The Day I Died Read online

  Dedication

  To Amanda Lumpkin and Trisha Tyree Cathey.

  And to my parents, Melvin Rader and Paula Dodson, who gave

  me a happy childhood and yet I still turned out to be a writer.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Opening

  Part I Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Part II Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Acknowledgments

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .* About the author

  About the book

  Praise

  Also by Lori Rader-Day

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Opening

  On the day I died, I took the new oars down to the lake. They were heavy, but I was saving myself the second trip. The blades rode flat along the ground, flattening two tracks through the wet grass.

  It was morning. The air was cool, but down on the dock, the slats were already hot. I noted a lone fishing boat out on the water. Inside, two men hunched silently over their tackle, their faces turned out across the lake. Beyond them, mist rose off the water, nearly hiding the far shore.

  This moment. This is what I return to.

  Later, I will note the long crack in the new oar, just before my head goes under, just before the flume of blood rises off my skin under the water like smoke. I will come back to this moment and think, if I had just gone back up the steps to the house immediately. If I had just stayed up at the house in the first place.

  If I had just.

  Part I

  Chapter One

  By the time the search volunteers arrived at my door with a handful of flyers, their zeal and concern had worn to a polish. I’d been watching the news and was a little tired of the kid myself. But I couldn’t look away. A baby, really, gone all day. He had bottomless brown eyes and tousled hair like the fuzz of a baby bird. He was two. He hadn’t toddled down the street to pet the neighbor’s dog, wasn’t found halfway to the convenience store with a handful of pennies for candy. The real thing, this kid. Missing.

  “Have you seen this little boy?” asked one of the women. The other yawned into the back of her hand. They wore yoga pants and Parks Junior-Senior High School Booster Club sweatshirts. One had pigtail braids, like a child, and the other one, the tired one, had her hair pulled back in a band, probably growing out bad bangs. Behind them, the street was overlit with neighborly porch lights.

  “I saw him on the news,” I said, taking the offered flyer and reading the details I’d already heard: Aidan Ransey, height, weight. So small. “How long’s he been gone?”

  “Since this morning,” said the one with pigtails, but the other woman didn’t like me being curious, I could tell. Either she’d tired of the questions or she thought mine wasn’t the right kind. “From his own bed,” pigtails said, her voice catching. I was reminding this woman to be worried for other children now sleeping in their beds or waiting up for their mommies to come home from their good deeds. “I can’t believe it,” she said, shaking her head.

  The other woman shot her friend a look. She could believe it. “Look,” this one said, getting down to business. “Can you put a flyer in your . . .” She glanced behind me, toward the staircase with its worn carpet, then toward the back hallway with the overhead light dangling, waiting for a new bulb. I lived upstairs, but none of the other neighbors would bother to answer a knock on the front door. Truthfully, I usually didn’t, either, but I knew from the news that there would be canvassers. Better to open the door. Better to take the flyer. “. . . in your laundry room or something?” the woman said finally. “Call the number if you hear or see anything, OK? We need to keep moving.”

  “Wait a minute,” the one with the braids said. “I know you from football pickup. Are you Josh’s mother? I’m Caleb’s mom, from Boosters?”

  “Joshua,” I said, my tongue thick in my mouth.

  “We haven’t heard from you about helping with concessions,” she said. “And the pancake breakfast is coming up—here, let me give you my number.” She folded a flyer in half, Aidan’s face cut in two, and pulled out a pen. “We really count on all the parents to help.”

  Her friend smirked as I took the flyer. “Thanks,” I said. It was the second time in one evening I’d been asked to volunteer for something. My activism was normally confined to dropping the occasional quarter into fund-raising buckets. But not for anyone who rang a bell or stood in street intersections. They were assholes. “Pancakes,” I said.

  “It’s the most popular fund-raiser for the team we do all year,” Caleb’s mom said. “And so much fun.”

  Headband and I exchanged a look. “Great, well,” I said. “I hope they find that little boy soon.”

  A shadow passed over Caleb’s mom’s face. “They will,” she said. “As soon as they find his—”

  “Come on, Steph,” her friend said. “We need to get this street done.”

  They were down the sidewalk, the reflective stripes on their athletic shoes flashing, when the door at my shoulder opened to the chain’s length. The neighbor, Margaret, put one myopic eye against the opening. “What did she say? As soon as they find his what?”

  “His mother,” I said.

  Margaret pressed her ear up to the door opening. She wasn’t hard of hearing. She caught every noise we made upstairs and let us know about it, thumping a broom handle at her ceiling. She wrestled with the chain to open the door wider. Her twiggy legs stuck out of her housecoat. “How d’you know that?”

  I looked again at the flyer, at the infant cheeks of Aidan Ransey, and handed it to her, then at the other copy, with a phone number and the woman’s name—Stephanie Bux—written in round, cheerful shapes. The i was dotted with a fat circle; the fours in her phone number were pointy, defensive. No—protective. The other woman would fill her in on their way down the street and then Caleb’s mom would be sorry she’d written anything down for me, even if we all knew I had no intention of calling.

