Mamie waited for Ray to say something. At last she said, “Your mother, honey. Her ashes.”
My mother had been a single passenger in a single-car accident. One car, one passenger. One tree. The tree, an old oak that had survived the American Revolution and a thousand scrapes, had to be cut down. I’d read the online news story six months after the death, sitting in a cold apartment in Ohio, and imagined my father asking after the firewood from the tree.
“Why do you—?” I heard the twist in my voice. Ray, stoic, shook his head.
Mamie said, “Your dad—”
“For God’s—don’t tell me my dad went through anger management, too.” I glanced a last time at the photo in Ray’s hands, and turned for the truck.
Mamie hurried after me. “He’s old. This might be your last chance—”
I slid inside, started the motor to block anything else Ray or Mamie wanted me to know. I’d already given last chances enough for a lifetime.
Chapter Thirty-three
On my way out, I bypassed the town. I had confronted Ray and had my mother’s ashes in a tidy box. I never had to see Sweetheart Lake again.
Within an hour, my head pounded and my stomach roared for attention. I needed gas soon, too. When one of the towns presented a gas station–slash–fast-food option, I steered for its harbor.
I dug the aspirin out of the back of the truck and, inside, bought a Coke and two fistfuls of breakfast sandwiches, each loaded with cheese and eggs and awful bacon. Hangover food. I had a hangover from being in that house, from bumping against that furniture. From trying to understand and explain. What a waste of time.
The restaurant portion of the station was busy. I found a stool by a window and tore into my breakfast. I realized I’d left the truck parked at a gas pump and didn’t feel as bad about it as I should have.
I was unwrapping the second sandwich when an old sedan pulled up behind my truck and idled there, waiting. The woman behind the wheel rested her head on her shoulder, her arm dangling out the window, patient.
A little head peered out the backseat’s window. The kid was small, jumping up and down. No seat belt or he couldn’t have been monkeying the way he was. After a few minutes the mother lost her cool and turned on the kid, slapping at him until he sat down.
The mother’s fault. Mothers took the brunt of everything that went wrong, but in this case, if she had just put the kid in his restraints, he couldn’t have been as much trouble. He was just a baby. Another day I might have said something, but I was tired of judgments and still inside the restaurant, chewing, my mouth filled with egg, when the boy in the backseat fled the woman’s hands and pressed his worried face against the window—
Aidan.
I stared, started to rise. But wait, how? The child slid out of sight and I still wasn’t sure. I stumbled off the stool.
Too late. The woman was backing up the car and pulling around the gas pump and my truck. By the time I navigated the restaurant’s tables and the other patrons to the parking lot, the car was gone.
“YOU’RE NOT SERIOUS, are you?” The dispatcher I’d bothered the night before was still on duty and tired. Tired of me, in any case. She put me through to the sheriff’s administrative office, but it was not Sherry who answered. The woman who picked up instead wouldn’t patch me through to the sheriff, either.
“He’s not on downtime,” I said. I had barricaded myself in the last known pay-phone booth in the Western world, and all the people leaving the restaurant seemed to smirk at me, cell phones casually to their ears. “Really. He’s working, and this is—he’s going to want to talk to me.”
“Think pretty high of ourselves, don’t we now?”
I had a sudden picture in my head. Deputy Lombardi. The young officer who was always watching me with junior-high eyes.
“It’s about Aidan. Aidan Ransey.”
“This conversation may be recorded to better serve you.”
“Are there any grown-ups there I could talk to?” I said.
“My break is in a half hour,” Lombardi said. “If you want to talk to your boyfriend, you might have better luck with the next shift. Although, I wouldn’t bet on it.”
I’d had enough. “Let’s talk about how you say you discovered the ransom note in the Ransey house before Charity’s body was even discovered,” I said. “Because you were there all night, with Bo.”
“Oh, look who thinks she’s a detective.”
“And who maybe had time to get over to patrol the crime scene just in time to leave that body there.”
