The Current

by Tim Johnston

  Katie Goss shook her head. “You’ve got nothing on him,” she said, still looking down. Then she looked up and her eyes were focused again.

  “Ma’am?”

  “You’ve got nothing on him for Holly Burke.”

  He watched her, and he knew who she meant.

  “No, ma’am, I don’t. Not without Danny Young I don’t.”

  “So you’ll take him any way you can get him.”

  “Yes, ma’am. That’s right.”

  She nodded, watching him. Then she shook her head again. “A little late, though, isn’t it, Sheriff? Ten years. Why would anyone wait that long to come forward?”

  “For good reasons. Because he’d threatened her. Because she was young. Because she didn’t think anyone would believe her. Because she wanted to get on with her life.”

  “And suddenly she decides she doesn’t care about any of those things?” said Katie Goss. “Suddenly she doesn’t want to protect that life anymore? And if they wouldn’t believe her then, what would make her think they’d believe her now, ten years after the fact—the alleged fact?”

  “Because, for one thing,” he said, “she’d have the full support of the law enforcement apparatus, including the sheriff’s department and the county attorney. And for another thing, she wouldn’t be the only one.”

  Katie Goss was silent. Watching him. The cartoon voices, the sound effects playing on in the other room.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” she said.

  He opened his hands and clasped them together again. “It means, do I think in ten, fifteen, however many years, you were the only one? That it was just your bad luck and nobody else’s?” He shook his head. “No, ma’am. If what happened to you is true, and I believe it is, then you haven’t been the only one. And you won’t be the only one to come forward, once he is served and arrested. I can pretty much promise you that.”

  “But you don’t know it for a fact—that they’ll come forward.”

  “Not for a fact, no, ma’am.”

  She drank from her water and set it down again.

  “Sheriff, I’m no idiot.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “What I mean is, even if you got my statement, aren’t you forgetting something?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Statute of limitations,” she said, and he looked at her more carefully, and understood her better. She hadn’t forgotten. She hadn’t put it all behind her.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “The statute is nine years.”

  “Nine years. And there’s no DNA, no kit, because I never reported. So why are we even having this conversation?”

  “We wouldn’t be, except that the man in question moved out of state more than eight years ago. Eight years and seven months, to be exact.”

  “So?”

  “So that stops the clock on the statute of limitations. By the law, less than a year has passed since the night he pulled you over. The clock starts running again when I bring him back to Minnesota in handcuffs.”

  She sat staring at him. Processing this. She took a breath and let it out.

  “It may be less than a year by law, Sheriff, but it’s still ten years that I didn’t say a word.”

  Halsey nodded. He looked around the apartment again. The little girl just out of view.

  “I’ll say one last thing, ma’am, and then I’ll be on my way.”

  She waited.

  “If a man commits a certain kind of crime,” he said, “if he commits a certain kind of offense that is motivated by his sexual impulses, and he gets away with it, then he doesn’t just quit. He doesn’t just call it a day and become an upstanding, law-abiding citizen thereafter. That same impulse—”

  Katie Goss raised a hand to stop him, then lowered it again. “I’m familiar with the argument, Sheriff. I just wish you’d made it to some other girl a long time ago.”

  “Yes, ma’am. So do I.”

  He collected his hat from the empty chair and began to get up.

  “Which degree?” she said.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Which degree would he be charged with?”

  He sat down again. “Well, that would depend on a number of things.”

  “I know what it would depend on. It wasn’t just contact, Sheriff,” she said, citing the distinction.

  And to spare her saying the other word aloud, in her own kitchen—penetration—he said, “I understand that, Miss Goss. It would also depend on whether or not he was armed with a deadly weapon.”

  “He was. But he never pulled it. He never threatened me with it.”

  Halsey nodded. She’d read the codes carefully. “Then how did you know he was armed?” he said.

  “Because he was wearing it on his belt.”

  “In plain sight.”

  “Yes.”

