What Remains of You

The Report

It was the title spread on a blank sheet of paper that shook Rebecca. This must be about dad, She concluded. It didn't take long for her to come out of the trance the sentence had put her in and take a look at the booklet. It was quite a few papers thick and consisted of many white pages in a stack. The papers were held together with a singular staple on one corner and it looked like it had been flipped through many times due to the creases on the page. The edges were ruffled and dirt soaked into the first few but not in the ones near the end which Rebecca guessed had been added quite recently.

She gave up inspecting the booklet and went straight for the first page. It was a printed-out version of the autopsy report and scribbles of Dennis's handwriting littered it. He had written notes all over it and the parts talking about the dead body of her dad. It was a more in-depth version of what he had talked about in his diary and Rebecca concluded that he had spent a long time pouring over these words, trying to figure them out. She continued to flip through the papers when a blank sheet with a title on it stopped her in her tracks and caught her attention. It was titled, The Full Account of How I Think Oscar Cromwell Died. her hand trembled as she reached over and read the story of how Dennis suspected her dad died.

Dad would have woken up at 6:40 and done his normal routine for the morning. The day before he had gotten a promotion for his job working as a salesman. I remember him being so happy and had been eating his breakfast in a very joyful manner. He even hugged me and Rebecca good morning, which was something he never did. I don't think he knew anything of what would happen to him later that day.

He would have gotten into his car and drove off at around 7:45. He had eaten breakfast and said goodbye to us with a wave. That was the last time we ever saw him. The traffic would have been quite bad that day which is why I suspect he took the back road. He would not have wanted to be late right after getting his promotion so he decided to do the logical thing and skip traffic by taking a different route. I wish he hadn't done that. There would not have been cameras on the road for it was far out of the way and would be a waste of money to put something there where nothing happens. They are wrong. There is something weird about that street that I can't put my finger on.

I think dad was driving at one point then he stopped the next. There are two reasons why this could have happened: One, his car ran out of gas, or two, his car broke down. I suspect the latter. From analyzing both the autopsy report and the limited pictures I have of his broken-down car, I have come up with this conclusion. I hope with all my heart I am wrong, but I have a sinking feeling in my gut that this is not that far off the mark.

So his car had stopped on this road and he probably stood there for a little while. That was when another car would have pulled up. I have reason to believe that this is the person that called the police saying he had gotten into an accident with him. In the call to the police, he had sounded quite distressed but there was an underlying tone that showed he had known he had been dead before but was crying for different reasons. I think he murdered my dad.

Rebecca had been silently reading the report that Dennis had made but stopped at the last sentence. So this is what you meant by dad not being in an accident. You think he was killed? Why didn't you tell me this Dennis? I thought we were close. "Why?" she whispered. She flipped to the next page and the report continued on.

I do believe that he had not known who my dad was before this encounter, but had killed him for a different reason. I have done extensive research on this whole case and can not find any evidence of a motive. There is no proof that he murdered him but I do think he did it. I am writing this report with the view that the guy, Tony, who called the police about the accident, killed my father.

I think Tony was in a distressed state because his daughter had passed away a few days ago. He would have been upset and was looking for a way to let his anger out. One thing I can not understand is the way that I think he killed him.

So dad's car would have stopped on this far, out-of-the-way road, and Tony came over to him saying he would help. He would have taken him into his car to probably bring him to the nearest phone to call for a tow truck. At least that is what he told him.

In the autopsy report, it stated that there was blunt trauma to the head. This would fit with the car crash idea, considering he "rolled three times.'' Instead, I think Tony hit him in the head as they were driving. He killed him at some point in the next half-hour with a piece of shrapnel in his chest. One thing I do hope, deep in my soul, is that he was unconscious for this whole thing. I hope he didn't suffer.

Tony, at some point, had brought the dead body back of my father to his car and made it seem like he was in an accident. I think he took some sort of hard tool and broke dad's car in the front and on the back a few times. He would not be able to get away with this if his car wasn't damaged too, so I believe he did something similar with his own, except less. I can not understand why he did that.

There is no motive to kill my dad. No connection. He obviously lost a lot of money in this whole ordeal and could have avoided it if he killed someone else a different way. Also, why didn't he just kill him right then and there? This is all speculation, so this could be incorrect in a few, or even all of these spots, but I can not ignore the signs any longer.

The last thing I would ever believe dad to die of would be a car accident. I have never met anyone else more careful on the road than he was. That is actually why I started looking into his death more thoroughly. It never sat right with me that he died in that way, and I think the pictures of the broken-down car are enough to help prove my point.

Rebecca's heart had started to race since the beginning of reading, and now it was pounding through her like an avalanche dropping blocks of snow onto her body. Her whole life was changing and re-aligning in these paragraphs that Dennis had constructed at some point in the near past. It hurt even more due to the fact that he told her none of this, but that wasn't what mattered. Dennis believed that her dad was murdered and she had absolutely no reason not to trust him on this. It was all his words and thoughts that he never told her, after all.

She flipped back to the pages that contained two different pictures of the car in different angles. In both, you could kind of see where a person had dented it by their own doing, instead of actually hitting another car. Rebecca came up with her own conclusion that it was made by a sledgehammer to the size of the impact point, and the many different dents that would fit its shape.

She was not as bothered by this revelation as any sane person would be, but after finding out her brother lied to her, this was nothing. In fact, she was very interested in the way that he was able to pull off the stunt in such a manner, considering no one ever suspected a thing. Well, until Dennis, that is. She was about to close the homemade booklet when a small piece of paper flitted out from the back. A street name was scribbled across it.