August 2006 – December 2006
In my spare time, I worked on the farm. I kept the yards mowed and installed timers on the lights so they would turn on and off at specific hours. It was part safety, part deterrence, and part illusion. I wanted the house to look lived in, occupied, watched over. More than that, it felt like protection. Stewardship. This place had been entrusted to me, and I took that responsibility seriously.
I contacted Mr. Hardaway and offered to let him cut the fields again in exchange for keeping the hay. He agreed without hesitation. It was one less thing I had to manage and one more way to keep the land from slipping into neglect.
I also began packing my parents’ belongings. Most of the time, it was tedious work. Box after box filled with things I would sort through later or eventually sell at a garage sale. The emotional weight came and went in waves. I tried not to linger too long over any one item. There was too much to do.
Organizing documents for the trial felt different. That work had purpose. It was a mission. I sorted deeds, right-of-way records, correspondence—anything that might be relevant. I placed the most important papers into a dedicated filing cabinet. As I worked, I felt a growing sense of responsibility settle over me. I was their voice now. I represented us. That clarity gave me focus when other tasks threatened to overwhelm me.
Every so often, though, something would stop me cold.
One day, while packing the bedroom, I opened the nightstand and found a shoebox. Inside were small bottles holding my brother’s and my baby teeth—the ones we had been told the tooth fairy took. There were old report cards from grade school. A green jade elephant necklace I’d had as a kid and thought I’d lost. Arrowheads my dad and I had found together while walking the woods on the farm. Things I assumed were gone forever.
Instead, my mom had quietly kept them.
The box felt like a map of what she valued. What she chose to hold onto. It was a gift. A revelation. I sat on the bed in my parents’ room, clutching that box, while time seemed to stop. Memories came flooding back, one after another. I don’t know how long I stayed there. Long enough to understand that this wasn’t just storage—it was love, preserved. I still have the box. I’ve added to it over the years items that remind me of my parents. A treasure of memories that one day I will share with my children, to let them know who their grandparents were.
I rented a dumpster and had it brought up to the farm. It was a practical necessity. One afternoon, while throwing items into it, I heard something rustling in the brush near the tree line. My body tensed immediately. The past violence lingered in places like that—in sudden sounds, in moments of surprise. I started toward the house, ready to retreat, when I noticed movement near the ground.
It was Oreo.
He was thin, his fur matted and wild, but he came straight toward me, meowing nonstop. I picked him up and hugged him tighter than I probably should have. He head-butted me, purring and meowing all at once. Relief, joy, disbelief—it all hit at the same time. It felt like a win. A rare one.
I carried him inside and said to Buffy and Charley, “Look who came back home.” By then, talking to them felt natural. I filled a bowl with food for Oreo and let him eat. When he was finished, he climbed into my lap, and I sat there petting him for a long while.
With all three animals back in the house, even temporarily, the place felt more alive. Not whole—but breathing.
I kept Oreo with Buffy for the next few weeks, until it was time to reunite him with Blackjack at John and Barb’s. But for that moment, having him back felt like grace. Unplanned. Undeserved. Exactly what I needed.
The first week of October was difficult for me. That was when I moved the ducks and geese off the farm. I couldn’t get up there every day, and leaving them outside at night without protection made them vulnerable to predators. I had already lost a couple since being home. It felt like a failure on my part. If I had been there consistently, I could have put them in the Hilton every night and let them out every morning. They had shelter. I just couldn’t manage the routine anymore.
A friend at work suggested a solution. The park near where she lived would be happy to take them. There was a creek they could swim in, plenty of space, and people who would feed them. Hearing that felt like relief. I didn’t know what else to do with them, and I knew almost immediately it was the right choice.
Friends from small group, Fred and his son Travis, came up to help. The work itself was oddly ordinary for such a significant moment. We focused on wrangling stubborn, independent ducks and geese into cages. The geese, especially, made sure we earned it. There wasn’t much talking. Just effort, coordination, and the quiet understanding that this was necessary.
