Waiting for the worst. Both of them. Joe with his concern and now this skinny librarian and her surprise—everyone was just waiting to hear Madame Zonda–inspired news.
Joe moved us over to an empty table away from the students. “No news. Ms. Winger just has some questions for you.”
“For me?”
I sat across from her. She seemed sincere, not at all like she’d been asked to placate a disturbed woman. “Joshua was working on a project during library time?”
“He certainly was. He seemed very engaged.”
“But it wasn’t for class.”
“Well. I don’t know,” she said. “The students do all sorts of research. Unless they’re making a mess or getting too loud, we don’t ask too many questions.”
“No, I’m telling you,” I said. “It wasn’t for class. I’ve gone over it with—” I glanced at Joe. Better not to mention Steve as a source. “I’ve gone over it a couple of different ways, but whatever he was doing was personal.”
The buzzer sounded again. All the students would be back in place now. All the students except mine.
“Some of them research their favorite baseball teams during library,” Joe said. “Or their favorite supermodels or . . . we have a lot of websites blocked.”
“So library time is all about the internet?” I asked.
“Most of them have access at home, so many will research in the books or use the time to write their papers or do their homework,” the librarian said. “Or ask questions of us. It’s really just study hall.”
Joshua didn’t have access at home. At home, the internet was for work. My work. “Was Joshua using the web for his project?”
“Some. I helped him a bit.”
“Can you show me? Please?”
She and Joe exchanged looks, and then stood and led me to one of the study carrels. A girl sat there, tapping into the keyboard. The site in front of her looked like it belonged to a pop group. She hastily clicked the screen empty as we approached and gave up her spot without argument.
“Do you remember what he was looking for?” I asked.
Milah frowned. “A genealogy project, wasn’t it?”
We gathered around the empty carrel, Milah leaning into the keyboard. “He was researching some distant relatives. Cousins.”
“He doesn’t have any cousins,” I said.
“Well,” Milah said slowly. “Everyone has some cousins. Down the line.”
“We don’t.” Of course it wasn’t true. “How would he have started? Wouldn’t he have started with a name or something concrete? How do you do this?”
“Well, he could have started with himself.” Milah tapped a few keys, Joshua’s name appearing in the search box. When the results came up, she ran her finger down the few entries, tried a few more keystrokes. “But he doesn’t have a web presence that I can see. Good for you. He’s too young. Or he could have started with you. Your name is—”
I hesitated, glancing at Joe. Then gave the name I went by. No reason to call up the old newspaper stories now.
Milah typed my name, tapped around.
“You’re not here, either.” She shot me a look of renewed interest. In this day and age, it must be unusual not to come rising to the surface when someone tried to fish you out.
Joe shifted impatiently. “I’m just not sure how this is relevant.”
I didn’t want it to be relevant, either, but it was. I was willing to admit it now.
“Try this name,” I said, saying it aloud for the first time in thirteen years. And spelling it the way I had for Joshua, the wrong way, the just-in-case way.
Chapter Twenty-six
Eliot Ray Levis. One l, one t. Sometimes he got mail addressed to Elliott, two l’s, two t’s, and it pissed him off. Or Lebis. Or Leeves, Leaves, Levi. What does that say? he’d crow, holding the offending catalog or envelope to my face. How can they get away with being so wrong all the time?
Milah clicked around on a few things then looked back at me. “Not much on that guy, either. I don’t think Joshua would have the skills or the credit card to take this search as deep as you’d need to go. Some real estate stuff . . . nothing new, at least.”
I let out the breath I was holding but didn’t feel any better. I had to catch her attention before her search dug up thirteen-year-old headlines or chat rooms. “How could Joshua have spent all his library time on this if we’re coming up tilt within ten minutes?”
“Oh, I didn’t say he spent all of his time on this,” she said, finally closing that search window and looking away from the screen. “He mostly used the reference section, which is why I noticed him specifically.” She glanced at Joe. “They don’t usually bother with the dusty side of the room.”
“Reference section . . . like encyclopedias?”
Milah stood up and started toward the table we’d left earlier. Behind it, a wide array of books: thick, tall, old. “I think he was more interested in—”
She stopped.
“—maps.”
I ARRIVED HOME without paying attention to how I got there. Underneath my skin, my veins thumped. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t stop thinking.
Maps.
But where was he going? No one had thought to ask, to look over his shoulder to see what trip he was planning.
Jeffries had gone and fetched the boys: Steve, Shay Mullen, another boy from the pack I’d seen on the courthouse lawn. Stephanie’s kid, Caleb.
“He was always talking about Chicago,” Shay said. His mouth didn’t open very wide when he talked. I leaned in to hear better. “But then it was all about some woodsy place? Remember?” he put this to Steve. “He wanted to go camping?”
“I don’t know,” Steve said. He seemed embarrassed to talk to me now. The French fries, probably. I’d hurt his pride, even if I’d cured his stomach illness.
“Where?” I said, my heart in my throat.
“I can look it up when I get home,” Shay said.
“How will you look it up?”
“Online,” he said. “On the chat on low keys revenge.”
