“Ms. Winger,” he said.
“Sheriff,” I said. The nod I gave might have clicked in its efficiency.
Sherry said, “Sheriff, before you go, two calls came in for you. A little dispute over land at the Karpowicz house with the Martins. And then this one from the prosecutor. It didn’t seem urgent, so I didn’t interrupt.”
“What’s the—did you say land dispute?” he said.
“Yeah.” She smiled. “The Karpowiczes’ dog has been—violating some boundaries.”
“Oh, hell.”
“Yeah.”
Keller laid the paper back on Sherry’s workspace. “Can you?”
“Yep.”
“Thanks.”
The man certainly had some hocus-pocus of his own. First the citizen promenaded out of the office and now a secret language, half unspoken, with his assistant.
The room seemed close, stuffy. I’d been too friendly, too open with both Sherry and her boss. I’d have to pull back.
The sheriff sighed and took a look all around the office before turning to me. “Well, Ms. Winger. Let’s go have a talk.”
Was that a question? Or a command? I’d already lost this one, already run over when bidden. I should have made an appointment later in the day, called the shots.
I started walking toward his office, letting him follow me.
Inside his office, the sheriff started right in. “I hear that you had an accidental face-to-face with Bo Ransey,” he said.
This pitch was a few feet wide of my expectations. We sat. “Yes, when I went to my son’s school, I ran into him. Literally.”
“Did you get anything from that meeting?”
Another throw, another few feet. “Get anything?” I said. “You mean, like vibrations?”
“That’s not what I meant. You don’t get vibrations, by the way, do you?” He was looking at me mock appraisingly. “That might be a useful talent to have in my arsenal.”
His arsenal. He could believe whatever he wanted.
“No, I didn’t get anything—well.” The memory of the meeting in the school hallway came back in sudden dramatic clarity. I felt something bright hiding in that dull scene and stretched for it. “Well, I guess that’s not true, now that I think about it. I learned that he has another boy in his house, a nephew my son’s age. They seemed to get along fine, I suppose. Although that kid is probably a menace to neighborhood pets. If the Karpowicz dog goes missing, check the Martins’ backyard for shallow graves and then head straight over to talk to that kid.”
“Yes, I’ve met young Master Ransey before. I don’t know about his way with animals, but he does have quite an artistic talent. With a can of spray paint.” He tugged at the bill of his cap, like the punctuation of his own joke, paused, and then offered, “That was his grandmother who was just in here.”
I couldn’t make out what he was saying, and then all the pieces snapped into place. “That lady was—?” The woman clawing at the TV camera in anguish the night Aidan went missing. The woman who’d fed the Dairy Bar counter girl change the night before. And today, in her church dress, unrecognizable. Each woman seemed like a different one.
“Mother of our friend Bo, grandmother to both the spray-can artist and his cousin, Aidan,” he said.
“Huh.” I had crossed my legs, and now the dangling foot jiggled a bit as I thought this information through. With effort, I forced my foot still. “She seems to . . . like you.”
“Mrs. Ransey and I go way back. Well, as far back as I’ve been here,” he said. “I guess the former sheriffs have always had the opportunity to get to know the Ransey family. Bobby comes from a long line of hell raisers.”
“Bobby?”
“Bo’s real name,” he said. “His mother, she calls him Bobby.”
The sheriff began to dig under some file folders.
Bo Ransey was a guy you didn’t turn your back on, but Bobby? Sugar wouldn’t melt in his mouth. Names had power, or a lack. Like Joshua’s name, which was an itchy collar my kid wanted to yank off now. Someday he’d be happy to have it.
I hated that anything about Bo Ransey reminded me of Joshua.
Keller found what he’d been looking for and slid it across his desk. “The Ranseys are about all I can handle right now,” Keller said. “One of them calls me twenty times an hour. His mother has stolen, with her concern and her grandmotherly theories, most of my morning. There’s a thirteen-year-old who seems to want nothing more than to spend the rest of his youth in my little jail, as is his legacy. And now—” He tapped a finger on the page in front of him. “One of them is starting to get sloppy.”
