“Let me tell you why I think that’s bullshit.”
I whipped to face him. “Excuse me?”
“I said, I think it’s bull that this letter doesn’t mean anything to you.” Keller pulled out the chair Joshua had been spinning in not so long ago and sat on its edge with his elbows on his knees. He gestured for me to join him.
Invited to sit in my own home. I edged around the table and took my customary chair. The laptop had been put away; the rest of my in-box had been sifted, the trash emptied, studied, replaced. Between us now, at last, was the table. Let him try to take charge when he’s sitting on the receiving end of my desk. I clasped my hands and leaned over the table.
He smiled. “Good. Here’s why I think this means something to you that it doesn’t to me. It’s simple really.” He held the paper up with both hands, pinching the edges of the top corners so it hung over his shoulder. “See that?”
I’d seen it. I’d seen enough.
“Look at it. What does it say? Just—what does it actually say?”
I glared at him, then at the note. Large black letters printed wide across the page, as large as the paper allowed. “It says,” I said, my voice sounding choked to my own ears. “It says ‘I know about you.’”
“No, did you hear yourself? What it says is: I know about you,” he said. “No emphasis, no underlines. Just straight. Four words, that’s it.” His voice was low and calming. I thought of the people who were supposed to be able to make animals easy with the tone of their voices. I didn’t want to be soothed. I’d never told him how much I could read into four little words. He had no idea. Skin the fucking bastard. Four words was all you needed. “It hardly means a thing,” he said, “without having you here to read it to me.”
He put the note on the table, printed side down and far from me. An offering. Maybe he could read people a little bit.
“Here’s what I think,” he said. “That’s a sentence that could frighten just about anybody. Everybody has a little something they don’t want out.” I raised an eyebrow, and he shrugged. “Sure. Sure I do. Everyone has something they like to think is hidden. You could know someone really well, for years even, and still not know everything about them.” He sat back, seemed to go somewhere else for a second. “And if everyone’s got a secret, then what’s the most general stab-in-the-dark threat I can make? To say ‘I know you,’ when you have no idea who I am at all? That’s something none of us wants to get in the mail. Most people don’t even know themselves. They don’t like the idea that someone else does.”
The thing hadn’t come in the mail, though. It had sneaked into the building and then into our apartment, in disguise. I hadn’t mentioned the Sweetheart Lake magazine.
“Of course this sort of threat would be more keenly felt by someone who was . . .”
“Hiding something?” I said.
“I was going to say someone who was private,” he said. “But yes, for someone who had a real secret, I’m sure a message like this would be a big deal, like the world was closing in. In fact, it might seem like the anvil she’s been waiting to fall out of the sky and onto her head.”
“Is that some sort of children’s story reference? A cartoon? What?”
“I assure you I’m taking this matter seriously,” he said.
“You seem to think I’m either overreacting or predicting doom and overreacting. Is this how you investigate every crime around here—”
“Where’s the crime? There’s no crime I can see,” he said. “Have you considered that this is some sort of joke? You know better than I do what these things look like.”
“I’m suddenly feeling very sorry for Bo Ransey when he had to call you for help.”
That stopped him. We both rose from our seats.
“Ms. Winger, are you sure these are the words you want to spend your breath on?” The volume was up. We were back to formality. It was Ms. Winger again, the desk between us in every way.
“You know, when you’re right, you are on the mark, Sheriff.” I met his volume. “These are not the words I want to spend my breath on. The words I want to say are—”
Down the hall, Joshua’s door flew open. “Mom?” He rushed down the hall, stopped. His eyes shifted from me to the sheriff and back. “What’s going on?”
I felt a crushing weight of weariness fall onto my shoulders.
If someone knew? It was so unlikely, and yet, why not? I’d been so careful, but it was never careful enough. In the age of two-second internet searches, why couldn’t someone track me down to the spot where I stood? A new name, thanks to Kent. No property, no utility bills, no credit cards. Don’t get arrested, don’t be a hero, don’t get quoted on the news. It was easy to stay invisible: don’t get a life.
But if someone was curious, all they’d need was a bit of know-how, a little bit of access, maybe a few hundred dollars for a private investigator. It wouldn’t even take someone good. It wouldn’t even take the investigative powers of the sheriff.
I suddenly had the feeling that someone did know. Maybe not the person who wrote the note and took the effort to place it in our mailbox. Maybe that person was just guessing well, like the sheriff said. But if anyone knew, it was Sheriff Keller. He had the world of investigation at his disposal, databases and background checks and all that. Hadn’t he been referred by Kent to begin with? And he had a reason for checking on me—he had to keep the woo under control.
If he knew, how soon before someone else? Sherry? Sherry and then her friends, her neighbors. Stephanie and Grace and the Boosters, the guidance counselor Mr. Jeffries, the school, the students, the Ranseys, all of them. The grapevine.
Or maybe Sheriff Keller would keep it to himself—in his arsenal, wasn’t it? What had he said about the Ranseys the day he’d parked behind us on the street and knocked on my window? That he was just trying to make his town a better place to live? His town? His town, his citizens, his problems when they got into fights and lit things on fire and drove too fast down his streets—and yet here was one of his people—one of those little pink stick figures in the game of Life, if that’s how he wanted to play it. One of his own in trouble, and he didn’t seem as interested in making the town a better place for me.
