Ashes to Ashes Read online

  Chapter 21

  It was a garden. Indeed. But instead of pretty flowers, colorful and various, or fruit, juicy and delicious, the garden around Ashe was filled with planted slabs of stone, polished and engraved. Also, below the planted stones, other things were planted into the earth, husbands, wives, sons, and daughters. It was a garden of loss and memories, of pain and longing.

  After managing to make it back from Cleveland, Ashe didn’t know where else to go or who else to talk to. He had learned some important things about Owen, but the path seemed to have faded beneath his feet. If he only knew the full name of Scott’s girlfriend. Many things were spiraling around in his mind, threatened to bring his high mood down to the dirt. He needed a kind ear, someone he loved to comfort him. Kneeling at the grave of his late wife, he decided to speak to the only person he ever truly trusted.

  He leaned down and ran his eyes across her name. Susanne Walters. The normal feelings of guilt and anger and regret washed over him like a strong, hot spring. No. It was more like quick flowing rapids, deadly, if not journeyed with caution.

  He pictured his wife.

  Her dark black hair, which seemed to hold perfectly formed natural curls, was always tied up in a ponytail, no matter how many times Ashe insisted that she leave it down. She looked sexy as hell with her hair down, hanging loose against her shoulders, one side tucked behind her right ear. Moments had existed in those days, either during the first minutes of the morning, before his wife had had the chance to completely start her day, or during the last minutes of a long evening, when she would had finally let herself relax, in which her hair would be allowed to tumble down. It had been beautiful.

  Ashe had also loved Susanne’s smile, which never seemed to touch more than one side of her lips, making it more of a smirk than a grin. It was a clever bend of her mouth, as if she knew a truth about things, a truth which was both funny and clever at the same time. He always wished he could have shared that truth with his wife. But she had taken the answer to that mystery with her.

  “Dust of the dead/inhaled each day/in/through/and out again.” Ashe thought hard about the next lines of the poem. “Ashes to ashes/one breath at a time/in/through/and out again.” It was one of her poems that managed to get lodged in head for days at a time, both as wonderful as it was truthful. “Taste it on the tongue/those who fill our chests/in/through/and out again.”

  Before meeting his wife, he had only a passing interest in poetry, in the writings of T.S. Eliot or W.B. Yeats. But Susanne’s passion for that type of literature affected him, because he felt it like heat coming from an oven.

  He loved his wife’s poems more than anything. They were always simple. He was far from an expert when it came to prose or stanzas, but Susanne’s writing always spoke to him, as if they were his own thoughts and emotions expressed in a way that he wished he could express himself. And what more could a person ask from a poem.

  “Ashes to ashes/one breath at a time,” he repeated.

  “Baby,” Ashe said in a low voice. “I love you. More now…than ever before. I wish you were here with me now. Dear god, I wish that so very much. I need you. I need your strength.” He felt his eyes getting warm. “Scott’s in trouble. Your baby boy is in real bad trouble, hun. And I’m trying…but I don’t know if I can help him. I am trying so hard…but I don’t know if I can do it.”

  Ashe paused. Tears lined the bottom of his eyes, but never fully fell.

  “He killed someone.” The words hurt. But they were true. There was no more denying it. Scott was guilty. In the beginning, Ashe wanted to prove his son’s innocent. He wanted to show that Scott had not killed Owen. Even though everything that happened proved to him otherwise, he had hung on to the hope of his son’s innocence. It was reckless. It was biased. And it was compromised. But that finally changed. It was no longer about innocence. It was about…why?

  Why?

  “I don’t know where to go from here,” Ashe admitted. “But I’m going to keep going. For you. For our son.”

  Oscar had been right. He was emotionally compromised. But he was also driven, more than anyone outside the situation would be. He was not on a mission to simply find Scott, as Oscar and the rest of his group may be. He was on a mission to find the reason…the reason behind the bodies.

  The reason. That was where he needed to find his way to.

  His thoughts were suddenly interrupted by a sight.

  Lying on the dirt directly next to Susanne’s tombstone, sat a bundle yellow flowers. They looked fresh. But they weren’t the kind of flowers someone would buy at a flower store. They were more like the type that would grow wild in some yard, growing in the Spring only to die off in the Fall. They weren’t even flowers at all. They were Dandelions. Weeds. Weeds that sprouted all over Ohio. In fact, there were clusters of them all around the cemetery, ready and waiting for someone to spontaneously pluck them during an unplanned visit to the cemetery.

  Ashe rose from his leaning position and began to look around him. When were the flowers placed? Recently? Scott? Could his son have just been there, leaving flowers, the only flowers that he could find in a hurry, at his mother’s grave?

  Looking around, his heart beating fast, Ashe searched the graveyard for another body, but not another figure could be seen. He fought the urge to run around the cemetery, checking each shadow and behind every tree. But he didn’t. Scott was not there. He would once again be chasing a ghost.

  He needed to get his head clear.

  There were flowers in the garden of stone, after all, he admitted.