The white and gray mobile homes sit side by side, line by line, atop a sun-baked hill several miles outside town. There’s a worn sign at the entry of the community. Black stick-on letters. Some curling from the heat. “BEAVER CREEK - A MOBILE HOME COMMUNITY.”

It doesn’t take long to find someone here who can tell you how to get the place where it happened. Drive all the way around. It’ll be on your right. No. 268. You’ll find it.

And you do.

No. 268 is the same drab color of the other 100 mobile homes here. It has the same small concrete parking pad. It has the same lack of trees, the same sparse grass, and the same red clay, hard as the kind of lives that must be led here.

But No. 268 also has something different. A big, green trash dumpster situated near the front door. Windows that are pushed as far open as they will go, emitting an odor that makes a chicken farm smell sweet.

No. 268 is an infamous place now. Here, a man was charged last week with imprisoning and abusing his wife and four children for three years. Right under the nose of a community where mobile homes sit like decrepit dominoes, not any more than 14 adult-sized steps from one trailer to the next.

Here, maggots were found in unflushed toilets. Used toilet paper littered the floor. Roaches ran rampant. As did garbage and rotten food.

And the talk is what you might expect. Nope, hardly ever saw him. Sometimes you might see her open the front door just wide enough to reach a hand through for a notice taped to her door. Never saw the kids, though. Didn’t come outside and play. Don’t know how it could’ve happened. Never heard anything out of that trailer. Looks like somebody would’ve heard something, you know? Looks like the wife would’ve gotten out of there to get help when the husband was gone off to work.

But looks are deceiving.

Or are they?

The Beaver Creek Mobile Home Community looks like a place where life is clung to, where joy is a rarity in the daily grind of barely getting by.

Here, in this community, is a human precipice. Here, falling off the edge of how humans were meant to live and into the abyss of how they weren’t is just a misstep away.

It’s easy to see how a family could become isolated from the outside world here. It’s easy to see the nasty old mattresses left to rot at the end of the street where the big dumpsters are. It’s easy to see the little girl who is toddling about outside her mobile home, barefooted, no shirt, a bottle in her mouth, a diaper on her behind.

“Everybody keeps saying something about a beaten wife syndrome,” a neighbor said, “but I don’t get it.”

I do. Look around you. It’s called the beaten life syndrome.

Salley M. McInerney can be reached by emailing salley@hartcom.net.