Our problems had come in the night and could be packed upon our backs and taken away again, if the sheriff decided that his town couldn’t harbor them, if he decided that his town would be better for everyone else, would run just a little more smoothly, if we weren’t in it.
I was being irrational, and I knew it. My head was thrumming with anger, but beneath that was a feeling in my gut I didn’t like, something alive and crawling that made me want to duck under the table or into a corner. An old instinct.
I held my body tense, willing it to keep still, just now, just this once. The sheriff was not going to hurt me. That wasn’t his game. But if he had his own motives, whatever they were, they had nothing to do with me. I wouldn’t let him have anything to do with me.
“Nothing, Joshua,” I said. “The sheriff was just leaving.”
I HADN’T MADE anything good for dinner after all, but it didn’t seem to matter. We both picked at our plates, and I reached again and again for my water glass in an attempt to wash the brackish taste from the back of my throat. The old taste to go with the old fears. No amount of water would drown it out. Joshua poked at his food. “What was he doing here, anyway?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Was it because of that letter?” he asked. “Or something else?”
“It’s not really anything for you to worry about.”
“But you were yelling.”
“I said—”
“Why won’t you tell me?” he said. “I live here, too.”
“Fine, Joshua. Fine.” I went to the kitchen and found a bottle of wine. I returned to the table and pushed my plate away so that the full goblet had its rightful place in the center of my vision. I had never been much of a drinker—alcohol hadn’t done much for my
life. But I suddenly understood how a drink could be the thing to reach for when other things were lacking: lover, friend, mother. Life. Safety.
“The letter,” I said. “I just wanted the sheriff’s opinion on it.”
Joshua’s fork dropped to his plate with a clatter. “What did he say?”
“He thinks I’m overreacting.” I swirled the wine, watching its color cling to the inside of the glass. I could already feel my desire for the rest of the bottle recede. There would be no hangover tomorrow. There would only be sharp, acrid clarity and the damn sun in the window again. “He might be right.”
Joshua scooted his plate to the side and crossed his arms in its place, nesting his chin there. “I have to ask you a question.”
“Sure.”
“You won’t like it,” he said.
“Now I can’t wait.”
“Mom, stop trying to make it funny. It’s not funny.” His chin slid deeper into the hollow of his arms. His voice became a mumble.
“What?”
“I said,” he said, sitting up so I could hear his exasperation. “I said I have to ask you about Dad.”
“Oh. You have to?” Sometimes I wished I’d killed Ray off. Ray could have died a glorious death in the military, in a fire, rescuing small children or puppies. But I never could have lived with those stories. Ray as hero.
I steadied myself. “OK,” I said.
“It’s for a project at school.”
“What do you mean? Like—”
“It’s a family tree. They’re making us do it in history class, like, personal history, you know, what’s it called?”
“Genealogy,” I said, my voice stretched thin.
“Yeah. We have to try to research our family as far back as we can.” He rolled his eyes. “My teacher would wet his pants if I could trace my family back to the Mayflower or Spain or something.”
“We are not from Spain.”
“But what about Dad?”
I hated that word. It was too familiar. Why couldn’t he use something less—affectionate?
“Your father was not from Spain.”
“That’s what he isn’t. I need to know what he is.”
True. “So what do you need to know?”
He reached for his backpack. After a little digging, he came up with a notebook with frayed corners and a mechanical pencil. He gave the pencil a few clicks. “Well, I need to know his name.”
Something inside me plummeted. I’d kept every shred to myself. Sweetheart Lake and all that had happened there—it belonged to me, didn’t it?
But I could have spared him a name. Names had power, but even this I’d withheld. I could have spared him, even just a little, but I hadn’t.
“Ray.”
“Winger?”
“Oh. No.” I didn’t want to say it. Magical thinking again. “Give me your notebook.”
With my own pen from the cup on the table, I wrote out Ray’s name in thick, clear letters that reminded me of the typewriter hand Joshua had adopted. At the last moment, I misspelled his last name. As bad as I felt about keeping secrets, I didn’t want to open up this particular vault.
He leaned closer to see what I had written. “What about his parents’ names?”
I drew two branches and supplied the names of Ray’s mother and father, using the same fake name. I’d never known them; they’d died before we met. Across the table, Joshua nodded his approval. “What about his sisters and brothers?”
I looked up from the notebook. I didn’t know. Or I couldn’t remember. “He didn’t have any,” I said. Best to keep it simple, in case I had to be responsible for these facts later.
“Do you know anybody before that?”
“No. No, that’s all I know.” I drew a line from Ray and added a name carefully: Joshua. I added another branch from Joshua’s name and added my own.
Joshua pushed up from the table with his elbows to see what he’d collected. “That’s not very much.”
“We’re a small family, I guess.”
“Well, what about you?”
“Me, what?”
“What are your parents’ names? Do you have any brothers or sisters?”
