And then I knew what was bothering me about the photos in the newspaper. The babysitter had been given the golden opportunity, in death, to cradle the missing boy, but his mother was treated as a suspect in a lineup. There would be no baby in her arms, not in the newspaper or, one might assume the editor had decided, ever again.
It was practically decided here on the front page of the Spectator. The sitter: beautiful, loving, and good. The mother: a villain. There were no pictures of Bo, no mention of details about the family, other than an address. No hints of any discord or bad checks, of offenses past or present.
“Hey there,” a woman’s voice said.
I startled back to attention. The two Booster Club moms from the night Aidan disappeared stood in front of me. Only this time, the bored one who couldn’t be bothered with me was leaning in with a grin on her face. The other one held back. “Hi,” I said. “Stephanie and—”
Stephanie’s head snapped in my direction.
“Grace,” the other one said, smiling. I thought she was more pleased that I’d remembered Stephanie’s name, that I might have studied what Stephanie had written on the flyer for me, than she was thrilled to see me again. “We thought we saw you out at the school yesterday.”
“Oh,” I said. “Yeah, some paperwork we missed. In the transfer.”
“There was some trouble out there yesterday,” she said. “Thought maybe yours was in on it. Mine definitely was. Any trouble there is, he’s in the thick of it.” She seemed almost proud of it, the trouble her kid could cause. Then she looked at me more closely. “What transfer?”
“From his last school,” I said.
“I can’t believe anyone would choose this place over anywhere else. Especially Chicago.”
Grapevine indeed. Everything Grace said was a leading question without the indignity of having to ask.
“It’s so unsafe there,” I said finally. “You’ve heard the stories.”
“And then to land here in the middle of all this,” Grace said, poking at the paper in my hands. I closed it and folded it under my arm.
“Well, the joke’s on me, I guess.”
“Are you the source?” Stephanie spoke up. She was watching me warily. “In the paper? The one who said it was the mother’s handwriting.”
“No,” I said.
“But you’re the one they’ve called in, aren’t you? That’s what you do, isn’t it?” Grace asked.
“It’s not all I do,” I said. I couldn’t see a way out of this conversation, and then suddenly, I could. “You seem interested. Did you want me to look at your handwriting?”
“No,” Stephanie barked.
“Bet your ass,” Grace hissed, grabbing for a pen from her purse. Through a few negotiations, it transpired that the only paper available was the one tucked under my arm. I handed it over, and she wrote a few words down. “And then my signature? Do I sign it?”
“Whatever you want,” I said. I’d thought they both would have raced away in horror, but that just goes to show how little I knew about people, off the page. Now, even though I’d promised the school counselor I didn’t do parlor tricks, I’d tricked myself into doing them.
Grace handed back the paper. “Do your worst,” she said.
She’d written You are so full of shit. Love, Grace Mullen.
“You have . . . a healthy skepticism,” I said.
“Oh, my God,” Grace said. “Steph, it’s like going to the creepy fortune-teller at the county fair. You have to do it, too.”
My eyes were drawn to the bowls of the rounded letterforms, her o’s, e’s, c’s. They should have been cupped and open but were actually quite narrow and stingy. Maybe not quite healthy, really, all this lack of generosity. I’d seen the same tendencies in incarcerated women, in men trapped in jobs they felt they had to keep. In my mother’s handwriting, in fact. A trapped woman who had never wanted anyone else to make it out alive. I wondered what the county fair fortune-teller might tell Grace, and what might be left out. There may have been a lot left out already, a great deal withheld. I looked up into Grace’s greedy eyes. Nothing to be gained by telling the whole truth and, anyway, this wasn’t a job.
“You have a natural openheartedness,” I said, studying the letters for other lies I could tell. “You only wish you could do more. And, oh, that’s interesting—”
“What?” Grace leaned in.
“Well, I see some markers that lead me to believe that you might be”—for the first time her expression edged into apprehension—“really fun to work with at the Boosters concession stand,” I said.
