I reached for the paper, but she had opened it to an inside page. “What’s this place like? Will you go back?”
“Not sure. No plans until I find—”
“Hey.” Theresa parachuted the newspaper open and folded the pages back. “I think I know this one.”
She turned the paper around, and there he was: Bo Ransey. The story from the front page continued inside, with the photo of Bo in front of his tumbling front porch.
“You’re not kidding, are you?”
“Why would I kid about that redneck? I’m sure I saw him over at The Shaw in Rhinelander once. Remember The Shaw? I don’t drink anymore.” Theresa dipped her head at the paper, so that I had a sense of how much drinking had gone by. Maybe I had been the cause. Another thing to apologize for. “But we still go for burgers sometimes. I wouldn’t remember him,” she said, “except he seemed like such an ass.”
I rushed from thought to thought, but nothing lined up behind what I knew. Nothing made sense. Bo Ransey hadn’t kidnapped his own child. He hadn’t left town. Had he? Had he paid someone to do it? But then how was he still in Parks bothering the sheriff every day?
“Do you remember when you saw him?” I said.
“Sometime this summer.”
“Not in the last two weeks?”
Theresa leaned on a T-shirt rack. “No, it was early this summer. May, maybe April.”
If only I knew what it meant. I’d been given a handful of puzzle pieces, but not enough of them to build the picture.
“So,” she said, handing the newspaper back. “I hate to bring this up, but you know your dad is still kicking, right?”
Ray and Mamie, now Theresa. They were determined to tell me the things I didn’t want to know.
“I’ve been made aware of it,” I said.
“He’s at Riverdale, Lee,” Theresa said. “A couple of years now.”
Riverdale. So this was the news that Ray had wanted me to have. My dad was alive, and he was stowed in the bogeyman place of my childhood, the cuckoo’s nest, a haunted house made real.
“That’s probably fine for him,” I said.
“I know how you feel about him, but—”
“I won’t be going out there,” I said. “How does everyone seem to know about his being alive except me? Never mind.”
“Everyone?”
I sighed, picked up my bag, and faced Theresa over crossed arms. “I stayed with Ray and his wife last night. Please don’t ask how that happened, because I’m still not sure myself.”
“So he told you?” She sounded so surprised, I could tell there was more to hear.
“What? Just—out with it.”
“He didn’t tell you.”
“I think you’ll have to tell me to find out.”
Theresa looked sharply at me. “You’re changed. As changed as Ray thinks he is.”
I felt the insult but let it go. I had changed. I wasn’t here to morph back into the tiny Leeanna shape that allowed everyone to stay comfortable and uninvolved.
To get it over with, I asked, “How much has he changed?”
“Ray Levis,” Theresa said with a deep sigh and a fast glance around the store. “Ray Levis is the guy who pays the bills at Riverdale.”
I felt something in my body shift threateningly. If I didn’t sit down, I might fall. I reached for a T-shirt rack. I hoped I was misunderstanding.
“Ray is the one who keeps your dad. There’s assistance, sure. But it doesn’t cover everything.” She looked uncomfortable. “Also, they visit him.”
“But—why?”
“He didn’t tell you.” Theresa shook her head. “I’ll be damned.”
“He thinks he’s making it up to me. He has some nerve.”
“I won’t argue that. But I think he started out believing that if he did something for your dad, people wouldn’t think he’d done something to you. That’s not how it went. Karma must be really hard to buy.”
I remembered Ray seated at his own kitchen table, rubbing the photo of Joshua. We had to move. You wouldn’t believe the looks he gets in town.
What would I have thought if I’d been one of the bystanders?
“They wanted to think he’d killed me,” I said, seeing it all clearly. “And then he gave them a reason to believe it.”
Chapter Thirty-five
At the Vilas County sheriff’s office, the chief was out. A bored officer with a walrus-whisker moustache sat at the front desk alone, his gut bumping the counter. He wouldn’t say when his sheriff was due back, wouldn’t get anyone from behind the security door to talk to me. He took my information down.