“Don’t you think you might have met my brothers and sisters if I had any?”
He raised his eyes from the notebook, a line frowned into the freckled spot between his eyes. “I never met my dad.”
“Well, that’s different.”
“How? It doesn’t seem different.”
“Well. It is. It just is. I don’t have any brothers or sisters. We can put down my parents’ names.”
He watched my hand move across the page. “Are they—are they dead?”
His solemn face creased with concern, but for just this minute he gave me no comfort. Here he was, the justification of all those hormones flooding, bodies grinding, DNA strands replicating. But just for this minute, when my hand had just filled in the name of my mother—and my father, too, despite everything—I felt only loss. Nothing would change it. Nothing would cure it. If the presence of Joshua next to me didn’t fix all that had gone wrong, then there was nothing that would. “They are.”
“When did they—”
“My mother died in an accident. A car accident.” The truth was inadequate.
“What about your dad?”
I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t want to know. “He died,” I said. “Of old age.”
The end. The period at the end of a sentence and the conversation, and I knew we both felt it. Joshua took the notebook from my hands and studied our tree. It wasn’t a tree, really. A little bush, perhaps. A little patch of weeds, grown wild and stomped out.
And where the world might have once seemed vast, now it was tiny. It was really rather small.
Chapter Fourteen
On Saturday, I reported for Boosters duty at the school, dodging practicing kicks by a group of cheerleaders with skinny stilts for legs and smiles full of braces. The Boosters booth was a squat little green-painted cinder-block building next to the home team stands.
I arrived at the front, like a customer. Stephanie waved me around to the back and handed me a T-shirt. I’d worn a button-down green shirt, the only green item of clothing I had in support of the school colors. But she was right. Next to the rest of them, I looked like an accountant. I threw the T-shirt on over my other shirt.
Lines quickly formed on both ends of the service window. The Boosters’ play clock started early, ended late.
Stephanie put me in charge of popcorn. I got the hang of it well enough: fill the pan at the top of the machine with kernels and oil, push some buttons, flip a lever, watch and listen for the popcorn to pop itself down to a certain threshold of pop-to-silence, and then flip the lever back and dump the popcorn into the bin. I was given a saltshaker and some red-and-white striped cups to fill. Newbie job. Stay out of the way.
The pros grabbed at everything coming their way, yanking potato chip bags from where they hung by clothespins, filling soda cups, taking orders and yelling them back. Stephanie and Grace were adding up figures in their heads and giving change. One woman who had shown up in tight white jeans and high heels—“Kelly,” Stephanie had cried, “you made it!”—had promptly been put in command of the nacho cheese and chili dog sauce bins. “Are there . . . aprons?” Kelly asked, holding her charm bracelet back to stir the cheese sludge as it warmed.
The double lines ran all the way to the fences for the first forty-five minutes, petering out only when a shaky national anthem started up on the field.
I loaded the popcorn machine again: kernels, button for oil, lever, pop.
“—anyone with a baseball bat could have killed—”
I looked up, trying to pick up the rest of the sentence out of the noise of the popcorn. Volunteers were resetting their stations and cleaning up spills, rushing by, bumping into one another, squeezing through narrow passages. So much movement that at first I had trouble locating the conversation.
�
�—meth heads are strong,” Grace was saying to someone over the counter.
The woman on the other side sipped at a straw, nodding. She had a paper tray of nachos and a popcorn cup tucked to her chest with a pudgy arm. “She could have done it, that’s what I’m saying. Didn’t you think once that she was after Shane—”
Grace waved the idea away. “He’s just doing his job. They’re a mess or he wouldn’t have to be over there night and day. Hold on—hey, Tara!”
Deputy Lombardi, in uniform, walked up to the counter. “You guys seen Russ?”
“Anyone left at the station to keep the lights on?” the other woman said.
“I saw him earlier,” Grace said. “Shane’s off duty but here to watch Shay play. Keller might be in the stands. What’s up?”
“You didn’t hear it from me, but the Jordans just found a suitcase packed with panties and lingerie stuffed into the corner of their garage,” Tara said. “Looked like someone was ready for a romantic getaway.”
“Charity’s hope chest,” Grace said. “Now, where do you suppose she thought she was going? And with which fella?”
“Bo,” said the other woman. “I mean, all that time with his wife gone, what do you expect?”
Tara shot her a disgusted look, reaching for a handful of popcorn and then edging away. “Yeah, so if you see Russ . . .”
Grace and the other woman waited in silence until she was out of range, then made eyes at each other. “Russ?” Grace said. “Notice how she has to find him, tell him in person. Not like his radio’s broken. It’s ridiculous. She wouldn’t leave Shane alone all last year, and I’d just about had it, though Shane always tells me I have nothing to worry about. These skanky girls.”
“The sheriff’s single, though,” the woman said. “How in the world, I have no idea. You know I’d—”
“What’s burning?”
Stephanie was at my side, pushing me out of the way and reaching for the lever to dump the popcorn, but it was too late. Smoke billowed out from the pan, a tongue of flame licking its rim. The woman on nacho cheese screamed.
The Day I Died Page 11
