that I want Aidan with me. You figure out how to get money to us after. We’ll go away
I smoothed the paper under my hand, though it was perfectly flat. I kept reading the content over and over—though I hadn’t been hired for content, had I? I was stuck here, hoping that the sentence would finish, that something would link up and make sense.
After a few seconds, I sat back.
“Tough case?” Sherry called from across the room. She sat forward in her chair, making me think of her open, overly giving handwriting, her Back in a jiff! Those round letters, the ending flourishes of those ffs, like an arm curled, beckoning.
I glanced back at the grocery list. “Pretty tough,” I said.
She lit up and hurried to my side, looking down at the two samples for a moment. “I don’t know how you can tell anything from that,” she said. “Especially that one. Block letters all look the same, don’t they?”
We stared at the pages. “Do you know the little boy’s family?” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “I mean, doesn’t everyone know everyone else around here?”
“No,” I said.
“Yeah, but you’re—well.” She could have said new to town, but she hadn’t.
“Tell me about the father,” I said.
Sherry’s eyes drifted back toward the note and list. “I thought it was the mother who wrote these.”
“I was just wondering.” I paused, uncertain. Probably it was wrong to prey on what I could tell from the big open bowls of Sherry’s a’s and o’s. “Just wondering who had her so scared.”
Sherry’s mouth dropped open. She pulled a sample closer to her with a manicured finger. “You can tell that from just—from just a grocery list?”
“You can tell a lot from a grocery list,” I said, enjoying the demonstration a little, despite myself. “She was young. She was poor. She loved her son. She had a cat.”
“You can tell she had a cat—”
I pulled the list back toward me. “I’m not a psychic. Cat food’s on the list.”
“Oh,” Sherry said with a shaky laugh. “Just like you can tell she likes peanut butter.”
“Or Aidan does.”
“I bet he does,” Sherry agreed, her voice gone soft.
I had a vision of Joshua, age three or so, crying from being left at the bad day care while I worked a double shift. My little boy had loved peanut butter. He used to love everything, including me. I missed that age, his sturdy little legs figuring out the world, but always running back to throw himself at me. I hadn’t wanted to leave him at day care, then or ever. In the time I was gone, I could imagine a hundred ways for him to be taken from me. A hundred impossible ways to lose him.
This was all wrong. I should be telling CEOs which executives not to hire, or mining the halting love letters my lonelyhearts sent me. I should be turning Sherry’s attention back to the question she hadn’t answered, about Aidan’s dad. But it was surprisingly pleasant to be talking this way to another woman, another mother. I hesitated, thinking of the women at my door from the Boosters, and then said, “For about two years, mine wouldn’t eat anything but creamy peanut butter sandwiches with the crusts cut off. Morning, noon, and night.”
Sherry looked behind her, found an extra chair, and pulled it up next to me. Her bright ponytail swung over her shoulder. “Mine’s five,” she said. “I can’t talk about him enough. How old is yours?”
My head felt a little light. “He’s a teenager. I wish he were still five.”
“Yeah, because at five you can still put them in your pocket, you know? Or at least pick them up and carry them out to the car if they’re being jerks. In some ways I can’t wait for Jamey to grow up and turn into what he’ll be,” she said. “But in other ways, I want time to stop. I want him to stay perfect, just the way he is.”
Perfect ears, perfect hands. I was often startled by Joshua’s beauty. How had something so perfect come from such a mess? “Except—” I stopped. Was my life so empty that I was turning into a person who confided in strangers? Sherry had her fist hooked at her chin, waiting. “Except that he was perfect before, and he’s perfect now, and he’ll be perfect tomorrow,” I said. “Suddenly he’s a different boy than the one you knew, but still—perfect.”
“That’s it,” Sherry said, triumphantly. “That’s exactly—”
Across the room, the door swung open, banging against the wall. Sherry jumped to her feet. I expected the sheriff or another officer but instead a tall, thick man in a grease-smeared zip-up jacket stood in the doorway.
