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“Start over? Again!”

Fall 2021

In October, my husband left me.

He went up north on his annual moose hunting trip. Which left me basking in a wannabe writer’s glory with having the entire weekend all to myself to just write! Cedar & Snow was coming along nicely, and after a long work week at that power plant, I was looking forward to diving back in.

When he called early Friday evening while I was making a cup of tea, I was genuinely surprised—given where he was camped out in the bush, cell service was spotty at best.

“Hey, I thought I’d let you know that I just got a call from a guy you grew up with.”

“Oh?” The relief that he wasn’t injured somewhere out in the wilderness was replaced by my curiosity.

“Yeah, he wanted my permission to call you.”

I could practically see him puffing out his broad chest. “Is that so? And did you give it?” I teased, knowing he had.

“Why wouldn’t I?” He asked before the line went dead.

Shortly after the abrupt ending to that call, my phone rang for the second time that night. This time I was greeted by the voice of a man of a boy I once knew. We had been close friends in our teenage years, bound by memories during a time that was impossible to forget: the murder of our mutual friend, Kerrie Ann Brown.

His phone call shouldn’t have surprised me. It was October 15th, 2021—the eve of the thirty-fifth anniversary of Kerrie’s murder. And like him, I too had been thinking about her.

Our conversation lasted well over two hours, with me mostly listening. He needed to talk and revisit the details of her murder and then vent his outrage that, after all these years, the case was no closer to being solved. But as the conversation stretched on, my disappointment grew, not with the status of the murder investigation but with him. At first, he sounded sober. By the end, he was inebriated and barely making sense.

Later that night, as I crawled into bed, memories of Kerrie came flooding back, as they often did this time of year. I tried to block out the horrific images, willing myself instead to focus on Kerrie’s pretty-cute face. The laughter in the air we once shared. The small moments of friendship. Why was it that the monsters always overshadowed the memory of her? Why did each and every conversation about Kerrie always lead back to them? Even after all these years? It just didn’t seem fair to her.

A week passed, and I found myself literary frustrated. I was no longer able to focus on Cedar & Snow. Reluctantly, I pulled out the box hidden in the back of my closet, the one containing the book I had written over three decades earlier about Kerrie.

Flipping through the pages, I could now see there was an untold story within the book. A gaping hole. This story focused solely on the crime—but what about the girl that once was? Where were those memories? Those moments that she and her friends shared? The way Youth for a Better Tomorrow had found a way to honor her memory?

Now, sitting on my closet floor thirty-five years later, I saw things differently. A new perspective—one that didn’t put a spotlight just on the nameless, faceless monsters who took a young girl’s life, but instead, put it right back where it belonged—on Kerrie.

As my knees cracked in protest while getting up off the floor, I muttered a few choice words under my breath, as I realized that Cedar & Snow was going to have to wait—for now.

“Could I rewrite Kerrie’s book after all these years?”

All I could do was give it a good old wannabe writer’s try.

 

Coming up next: God Willing (spoiler alert: Blindsided once again by life.)