“What are you talking about?” Lombardi said.
“Just put me through and you’ll find out—” I held the receiver away from my ear. The phone had gone dead. I really did hope the conversation had been recorded, but I didn’t think so. I stared at the receiver. Call back? But what was the use? The criminals were running the jail. I hoped all the signatures on Keller’s evidence forms led to Tara Lombardi, I really did. At last I had nothing to do but slam the phone onto the hook and get out of the booth.
The car with Aidan inside had had enough time to drive around town twice while I’d wasted precious minutes with Parks County’s finest, but I pulled out of the station parking lot with intention, going the way I thought the car had turned. It was the same strip of town I’d passed through already, but now I paid attention. I bore down on each gas station and then slowed down to sort through the cars at the pumps. I started to doubt myself. Had I passed it? Was it blue? Black? There was rust on the front passenger door—or was it the back door? Did it matter? Wouldn’t I know the thing when I saw it?
Wouldn’t I know—
Something about this situation had been nagging at me, and now it came to me in a rush. Aidan. I’d never met him back in Parks, but I’d seen him before, once. He’d been sucking his thumb on the shoulder of a woman brushing past me in Sweetheart Lake the day I’d returned to town. Outside the store that used to be a bank, Aidan had looked right at me.
I’d missed my chance to help Aidan, missed perhaps the only chance anyone would have to bring Aidan home.
I drove on, head swiveling. The road kept offering places the sedan might be—up ahead, like a shimmering mirage—and so I pushed on. The trees began to edge closer to the road. I knew where I was going. Back the way I came, back to Sweetheart Lake.
I HADN’T FOUND the car by the time I drove once again into the tidy downtown of my youth. I’d been calculating the entire ride back what evidence I had. Sitting in my truck in front of the fudge shop as the town began to wake and the shopkeepers flipped over their door signs, I wasn’t sure I had anything but doubt. Had the kid really been Aidan Ransey? What were the odds? And if the boy was Aidan, then who was the woman? How likely that a stranger had abducted Aidan and was brazenly carting him around northern Wisconsin as though he was her own?
I’d got it wrong. Simple enough. Lots of little boys had blond hair and mournful eyes.
I tried to bring back the image of the boy’s face as he dodged the woman’s slaps. It was the sadness that got to me. The kid had been jumping up and down in the backseat without joy, his face blank. Maybe it meant nothing, but if it meant anything, it was worth looking into, just to draw attention to a child who needed help.
I got out and opened the back of the truck, digging for my work stuff. Tucked into a pocket of my computer bag were some of the Spectator clippings I’d saved. When I saw the photo of Aidan’s round face, the hairs on my arms stood on end.
I grabbed all the files and my computer and filled the parking meter with quarters. In the pharmacy I made fifty grainy color copies of the clipping, watching Aidan’s face shuffle again and again to the top of the pile. The cashier accepted my money and glanced at the stack of pages.
“Have you seen him?” I asked.
The cashier was a young woman with fading purple hair, and a metal toothpick through her nose like a bull’s ring. I wondered how hard it was for her to live in such a small town, or if she’d found
her crowd anyway. “Cute,” the girl said in an unconvincing monotone.
“He’s missing.”
The cashier looked more closely. “From Sweetheart Lake?”
“From Indiana. I think he might be—maybe someone brought him up here.”
“Oh.” The cashier fed me a receipt. “Why?”
It was the perfect question. I couldn’t think why. “So you haven’t seen him?”
“They all look the same to me, really. Small.”
“Will you keep one behind the counter? If you see him—” What? What plan did I have? “Call the police, I guess.”
The girl looked at me, blank.
“I’m working with the police. The Indiana police, I mean.”
The cashier seemed to believe me less. “I’ll keep it back here?”
Up and down the street, I handed the posters to skeptical shopkeepers. No one could say that they’d seen him. And maybe they hadn’t. Or maybe they had and hadn’t noticed him. There were no news alerts here, no Aidan Watch time lines in the daily paper. To them, he’d be just another little boy on vacation with his family. Just another tourist.