This was Aidan’s father. I knew it from the shifty look Sherry gave me as she returned to her desk. I slid the handwriting samples out of sight.
“He’s not in at the moment, Bo,” Sherry said.
“Is he on vacation? I need to know what’s going on.” The man’s voice violated the silent room.
“He would call you if there was anything at all,” Sherry said. “I can have him check in when he gets back.”
Bo ran his meaty fingers through his hair, then jammed his fists into his jacket pockets. “I mean it, Sherry, I need to be kept up to speed here. Are they even trying to find my kid?” His eyes swept the room and located me. He froze. “You got some help in to find him or something? Those detectives—”
“She’s just doing a favor for the sheriff,” Sherry said. “Now, why don’t you give us your number again and I’ll let him know you were here.” She scooted a notepad across the counter to him and held out a pen. He grabbed it and scratched at the paper while Sherry watched. “Put your name down, too,” she murmured.
“Shit, Sherry, you don’t think he knows my number by now?” But he didn’t look up. His hand dragged across the notepad and thumped the pen down. “The second he gets in, all right? I want answers.” He wrenched the door open, paused, gave me another look, and was gone.
We listened to his fading footsteps down the stairs. It felt as though he’d taken half the oxygen in the room with him.
With a flourish, Sherry ripped the message from Bo off the notepad and marched it back to me, held high over her head, a flag. “Looky what I got,” she sang. “Would I not make the best detective? Sheriff won’t let me do anything but take calls and stuff, but I say I’ve got what it takes.” She slid the paper in front of me.
“I don’t even need to see it,” I said.
“I know,” Sherry said, shrugging. “He’s wearing it like an aftershave, isn’t he? He didn’t used to be so—well, maybe he always was. We all went to high school together, me and Bo and—but so what? What do you see?”
For a moment, I didn’t answer or look at Bo’s message. This wasn’t what Sheriff Keller had asked me to do. He wouldn’t like it, and I didn’t, either. This sample would taint the process—though of course encountering Aidan’s dad in person had probably already done that. I thought about the pressed block letters of Aidan’s mom’s grocery list, about the fear etched into such a perfect word as bananas.
I picked up the message. White paper, blue ink. It had come from a memo pad with designated blanks for the time and date and the caller’s name and number. Bo had scribbled on the diagonal across the entire sheet. The numbers were uneven, his signature sloppy. He had what my training had taught me to call resentment lines, vertical strokes in letters that clawed across the page like shovels digging a grave. Hidden in each millimeter of ink—Bo Ransey—was insult sustained, offense calculated. Not to mention the coiled twirls in his B and R, lying in wait like snakes.
I looked up.
Sherry put her palms on the desk and sighed. “I know,” she said. “I hope she gets away, too.”
Chapter Four
After a long shared silence, Sherry went back to her desk. I laid the samples side by side and studied them again.
The plastic sleeve turned out to be the most interesting and confusing of the pieces provided. Inside was an original sample, several two-inch or smaller shreds of blue stationery ripped and charred. Only a few inches o
f writing was visible between them. I tried to puzzle the pieces together without taking them out of the sleeve—they would disintegrate if I tried. All I could do was study the few discernible words visible:
to, and, never your, need to, her, love
I had the feeling the author was taking care to be clear—legible as well as firm in the message itself. I spent a long time on each curve, on the spaces between words.
Tearing myself away was like rising out of water. I looked around me, stretched. The sheriff hadn’t returned. No one had come through the door. I pulled a notebook and pen from my purse.
About the first two samples, I knew what I had to say. I smoothed the paper and bent to the task, but the words wouldn’t come. At last I had to admit that I didn’t want them to. I pictured the sheriff coming back to a handwritten analysis, poring over my self-conscious script to find something to mock.