I leaned in. The page had a small receipt copied into its center, the edges scratchy from having been faxed. It was for a credit card used at a motel in Indiana. If the total included lodging, the place was a fleabag. At the very bottom, a cramped, small script read Beatrice Ransey. “Beatrice?” I said.
“Bea Ransey, who you saw leaving my office just now, was taken aback to hear that she spent the night upstate this week. Nor does she remember signing her name quite in that way, ever in her life. Your expertise says?”
I hardly had to look. “Some of the markers look . . . familiar.”
“Thought so. Seemed like it was about time Leely popped up.”
I gulped, hard. The room seemed to tilt, the wall of photos leaning toward me.
Too strange. Too much. Not possible.
“Who—what did you call her?”
I imagined my face was white. I felt white. I felt as though a door had slammed somewhere, and I was on the other side. Somewhere else entirely, where doors slammed, and precious things were thrown up against them. One barking voice, gruff and animal, and then another voice, a woman’s, in the rise and fall of a keening, desperate song.
I couldn’t still be in the sheriff’s office, because these sounds didn’t belong here, or now. They were from long ago, so far back in years that I wasn’t sure I’d ever really heard them. I had tried not to listen, because that’s what my mother had told me to do. But now I remembered the wailing sound, a song with one word, drawn out long and ugly so that no one else could understand it. I knew the word: my own name. My mother begging, and the only thing she could or would beg for was her daughter, for a girl who didn’t exist anymore, not in this room and not anywhere. My mother begged only for Lee-Lee, Leeanna, who was now me, the woman who had almost forgotten that song.
“Leely is the name Mrs. Ransey uses for her daughter-in-law,” he said, watching me. “Leely and Bobby. I guess I took it up when she was here . . . do you need a drink of water?”
I’d only seen that stark image of Leila Ransey but now she came to life in my mind: wrung out, dark-eyed, anxious under the constant demands of her two-year-old. Maybe the little boy’s cries rang out along the hallway of that cheap motel. I knew how alone she must feel, how in need of a trustworthy friend to tell her what to do. I knew the right thing to do, the lawful thing that any good friend should tell her.
Turn yourself in. Get a lawyer. Cooperate.
But if I were the friend, I wasn’t sure what I would tell her.
Would I tell Leila Ransey how hard the years ahead of her would be on her own? Would I tell her how it would feel not to have anyone—really, absolutely no one? How almost anyone Leila knew would turn her in? How almost any move she made from here on out could lead to her capture? That, someday, something would?
“Ms. Winger,” the sheriff said. “Are you OK?”
Leely. Not possible. Not funny.
Or would I tell her to do the only thing that had occurred to me? To run?
Yes, run. Stop using the credit card and run. And hide. And try not to pop your head out again. Live an unexceptional little life somewhere crowded and noisy, so that your presence will be drowned out by the cyclone of activity around you, and no one will think to ask you questions, but if they do, run again.
Or move to another town, a small one, and keep your head turned from the street, and try
not to gather too many pieces of a life or too many objects or too many friends or too many hours in one place. You need to keep light, and fast. Because you will need to run again.
“Anna?” the sheriff asked gently. “Does the name Leely mean something to you?”
I remembered signing the form for Margaret, not even once thinking about the name I once used. You could slough off another life, but it took a little practice.
“No,” I said, straightening my spine and focusing all my effort on meeting the sheriff’s eye.
This is what I mean. Look them in the eye, until you can’t. Then run. “I don’t know a single person by that name,” I said.
Chapter Eleven
It took me a while to recover from the surprise of Leila Ransey’s nickname. The sheriff left the office and came back with a little plastic cup of cold water.
“Why am I here?” I said.
Keller had been giving me all of his attention, and yet he still seemed to look even more closely now. He took off his cap and threw it in the corner of his desk. I’d never seen him without it. “You don’t want to be here?” he said.
