The Current

by Tim Johnston

  “No evidence doesn’t mean no reason.”

  She shook her head. Her heart was pounding. How did they get here—with her condemning her father’s actions and Gordon Burke defending them?

  “And what about those pictures?” she said. “The photo line-up? I couldn’t ID him myself.”

  “Doesn’t mean it wasn’t him.”

  “And Danny Young?” she said—she blurted.

  “What about him.”

  “I mean—should he have shot him too?”

  He stared at her and she did not look away, her heart pounding, and there was no sound but the tumbling of her clothes in the other room, that constant thumping and ticking, until suddenly an alarm sounded, so loud and urgent she jumped. It was the dryer. It blared and stopped and the drum stopped turning and they studied each other in a new silence.

  “I think your dad was right about one thing,” Gordon said. “It’s none of your concern.”

  She saw him again, her father, sitting on the bed, his cool hand on her forehead, You have to help him now, sweetheart. She felt Holly Burke’s heart beating in her chest again—or the memory of it, the emptiness that so much feeling left behind.

  “And if he was here,” Gordon went on, “I think he’d say it was time for you to get back to school where you belong.”

  “How do you know what he’d say?” she said, and she saw how these words struck him, and she said, “I’m sorry . . . Mr. Burke, I didn’t mean that how it sounded, I—”

  He raised his hand again and shook his head. Suddenly he looked very tired and very old.

  “We keep saying things we’re sorry we said,” he said. “Which tells me we should just stop talking about it.” He looked at her with kindness, or his idea of it in that moment, and Audrey nodded, and smiled, and wiped her eyes. Then she stood from the table and went into the utility room to get her clothes.

  44

  It’s none of your concern.

  Her father had told her that years ago, and Gordon Burke had said he was right.

  But her father had also said, You have to help him now, sweetheart.

  Help who? Mr. Burke? Danny Young?

  All that day—the day after Gordon Burke brought her home—she did not leave the sofa except to make herself soup, except to use the bathroom, and by nine o’clock the next morning she was done lying around on that sofa.

  She’d not been back to the building since his retirement but it had not changed, and its smell was still the smell of her father: leather belts and coffee and cigarettes and dusty wooden floors and the smoky wintry smell of his sheriff’s jacket when he would let her wear it as she sat reading in the old wooden armchair, waiting for him to finish typing at his computer, finish his phone calls, finish talking to his deputies, to Gloria, his secretary, before at last jingling his keys and putting his hand on top of her head, Ready to roll, Deputy?

  Ready, Sheriff.

  “Oh, goodness—hello, sweetie,” Gloria now said, turning from her computer with her smile. Older now. Old. Hair gone to silver, cigarette voice deeper, but the same kind eyes peeping out of the same enormous glasses. At the funeral she’d wept like a widow and hugged Audrey for so long her husband had to pry her loose.

  There was no one else around, the deputies out on call, or back in the jail, or behind the closed door that once bore her father’s name on the frosted glass and now bore the name of the new sheriff, sheriff wayne g. halsey, in black-and-gold letters.

  “How are you getting along, sweetie?” Gloria said, glancing at the purple cast.

  “I’m doing all right,” Audrey said. “You know.”

  Gloria looked at the too-big canvas jacket and shook her head. “Not a day goes by I don’t think of him.” She plucked a tissue from the box and dabbed at her eyes. Audrey thought to put a hand on her shoulder or squeeze her hand, but then Gloria sniffled loudly and tossed the tissue into a wastebasket and looked up smiling again.

  “So. What can I do for you?”

  “I was hoping I could talk to him for a minute. The sheriff.”

  “Sheriff Halsey?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Oh, yes. I just wanted to ask him something.”

  A crease appeared between the older woman’s thin, painted eyebrows. “Let me just make sure he’s not on his cell phone,” she said and picked up the handset and pushed a button, and from behind the office door they heard the beep-beep and they heard him say, “Yes?” and Gloria spoke into the handset, and her voice was in the speaker in his office at the same time, “There’s someone here to see you, Sheriff.”

