered a dead snake to the medical examiner.
    Margaret says that sh ows how crazy these people are. She shouts that it’s madness, that she heard they did an autopsy on the snake. “They autopsied a Goddmaned dead rattlesnake. Can you believe this shit?” she asks rhetorically of anyone who will listen.
    Not me , I don’t listen and I don’t answer. I know what they were doing and I know why. I’m an ex-cop. They were looking for tire tracks. What I don’t know is whether or not I’m glad that the snake turned out to be so badly decomposed that they were unable to find any. Okay, I can’t talk about this much more right now, other than it has been the very worst time of my entire life.
    I was prepared to search to the ends of the earth to find Deeley, and in spite of the fact that Margaret had begun to alienate a lot of helpful people and organizations, they were still there, still looking, still trying. With a little angel like Deeley, even strangers had a hard time letting go of hope. Not everyone was calling us baby killers. There were so many good people out there too. Of course, now there’s no reason to look or to hope anymore, the only people who are looking for anything are the police. What should I hope they find?
    Those who hated us , and those who supported us, and those who profited, like the media and those whose job this was, like the police, you name it, all of them have been hinting all along this dark journey that I, Denise’s father, Deeley’s grandfather, would be thrown under the bus at some point. Bus? Try a freight train . I feel like I’ve been shattered into a thousand pieces beneath a train and I can never pick up the pieces and go home, wherever that is now. I’m as good as dead. Hell, I envy the dead.
    Margaret and I have said to each other so many times, “If only these people knew us, if only they really knew us , they’d feel differently. But, in actuality, these people do know us now, and they’re going to know even more eventually, things we’ve never wanted known. We’ve already been examined under a public microscope, unlike any other family in history, except maybe the Ramseys, and like them, the picture of us doesn’t improve with close scrutiny. They are seeing the worst of us, the bottom of the barrel worst, and now we don’t know how to act, we don’t know what to