The woman running the real estate office said he looked just like her grandson when he was a baby. “I hope you find him,” she said, displaying the copy I gave her prominently on her desk. “His poor mama.”
In one of the last shops, a tourist T-shirt emporium, a teenage girl welcomed me through a mouthful of braces. Her skinny arms stuck out of a candy-colored Sweetheart Lake T-shirt too large for her.
“Is the manager or owner here?”
The girl went to get someone, her ponytail swinging.
I glanced around at the shirts, instinct drawing my eye to one that seemed closely related to the shirt I’d had in high school, the pair of matching shirts Theresa and I bought to wear together that the other students hadn’t liked. It was pink with, inexplicably, a palm tree scene and the words Sweetheart Lake Welcomes YOU! blazoned across the chest. I pulled it off the rack.
“That one is sort of funny,” said a woman’s tentative voice.
I glanced up and did a double take. Things were funny, when you were least ready to laugh.
Chapter Thirty-four
Theresa. This time I was sure of what I saw. The only living person I might have wanted to reclaim from Sweetheart Lake stood before me, a little older, a little more chin, a little more hip. I looked at the shirt in my hand.
“Those shirts were funny,” I said, finally.
Theresa’s eyes flickered to my face and away. “I can’t believe it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I feel like—like I just got punched.” She held her hand to her stomach. She couldn’t seem to look at me directly. “How—I mean—I don’t know where to start.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“Stop it. There’s nothing to apologize for. You made it out. It’s what we—it’s what I always wanted. I thought you were . . .”
I hung the shirt’s hanger back on the rack with a clatter. “Murdered.”
“Yeah.”
“I didn’t think it through. I should have written you. I should have called.” None of it seemed like enough.
“Should-haves are like apologizing except no one’s listening, is what my gammie used to tell us,” Theresa said. “You remember her. Crazy lady.”
“Sweet lady. Your whole family—”
“She’s gone now. And my mom.”
“It’s not apologizing to say I’m sorry for that.”
“Over ten years, but—well, I took it hard. So soon after—” She looked to the door, though no one had come in. “I thought he killed you. They told me he didn’t, that you were living in a trailer in Tennessee—”
“For a while.”
“—but I tried to find you and I couldn’t. I didn’t believe them.” She covered her mouth with her hand. Over it, her eyes went soft and then snapped back. “I didn’t know you had it in you.”
“I didn’t, either,” I said.
“I didn’t know you at all.”
I dug in my bag, my wallet, and finally found a tiny photo of Joshua from Chicago. The photo wasn’t that old, but he still looked so young. I paused with it in my hand. If I didn’t find him, would every photo of him catch me like this? I held it out to Theresa. “This is how.”
“What,” Theresa said, smiling for the first time. “No kidding. That is—wow, is that his kid.” She glanced up.
“I’ve seen him.”
“Born again,” Theresa said.
“He seems to think so.”
“His wife is nice,” Theresa said, studying Joshua’s picture. “She might be an idiot, though, I can’t tell. All that ‘I believe in love’ stuff.”
“She’s said that more than once?” I said. “Wow.”
“I believe in what people do,” Theresa said. “You know? Not what they say. I know what he did. Except—what happened to you? All that blood.”
I blinked away, trying not to remember just now what he’d done. Ray seemed a million miles in the past. And so did Theresa, even as she stood with Joshua’s photo in her hand.
“Did you bring him with you?”
“Joshua? No. It’s—complicated.”
She handed back the picture. “If you say it’s complicated, I’m going to believe it.”
“He disappeared,” I said.
“He takes after you, then, too.”
It hurt. Apologies weren’t allowed, but I could see how they were necessary, would always be necessary, and would never be accepted. We’d lived without one another for thirteen years, and now I saw how small the reunion would be. I’d be an anecdote to tell.
