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Like so many ghost sightings, Scott Johnson came back to me in a photograph. My mother had taken the crooked shot years earlier with a disposable camera. Inside the frame, Scott is lying in our front yard, one cheek resting on the grass, his eyes staring up blankly, like two hard marbles. Standing on his back, smiling proudly, I am the little girl with a messy blond ponytail.

The photo was taken in 1992, the year before the Mississippi rose so high it washed over southern Illinois and parts of Missouri, coming awfully close to our southeastern Iowa farmhouse. It ran into valleys and parking lots, asphyxiating crops as it surged between rows of soybeans and corn. The water washed up pesticides and fertilizers from the farms, then deposited the poison in towns, playgrounds, and bayous all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico. It eventually smothered St. Louis in ten feet of water. All across the Midwest, the dead returned to haunt the living as the flood unearthed caskets and washed human bones to the surface. The Batesville Casket Company began installing tubes in its new coffins so it could insert tags to identify any future marooned corpses.

I brought the photo up close, trying to see something in Scott's expression—a flicker of madness in his eyes, a tension in his jaw—any foreshadowing of what went wrong that day so long ago.

I hadn't seen the photo or heard the name Scott Johnson in years. Now I couldn’t stop silently repeating it to myself. I wanted to pinpoint the moment he became a killer, but there was nothing in his face in this photo, no misery, no why. His dusky blue eyes were empty and opaque, like a dead deer's. And that's what made them so frightening—they were animal eyes, almost not human.

In some ways, Scott looked in the picture exactly as I remembered him: the gentle welder who had been my mother's lover for three years, up until a few months before he died. There was the silver hoop earring, the torn-up blue T-shirt he'd never throw away, and the dusty-brown rattail that had made him distinctly cooler than my moustache-and-side-part father—at least in that early nineties sort of way. There was that boyish handsomeness—full lips and troubled blue eyes. But now the stoner aesthetic seemed like a costume, a way to pass off his debilitating shyness and distant personality as defiance. I couldn't tell precisely when Scott became someone capable of murder, but I think that by the time this photo was taken he was already dead.

The sudden brutality that gripped the last hours of his life—and eternally came to characterize it—was a mystery I couldn't put out of my mind, even long after I had put the photograph back in its box. What broke this soft-spoken, achingly vulnerable man and made him so violent? Had he been a killer all along and we just didn't see it? His was a crime no one ever understood, with no apparent motive. Even his suicide note shrugged: "Give my cat to my dad." Why didn't he just kill himself? What debt did Crystal pay? And why didn't he kill us? After all, he was with us the day he died. 

Buy Rachel Corbett's A Killing in Iowa for $2.99.