  “Well, who is it?”

  “It’s Audrey Sutter.”

  He said nothing. Then he said, “I’ll come out,” and Audrey wondered how Gloria could’ve thought he was on his cell phone with that voice of his.

  Halsey himself was larger than her father, even when her father had been healthy. Taller, heavier, louder. As a deputy he’d looked more like the sheriff than her father had. He looked like he’d been raised from birth to be sheriff, although she knew for a fact that he’d been raised by two English professors at the University of Minnesota.

  He walked her back to his office and she sat in the old wooden armchair and he sat in her father’s old swivel chair behind the desk. Behind him on the wall was the big map of the county, all in yellow but for the river looping through it in a blue cursive.

  He watched her looking around the office and said, his voice just a little softened, “I imagine it’s not easy for you, coming back here.”

  “Not easy but not bad either. I always loved it here.”

  He scratched at the back of his head. His hair was dark and thick and it held the depression from the sweatband of his hat all the way around. Finally he put his hands together on the desk and said, “You’re always welcome to pay a visit, of course.”

  “Thank you, I appreciate that.”

  “But this isn’t a social visit. Is it.”

  “No, sir.”

  He checked his watch and said, “Well, I’ve got ten minutes before I have to be somewhere else, so we’d best get to it.”

  “Yes, sir.” She turned her father’s watch on her wrist and then held it still. “I just wanted to ask you about Deputy Moran,” she said.

  He looked at her. “You mean Sheriff Moran.”

  “I mean when he was still a deputy here.”

  The sheriff sat regarding her blankly. Then he stood up and came around the desk and shut the door with a quiet click and walked back and sat down again.

  “What did you want to ask?”

  “I wanted to ask why he left the department.”

  “Why did you want to ask that?”

  She was not expecting the question and she sat trying to think, her heart beating.

  “Since the accident,” she said, “my accident, in the river, I’ve been thinking about Holly Burke. I’ve been thinking about her a lot.”

  “I guess I can understand that,” he said.

  “And I’ve gotten to know her father a little bit too—Mr. Burke.”

  “I saw him at your father’s service. Was somewhat surprised by that, I have to say.”

  “Well. He came to bring me firewood—this was after the funeral—and I was sick with the flu and he took me in. He took care of me.”

  The sheriff moved a pen on his desk from one place to another. She could see him trying to imagine all of that. He looked up again, waiting for her to go on.

  “So, I’ve gotten to know him,” she went on, “and he’s told me a little about . . . back then. About Holly. And I know how bad my father felt about that case. I know how much it bothered him.”

  “It bothered all of us.”

  “Yes, sir. Well, all of this got me thinking back to that time, and how it wasn’t long after the Holly Burke case that Deputy Moran quit the department and went down to Iowa”—she looked to the sheriff to confirm the timeline and the sheriff nodded—
“and I remember asking my dad why he was leaving, why Deputy Moran was leaving, and my dad saying it wasn’t any of my concern.”

  Halsey said nothing. Waiting to hear something that required his response.

  “Which of course it wasn’t,” she said. “But now, after going in the river, after Caroline, and after—” She stopped, hearing the struggle in her own voice, the distress of it. A kind of choking, childhood feeling. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “It’s all right,” said Halsey. “Do you want some water?”

  She shook her head. “I’m fine.” And after a moment she was: her heart no longer racing, her lungs working again.

  “After everything,” she said, “I guess I just wanted to know what it was. What he wouldn’t talk to me about.”

  Halsey picked up his pen and tapped it once on the desk on its ballpoint and then once on the other end, and set it down again.

  “Did your dad generally talk to you about his work? About the goings-on of law enforcement?”

  “Yes, sir.” She’d been his deputy herself, she wanted to remind him, but she couldn’t say that.

