The Day I Died

by Lori Rader-Day

  He didn’t want to answer. “The nanny’s room. From the garbage.”

  When did a young woman burn a letter with the word love in it? Either the love was over, going bad, or forbidden.

  “Would you recognize the handwriting in the pieces again if you saw it?” the sheriff said.

  “Out of context? It’s hard to say.” I remembered back to the feeling of sinking below the surface of the shredded sample into another life, a story not mine. “I had the feeling that he was being careful to be clear. His handwriting might be smaller and tighter in this note than in something he was just dashing off. But maybe.”

  “That doesn’t leave us with much, does it?”

  “Well, we didn’t start with much, did we?” I said. “Here’s what I can tell you. The same person wrote the first two samples, the list and the partial. If you say one is from Aidan’s mother, then both are. If it’s the nanny—” I recalled the slight slant to Aidan’s name in the grocery list. No one else could have written that list. “Fine. The mother wrote them both. But that doesn’t mean she took him. Or if she took him—”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  Keller pulled his other leg over the bench and faced me. “Is there more?”

  Was it professional courtesy to tell him I could rule out Aidan’s dad as the source of the third sample, having seen his heavy, thudding hand already? Or was it just stepping in a pile of trouble? Either way—I’d done the work I’d been hired to do. I had a lot of questions about the household the child was missing from, but not questions I had a right to ask.

  “That’s all,” I said.

  I could tell he didn’t believe me. We both turned to see his partner coming across the parking lot with a malt in each hand. His knuckles had that particular splotchy pink sunburn across them I recognized from a long day spent with hands on the steering wheel. The burn ran down to both wrists. The officer nodded to me and held out one of the cups to Keller.

  “I got you strawberry,” he said.

  The sheriff took the cup sternly. His ears were strawberry colored, too. He didn’t glance my way until he’d dismounted the picnic table and reached the passenger door of the cruiser. “You’ll send that all in a formal report,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

  It wasn’t a question for me, either. I wanted nothing more than to be done with the Ranseys and this man. I stood and fed my cup into the trash bin. “Yes, sir,” I said to the retreating car.

  Chapter Five

  The junior-senior high school sat among harvested cornfields just outside of town, a sprawling single-story outlet mall of a place inconvenient to almost everyone. Joshua took the bus to school, but I could tell by the station wagons with mismatched doors and repurposed farm trucks in the lot that the older students drove themselves.

  I checked in at the front office, got a pass, and was led to a waiting area for the guidance counselor. I didn’t want to wait. The student receptionist glanced at my tapping foot. When the counselor’s door finally opened, a lanky man emerged with his arm around the back of a young woman with puffy eyes. The man, dressed in a sleek gray suit more stylish and probably more expensive than anything I’d seen in town so far, shot me a conspiratorial smile and escorted the girl out of sight. In a few minutes, he was back with his hand extended.

  The grip was loose, as though I might be in the same delicate state as the crying girl.

  I’d seen this guy before and it took a moment to realize where. He’d only recently moved back to Parks, a hometown boy from the right side of Main Street. The local paper had covered his return as though he were a Kennedy. A local sports hero, a graduate of an upper-tier school out east, and now—my son’s guidance counselor? Probably a hushed story there.

  “Ms. Winger? Joe Jeffries. So happy to finally meet you.” He had the sharpness of a paper crane in the shoulders, but around his eyes, I sensed something more animal. He was attractive, and I held that against him and also against the people who’d hired him. I tried not to think about the arm he’d had around the student.

  I followed him into the office, already leery of that word: finally. Fine on paper, but in execution it certainly put out a notice of deficiency.

  “I’ve been so eager to talk to you,” Jeffries said, gesturing to a chair. “For a couple of reasons, really. The first, as you might have guessed, concerns Joshua.”

  I appreciated Jeffries’s efforts. I knew Joshua secretly went by “Josh” at school, but I wanted no part of that.

  “I would imagine both reasons concern him,” I said.