“Do you get missing kids from Indiana up here all the time?” I said, my blood starting to rise.
He finally rose to the challenge of noticing me, his demeanor telling me what they got most was crazy out-of-towners. “You wouldn’t believe it if I told you,” he said.
I slammed the door on my way out.
I found another sticky pay phone in the lobby and tried Sheriff Keller’s office again. The Parks County dispatchers had traded shifts, but the new one was no more help. She wouldn’t put me through to anyone else. “He’s out on a call,” the woman said. She sounded older, not smoking while she worked, but she was all business. “I can put you through to the nonemergency number and you can leave a message.”
“But this is actually an emergency.”
“Deputy Lombardi said you’d say that.”
So now I had a reputation among the ranks. I did as I was told, leaving a message. But it felt as futile as it probably was. Who was going to get that message? And when?
I dialed the only other number I had memorized. The phone rang and rang in Kent’s office in Indianapolis until voicemail engaged. “Kent, it’s Anna. This is going to sound crazy, but what’s new, right? Listen, I’m up in Sweetheart Lake. It’s where—” I pictured Kent’s precise way of talking, the delicate way he asked what I wanted to know. “My hometown, but you probably remembered that. Look, that kid missing from Parks, Aidan Ransey . . . I swear he’s here. I don’t know how or why yet, but he’s here. I can’t get through to Keller, but if you could get someone up here with one of your shiny badges, I could use the support. I need to get back to Parks and my phone doesn’t work here . . .”
I looked over my shoulder at the lonely lobby. “Kent,” I said. “I’m trying to do what you told me. I’m trying to do everything I can—”
The system beeped at me so that I wasn’t sure if it had stopped recording or hadn’t caught a word. I hung up.
The street outside the station was quiet. Maple Street. Of course. And a block away was Birch. In the other direction, Spruce. And don’t forget Pine, the heart of Sweetheart Lake.
I retrieved my truck and took Maple to Railroad Street, crossed the river. In town the river was little more than a creek. The water was low now, the grass up both banks a fragile yellow. A breeze blew in through my window, pleasant but cool. When I hit a red light, I stuck my arm out the window and caught the wind with my cupped hand. Not just cool, but maybe a little cold. I stared out my windshield at the trees as if I’d just woken up from a long sleep. I hadn’t paid attention, but the maples had begun to turn gold. It was October and, if I blinked, it would be November. And Joshua, out there in just a thin jacket. He hadn’t packed for the Northwoods.
The car behind me honked to urge me through the green light. I couldn’t remember what to do for a second, but I did it anyway, unconsciously, driving up Railroad as it widened and led me past landmarks I knew, like the golf course, where Ray had done maintenance for a few months one summer until he’d pissed off too many people. I drove out of Sweetheart Lake, recognizing an old house turned into an antiques store, a motel that still seemed in working order. I swung into a dirt turnaround and back toward town.
When the Dairy Bar appeared, I turned in. I wasn’t hungry so much as empty. I took my time getting out and walking up to the window, where a girl in a pink Dairy Bar shirt checked her hair
for split ends.
“A—malt, I guess.”
“What flavor?”
“Chocolate.”
The girl ducked out of the window.
I leaned against the counter and looked around. I was the only customer. They’d shutter the place for the winter and reopen in April when the summer tourists started trickling back. Theresa’s store probably closed for a few weeks, but stayed open for the winter visitors: the snowmobile adventurers, the ice fishermen. For the long-lost friends she thought were dead. Long-lost friends she’d come to rely on being dead. People got used to things, even things that were hard to get used to. They wrote the stories in their heads and rewrote them until they made sense. That’s what I’d done. And now the story was unraveling.
I closed my eyes and imagined Joshua, wherever he was, safe and warm and being fed. If I believed it, maybe it would be true.
But I couldn’t wish him home or pray him home. I could only rely on action. If only I knew what the best action was. I opened my eyes. The malt, whipped cream and cherry, too, sat on the counter. I slid a handful of dollars to the girl. “I never knew these were a chain.”