“That’s not what I said. I don’t have any work to do here—do I? That receipt? That was all?” My voice rose. Sherry was probably listening, as well as Shane Mullen and the other one. I started over, lightly. “My time isn’t too precious to try and help here, but I don’t feel like I’m doing all that much.”
The sheriff rubbed his scalp with the flat of his palm for a second, reached for his hat. He sighed. “I know.”
“You—what do you mean, you know?” My voice grew again, and this time I didn’t care who heard.
“I don’t mean you’re not pulling any weight. That’s not what I meant,” he said, holding up his hands in the universal signal for whoa, girl. “What I meant to say is—here’s the problem. You and I are not very central to what’s going on right now.”
I thought it through. I’d seen the unmarked cars lined up outside. “The feds took over, you mean.”
“The feds, sure, and they’ve got first dibs on every guy I have. But it’s Leila’s game right now. Her move, for the moment. Here I sit.” He sat silently with his hands folded on his desk.
I wanted to stand up and give the guy a chance to pull himself together. I’d seen this hands-up weakness: my mother, standing at the sink with her back to me. Someday, I would be an eighty-year-old woman and all I’d remember of my mother would be her back, her hands slack at her side. An entire life, worn down to a single moment.
“Leila Ransey is playing a game of chess against lots of opponents, least of all me,” the sheriff said. “We got things rolling here, got the Amber set up, got a lot of local guys out combing the outskirts, the roads, the cornfields. And then got Aidan listed in all the places he should be listed and talked to about a hundred people about what I should be doing. I mean—” He stopped and seemed to remember I was there. He nodded and leaned over the desk, as though just now deciding he was all in, penny or a pound. “Remember when I said all that stuff about—how kids go missing, but they’re never very far?”
From our first meeting. He’d seemed confident, almost cocky. His message had come in loud and clear. He was the guy who ran the place day in and out. He was in charge. “I remember,” I said.
“Well, here’s the thing. If the kids who’ve gone missing aren’t really missing, as I said, how did that prepare me?”
“For when the child is really gone,” I said.
“We get about five or six reports a year. Most of them just teenagers taking a walk. On purpose or not, they never get very far. Only one was gone for more than a day, and that was because he’d stolen a car that happened to have a full tank of gas.”
“No little kids? Babies?”
“Zero,” he said.
I glanced above his head at the wall of people, all of them depending on him. If all his officers were currently in the service of finding Aidan, who was out there keeping the faith with them all? Who was patrolling Sugar Creek Park, as that neighbor had assured me they had? “So what did you do? How did you know what to do?”
“You can’t laugh,” he said.
“Fine.”
“Really now. This is a secret between you and me. How did I know what to do when the time finally came?” His knees bounced against the underside of his desk. “I got out the manual. I read a damn book.”
I tried not to laugh but had to hide a smile. “That’s not . . . awful,” I said.
“Oh, yeah? You want to know that the guy you elected to protect you from the hazards of the modern world has to get out the instruction manual?” But he was smiling back. “I should have sworn you to silence first, I reckon. Too late now.”
“Sheriff, really. Who am I going to tell?”
I had meant to keep the joke going, but the sheriff seemed to know how deep the truth was to this admission. He could see right through me and the empty spots on either side of me where others had been and no longer stood. Now I was embarrassed again, this time for myself. But then I thought of Sherry gossiping over her desk, of Grace rolling her eyes at me in the parking lot of the Dairy Bar, of Margaret tucked into her couch with a tattered quilt. And now, as stern as I’d wanted to be, here I was laughing with the sheriff, again. Things were changing, and it was my own fault. My own weak will, letting them in.
“I have something you can help me with,” he said.
“Oh. No. That’s not necessary at all. I have a job, you know. I’m sort of behind, actually—”
“Because I keep calling you in here.”
“Not just that. Joshua—” The sheriff already knew about my visit to the school. Probably knew the reason, too. The grapevine, after all. “Joshua is in an epic battle with algebra.”