  “Actually, no.” He tapped a pencil on his desktop, and we both took the opportunity to look at the pencil instead of each other. “I heard through the grapevine what you do for a living. I find it incredibly fascinating.”

  My heart fluttered. It was as if the alarm had sounded. Someone knocking on the door. A phone call in the night. Sometimes it struck me how unfair it all was. I was not the one who had ruined our lives—but I was the one who had to deal with the fallout, flitting from perch to perch. I was the one who had to decide, each time. Is it time to go?

  In Kentucky, it was a phone call in the night, a familiar voice asking for a name I was starting to forget. In Chicago, years later, a woman on Michigan Avenue stared at me and said, It’s you, isn’t it? You’re that girl got herself drowned in Sweetheart Lake.

  I drew a deep breath and tried out my voice. “It can also be quite tedious,” I said.

  “Well, I’m fascinated,” he said. “And I think our students would be, too. Maybe you could come in for an afternoon to talk to the Honors Society or something?”

  I shifted in my seat. How quickly news traveled in this town. “It’s not a sideshow act or anything,” I said. “I don’t do party tricks.”

  I didn’t sound as certain of that as I normally did.

  “Of course not,” he said. “No, I didn’t mean to suggest—I just thought the students would enjoy it.” He leaned over his desk, and the scent of him—soap, shaving cream, minty breath—wafted across the desk, an assault. The weight of his gaze made me wonder if I’d ever been really looked at. The sheriff—he’d had a good look at me at our first meeting. He’d really seen me, too, more than I wanted him to. “I just think—what a window into the soul,” Jeffries continued, poetic. Then he smiled. “And you must run up against some real damage. What’s the most disturbing thing you’ve ever learned from someone’s writing?”

  The chiding in his smile was familiar and, though it had been a while since I’d seen it, a little sexual.

  I shook my head. “It’s not really like that.”

  But it was. Until this week, I might have pulled some anecdote from my work with the lonelyhearts, the lovelorn people who send me scraps of letters and canceled checks believing that I can tell them something promising about the person they want to trust. Like the woman who’d sent me a love letter from a federal prisoner, in the hopes he was reformed. He wasn’t. Or I might have hidden enough details to tell a story from the confidential case files from working with Kent. But now of course it was Joshua’s incomplete classwork that came to mind. My son didn’t trust me, and he would lose himself to hide from me.

  Across his desk, Jeffries waited. What he wanted was a sensational story that would turn my modesty false, something to retell in the faculty lounge later. I straightened in my chair and said, “I’ll think about your offer to join the lecture circuit. What was the other reason you wanted to see me? About Joshua?”

  “Right, of course.” Jeffries reached for a file folder from his desk and riffled through a few loose pages. “Well, you probably aren’t surprised to hear he’s struggling. Math, especially. You might go over his homework with him each night, if you’re confident in your seventh-grade math, which—don’t be afraid to say that you aren’t.” He glanced up. Joshua didn’t want my help and he certainly didn’t want me looking at anything he’d written by hand. You could tell a lot from zeroes and twos. I shook my head. “We
ll,” he said, “you can try just checking to see that he’s done it. That’s a first step.”

  “I can ask,” I said.

  “What’s really bothering me about Joshua is less concrete. A couple of his teachers have mentioned he seems distracted or withdrawn. He’s missed a few assignments. In some of his classes, he doesn’t seem to be doing his homework at all, particularly some worksheets from his social studies class. Last week he refused to come to the board when one of his teachers asked him to . . .” He ran his finger over some notes. “Mrs. Tyler, English. She asked him to write a sentence across the board from their reading for some activity she had planned and he absolutely refused. She chose someone else but found it odd. Does this sound like your son?”

  It didn’t sound like my son, but it sounded exactly like the stranger who’d moved into his bedroom.

  “I’m not an expert in seventh-grade math or seventh-grade boys, Mr. Jeffries,” I said. Over Jeffries’s shoulder, a title in the bookcase caught my eye: Your Child in Conflict. Then another: The Age of Innocence Is Over. The spines of a hundred books and journals begged for my attention. No one was an expert.