  “And his deputies? He talked about us too?”

  “Sometimes,” she said. “Not about you, though.”

  “No, of course not.” He picked up the pen again and gave it a click with his thumb. He leaned back in her father’s old chair and regarded her from that new distance. “And so you’ve come here hoping I could tell you something your father wouldn’t. About Sheriff Moran. Do I have that right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He nodded. “All right.” He clicked the pen. “And why would I do that? I mean, even if I knew what he didn’t want to talk to you about, why would I talk about it?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess because that was ten years ago. I guess because what does it matter now?”

  “That sounds like my argument. What does it matter now? What good can it possibly do you?”

  She held his eyes. “I can’t explain it. Maybe after you tell me I can, but otherwise . . .” She sat watching him. The sheriff watching her.

  “And what if I have nothing to tell you?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll have to think about that when we get there.”

  He looked at her a long while, saying nothing. Then he leaned forward again and put his forearms on the desk and sat turning the pen between his fingers, frowning at it. Her father’s watch was ticking away on her wrist. Finally the sheriff looked up and said, “I just can’t imagine what good it can do anyone to rehash any of it, but if you want to know did Deputy Moran leave because of anything having to do with the Holly Burke case, then I can tell you unequivocally and categorically no. As to whatever it was your dad didn’t want to talk to you about, I find his own words entirely . . . adequate. None of your concern. I don’t mean to be harsh about it, but I don’t know what else to tell you.”

  He paused, watching her, but she had nothing to say, and after a moment he said, “Ed Moran by all accounts has been a fine sheriff. And I’ll say further that I sympathize with the man’s frustration in your own case down there. Under the circumstances.”

  She watched him, and seeing that he’d finished she nodded and thanked him and began to stand.

  “Now hold on there a second.”

  She sat again.

  “You said you’d think on things once we got there, and now we’ve got there.”

  “Yes, sir. Well. I guess I can’t think what good it would do to tell you anything more right now myself. I guess we need to go some other route.”

  “Some other route?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He watched her. “Young lady, I sure hope you’re not getting mixed up in something here.”

  She stood and he watched her stand. He didn’t get up. Then he got up and came around the desk and reached in front of her for the doorknob.

  “Thank you, Sheriff.”

  “You take care,” Halsey said. He watched her pass through the outer office toward the glass doors and he was standing there yet, holding the edge of the door to his own office after she’d gone.

  Gloria stood at the bottom of the steps in her overcoat, and when Audrey came down the steps the older woman smiled and held up a cigarette and said, “Nasty old habit.” The cigarette was just-lit, and there was a whiff of butane in the air.

  “Not so nasty,” Audrey said.

  “Oh, did you want one?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Good for you. Ginny, my daughter, started nagging me to quit when she was nine and has never stopped.” She looked at Audrey, standing there in the canvas jacket. “Your dad,” she said, “he’d say, ‘You need to quit those things, Gloria,’ and I’d say, ‘I will if you will, Sheriff,’ and he’d say, ‘That’s a deal.’ And then we’d both finish our smokes and get back to work.” Her eyes shone behind the lenses, and Audrey looked down at the concrete.

  When she raised her head again Gloria was still looking at her.

  “Well,” said Audrey, “it was nice to see you, Gloria.” But before she could turn away, the woman reached with her free hand and took hold of Audrey’s sleeve. She glanced back up at the glass doors, then leaned in so close that Audrey could smell her cigarette breath.

  “I don’t want you to think I was eavesdropping, but sweetie I hear every word that man says in there, since day one. Sometimes I have to remind him to lower his voice but he just doesn’t seem capable of it.”

  Audrey didn’t know what to say to that.

  Gloria said, “Well, I heard enough and I’m sorry I heard and I don’t want to stick my nose where it doesn’t belong but I’m gonna tell you one thing, so long as you promise me you never heard it from me, all right?”

  Audrey nodded. “I promise.”