“Two?” Steve said.
“Yeah,” Shay said, flipping his hair out of his eyes and pulling up the waistband of his too-tight jeans.
“What? What’s low keys revenge?”
“Lo-ki,” Shay enunciated. Someone across the room shushed him. “The god of mischief. Loki’s Revenge.”
“Two,” Steve said. “The next generation of the game.”
“Oh, it’s a game,” I said. “And it’s online? But Joshua doesn’t have online access.”
“Yeah, he does,” Steve said, that hiss escaping him again.
“He plays all the time,” Shay said.
“And there’s a chat,” Caleb said. “You know, where you can talk on the screen with the guys you’re playing with. All over. Not just in Parks. Not just your friends, I mean.”
His game system?
“But he didn’t have online access at our place—”
“The neighbor,” Caleb said. “Really easy. One of your neighbors doesn’t keep their network locked down.”
And here I thought I’d been the one running a secret online enterprise from our apartment.
“When he talked about going somewhere, going camping,” I said, “did he mention anyplace in particular?” I glanced at Joe, then Milah. “Did he mention Wisconsin? Sweetheart Lake?”
Shay looked at me sharply. “Yeah, that’s it.”
Funny how the name of the place stuck in your head once you heard it. The boys confirmed they’d all heard that name, that maybe Joshua had been looking it up online during one of those library hours, too.
Now, driving home, I raged at myself. How had I wasted a minute trying to pretend I didn’t know where Joshua had gone? He’d gone to find Ray. Of course he had. The police had asked. Russ had leveled with me. I wouldn’t let them consider the possibility, because I’d hoped it wasn’t true. Because my only hope was that it wasn’t true. Because it didn’t se
em possible. Joshua couldn’t go to his dad’s because he didn’t have one. A dad? That was the stuff of greeting cards and sitcom TV. Joshua didn’t have a dad. Neither of us did, not anymore, and we were both better off for it.
When I pulled up in front of our building, Russ was standing outside. He didn’t have his hat.
“Been looking for you,” he said.
My hands began to shake so badly I had to grip them together. Just like everyone else, expecting the worst. “Joshua?”
“No, no, sorry—no news there, not exactly.” He looked me over. “Have you had some news?”
I should tell him about Ray. Ray, for God’s sake. Of course Ray. I had been using more magical thinking. And now: one name. One name, and I’d call down the power of the nation’s security forces to retrieve my son quickly and quietly. But that seemed . . . oily. As Kent had said, if I went out and yanked him back, I’d get back the boy I deserved. I couldn’t begin to explain that, or what it cost me to say Ray’s name again. What it would cost me to explain what he’d done and how much I’d let him get away with.
“Can we go inside?” he said.
I looked up, then away.
“Oh.” He turned his head down the street, watched a car coming at us too fast. The driver slowed down when he spotted Russ. He stared after the car until it turned a corner. “I guess I can tell you here, then. Nothing bad, now, nothing bad, but it’s not that helpful, either. Just. Just a mystery solved.”
“Aidan?”
“No—”
“Nothing? Even with Leila home again?”
He grimaced. “I can’t really talk about it.”
“Oh.”
We stood uncompanionably for a moment.
“We got a match on that . . . that threat.”
I couldn’t understand him, but then I remembered the envelope, the flyer, the mean, bold letters: I know about you. The memory of that day rose to meet me; pieces fit together.
“Joshua,” I said.
“Found a photo file of it on the hard drive of his game thingy. Does that surprise you?”
I could no longer be astonished by anything Joshua knew, said, or did. He’d signed me up for the Sweetheart Lake travel mag, too. No one else could have done it. No one else could have been as cruel.
“It would take a lot to surprise me at this point,” I said.
We stared at one another for a long moment, until I felt we were deciding something I hadn’t realized we were going to decide just now.
“OK,” he said. After a few seconds of silence, he started down the sidewalk to his truck. That day in the barn was over and now tainted.
“Wait,” I said, and hated the sound of my voice and the chiseled impatience I saw in his face when he turned back. “The handwriting—”
“I can’t talk about that case, I said.”
“No, not Aidan’s note. Those evidence forms.”
He wouldn’t meet my eyes. “What about them?”
“I couldn’t figure it out for a long time,” I said. “They were all blending together. I couldn’t get a handle on it. But I think all the signatures are signed by the same person.”
Now I had his attention. “That can’t be right. The techs—”
“Well, no, before the samples go to the lab,” I said. “By the time the evidence goes off for testing, it’s too late. That’s where they’re finding the problem, right? They come back from the lab as—something else, not drugs.” I paused to make sure we were talking the same language.
“Listening.”
“The arresting officer in each, and then the person who logs it into your storage, and then the person who claims the sample back to send to the lab. Sometimes they might be the same person, right, but on your forms, they’re many names, all different—but all signed by the same hand. He tried to make them look different, pretty successfully, actually. Does that make sense to you? Is that—”
“Well, it would explain some things,” Russ said. “Is there no way to tell who’s doing it?”
