When She Was Gone

Tonight is the eighth anniversary of Asha Veil's death.  I would even call it an abduction in some ways.

It was a full moon night, dry and a little cold.  I will drive up to Ben Lomond after class tonight, to the market, then up Love Creek Road, then up to Quail Hollow Road, and then I might write in my car before going home.  I want to get a sense of what the landscape was like, what the moonlight looked like, and how it must have been for her.  Last night I watched the supermoon and stood in light that was like silver-white daylight.  Somehow I remembered a night when Arctic cold came down from Canada, many, many years ago when I was pregnant with my youngest son, and stood outside on my deck, the whole landscape having gone sinister and nearly blue from the full moon and the killing cold.

I wondered last night if Asha looked at the moon as she went off with McClish.  How this happened I do not know. No one saw him bring his truck back to the market (I believe it was still open on that night), and she usually parked her car near Mill Street Hairquarters, where I get my hair trimmed; it is near the Ben Lomond Park.  I doubt McClish moved her car after the murder; he had other things to do, like dump her backpack, get home as quickly as possible to clean his car and throw all his clothes in the washer. He would have been spattered with blood, which would have transferred into her car had he moved it after the fact. There was no blood in her car, but his DNA was found on the steering wheel.  That part--how the car got to the place where it was found, a short distance from the market but not anywhere near Asha or McClish's home--is a mystery.  He could have slipped out of his house after everyone was asleep and moved it himself, but who knows?

There were baby clothes in the back seat.  Some things really stay with me.  That, and the list of baby shower clothes found in her backpack.

Good and evil.