The librarian who’d taught me my first little bit of analysis had warned me. “It will mess up your own handwriting for a while,” he’d explained to that small group of curiosity seekers at the community center. Kentucky. Everyone there had a slow drawl that twisted words into new formations. “You’ll have to stop thinking about handwriting,” he had said, “just to get the check for the light bill written out.”
Aidan’s mom’s handwriting swam in front of my eyes. I hadn’t brought my laptop because of the lobby security, and now I couldn’t bring myself to leave behind anything handwritten. I would go home to type my report. It would take longer to be done with the project, but I still needed these precautions, these rituals. The sheriff would understand, or at least think he did.
I LEFT THE samples behind with Sherry, but thought about them as I left the courthouse and retrieved my truck from the square. Outside, the sky was still bright and inviting, one of those perfect fall days, maybe one of the last of its kind. When the turn came to return to the apartment, I drove on.
I meandered through the town, letting my hand dangle out the open window. At the end of town, real estate signs attached to fences enclosed fallow fields. They’d be a development of starter homes before too long. Parks was a nice place to start. Back in town, I found an enclave of older, nicer houses and turned in to shop them. Parks, it seemed, was a nice place to end up, too.
I drove back through town and out the other side, still restless. Passing over the highway, I slowed to watch the cars rushing along the ribbon of gray toward the horizon. On the other side of the interstate, I pulled into the parking lot for the Dairy Bar and sat with the key still in the ignition. This was the place in town I felt most at home. That was the embarrassing truth of the matter—more at home at the local ice cream shop than even the place I lay my head at night. I’d worked at a place just like this, same name, back when I was a kid. It was the only explanation for why I’d let this little ice cream shed dictate where Joshua and I would land this time around.
We had left Chicago that morning early with no plan. Maybe Ohio again. Ohio was quiet, and far. But not Cincinnati. Smaller towns were better. I took a different direction there, too, dipping south into Indiana with the notion of swinging around Indianapolis and then east until we found something suitable.
Only a few hours into the drive, though, we were miserable, baked to the seats and battered by the highway wind coming through the windows. When a patch of roadside facilities presented itself, we stopped to fill the tank and stretch. Then I spotted the Dairy Bar sign. The same lettering for the neon sign and everything.
“They have the best burgers,” I said to Joshua through the window. “I used to work at the one back in Wisconsin.” I allowed an image to climb through the opening in my memory: my best friend, Theresa, leaning into the sliding window to order a malted milkshake big enough to ruin dinner and maybe breakfast the next day, too. Making faces at me as I worked. Theresa, once a real person, was now only a regret. When she came to mind, I stuffed her back down into the locked bin of my mind. A lot of people lived there, but wondering about Theresa only led to black thoughts and bad dreams. Theresa and my mother. “I had no idea these were a chain,” I said.
Joshua glared at the sign and back at me. He didn’t want a cheeseburger or a hot dog. He didn’t want anything, not even the chocolate malt I bought him. He wanted to be furious. He didn’t remember being mad about moving to Chicago, didn’t know that he would attach himself to the next place, too. And of course he didn’t understand why we’d had to leave in the first place, why we always had to leave. After I finished my burger, I drove us not back to the highway but into the town. At the courthouse square, I admired the white pillars and bought a paper at the little newsstand café.
Joshua hadn’t said more than a few words all morning, but he broke his silence when I returned to the truck and opened the paper to the ads. “You’re going to pick a town based on a crappy malt?” he said.
“I’m picking a town based on cheap rent,” I said. “And I think my friend Kent lives not too far away.”
He narrowed his eyes. “You don’t have any friends.”
“My colleague, then. The crappy malt is just a bonus.”
Not a bonus but a salvageable piece of my childhood, something I could keep, something I could return to, for crying out loud. What was the harm in that? One good memory—was it too much to ask?
