Page 59 - The Bridge Vol 17_pgs

VOLume 17

Somewhere in these woods there are teenagers smoking weed together in their dad’s pick-up truck.
This is the first time I’ve seen anything really bad happen. Not just around here. I haven’t seen
something like this anywhere. I’m only twenty-two, and I grew up in a more upper-middle class town.
I got my bachelor’s in criminal justice, and now I’m here.
In nowhere Willbrook, New Hampshire.
With God’s wife, Ellen, dead in front of me.

* * *

It’s been two and a half weeks since Ellen’s body was found up in the trees. God’s sad, but he hasn’t
been showing it. At least not around anyone. Even the day that we first saw her, he just stood quietly
next to me. Now, we’re looking up at the trees again. Two more bodies are tied up with ropes, with their
arms out. Two children that look like crosses in the air.
Their names were Clay and Rachel Godesko.
God is standing next to me again, looking up at his children’s corpses.
The little boy who found them is crying at home now, while his mother holds him. This short and
stocky cop with a Band-Aid on his chin came over and started talking to me and God. He said all the
regular condolences and all, but then went into what he really came over to say. They tested the DNA
found on Ellen, and all that was found were traces of the family. The only suspect they had was Mr.
Obsurro, the creepy drifter, but now he seems unlikely. Something else came up, too: the ropes used to
tie up the bodies were from God’s house and the bodies were dragged out into the woods already dead.
God plunged himself into this investigation. When he wasn’t at home with Adrien, he was at the
station looking through reports, or at the crime scene studying every little thing.
The people of Willbrook all felt awful for him. Guys at the bar said they felt bad they didn’t know
some crazy serial killer was on the loose and coming after God’s family, that they didn’t have the
common sense to recognize this. Some of the ladies I talked to who live nearby the house have this
theory that it might’ve been Adrien. Apparently, a couple of their kids go to school with him, and said
that Adrien was known to “have a temper” and “wasn’t afraid to go after someone if they messed with
his friends.” The ladies are pretty dead set that he did it.
“That would explain how his DNA was found on the ropes.”
“Plus, he would be able to get the ropes and everything from the house.”
They kept going on and on about how it was Adrien. As much as I was starting to agree, I wasn’t
planning on telling God anytime soon.
“I feel so bad for him,” one of the women said. “Lately, poor God keeps getting bad news.”
“Yeah. First his wife and now his two kids. It’s only him and Adrien now, and what if Adrien really
is the killer? Then what? God just has to live in the house with the kid who murdered his family?”
“I think I’m gonna make the poor guy a lasagna for dinner tomorrow, then he won’t have to worry
about cooking.”
I drove back to the station after that. How was I going to tell God that his son was the killer? It was
so obvious—the DNA, the bodies being dragged from the house, the ropes belonging to the family.
When I get to the station, I walk in and see God sleeping on the desk with papers all over the place,
drool falling from his mouth, making a small puddle on one of the folders.

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