It is unnatural to lose a child, but nature goes on. John’s nature, always to pull, to search, to unravel, led him down a very unnatural path. Seventeen children had died in what the police and papers called an accident; Seventeen grade-schoolers, their teacher, and a bus driver, while returning from a field trip.
John couldn’t accept that his son was dead, no father could, and he couldn’t accept the story of a break failure either. When he saw his son’s corpse, he knew something other than the river had killed him; a crash couldn’t explain the wounds. What friend would deny a grieving father; even when the directive was passed down and the files were all locked away, John found his way to a copy of the unfinished report.
A student of Sherlock Holmes, he knew when to accept the improbable, even when it seemed impossible. The students, the teacher, the driver hadn’t drowned, and that gash on his boy’s neck, on all their necks, wasn’t the fault of an accident.
Tale Told 