The girl took the money. “They’re not.”
“How many are there?” Maybe I could find another Dairy Bar town, just to see the look on Joshua’s face.
“They’re not a chain.” The girl slapped my change onto the counter. “Do you live in Indiana?”
I glanced at my truck. The license plate was visible, but the girl had extraordinary eyesight. “For now.”
“There’s one in Indiana and one here. If that’s a chain.”
“That’s weird.”
The girl looked up from her split ends with a look that I could read. I was the weird one here.
“I used to work at this one, this very store,” I said. “One time I dropped a bag of malt and the powder went everywhere, coated everything white. One of the other kids tried to snort—”
“Did you want an application or something?”
Got it. “No, thanks,” I said, and took my shake back to the truck.
An application. I couldn’t laugh it off entirely. How long would our savings last? We’d have to stop jumping around so much, stop paying first month and last month, stop leaving mattresses behind. Stop wasting money. Stop wasting time.
I sat behind the wheel, the malt melting, unwanted. I had to stop wasting time, no matter what happened.
I swept past a trash can on the way out of the Dairy Bar’s parking lot and threw in the malt.
Stop acting as though I knew what to do. Stop acting as if I had any confirmation at all that I had ever known what I was doing.
Stop—everything. God, couldn’t the world just stop for a minute? I had to catch up. I had to find Joshua. I had to find Aidan. I had to find a way to start over. Forgive and be forgiven and start over.
Do-over, as the kids in my neighborhood used to yell when a game hadn’t gone their way. I was nearing that place now, the school, the houses lined up behind downtown on tree-named streets. I turned in and rode up and down the shady, parallel lanes. A friend in elementary school had lived here. I’d been allowed to go to a birthday party in fourth grade there. The library. The school. The jungle gym where I’d played with friends until the sky turned dark one night and I grew afraid to go home. I climbed to the top of the tallest slide and tried to hide as the other kids peeled off toward home when their parents called for them. Mine didn’t. They didn’t come for me at all. A woman who lived nearby finally shooed me home. I knew I would never talk to those kids again. We didn’t live in the same world.
Stations of the cross. I was beginning to feel loose, like my bones had slipped out from under my skin. I knew that I could not avoid the places we had once lived. That I would choose to see these places, like a punishment.
The first was easy: in town, a run-down one-story. Inside was a room that was probably not still yellow. Two streets away, a ranch-style trying to return to the earth.
I couldn’t remember where all of the houses were, but found four in town before striking the main street and taking it south. I passed Greenhouse Lodge Road, where Theresa’s family had had their place. Probably still had their place. I hadn’t asked. So many things I hadn’t asked. What would it mean to settle down in a single parcel of land and watch your life flower out around you?
And then the worst of them all: the old motel restaurant where my parents were eking out their existence when I’d left town. The motel’s strip of rooms had been torn down long before we had to live there. Now the building had graffiti-covered boards on the windows. The cement stops from the motel’s parking spaces were still lined up facing the woods beyond, but no one had visited in a long time. This was it—the last place. As far as I knew, this was going to be the place where my father breathed his last. He owned it, some kind of auction deal. All the apartments, all those years, but he owned this dump.
I got out of the car and looked the place over. Inside, I knew, was a smoky kitchen, torn booths, a long, stained Formica counter. A storage room with a single mattress on the floor, home sweet home.
Joshua had no idea what a terrible life was. Standing here, I was so angry at him. He was gone, and the empty space he left was like a deep sore, every move I made scraping at it, keeping it raw. He thought moving from town to town was difficult. Try staying in one place. One awful place with no one looking out for you. I had never run. Not, at least, until I had to.
I circled the motel parcel now. I couldn’t stand this story I was compelled to tell myself. Because I had put up with abuse and ugliness, I was somehow better than my son? He’d taken matters into his own hands far earlier than I had. He was the smart one. I couldn’t even be angry with him anymore when I thought of myself at the same age, the mousy girl afraid to make a sound. If it hadn’t been Ray, wouldn’t it have been someone else? Whose fault was it that I expected and accepted so little?