When we released them at the park, most of the ducks went straight for the water. They slipped into the creek without hesitation. The older ones—the ones that knew me—stopped. They turned and looked back. I felt like a shepherd standing at the edge of the field. I bent down, petted them on the head, and told them it was okay to go. I was telling myself the same thing. After a moment, they turned and followed the others into the water.
Once the ducks and geese were gone, the farm felt lifeless. The silence came all at once. It wasn’t gradual. It was sudden, like a sound being cut mid-note. For the first time, the place was truly quiet. No squawking. No movement. Just the crunch of gravel under my boots and the steady push of wind through the trees.
Without the animals, the farm no longer felt inhabited. It felt abandoned—even with me standing in the middle of it.
Some days, I took my walking stick and wandered up into the woods. I wasn’t searching for anything. I was just moving, drifting through familiar paths like someone retracing steps out of habit rather than purpose. The woods were comforting. I walked where my family had walked, where my dad and I had found arrowheads, where my parents had wandered together. It felt as if the past closed in around me, not in a threatening way, but in a way that swallowed me whole.
I began to feel less like someone living on the land and more like something haunting it.
I moved through the property quietly, instinctively, as if I didn’t want to disturb anything. I spoke softly—to myself, to Charley, to Buffy—but even my own voice sounded out of place. I was there almost every day, yet I didn’t feel fully present. It was as if the life had drained out of the farm, and I had followed it halfway out, lingering behind as a kind of echo.
Sometimes I sat inside and watched television, the flickering light filling rooms that once held conversations and laughter. The shows played, time passed, and I stayed still. Watching became a way to mark hours, to give shape to days that otherwise felt hollow. Familiar routines helped, but they didn’t bring me back to myself.
I wasn’t living on the farm anymore.
I was lingering.
Like a lost soul haunting the place where he once belonged, moving through rooms and fields that remembered him more clearly than he remembered himself.
By November, we had a good sense of when the trial would be. Knowing a date didn’t bring relief. It brought inevitability. Once it was on the calendar, time seemed to accelerate, as if everything was being pulled toward that moment whether I was ready or not.
My meetings with the prosecutor and the detective became more frequent. Most of them took place at the courthouse. Walking through those halls no longer felt foreign or intimidating. The meetings were purposeful and grounding. They treated me as someone who mattered to the case, not just a bystander to it.
I brought everything I had. Documents. Images. Videos. Notes. Anything that might help build a complete and accurate account of what happened. This wasn’t about reliving the trauma—it was about building a case. About making sure nothing was overlooked. I was here to tell what happened to us. To tell our story.
I followed up on every lead I could find. I tracked down people who had heard Dale make comments about my parents. Most of it led nowhere. Some of it was hearsay. The work was exhausting. Still, I pressed on, passing names and information to the detective, letting them decide what mattered and what didn’t.
One conversation stayed with me. Someone told me that Dale had once said he could do anything he wanted and get away with it because he had a good lawyer who would get him out of it. Hearing that was disturbing. It reinforced why every detail mattered.
When investigators asked questions I didn’t know the answers to, I made it my job to find them. My motivation was loyalty—to my parents, to our story. It had to be airtight. I refused to give Dale’s attorney even the smallest opening to place doubt in the minds of the jury. I wasn’t doing this out of anger alone. I was doing it out of responsibility.
Preparing for the trial gave my days structure, but it was different from school. This felt more like preparing for a bowl game. This was game time. The championship. There would be no redo. No second chance to get it right.
The work pulled me out of that ghostlike state I had been drifting in. I felt present again. Focused. I knew what my role was now.
I would be ready—with facts, with testimony, and with the responsibility of speaking for my parents. Preparing for the trial felt like the last thing I could do for them. My way of standing up for them. My way of making sure their voices didn’t disappear just because they were gone.
I would not let them down.