“OK, fine. You have more than this case going on in your very busy life,” he said. “But you seem interested in this case. You want to help. I didn’t read that wrong, did I?”
I wanted to help, but I wasn’t sure which side of the field I played for. I remembered Bo Ransey flinging off the hand of Deputy Lombardi as she escorted him from the premises. And Leila Ransey, skinny and shifty-eyed, out there alone with a cranky toddler. Did they have a place to sleep? Could she get milk without using the mother-in-law’s credit card? I made sure I had control of myself, and then tried it aloud. “I want to help.”
“And I need your help.”
“Sheriff—”
“Don’t go straight to shooting me down,” he said. “Just listen? It’s a little busy around here, what with taking social calls from Ranseys all day and of course everyone else because one missing kid means their kids are next.” He waved his hand toward the outer office as though they were lined up waiting for me to leave. “And, you know, all the dogs trying to annex new patches of backyard. Meanwhile, I’ve got a little—” He glanced at the door and lowered his voice further. “A little internal issue with some missing evidence. Drugs, to put it bluntly. Now. If there was a way you could pull some weight around here that no one else could? You would help me with that, wouldn’t you?”
When he had finished, I felt caught up. Caught. What choice did I have? I gave the smallest nod, noticing a headache I hadn’t felt come on. Leely, if you’re going to get away with this, be smart. Be smarter than you’ve ever been. Be smarter than me.
I WOKE SLOWLY. I’d come home from the courthouse with my head thick and gone to bed in all my clothes.
In my dreams I had visited places I’d long forgotten.
The room, now, was wrong. Before I knew where I was, when I was, I watched the room stretch and morph out of memory and into real life.
Leely Ransey had opened my memory like a can of tuna.
I remembered: my mother, her back to me. We wouldn’t look at one another after a rage. He’d leave for the bar, for three days, for the woods, we never knew. We wouldn’t share our relief. We didn’t share anything.
Now, I sat up and held my aching head. I felt as though I’d been sniff
ing paint fumes. I looked around at the bare white walls. But I had, in a way.
Yellow. As a child, the walls in every apartment we ever had were yellow, or at least the bedroom I slept in. Another move, another yellow bedroom. At first, I probably hadn’t noticed. When I did, it had seemed like a lucky accident. My favorite color.
And then I’d caught on. Room after room. Rooms I had lost track of and could never put into order. Some had windows with white curtains. Sometimes the curtains were dirty, and my mother would take them down and wash them again and again. Some of the rooms had no window and barely enough room for my small bed. Closets—holding pens, really—rooms that were not useful for anything else and therefore belonged, as much as anything belonged, to me. Lee-Lee.
Drowsing, I found that the name supplied itself. Just as the yellow rooms had returned, so had the name. I’d grown tired of the yellow rooms, hadn’t seen the point. When I was twelve, thirteen, I refused.
“What do you mean, you don’t want it?” My mother stood over me at the kitchen table of the new house, the newest new house, which was not really new at all. It was our new, someone else’s old. Most of my clothes were that way, too, and the furniture. The table I sat at in the kitchen was from someone else’s alley. My mother crossed her arms over her loose shirt. She always dressed in baggy clothes, jeans and long sleeves. Dark colors, though I thought she must love bright colors. I knew she did, because of the yellow paint. Daisy Smile yellow.
A can of the stuff left over from the last house was just feet away on the back porch. “I’m tired of yellow,” I said. I sat at the table with a textbook, eating a bowl of cereal without milk with my fingers, one piece at a time. It drove her crazy, which was one of the reasons I did it. My mother always twisted her mouth at the bowl and checked, every time, that there was milk in the refrigerator. The one thing I can do, my mother would say at these times, peering close at the date on the carton, is keep milk in this house.
My mother did not check for milk this time. She stood at the counter and looked into the sink. “I’m tired, too.”
The Day I Died Page 9