“I could—don’t take this the wrong way, but we’ve had this talk already. I need the originals,” I said. He rolled his eyes. “Sheriff, the copier you used has dust or nicks on the glass, for one thing. It shows up as little black dots all along the page, right where the signatures begin. It’s distracting. Get me the originals and I’ll see what I can do.”
He nodded once, curt. “Yes, ma’am. Anything else?”
I was telling him how to do his job again but was too tired to argue. What were the other questions I’d had for him? I didn’t think I’d ever see this man or this place again, and saw no point to having this conversation. But maybe really pissing him off would keep him and his security service away from the apartment for the night. I only needed one night. I grasped at any of the threads from my notes that had been left untied. “When the drugs come back from the lab and it isn’t what it’s supposed to be . . . what is it?”
“Why does that matter?”
“It doesn’t,” I said. “Not to me. Just wondered. Missing cocaine, missing crystal meth.” I paused, looking for the worst thing to say. “I would have thought it would matter to you. Enough to ask, anyway.”
“We’re working on it, Ms. Winger.” His tone was as clipped as the click of a typewriter key. “And—I think I’ll be using more traditional methods to solve my evidence leak from here on out, so don’t worry about any further calls from me. I thank you for your service to your community.”
For a moment I recalled the slanted doorway of the barn and my arm sticking out of the shadows into the daylight as we parted. Don’t leave it here, he’d said, when it had never happened, when the place we’d gone had never existed.
“Of course,” I said.
I turned to go but when he called after me, I stopped and looked back.
“You know, for a while I wondered what team you were on,” he said. “It seemed to me that you had a dog in this race when you couldn’t possibly.”
“Meaning?”
“I thought you wanted Leila Ransey to be innocent. Tell me I’m crazy.”
“No,” I said. “I wanted Leila Ransey to get away. It’s not the same thing.”
I turned and walked toward the door, fighting the urge to look back again. I knew what I would see if I did, and I meant what I said. I had wanted Leila to get away. I wanted us all to get away.
Chapter Twenty-seven
I packed as though I would never return.
Clothes. Shoes. A jacket. I packed a few towels, a blanket. I threw pillows on top of it all. I might have to sleep in the car. My computer. I dragged the collapsed boxes from under the bed but didn’t begin to fill them all. Light. We had to travel light this time.
I packed a bag for Joshua: underwear, socks, T-shirts, his winter coat, his snow boots. I began to see what was missing, what he’d taken with him. I developed a theory as I sorted through his things. The first time you run, you don’t know what to take. You leave behind what you need and cart along what you don’t. The first time I’d run, I had nothing but the clothes I’d stolen from the woman in the next hospital bed, but that hadn’t been my choice.
His game system was still in county evidence, but I packed his new headphones, carefully wrapping the cords and tucking them into a corner of the cargo area behind the backseats.
I packed until I was exhausted, almost midnight. Everything felt as though I were doing it for the last time. Maybe I was washing my hands in this sink for the last time. Maybe I was closing this door for the last time and descending these steps for the last time. But there would be other sinks, other doors, other steps. That was not how it felt. So little of my old life offered itself up to be taken along, I felt as though I were packing for my own execution. I packed for the trip, but not for what came after. I couldn’t imagine what might come after.
At the bottom of the stairs, Margaret’s door opened. I saw the glint of her glasses in the dark crack, gave a nod, and tried to slip past.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
“Nowhere, Margaret, don’t worry.”
“That’s bull, lady. I know bull when I see it.”
I glanced toward the back door, propped open for my last trip through. “Seems like you already know it all.”
“What’m I supposed to tell that police when he comes to check on you?”
“He won’t.”
“What did you tell him?” she said.
“Margaret, I need to get on the road.”
“Nothing? Slip out of town like you came in. You don’t know a thing.”
Agreement rose to my lips, but I swallowed it.
“Tell me, then,” she said. “Just in case.”
I had thought of this—so many just-in-cases. But I hadn’t taken care of any of them. I’d never left a forwarding address, never told anyone where I came from, where I was going. Why start now? Joshua. What if the police found him on his way to Sweetheart Lake and brought him back? What if he changed his mind halfway there and came back on his own?
But if I believed that, I’d be waiting here forever.
“Home,” I said. The word caught in my throat. Whenever I thought of home, I thought of dusk and mosquito bites, the lake like a photo on a wall calendar I took for granted. The trees hulking over the houses, gods waiting to pass judgment. Red dirt in my socks and the smell of burgers from the Dairy Bar drifting out into the night. I thought of rental house after rental house, all dumps, and the sad bucket of yellow paint always stacked in the basement. “Home. Joshua’s gone home, and I have to go get him.”
Margaret opened the door wider, her worn slippers appearing over the threshold. She turned her bad ear toward me. “And where is that?”
“I’ll call the sheriff’s office from the road.”
Margaret reached out to stop me, but I slipped past and out the back. The SUV didn’t seem loaded for a new life. The far back was full and covered, but otherwise I might be taking a Sunday drive or running an errand. I got inside, buckled in. The sounds of the night came through the open window. After a moment, I started the engine and rolled out into the street.
The Day I Died Page 21