  I had to get it right, but the cracks were starting to show. For a moment, I let myself imagine Mr. Jeffries’s comforting arm around my shoulder as I confided in him. But: grapevine.

  “I’ll talk to him,” I said. “About his attitude. And the math.”

  “Well, if it helps, you can tell him that if his grades drop any further, he’ll be cut from football,” he said. “That would be out of my hands, though I’d hate to lose him.”

  I stared at him. “Oh, you’re the—”

  “The assistant coach, yeah.”

  “Sorry I didn’t . . . I’ve been meaning to stop by practice.”

  “No worries,” he said, flashing the smile again. “We have our first game coming up soon. Hope to see you there.”

  Afterward, I walked the hallway, thinking about what Jeffries had said. The football team might be the bargaining chip I needed. Being on the team represented the most freedom Joshua had been able to negotiate. He’d worked so hard to make his case. But I’d never seen a schedule of the games. I was sure one existed, that it was being kept from me on purpose. But I couldn’t have it both ways. I couldn’t be mad the schedule wasn’t pinned up on the fridge when I didn’t want to go sit on hard bleachers and chitchat with the other parents.

  A few minutes later, I realized I was lost inside the school. I turned back toward the guidance office, but couldn’t find it again.

  Three boys were sitting in a row outside a closed door. They had the same limp hair in their eyes, the same skinny legs. As I hurried past, one whistled. They laughed, and one of them, grown bold, called after me in a sultry voice, “Hey, baby.”

  They were Joshua’s age. Over my shoulder, I gave the boys what I hoped was a warning glare. But then I thumped into something, hard, and started to fall. I felt arms trying to catch me and grabbed at them. “Whoa, now,” a man said.

  I looked up. Bo Ransey held me in his arms. “Sorry,” I whispered, pulling out of his reach.

  “No problem, my fault.” He released me without a glance. “Steve-O,” he yelled down the hall. “What the hell am I getting called in for now? Get your stuff and get out to the truck.”

  One of the boys separated from the others, high-tops dragging.

  “Is that your son?” I asked. “I mean—your other son?”

  Bo turned back to me. He was gray around the eyes. “Oh,” he said. “No, this here is my sister’s kid.” The boy stood at our elbows, his eyes on the floor. Down the hall, the other two were having fits on his behalf. “Good as mine, though, right, Steve-O?”

  The kid’s eyes darted between us. “Yeah,” he said. I recognized the little creep’s voice. Hey, baby.

  Ransey knocked his nephew on the shoulder. “Go on. Be there in a second.”

  The boy seized his opportunity as Ransey turned to me. “Look, really,” he said, his voice going soft. “Do you know anything? Are they not telling me something?”

  “About Aidan?”

  “Yeah, Aidan. What else could I—?” He looked tired. “Do you know where she took him?”

  “I don’t—I don’t know anything,” I said, which was the truth. Nothing was certain except that a baby was missing and a woman was dead. Nothing. For all I knew, this man in front of me had killed his family, that nanny. And he was tainting my process, big-time. “It’s better that you talk to the sheriff. All I was doing there was—”

  “The note, right?” He shook his head. “I heard about what you do. I don’t believe in that crap, I can tell you that.” He drew his palm over his face. “I don’t believe in it at all, but if it helps find my boy and gets him back OK, I’ll believe Santa Claus is married to the damn Easter Bunny, all right?”

  His voice rang down the hall. The boys had gone still.

  Finally Ransey folded his arms and took a step back from me. “Look,” he said, gentle again. “Who knows what you see when you look at me—I’m not perfect. But I just want my kid back. She had no reason to take him. No reason to take him away from me.”

  I stood under his pleading eyes, believing him. But then I’d often taken things at face value. People were liars. In the end, and maybe after a long time, they would show you who they really were, how far they would go.