Now I leaned into the sliding service window to order. The woman inside wore the familiar Dairy Bar–pink golf shirt, the logo over the breast. I could see through the store out the back door to another woman, much older and stooped, smoking a cigarette and wearing the same logo pink shirt. I had once owned that shirt, had once had the seventeen flavors of malted milkshakes memorized. On the hand-painted menu at my shoulder now, the flavor count appeared to be a little higher. Next to the menu, Aidan Ransey’s face peered out from one of his posters. I turned my back on him and watched the traffic.
I was sipping my milkshake at a picnic table when a county cop car pulled in next to my truck. The driver hopped out and headed for the window. I watched after him. I was starting to recognize a few of the faces from the courthouse lobby. Then the passenger door opened and the sheriff emerged.
“You on a stakeout?” he called. He wore sunglasses, his black ball cap pulled low over them. “Or shake out, I should say.”
I raised my cup in a toast, hoping he wouldn’t feel that he needed to be friendlier than that. He came over anyway.
“Did you get a chance to look at the ransom note?”
“The copy of the note,” I said. “I’ll do my best with the partial information I’ve received to get you a report this afternoon.”
“Why don’t you report right now?”
“Don’t want to keep you from your malted,” I said.
His eyebrows rose. He took off the glasses and hung them in the pocket of his shirt. “We’re here on county business.”
Free malteds, then. I made a noncommittal noise around my straw.
“I guess you know the Ransey family runs this place—”
The straw dropped out of my mouth. “They do?” The other officer stood at the service window, leaning low to talk to someone inside. Out of all the things I might have learned, the fact that the Ranseys dealt in ice cream startled me. I’d picked up a certain global disdain for the Ranseys that no one had yet explained—that surprise that anyone might “hup to” for them—but maybe I was only protective of the Dairy Bar for my own reasons. I had been elbow-deep in the ice cream cooler for a full summer, breaking in my teenage back rolling big bins of chocolate sauce and hauling heavy bags of powdered malt and ice milk crystals in and out of the storage room. My first job, my first chance at freedom.
“You didn’t know? You come here often?”
Could he even hear himself? He could. He was blushing up to his hat.
“Once in a while,” I said. “We had one of these places where I grew up.”
“Oh?” He looked up at the Dairy Bar sign. “Where’s that?”
I slurped at my shake for
a time. “Did you want that report?”
The sheriff hitched a boot over the seat on the other side of the table and sat sideways to me.
“OK, first off, the two photocopied samples,” I said. “I identified some markers—are you going to write this down?”
He grinned at me. “Are you?”
“I identified some markers in the two pink samples that lead me to believe the author is a single individual,” I said. “Some of the letter shapes are highly idiosyncratic, even though the author wrote them in what seems like two different situations. Different pens, different styles, maybe with different levels of urgency. If you’d asked someone to produce two handwriting samples that looked completely different from one another, they couldn’t have done a better job. But—definitely the same hand.”
“The same hand,” he said.
“The same person,” I said. “I’m assuming that’s what you wanted to know.”
“So the mother took him?”
At the Dairy Bar service window, the other officer was leaning in, flirting with the girl behind the counter.
“I can’t tell you that,” I said. “I never said I could.”
“The ransom note—”
“Did you read that note?” I said. “I’m less interested in the script than I am in where the rest of that note is. The actual note, not a reasonable facsimile.”
He glared at me. “You can’t tell me because the thing’s ripped or what?”
“Because it doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “The third sample, the little pieces of nothing, make more sense than that note.”
“OK, the pieces,” he said. “What about them?”
“Different hand,” I said. “But you probably didn’t need me for that. Written by a man, I think, but that’s a bit of a guess. Someone hesitant to say what he was trying to say, sort of—halting and stunted. Labored. He probably spent a lot of time on it, maybe started over a couple of times? He does this thing before his words where he taps the paper a few times with his pen, and then goes on. He might have been lying or saying something difficult—or both. That one was from the Ransey house, too?”
The Day I Died Page 4
