12-year old Karissa Boudreau first disappeared on January 27, after apparently having an argument with her mother, Penny. Penny indicated that she had left Karissa in the car and gone into the Bridgewater, Nova Scotia Sobey’s Supermarket for a few minutes, and that Karissa was gone when she returned to the car.

For most of us, the situation just deteriorated from there. I knew Penny from high school, and she and Karissa used to come to our church for Sunday School when they were living in this area. My first reaction, when the disappearance was reported in the news, was that this was a situation of a girl, smarting from a disagreement, who was temporarily hiding out at a friend’s home to teach her mother a lesson.

A week went by and Karissa had not returned or called, despite a tearful pleading by her mother on television for Karissa to contact them. It became apparent that unless she was staying with completely irresponsible people, someone should have made contact. Sightings of her walking her and there in the Bridgewater area were reported, none of which resulted in anyone actually locating her.

After two weeks, we were all forced to move on to more terrifying scenarios: she was in the hands of a predator, or she might have attempted to cross the LaHave River on the ice, and fallen through. Police divers searched the river area, while helicopters scanned the shoreline and roads in the area. No sign of Karissa Boudreau. People responded in their unique ways: many people prayed for her safe return, while others established a number of Facebook groups that offered a chance to exchange comments from people as far away as Texas, and later provided an outlet for name-calling and gossip when the case became even more troubled.

A bit over a week ago someone called 911 after seeing what they thought was a body in the snow just up from the western side of the river, within walking distance from Karissa’s home, and across and downriver from the Sobey’s parking area. Police responded, and in what at the time was considered a strange move, refused to release any information on the identity of the body for several days, while it was autopsied in Halifax. They did eventually say that the body was that of a “young Caucasian female”, and that was enough for most people to identify it as Karissa, although many didn’t give up hope and prayed more feverously.

The delay seemed unwarranted, but I guess we were naïve not to realize that police knew from the initial discovery that it was Karissa, but their release of this information was hampered by the need to announce as the same time that the case was now a homicide: Karissa had not likely crossed the ice and either drowned on the way, or collapsed on the opposite bank, since (according to rumors circulating at this time) her throat had been cut. Karissa had been murdered.

This morning I was over to the grandparents’ home, delivering to them a copy of a possible song for the funeral. Since Karissa is originally from this area, the funeral is here in Barrington, with the minister of our church officiating. They wanted a recording of “Amazing Grace” and I bought a download from iTunes that seemed ideal. We listened to it, and the grandmother, after crying through it, pronounced it “perfect”.

As I left their home she said, “We never dreamt this could happen.” Certainly no one did. From our early notion of a temporary runaway, Karissa had quite suddenly become no longer lost, but tragically dead, the victim of a cruel and senseless crime that everyone struggles to comprehend. If this had not already escalated into everyone’s worse case scenario, police have apparently been questioning her mother and her mother’s boyfriend, and searching their home and vehicles.

Some say that an earthquake troubles people far more than most would have imagined. We accept most storms, lashings of wind and sleet, but when the very ground that is our foundation trembles, a rift develops in our mind as well as in the earth’s crust. Similarly with Karissa, many people are struggling with something that should not have happened, something that carries no explanation that our minds can apply to it. To us it seems beyond reason, and it troubles us deeply.

I can see that a vast gulf has opened at the feet of the grandparents, and they will never cross it in their lifetimes. Some things you can’t classify, label, and file away as understood.

I think a lot of us project the yet unfinished story of Karissa onto the world as a whole. “What’s wrong with this world?” people continually ask. We’ve been given a glimpse of the bottom side—the under the rocks, down in the damp crawl-space, deep into the darkness and cobwebs of humanity area that we certainly have little familiarity with, and fervently hoped really didn’t even exist, at least not near enough to our world that someone could lift up the floorboards and stick our heads down there for a look.

Tomorrow, little Karissa will be buried, and the rest of us will be left to deal with the aftermath— certainly the legal matters that are far from finished, but also handling the realization that such things can, and do happen in our world. We may be a little less trusting, a lot more careful, and perhaps more discouraged.

But eventually we’ll walk those floorboards again, and perhaps even forget that another world lurks beneath.

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