  Halsey opened up his hands again. “If that doesn’t constitute fear of bodily harm I don’t know what does. So there’s three of the conditions for first-degree right there. And that’s just the one statute. Any prosecutor worth their salt would also make the case for criminal sexual predatory conduct, which could tack on another twenty-five percent of jail time.”

  “If he goes to jail.”

  “If he goes to jail, yes, ma’am.”

  “Mommy?” They both looked over. The little girl had come around the pony wall and stood holding a plastic Appaloosa by its hind legs.

  “Yes, baby?”

  “I’m hungry.”

  “All right, we’re gonna eat in just one minute.”

  “I believe that’s my cue,” said Halsey, getting to his feet. “Miss Goss, I’ve said what I came to say. I appreciate you hearing me out.”

  She rose too and walked him to the door. She opened the door and he stepped out and put his hat on and tipped it to her in farewell and turned to go.

  “Sheriff,” she said, and he turned back. The little girl had come to stand next to her again, to watch him go. To make sure he went, maybe.

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  Katie Goss held his eyes. “Aren’t you supposed to give me your card? In case I want to get ahold of you?”

  Halsey hesitated—and stepped back to her. “Yes, ma’am. I’ve got one right here.”

  58

  The wood he’d brought her burned most of the night but in the morning the logs were down to their smoky bones, and she lay under the blankets watching them pulse in the drafts, the tossing thread of smoke, before sitting up finally and pushing the blankets off. She hurt just everywhere. It was hard to swallow and when she did she tasted the river.

  Weak light of dawn in the windows. Her wet clothes, her boots, her father’s jacket, lay on the floor like a scene from some frantic disrobing, which it was—her hands almost too numb to make the fire, to flick the flintwheel, her body spasming, and she should go upstairs and take a hot shower but she didn’t want water on her skin, she wanted the fire and the blankets, and finally the flame took and the kindling crackled and the firewood burned bright and hot as she lay shaking under the blankets—she remembered all of that.

  And she remembered Moran, fighting him on the river . . . and going under the ice. Drifting, pulled along in the current, the wobbling moon following overhead. The feel of the underside of the ice. The girls of the river. Caroline . . . But how had she gotten home?

  Then she remembered the birds—two ducks, drake and hen, crying and beating their wings in panic and dragging tails of light behind them, pieces of light falling back to earth as the dark shapes climbed the sky.

  But before that . . . Before that there’d been a different kind of light—not the light of the moon but a yellow light trembling like a thin cloth, like silk—and the light was stuck, the yellow light wasn’t moving and she was going toward it, her fingers tracing the ice, but when she reached the yellow light her fingers fell through it, tearing it, and she followed her fingers, her arms, up into the light and she broke through it and suddenly she was above the ice again, sucking in the a
ir and watching the two ducks rise into the sky.

  She was in a kind of pool, in the woods, and the yellow light came from a single streetlamp beyond the water, and there was a straight, smooth edge that lay across the water. Then, over her own sounds, her splashing and gasping, she heard the hissing sound of the water spilling over the straight edge—it was a dam, but not the one she knew, not the one she’d fished at with her father—and she knew by that sound that she must swim or else be carried over the dam herself: over it and down into churning water, into the undertow, and from there under the ice again.

  And so she swam. In the wet heavy jacket and the boots like concrete she swam for the bank, splashing and kicking, until her fingers clawed at silt and her knees banged against stones and she was climbing up out of the water and heaving herself ashore like a great fish, retching river water from her guts, from her lungs, so much water! And she lay there inhaling the smell of frozen mud, the smell of the woods and even the animals in the woods . . . But get up, get up now Audrey or freeze . . . and she’d gotten slowly to her feet, and it was then the other light came, the bright twin beams that could only be headlights, and she thought, first, her heart failing: Moran. Moran had come to see if she’d washed up here.

  But it was two headlights, and Moran only had the one.

