PART 3 — NOVEMBER 1998
Here is what was in that box and what it means, and it took a detective and an attorney about four months to put it in an order I could follow.
The share transfer moves forty percent of Oyen Aske Millwork from Corbin Aske to Rowena Oyen for a stated consideration of one dollar. It is dated the eleventh of November 1998.
It is not Corbin Aske’s signature. Two examiners have said so and nobody has argued.
The affidavit underneath it is a witness attestation. It says that the signature above was made in the presence of the person signing below.
The person signing below is Gethin Keller. He was twenty-seven. He had been married to me for four years and I was seven months pregnant with Nessa.
The missing person notice is from the January of 1999 and it was filed by Corbin Aske’s sister, and it was closed in the March of that year as a voluntary absence, because a grown man is allowed to leave.
And at the bottom of that box, under everything, was a letter.
Handwritten, four pages, dated the second of June 2003, from Corbin Aske to my mother.
It is not threatening. That is the thing about it. It is a man of fifty-nine writing to a woman he built a business with, asking her to tell him what she told people, because his sister had stopped speaking to him and he did not know what she had been told.
There is no reply in that box and I do not believe one was sent.
My mother buried all of it under a tree in 1998 and added the letter to it in 2003, which means she dug that hole twice.
She could have burned any of it at any point in twenty-seven years.
I have thought about that more than almost anything else in this and I have arrived somewhere I do not entirely like, which is that she wanted it to exist.
Not to be found. To exist.
And she planted a maple on top of it and would not let a gardener near the roots and shouted at a four-year-old with a plastic spade.