Her face registered a twinge of confusion, then relief. “I am. You might not be so bad yourself.”
Steph shot me a curious look. It was just like going to the county fair. I was the midway barker offering to guess weights, and I’d undercut by a good fifty pounds so that everyone could keep having a good time.
“Joshua lost the team schedule already,” I said, using the tone I knew they’d expect. Boys will be boys. “How can I get a copy? And I guess I should sign up for some shifts?”
Stephanie handed me a card this time, preprinted and not likely to give anything else away. I took it, noting the twee little house design on it. Sommer House, it said under her name, though it didn’t say where the house was located. I took the card, smiled, sent them off with pleasantries. It pained me. The entire episode was pantomime—and yet. At the end of all things, there was my kid. What was a little dignity thrown in, after everything else I’d lost?
BACK AT THE apartment, a flat white envelope addressed to me had been propped against the wall below the mailboxes. The rest of the mail was junk and catalogs, stuff directed to past tenants and to “the customer” at this address. I paused over a flyer, one of those things that advertised appliances or rug-cleaning services on one side and used the blank spaces to put out missing kid alerts. This one was a teenager from Nevada. I had no reason at all to study the face as carefully as I did. Sometimes, when the missing kid was old enough, a runaway, I found myself admiring her ambition.
I pawed through the rest of it: a catalog of women’s clothing, all linen and large cuff bracelets as though the modern woman lived her life dressed for patio dining. I couldn’t help flipping through a few pages. Who lived this linen kind of life?
I was halfway up the stairs when I turned to the next catalog in the stack and nearly dropped the lot.
Sweetheart Lake Adventures.
My knees shook. I sat heavily on the nearest step, the rest of the mail falling and sliding to the landing.
It couldn’t be.
The photo collage on the cover contained every tourist option available to those visiting my hometown: children with chocolate faces in front of the fudge shop, a Paul Bunyan lookalike marching in a parade, fishermen lined up with their catches still on their lines, a gorgeous sunset cut through with purple and gold, and a long, scenic view of a dock with the calm, green-dark lake behind.
On the back of the magazine: my name, my address.
I pawed back through the thing, my throat hurting with tears held back. All of my childhood laid out before me so easily and—it was beautiful. The grocery store we used, the old movie theater. The long street through town toward the river, a celebration banner overhead. I had trouble believing it, really. It was a put-on. It couldn’t be real. It couldn’t still look like this.
It couldn’t be here.
How could this thing be here in my hands?
I picked up all the mail again and hurried up to the apartment. I tossed all the junk into the trash and spent a few minutes tearing the Sweetheart Lake magazine to shreds, tinier and tinier, before I put them all into a plastic bag, tied the handles, and buried it at the bottom of the bin.
After a few minutes, I dug it out and hustled down the stairs to the back door and out into the parking lot to the Dumpster and threw it in.
How? When you didn’t give out a phone number or an email or an address anywhere, turned down coupo
ns and incentives every chance you got, never signed up for any list, ever—how could you still be located and have your heart sold back to you?
Back upstairs, I paced until I thought Margaret might pick up her broom and then finally returned to the table.
I’d saved the newspaper with the story about the sitter, Charity Jordan, and now I distracted myself by flipping through the pages. Her photo was oddly cheerful in the blank apartment. Probably chosen specifically to show how bright a young life had been snuffed out. I compared Charity’s robust good looks to Aidan’s mother again, who seemed small, almost fragile, in comparison. The police presumably had a theory about how young and buxom Charity had been felled by her delicate employer, but damned if I could come up with a different one. Maybe she was one of those women whose adrenaline allowed them to pick up the ends of Volkswagens off their imperiled children. I hoped never to have to put my own lymphatic system to the test. I had chosen flight over fight every chance I got.