“He’s here?” she said.
“I thought he’d figured out where his dad was.”
“But you haven’t found him.” Theresa gestured toward the flyers nodding from the top of my bag. “Who’s that, then?”
“Further complications. I thought I saw this kid here. He’s missing from—from where I’ve been living.” I handed her one of the copies, trying to drag the woman and child from my memory again. Was I sure? “I mean—I think I saw him. It’s possible I’m losing my mind. They need to put me in the nuthouse. Is Riverdale still open for business?” Riverdale Center was a childhood taunt, the place where the crazies got sent. As an adult I understood it was a home for the elderly and fragile, not a psych ward at all.
Theresa looked like she wanted to say something but turned to the flyer instead. She studied it for a long time.
The girl who’d welcomed me stood outside the propped-open front doors, clicking through racks of clearance T-shirts. At this distance and angle, I saw that the girl must be Theresa’s daughter. I supposed I didn’t deserve to hear about her.
“I can’t be sure,” Theresa said.
An electric thrill shot up my spine. “You’ve seen him?”
“Well, I don’t know. There was a woman with a little boy in here—yesterday, I guess. She was looking for a job, but we don’t have anything. I wish I’d had her do an application.”
“She’s younger than us, brown hair, ponytail? If this was yesterday, she was wearing a . . . like a sleeveless black T-shirt and jeans. Not a job interview outfit.”
“That’s the one,” Theresa said. “I thought she might be looking for a place to rob. That was the vibe.”
“They passed me on the street. I was so caught up in my own thing.”
Theresa gave me an appraising look. “No wonder,” she said.
But it hadn’t been about Joshua at the moment the woman and Aidan had swept past me. I’d been locked into a dead-eyed gaze with the past and had forgotten the present altogether. I hadn’t been thinking about Joshua at all, and Aidan had looked right at me.
When had I become so self-involved?
The mistake with the murdered executive came back to me. I’d been caught up in my own drama then, too. If something happened to Aidan now, I’d never forgive myself. And Joshua—what was I mi
ssing? What had I seen and not paid attention to? I’d spent thirteen years with my head to the ground listening for approaching hoofbeats. Listening so hard for what wouldn’t come that I’d missed everything else. How could I still be down there on my knees, my ear pressed to the dirt, while missing boys walked right past me?
“You didn’t recognize the woman?” I said. “There’s no reason for that woman to come back to the shop?”
“I was pretty straightforward. No job here. No jobs in town, really, since it’s off-season. Doesn’t mean she’s not still in the area, though.” Theresa thought for a moment. “She seemed like she might be from here, but I can’t tell you why I thought so. Maybe she’s got a place nearby.”
Those winding roads, peeling off again and again to encircle the lakes. A hundred lakes, a thousand. The task was too big. A few color copies weren’t going to bring Aidan in. If anything, I might scare the woman away.
I dropped my bag to the ground and ripped it open. At last I found the original news clipping again. Under the large color image of Aidan was the small, grainy photo of his mother. I stood and held it out to Theresa. “What about her?”
“That wasn’t her.”
“But do you recognize this one? That’s his mother.”
She took the paper. “Nope. But you know how many people come here every summer. It was slow, economy and all, but still—maybe she was here this summer with all the rest of the crowds.”
But I knew where this woman had been for several days now, and where she’d been before that. That Indiana hotel receipt she’d signed seemed like it had been in front of me a year ago, not just last week.
Theresa unfolded the newspaper to read the front page. “Indiana, huh?”
I felt my face go red, as though I’d been caught in a lie. I hadn’t told the sheriff about Wisconsin and now I wouldn’t tell Theresa about Indiana. Holding my old life apart from the new, just as I always had. “We lived a couple of places. Before there.”
“How many times did you move?”
“Lost count.”
Theresa wouldn’t look away.
“Eight, ten times, city to city. Six states. Joshua is tired of it.”
The Day I Died Page 26