  She raised a hand, but the lights were backing away—they swung away and the car was turning around. It showed her its taillights and off it went down the unplowed road. It was no car she knew and it was leaving her. She tried to call out but her throat was frozen, or raw from retching, and the sound that came out was not even human. What had the driver seen? What kind of drowned, white-faced thing had come up out of the water before him in this remote place, in this yellow gloom? She hung her head to look at herself, and ropes of hair swayed and clicked like beads against her face.

  When she looked up again the taillights were still there. The car had stopped. A white fog chugging from its tailpipe. Then: reverse lights. The car backing, returning! Brake lights. A door swinging open and a woman shuffling toward her in winter boots—Oh my God, are you all right? Not a woman but a girl, sixteen maybe, and a boy coming up behind her at his own pace, wary, not yet convinced that this thing before him wasn’t what he’d first thought: a dead girl or her ghost, risen from the water.

  The other girl turning now to the boy and saying, Should we call 911?

  No, Audrey answered, coughing. I’m all right.

  Into the car with her then, into the back seat, but not before the boy spread the blanket out to keep her from soaking the fabric. Audrey pulling the blanket up around her shoulders, thick woolen emergency blanket that still held their warmth, their smells in its dusty fibers—deodorant and perfume, and deeper scents she didn’t want to know about.

  What happened to you? The girl hanging over the front seat. Her bright face, her big eyes. The car jostling and slurring down the road through the trees. Eric, turn up the heat!

  Fell in, Audrey said.

  Fell in? What were you . . . ? Where’s your—Did someone push you in?

  No. I’m all right.

  You are not all right. You’re coming home with us. What’s your name?

  The hell she is, said the boy, and the girl turned to glare at him. Hannah, he said. Your dad . . . ?

  What about him?

  I suppose we’ll just tell him we just happened to be at the spillway?

  The spillway! thought Audrey. The famous spillway. She hadn’t recognized it. She’d never come here herself except the one time, with Jenny White, their hearts beating with what they might see, then seeing nothing: water; a spillway . . . then the sun going down, nothing to eat or drink, no phones, a new kind of scared as they began the long bike ride home, and the sheriff himself pulling up alongside them, Audrey, Jenny—thank God. I’ve got the whole department out looking for you, are you all right—are you girls all right?

  Home, said Audrey, and the girl in the front seat said, What?

  We could drop her at the hospital, said the boy. His eyes were in the rearview and it wasn’t just fear Audrey saw; it was anger. She had interrupted. She had stopped him from getting something he’d wanted very badly and which he’d very nearly had and now might never have, not with this girl, not with Hannah, with her pretty face, with her nice full lips.

  Home, said Audrey. Please . . . just take me home.

  And next she knew she was lighting the fire. She was naked and shaking under the blankets and she was home.

  Now, sitting on the sofa, the blankets thrown off her, she looked at the purple cast in the dim morning light and felt again the unseen blow—the surprise of a swing thrown so wildly finding its target so cleanly, so crackingly—then turned on the lamp and looked more closely, but there was no blood that she could see. Of course not. All that time in the river, under the ice.

  The hardwood floor was cold on the soles of her feet and the air was cold on her skin but still she sat there, the curtains wide-open for all to see, and let them see, let them knock themselves out seeing, until at last she tugged one blanket free from the others and shawled it around herself.

  Her father’s things lay on the coffee table once again: the Zippo lighter, the aviators, the watch, the old .38 revolver. She did not remember going to the closet for the gun and yet there it sat, the green ammo box beside it.

  She listened for a moment, then picked up the watch and held it to her ear. Nothing. She looked at the face. A bubble of water lay under the crystal, rolling as she tilted the watchface. Like the little toy her granddad gave her where you tried to get all the BBs to sit in their holes. The bubble in her father’s watch enlarged the hour markers below like a lens and it rolled through all three hands where they’d stopped, fifteen minutes and forty-two seconds past ten o’clock.

  Was he still there? All night on the river. Frozen. Dead.