But I wouldn’t take this one on myself. This was not my fault.
I kicked at the loose gravel at my feet. The house had been left to the rats and the vandals. My dad, the architect of my ruined life, was in an institution, kept by a stranger; my mother’s brittle bones were reduced to ash in my truck. And here I was: home. I laughed out loud. The laugh gathered strength, rolling downhill toward hysteria until my ribs hurt and anyone who saw me might have believed me to be just who I was. The heir to this mess, this empire. Finally. I choked for breath. Finally we have a place and I am its queen.
I crouched in the dust and coughed myself into tears, then sobbed until I was dry, and the sparks caught flame. I was angry enough, at last, to go see the devil himself.
Chapter Thirty-six
It would not be a reconciliation. More like a visit to the zoo—to see the beasts.
I rose from the ground, dusted off. An RV heading out of town slowed down to get a good look.
“Damn tourists.” Which made me laugh a little more, but I didn’t want to kill the red coal that burned in my belly. I had to go see him now, before I discovered a secret store of pity and talked myself out of it.
The road to Sweetheart Lake was lovely in the afternoon light. I’d driven it four times since my return and could finally see the trees as trees instead of omens, the hints of lake behind the trees as water and not memories. I drove through town again, and this time nothing about it surprised me.
Riverdale was where it had always been, even if the town had remodeled the building completely and rerouted the roads all the way around it. I navigated my way through the new configuration, off the main road and onto a narrow access road, and into the complicated parking area. I threw the SUV into park and sat there regarding the building, which was not a haunted house at all, but a sprawling, squat box of medicinal glass.
The double doors swung out and a wheelchair emerged in front of a white-uniformed orderly. The chair held a person. Probably a woman, collapsed upon herself with age. She was aged to the point of agelessness—she could have
been seventy or she could have been one hundred seventy.
The orderly pushed the chair down the sidewalk and around the corner of the building. He tapped the chair’s brake with his foot and pulled out a cigarette. The chair faced the river, but there was no recognition by the patient of the fine sun or the orderly’s smoke drifting across her face. No recognition that she was still alive.
I got out of the truck and took a few steps toward the door. When the orderly glanced my way, the brief acknowledgment was all it took. I retreated.
I hadn’t regained safety in the truck yet when I saw a long, sleek car pass by on the main road.
The dark sedan with the rusted doors. Aidan.
The car moved fast, like a black fish rising to the surface and diving. Before I could get my truck moving, the car was gone. I made a bad turn trying to escape the access road and had to turn around, cursing all roads. At last I found the exit to the street and the turn I needed to follow the sedan west.
As I went, I scanned both sides of the road: storefronts, offices, gas stations. Restaurant parking lots and RV dealerships. A curve ahead. If I could just get around the curve and see a distance . . . but each curve provided a view of the next. I sped up, scoping out each turn, each potential hiding spot, as well as I could. I kept moving. I wouldn’t lose Aidan this time.
The doubt returned.
But then around the next curve, there—just a flash of light off the trunk as the car turned into the pines. I glanced all around for a landmark. We were miles and miles from Sweetheart Lake. Why would the woman with Aidan even look for a job in town? I had to remind myself about desperation—the woman had a lot to lose, but perhaps she had lost a lot already.
I rushed to make the same turn as the sedan and was rewarded by a clear view of the car and the road we shared.
I stayed back, gave the car room, my thoughts leaping ahead. As far from town as we were, I knew this road. Ray had liked to drink at a place called Digger’s, a backwoods pub that had been built onto an old house. And there it was, still open or at least it would be in a few hours, as forlorn and dusty as ever. After Digger’s, though, the road was like any other in the area. There would be nothing but turn-offs, narrow gravel roads that splintered into private drives, a boat launch for the lake. Rentals would be standing empty this late in the season, and very few cars would meet us coming the other way. Wherever the woman was staying, I would have to follow and I’d be hard to miss.
The Day I Died Page 27
