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“Yeah, maybe.”

Simone shares the sad resignation that is radiating off her husband. She too might like to rewrite history, plea ignorance, make different choices. Who wouldn’t? However, she, unlike perhaps her husband at this point, can accept these for the impossible, wishful fantasies they are. And acknowledge the price that comes from clinging to them, one she’s not willing to pay.

Something had been unearthed, not just excruciating secrets from the past, but a clarity about the present, about how easily we can fool ourselves about who we are, what we want, and what is right. But even more importantly, a vision for the future that doesn’t lose sight of those things.

Simone is going to help set right some wrongs of the past; she’s going to do whatever she can to do right by Wade Freeman and the people who loved him; she’s going to wrestle with her own regrets; she’s going to map out a path to come back to herself, her ambitions, her desires. But all that, at this very moment, can wait. For now, she goes over and takes her husband’s hand.

“Come on, let’s go home and get some rest. Tomorrow’s going to be a long day.”

EPILOGUE

WHAT’S DONE IN THE DARK—SEASON TWO, PILOT EPISODE

Cue AMBIENT SOUND: Birds chirping, the thud of footfalls against the dirt, background conversational noise. Fade into louder dialogue.

JEDIDIAH JENKINS: This is it? This tree?

KWAME WALKER: Yeah, this is the spot.

JEDIDIAH JENKINS: It’s peaceful at least, I like that.

KWAME WALKER: Marjorie planted this row of flowers. Pink peonies.

JEDIDIAH JENKINS: They’re pretty and all, but I don’t know about her guilt garden. Doesn’t make it right for me. Not one bit. Those are blood flowers far as I’m concerned.

Fade to VOICE-OVER

This story doesn’t have a happy ending, or a tidy one. In fact, it’s the exact opposite of tidy. There’s no mystery solved here, no satisfactory justice served, no precise resolutions or dramatic aha moments. But that makes it more of a reflection of real life than any other piece I’ve ever reported. This is a story about how we deal with unanswerable questions—starting with what happened to a kid named Wade Freeman, the best friend of Jedidiah Jenkins, who you just heard as he walked over to Wade’s grave for the very first time since his body was discovered here, sixty years after Wade first went missing. The gravesite is on a twenty-five-acre farm in a rural stretch of Wisconsin north of Milwaukee.

Over the course of my reporting on Wade’s death, I discovered his final resting place—but we can never know with any true certainty what exactly happened to the seventeen-year-old in the late hours of May 18, 1961, other than that he died while he was with two fellow students from his boarding school. Was it an accident, a teenage prank gone awry, or was something more intentional or sinister at play?

And given that Wade was a Black kid, and the two boys he was with that fateful night were white, there’s another factor to weigh. Was this racially motivated?

That’s just one vexing question to be explored through this story. There are many others: Who gets the benefit of the doubt? How well do we know the ones we love and what they’re capable of? How much is the past truly the past? We may not find answers, but the very search for them is itself revealing… A search that will take us on a journey through decades-old secrets, twisted loyalties, and a quest for justice that ran out of time. I’m Kwame Walker, and this is What’s Done in the Dark…

Cue MUSIC

JEDIDIAH JENKINS: Kills me I’ll never know what happened to Wade, how he ended up here, six feet under the dirt, in the middle of nowhere, alone. We had our whole lives ahead of us, determined to make the most of ourselves and our opportunities, and then my friend was just gone. It still doesn’t feel real. I don’t care how many days and decades have passed, still doesn’t.

Cue VOICE-OVER

Jedidiah Jenkins and Wade Freeman were two of five Black students awarded scholarships to attend the prestigious Tate School just outside of Milwaukee, in 1957, just a few years after Brown v. Board of Education was decided. The boys formed a bond born of fortune, fear, and solidarity—especially Wade and Jedidiah, who goes by JJ. None of them had been around many white people before they arrived at Tate, beyond passing them on the street, eyes down in their hometowns in the Jim Crow South. But they knew better than to squander this opportunity, so they worked hard to excel. Even when they were ostracized or looked down upon, they made sure to try out for the teams, join clubs, and study their asses off to get good grades. Wade was even on track to be valedictorian, and had already been accepted to Howard University, with dreams of following in the footsteps of his hero, the writer James Baldwin. Though they often kept to themselves in general, Wade was the most open to branching out. He was heavily involved in even more extracurriculars than the other guys, which brought him into closer contact with many of the white boys on campus.

JEDIDIAH JENKINS: Wade could be too trusting for his own good. I kept to myself for the most part. I ran track every year because it was something I loved; only time I felt truly free when I was on that campus. But I didn’t socialize because I knew better and I warned him to do the same, to keep to himself and his own kind, for his own damn good. But he didn’t listen. He wanted to take advantage of being a part of everything… chess, debate, football, you name it.

Guess spending time with those boys, he did get to thinking they were buddies. He got too comfortable. Especially with Larry and Roger, who was just straight bad news. Cocky son of a bitch. They were all a little bit cocky, though. That’s what happens when you’re rich and the world is yours. I musta told Wade a thousand times not to trust ’em. If only he’d listened…

Cue VOICE-OVER

JJ is referring to two Tate students in particular, Lawrence Hartwell and Roger Macon, who were by many accounts “golden boys” on campus. The night in question, the night Wade disappeared, an eyewitness saw him getting into a car—Roger’s car—with the two of them. It was the evening before finals, and Wade told JJ he was going to be back to their dorm room by nine p.m. to study and get a good night’s sleep before exams the next day. It’s a mystery how or why he ended up leaving campus with these two classmates. The witness, though, says it appeared to be friendly enough. Except… Wade was never seen again. For over fifty years, the story went that he drowned in a reservoir not too far away from campus. That theory came from finding his shoes in the area. But it never felt right to JJ.

JEDIDIAH JENKINS: No way Wade drowned. He hated the water since his little sister drowned in front of him when they were young. He wouldn’t go near anything deeper than a puddle. And he was hardly gonna go to some dark, secluded woods with any of those white kids of his free will, strip down to his skivvies, and go for a dip. He may have been friendly with them, or thought he was, but still, that’s too far. You felt the constant threat of violence in your bones back then. It was like a bitter taste that stayed in the backs of our throats. People got no idea what it’s like to swallow that kinda terror on a daily basis. Mind you, we got to Tate not too long after Emmett Till’s murder. We were his same age. We weren’t dumb. Wade wasn’t dumb.

Cue VOICE-OVER

Turns out Jedidiah was right. We know Wade didn’t drown. We even know he didn’t die out at that reservoir where they found his shoes. Instead, his body ended up on that farm north of Milwaukee. And we know Roger and Larry brought him there that night. After keeping the secret for six decades, Marjorie O’Neil, Larry’s girlfriend at the time, recently confessed to this, to the authorities and to me, about her role that night…

MARJORIE O’NEIL: They just showed up at my daddy’s farm real late. Outta the blue. With a body in the trunk. I didn’t know what to think or do. I was a seventeen-year-old girl who knew nothing about nothing. But hand to God, I don’t think they meant to hurt that boy. Larry was a mess when he got here, when he begged me to help him. Said it was an accident, and I believed him. Larry had his flaws, but I never saw him be cruel or violent or anything. Not the Larry I knew.