  The woman took a fast drag on her cigarette and glanced once more at the glass doors and blew the smoke from the side of her mouth and said, “Katie Goss.”

  “Katie Goss.” Audrey knew that name but didn’t know how. Then she did: Katie Goss had been Danny Young’s girlfriend, all those years ago.

  “Katie Goss,” said Gloria. “She’s up in Rochester now. She works at the nursing home up there, Green Fields or green something.”

  Audrey looked at the woman. The eyes behind the big lenses watery but bright.

  “All right?” Gloria said.

  “All right.”

  “Good.” She dropped her cigarette on the concrete and mashed it under her tennis shoe and left it lying there. “Tell you one more thing,” she said.

  Audrey waited, looking into those eyes.

  “She wasn’t the only one,” Gloria said.

  45

  It was called Green Meadows, not Green Fields, and the woman who answered the phone put her on hold and she sat in the sedan with the phone to her ear listening to recorded music. The sun was going down, and from where she was parked she could see a stoplight turning green, yellow, red . . . green, yellow, red. At last the music ended and another woman said, “Hello?”

  “Katie Goss?”

  “Yes?”

  “My name is Audrey Sutter. I’m so sorry to call you at work but—”

  “Audrey Sutter?”

  “Yes. I couldn’t find any other number for you, I’m sorry . . .”

  There was a silence that went on. Audrey could hear the other woman breathing. She could hear people talking in the background. From a distance someone yelled as if he’d just been stabbed.

  “Hello—?” she said, and Katie Goss said, “Yes. I’m here.”

  The apartment building was not three blocks from the hospital where she’d woken up with men in the room and a purple cast on her arm. The front entrance would not be locked, Katie Goss had said, and it wasn’t. A small dog yapping behind a door somewhere. TVs going. Smell of grilled onions in the air. She went up the stairs, her boots thumping dully on thin brown carpeting, and at the top of the stairs the door with the number 4 on it was not quite shut all the way. She rapped on the
door, trying not to open it any farther, and a voice called out, “Audrey—?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’re back here in the bathroom.”

  She stepped in and shut the door behind her and waited to see if Katie Goss would poke her head from the lighted doorway down the hallway but she didn’t. There was splashing, a child’s voice. The living and kitchen area were all one space, separated only by a short length of half wall. A TV played to an empty loveseat and a herd of toy horses on a coffee table, the horses all on their feet and of all different colors and sizes. Food-smeared plates and milk glasses had been left on the little dinner table.

  She moved down the hall and as she neared the open door there was the smell of bathwater and steam and baby shampoo. She eased her head around the jamb and it was the child who saw her first—great brown eyes looking up, then looking down again at the bathwater, at the colorful things bobbing before her in the suds. Kneeling beside the tub in her nurse’s uniform, purple top and pants, was Katie Goss, her hair gathered up in clips and a few blond tails fallen loose. She saw Audrey and she smiled the tired smile of a mother and said, “Ah, there she is, sweetie, there’s Audrey. Can you say hello?”

  The little girl didn’t look up but continued playing with her toys, her lips moving as she talked to them.

  “Shy tonight,” said Katie Goss.

  “What’s her name?”

  “Melanie. We call her Mel.”

  “Hello, Mel. Is that a mermaid?”

  The mermaid dove underwater, where Audrey couldn’t see her anymore.

  Katie Goss lifted a sudsy hand from the child’s head. “I’m Katie. I’d shake your hand, but . . .”

  “I’m Audrey. Maybe I should come back later?”

  “Why?”

  “You have your hands full.”

  “My hands are always full. I’ll tell you what you can do, though.”

  “What?”

  “You can go out to the kitchen and find that bottle of wine I set out and open it and pour yourself a glass. Do you drink wine? Otherwise there’s juice in the fridge, or water.”

  “I drink wine. Should I wait for you there?”

  “God, no. It’s Friday. Bring me back a glass of that wine. And take off your jacket.”