  She picked up the remote and aimed it at the TV and waited to see if the service was still working; the bill had not been paid in over a month and yet somehow the service kept going—and it was going still. But the early news programs were all about the weather, the cold last day of February, the endless winter—no one had found an Iowa sheriff frozen on the river, dead from exposure, or a blow to the head, or a combination of the two. No dead Iowa sheriff, period.

  She sat thinking about that. She thought about Sheriff Halsey, and she thought about Tuck Trevor, the lawyer. Self-defense, Audrey, obviously.

  But where was the proof? Who but her could say he didn’t go out there to save her?

  Indeed, Miss Sutter . . . a man goes out onto ice he knows is too thin—a man sworn to serve and protect, no less, a sheriff—goes out there risking his own life . . . Why would he do such a thing except to save you?

  She looked at the cast again, exhibit A, and she thought about the hospital, Dr. Breece. It was too soon; six weeks, he’d said. But the cast was wet, the padding under the plaster was soaked and it would have to come off—wouldn’t it? There were tools in her father’s garage: handsaws and hacksaws and power saws she’d watched him use and that she herself had used, with him nearby, always nearby. But then she saw the slip, and the wound that would send her to the hospital anyway, driving her bleeding self to the emergency room and—

  Her heart dropped into coldness once again.

  It was the car. The Ford. She’d left it in the park. They would find it there with the sheriff’s cruiser. With the sheriff’s body.

  She looked at the coffee table again—lighter, sunglasses, gun, watch, but no keys.

  Then how did you get in the house?

  Her mind flew back to the river: She’d parked the car, gotten out to stand by the pines . . . and Moran had come. He’d shown her the cuffs and she’d gotten ready to claw him with the keys, which she held in her good fist, in the jacket pocket.

  Hot now, her heart beating, she stood and went to her father’s jacket and picked it up by its damp collar and shook it, and there was the sound she’d hoped for: a dull jingli
ng in the left-hand pocket.

  Ready to roll, Deputy?

  59

  “How you doing, Big Man?”

  “All right Jeff how you doing?”

  “My head is throbbin like a young robin’s ass, you want to know the truth.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. You want to help me with the brake job on that Charger?”

  “OK Jeff just let me punch in first.”

  In a dream he watched the car go up on the lift and somehow all the lugs came off and the tires were dropped bouncing to the concrete and he stacked them off to the side with the chalk marks on them so they could rotate them later . . . then he was at the computer adjusting inventory for the brake pads and then he was taking the pads out to Jeff who was already turning the first rotor and it was only 8:05 and he didn’t know how he would get through the day, forgetting for a few minutes but always remembering and falling again, falling and remembering his dream, his brother so blue and cold and his mouth full of the dirty water that tasted of mud and fish.

  At 8:15 he swept out the break room, emptied the trash, cleaned the sink, and then on his way back to the garage he saw something through the bay door windows that stopped him. Mr. Wabash was out there, standing in the lot talking to Sheriff Halsey. And his heart jumped, it just flew, because he was wrong! He thought he knew—all morning he thought he knew but he was wrong! Danny was OK and the sheriff had come to tell him so and Danny was home already, or he was in the SUV and you couldn’t see him because of the sunlight on the glass . . . But then in the one or two heartbeats it took to have these thoughts he saw that it wasn’t the sheriff’s white Chevy Tahoe the two men stood before, it was a silver Ford Escape, and then he saw that it was not Sheriff Halsey at all but it was that deputy—the one from ten years ago, from Danny’s letter. Who pulled Danny over that night. Deputy Moran. And he was not down in Iowa but he was up here, in Minnesota.

  “Yo, Big Man,” Jeff called, but Marky had already pushed through the door into the office, and without pausing he opened the outer door and stepped into the sunlight and there he stopped, standing back from the two men as they stood looking at the cruiser. Their backs were to him but it was quiet in the lot and he heard Mr. Wabash say, “What kind of person takes a potshot at a sheriff’s vehicle?”