  I only trusted what was written down. I might also give some credence to things I’d witnessed myself. What I’d seen was that love was no guarantee, that you could grieve the damage you’d done yourself, that being sorry wouldn’t keep you from doing it again. The same hand that could caress you could swing at you with velocity. The same hand.

  I nodded to Bo Ransey and let myself pass him, ready if he reached out to stop me. I followed the path the nephew had taken, anxious to be away from this place. Outside, I took a deep breath, skirted the Ransey truck with the boy inside the cab, and kept going. If Aidan’s mother had taken him away, there was a reason. If I couldn’t believe that, I couldn’t begin to sleep at night.

  Chapter Six

  On the way home from the school I stopped at the café on the square for a copy of the Spectator. As I dropped the change into the man’s hand, I noticed a few checks taped to the back counter, almost out of sight. The account numbers were marked out, and the narrow man’s narrow hand had scrawled DO NOT ACCEPT across each one. I recognized the snakes-coiled twirls in Ransey in the signature line of one of them.

  “On second thought,” I said, “I’ll take a hot tea, too.” While the man turned to make my drink, I dug out more cash and leaned low over the counter to get a better look. The second check was also a Ransey, I thought, maybe even the hand of Aidan’s mother. But the writing was so small I couldn’t quite read the name. The third check taped to the wall was older and curled in on itself. As I squinted at it, the proprietor placed the steaming cup under my chin and narrowed his eyes at me.

  Outside, I cast the hot water into the trash without even adding the teabag and sat at one of the sidewalk tables with my paper. A beautiful young woman smiled out from the front page, a small child in her arms. I checked the caption. The nanny, Charity Jordan, with an infant Aidan.

  I skimmed the article. She was twenty-four. The child of Mr. and Mrs. So-and-So Jordan. Unmarried. She had cared for Aidan Ransey since he was six months old, living in most days but retaining residence at her parents’ house. Sheriff Keller had given a similar recitation of the facts the morning I’d met him. His delivery had seemed coldhearted, considering the subject. But now I recognized his approach. Bullet-pointed thoughts were how I dealt with important details, too. The higher the stakes, the more important it was to be clear, concise, free of sentimentality.

  Though it seemed a little sentimentality might be spared. Only twenty-four, still living with Mom and Dad, and found on the floor of a public toilet with her head bashed in.

  Lower on the same page, another photo. This one was full color, too, but it didn’t need to
be. The woman in it was thin, small, stark against a white wall. Shifty. How could a single photo convey so little confidence in a human being? It had the feel of a mugshot. Wasn’t this woman, Aidan’s mother presumably, also technically missing? The caption gave her name as Leila (Coyle) Ransey.

  I paused over the name, the first I’d seen it. The mother. His mom. She had been called many things in my presence but not her own name.

  I looked between the two images for a long moment, bothered, but by what?

  Deeper in the story, a “source” was claiming that a note left behind at the Ransey household was the work of Mrs. Leila Ransey. A handwriting expert had been called in.

  I swallowed hard. Well, at least they hadn’t mentioned my name or my FBI connection. That was the sort of statement that packed our suitcases.

  This “source,” though—was this Sherry, unnamed, giving away secrets or was it the sheriff, giving the reporter what she’d demanded, anything he could offer, in lieu of the kid’s whereabouts and a suspect in handcuffs? In any case, it was a big fat guess, since I hadn’t given any information in time to be featured in this issue.

  I looked up, watching a few cars passing by the courthouse. Across the square, that pixie-faced deputy from the security line was leading Bo Ransey out of the courthouse doors by the elbow. I raised the paper higher and watched over the top of it as Bo ducked out from under the girl officer’s hold and stormed off. What did you have to do to get escorted off county property during the investigation of your missing kid? Deputy Lombardi waited, her hands on her hips, until the guy had cleared the grounds. She was turning to go inside when Bo pulled out of his parking space, squealing the tires.

  I put the paper down. I couldn’t wait to turn in that report and be done with these people.

  A woman carrying a small child in her arms pushed an empty stroller past me.