Carol Webb found her at six-fourteen in the morning.
She knew the time because she always checked her watch at the park gate. Thirty years of early mornings had made it a habit she couldn't break even in retirement.
Her dog Biscuit ran ahead like always, nose down, tail up, happy with the world.
Carol walked behind him thinking about nothing the shopping, the weather, the call she kept forgetting to return.
Then Biscuit stopped, not the way he stopped to sniff something. The way he stopped when something was wrong, four feet planted in the wet grass, he looked back at Carol with eyes that said don't come any closer and come here right now at the same time.
Carol walked over to the spot,the girl was lying at the edge of the path where the grass met the trees.
Young, dark hair, a navy coat buttoned wrong second button through the third hole, pulling the whole thing sideways,One shoe on, one foot bare against the cold wet ground.
"Hello?" Carol said.
She knew it was pointless. She said it anyway.
She walked close enough to see the face, her eyes were closed, her facial expression the particular emptiness that Carol had seen enough times in her nursing years to recognize without question.
She took out her phone, called the police department immediately.
Stood over the girl and waited.
Biscuit sat at her feet and didn't make a sound.By seven-thirty the whole district was awake,people gathered at the park gate the way people always do drawn by the blue lights and the yellow tape and the simple terrible fact that something had happened somewhere they walked every day.
They stood in groups, coats pulled tight. Voices low.
"Does anyone know who she is?" said a woman in a red scarf.
"I think she lives on Clover Street," said the man beside her, he was still in his slippers. "The yellow building on the corner. I've seen her before."
"That's her," said a younger woman pushing a pram,"I know her always had her headphones in."
"She's so young," the man in the slippers said quietly.
Nobody answered that.
"I saw her last night." another voice chirped In, everyone turned.
A young man stepped forward from the back of the crowd wearing a construction jacket, his Coffee cup going cold in his hand.
He looked uncomfortable but kept talking,
"About nine o'clock, outside the grocery on the high street she was standing there with someone."
"Who?" said the woman in the red scarf.
"A man. Older. Maybe forty-five. Grey coat. Tall." He frowned. "They were talking. I didn't hear what about. I just noticed because she didn't look happy about it."
"What do you mean she didn't look happy?" said the woman with the pram.
"Like she wanted to leave but couldn't. You know when someone keeps talking and you keep looking for a way out?" He shook his head. "She kept looking down the street. Like she was waiting for something to interrupt them."
"Did he touch her?" someone asked.
"Not that I saw. He just talked. She just stood there." He looked down at his cup. "I went inside to do my shopping. When I came out fifteen minutes later they were both gone."
"You have to tell the police," said the woman in the red scarf.
"I know."
He didn't move right away.
"I just keep thinking," he said. "Fifteen minutes. I was inside fifteen minutes." He stopped. Swallowed. "What if I had just stayed outside."
Nobody told him that wouldn't have changed anything.
Because none of them knew if that was true.
"Did she have family?" said the man in the slippers.
"I don't know," said the woman in the red scarf. "I barely knew her. Just the nodding. Just the headphones."
"Someone will have to tell them," he said.
The woman with the pram looked down at her sleeping baby. Then back at the tape. She didn't say anything.
A man in a dark coat ducked under the tape.
Tall, Calm, the kind of calm that came from doing this too many times to panic anymore. He walked straight to the treeline without looking at the crowd.
Crouched in the wet grass.
Looked at something nobody outside the tape could see.
"Who is that?" said the young man in the construction jacket.
"Detective James," said Carol Webb from her spot near the gate, she hadn't moved since she made the call,"He's good, he will figure it out."
Nobody responded.
They just watched him work.
"She always had her headphones in," said the woman with the pram again, quietly, almost to herself. "I used to wonder what she listened to."
Still nobody answered.
The baby slept.
The blue lights turned slowly in the grey morning.
And in the wet grass near the treeline where nobody outside could see beside a girl with one bare foot and a coat buttoned wrong something small and dry and deliberate sat perfectly still.
A moth
Placed not fallen.