I turned to the back page and caught up on the day’s announcements: arrests at the local bar, a DUI out on the interstate, some spray-paint vandalism on a bridge outside of town. I turned back to the front, hungry for more information about Leila. Nothing new had been revealed, except that the address they’d had for her in Indianapolis turned out to belong to an organization, and she’d lived not at those coordinates but in a home run by that group. The former address was not repeated; the new address was not given. The group went unnamed. The lack of details seemed to be a point of view, a throwing up of hands. Halfway house, drugs, incompetency, suspicion. Whatever it was, it was odd, wasn’t it? That a mother had left her young child in the care of other people to move into some situation—it wasn’t right. It was all there, unspoken.
When I folded the paper up again, there was Grace Mullen’s message and signature. And below it, a photo I hadn’t looked at very closely. Some civic event, an award handed out, handshakes given. And standing to the side of the activity and commendations stood Sheriff Keller.
Which reminded me that I hadn’t finished up the report that would release me from any further conversations with the man. I shook off the panic. It was all a fluke, a marketing list gone bad. This report to Keller was the real urgent project here. I opened my laptop and got to work.
BY THE TIME I realized I’d forgotten to pick up Joshua from football practice, it was too late. I heard his stamping feet on the stairs, the key in the lock. He walked through the door and dropped the dreaded backpack on the table.
“I am so sorry,” I said.
“I caught a ride with a friend,” he said. I thought perhaps he was torn between making me feel guilty I’d forgotten him and making sure I knew he had solved the problem himself. “His dad said I could ride with them every night, if I wanted. They go right by, he said.”
“Well, I would need to meet this dad, you know. That’s not how it’s done.”
Joshua wiped a shank of sweaty hair from his eyes and looked at me blankly. It’s possible that he knew—and I didn’t—that this was precisely how it was done. No need for background checks or jotting down license plate numbers. Just blind trust that the village would reach in and help raise the child? That was not how it was done around here.
“Well, he said they went right by. He said it was no trouble.”
“We can talk about it,” I said finally. What we needed to talk about was math, but that could wait until the issue was upon us and the books came out. I had a sort of after-adrenaline hangover from the magazine in the mail. “Go get cleaned up.”
He headed to the shower, pleased with himself. I hadn’t even brought up the issue of the backpack dropped where it shouldn’t be. We were speaking, at least. Why ruin it?
Also, I was shaking a little. I’d forgotten him. I’d never forgotten him before.
After a long moment, I went back to fussing over the wording of the file I would send into Keller’s office about the Ransey handwriting samples. I wanted to get it right, demonstrate the right level of professionalism—and, yes, maybe I wanted to show Keller how it was done. Before long I was engrossed again. When I next looked up, the apartment was dark and quiet around me. The backpack and the homework inside lay untouched. He’d gone to his room and his video games.
Outside Joshua’s room, I took a deep breath. We were going to talk about math?
I pounded on the door, waited for the mumble I could interpret as an invitation, and opened it. He lay on his stomach on the floor with a game controller in his hands, his headphones dangling around his neck.
“Just five more minutes, OK?” he said.
“Actually,” I said. “I have to go somewhere for a few minutes. Just a quick errand. I need to—come with me.”
“I have homework.”
“Which you never do anyway. If you did, I wouldn’t have been called in to your school today.”
He dropped his face to the floor. “Oh,” he said into the carpet.
“Yeah, it was a good time for everyone,” I said. “I got to hear all about your stellar work ethic and some incident with a chalkboard.”
He looked up, wincing. In a strange way, I liked him like this. I said something, he reacted. Better than silence. At least I knew he could hear me.
“Or maybe I should say not involving a chalkboard. And now Mr. Jeffries wants me to come to your school and show everyone the magic of handwriting analysis—”
Joshua rose from the floor so quickly, I jumped back.
“You’re not going to, are you?” He threw the game controller to the floor and stared at it. So much like Ray just now, busting up his toys. “That’s what I need.”
He yanked the headphones off and sat heavily on the edge of his bed. I waited for him to swipe at his bangs. He did.
My mind raced to catch up with him. What was I learning?
“I won’t go if you don’t want me to,” I said slowly. “But—come with me now. We’ll grab burgers and malts at the Dairy Bar, and I’ll help you with your homework after.”
He turned a creased forehead toward me. He’d gotten so much from me, even if he did have Ray’s profile, his eyes. Look at the disbelieving expression on his face. Look at his suspicion. Look at his doubt. I’d given him that. Every bit of that was from me.
Chapter Seven
In the car, Joshua tucked himself into the passenger door. I fidgeted with the radio, finally deciding on silence. It was a cool evening, good for a drive. We pulled through town slowly, the windows rolled down. In the square, a group of boys sat on the wall enclosing the courthouse lawn. Joshua’s head swiveled as we passed.
The limestone buildings of downtown gave way to some older wood-frame houses, then a pharmacy, a gas station, a tire place, then a dirty white shop with blank windows. The sidewalks grew rough, cracked. We were only a mile or two from our comfortable apartment and its double deadbolts, but I felt the presence of those old enemies, decay and neglect. I slowed, leaning toward the passenger side to gaze up at the houses on that side of the street. Joshua’s hair was still wet from his shower and he smelled sweet: bar soap, laundry detergent, warm skin.
“What are we doing?” he said finally, as though granting me a favor.
“Research for a job I’m doing here in town,” I said, pulling the truck over to the side. A few impatient drivers rushed around us.
“Where’s the handwriting?”
“It’s not quite like that. It’s more like . . . reconnaissance.”
He glanced at me. A word of war, of video games. I hadn’t meant to offer a branch, but he seemed interested. “Recon? Are you on a stakeout or something?” He was teasing me, and I took the time to enjoy it. He leaned toward the windshield and peered out.
“OK, maybe more like surveillance.” I pointed to the specific house, a gray square-faced place with two front doors. One stood partly open, the screen hanging crooked. The porch sagged under the weight of a couch and a stack of boxes and milk crates.
“Did a murder happen here?�
�
“Do you think I’d be sitting here? Do you think I’d bring you along? A little boy is missing. This is his house.”
“I bet he’s not missing the house,” Joshua said.
Part of me wanted to agree with him, but I knew better. How could I explain to him how complicated it was, to love and hate a place so much? To know your home’s lack but still defend it—even yearn for it. To see glossy color photos of it and be angry it still existed without you. “He might be. This is his home, no matter what it looks like. If a stranger took him, I’m sure he’s missing it very much.”
“Did a stranger take him?”
I pictured the grocery list clawed into pink paper. “No,” I said. “His mother took him. His father wants him back.”
“Oh.” He sunk back in his seat and picked at a spot on his window with a fingernail.
“There’s a part of me that hopes the mother gets away,” I said, willing him to react. I wanted him to agree with me, but why should he? I was asking too much of him. Most of the time I asked too little, except his entire stock of faith.
“Why?” he said.
“I can tell from her handwriting that she loves her son so much, and all I can tell from the dad’s handwriting is that he’s probably not the kind of man who should’ve been anyone’s father,” I said. “That’s a problem, because I’m supposed to help the father get his son back.”
“Did you help?”
“I’m helping. But it’s hard to do what’s right. Right doesn’t always feel right.” I watched the back of Joshua’s neck. “And if the mother did take him, then—” I thought of the ridiculously attractive young babysitter. “Then she might have done a terrible thing in order to get her son away.”
I looked up at the house and thought I saw a face—a woman, young, dark hair—peeking out from behind a curtain. The curtain dropped.
A dark vehicle screeched to a stop next to our truck. I turned my head and saw the glint of the streetlight flash on the hood of a black SUV just as it started to back up and parallel park behind us. I pulled forward to make room, then did a U-turn toward home.
The Day I Died Page 6