  I turned to Margaret. “Haven’t you heard?” I held the folded flyer to my forehead. “Apparently I’m some kind of voodoo priestess. I can see into the future. I seeeeee . . . a small boy, brown eyes. Yellow, almost white hair . . . I see pudgy hands and a full diaper—”

  Margaret huffed and closed the door.

  I lowered the flyer. After a moment of watching the street
, I reached for the switch for our porch light and flicked it on. I didn’t believe in wishful thinking, even though it was all I seemed to do.

  THE NEXT MORNING at the café on the courthouse square, the Parks County Spectator was sold down to a few copies. A handwritten sign above the cash register read NO CHANGE SORRY. I paid for a paper and a weak tea, glancing between the careful, narrow warning on the sign and the careful, narrow man behind the counter.

  Outside, the courthouse rose over the square like a castle on high. People scurried over the lawn, between a set of imposing limestone pillars, and through the doors. The mechanical chimes from the clock at the top of the rotunda counted out the hour. I crossed the street and sat on the low wall encasing the courthouse lawn, my back to all the activity.

  The same baby photo from the flyer graced the front page. I flipped through the article, then searched the rest of the paper’s photos and captions, paging past high school football scores and gardening club news, chili suppers, a notice for that pancake breakfast. On the back page of the newspaper, a furniture store’s proprietor had signed his name to an advertisement as a guarantee on his low prices. His short, everyman name was embellished with a sweeping flourish. Someone had a Napoleon complex. I paused over the prices. Joshua could use a chest of drawers, but it was too early for furniture that wouldn’t fit in the back of our SUV.

  None of the photos showed me the county sheriff, the man I was not rushing to meet.

  At last I stood, discarded the tea, and followed the bustle of activity into the courthouse. In the lobby, under a lofty stained-glass dome, people in uniforms and with ID cards dangling from their necks outnumbered the civilians. Their faces grave and important, they rushed in and out of an area cordoned behind makeshift walls. I joined a long line snaking toward a set of metal detectors.

  “Is all this fuss for that one kid?” said a man ahead of me in line.

  “You know whose kid it is?” said one of the guards, taking all the cords and adapters out of my laptop bag and inspecting each piece as though we had all the time in the world. “Seen enough of them Ranseys come through here to last me the rest of my life.”

  “Good to know the law will hup to for anyone at all when the time comes,” the first man said. He noticed me listening and hurried away.

  The line for the elevator was short, but I took the stairs anyway. They were mottled marble, white with gray threads, worn by generations of shuffling feet. Best of all, they were empty of people, empty of pleasantries given and expected in return.

  At the top of the third-floor landing, rather too quickly, the Parks County Sheriff’s Administrative Office announced itself self-importantly, gold paint on opaque glass.

  I straightened my shoulders, took a deep breath. Then another. A minute ticked by. No one went in or came out.

  I could tell Kent I didn’t want to do it.

  But I couldn’t. Not really.

  The door opened onto a wide gray room crowded with closely aligned desks, each covered with spilling files and old paper cups. At my right, a reception desk sat unmanned. Behind the door, a low black sofa suggested guests, but none were in evidence. No guests, no hosts, no one at all.

  A single sticky note was pasted to the front desk. I glanced around, stepped in, and plucked it up.

  Square note, yellow. In thick black felt-tip—no. I peered more closely. In thick purple felt-tip, the note said Back in a jiff! The letters were round and rolling.

  At the back of the room, a light showed through an open door. I put the sticky note back and made my way there. I had raised my knuckles to the door when something inside slammed. I startled backward.

  “What do you want?” a man’s voice said.

  I nudged open the door. “I—”

  A man in a brown uniform and black ball cap sat behind a cluttered desk, his elbows on his knees and his hands steepled in front of his face. He opened his eyes and lifted an arm, crossing-guard style, to hold me at the doorway, and jutted his chin toward his desk.

  “We want the same thing you do, Russ,” a woman’s voice said, scratchy through the speakerphone.

  “Do we?” he said, waving me away. I backed out of the doorway a bit but studied him. He was younger than I would have predicted—my age, give or take. I had painted all small-town police officers with the same brush as the ones I’d known growing up: pudgy, doughy, bellies hanging over their belts. This one was trim with muscular, tanned arms. Such a shame. I didn’t have time for handsome.

  “The truth,” she said. “What the hell is going on over there?”

  “I don’t know yet and I don’t see how jumping the gun on this will help us get to the truth of it all,” he said. “I just wish you’d give us a little more time”—his hard look turned uneasy—“to confirm some things. I haven’t talked to Erickson yet this morning, for one thing. Have you?”

  “We have a deadline,” the woman said.

  “You can’t tell me that it’s within the next two hours,” the sheriff said. “People are still waking up to yesterday’s paper, Kay, for crying out loud. Our deadline’s more important than yours, anyway, or you’ll be printing two—” His eyes caught mine. He lifted the receiver on the phone and swiveled in the chair, his back to me. “I can’t tell you what to do. But it’s not time for guessing. Sure as hell not time for blame. We don’t know what happened to him yet.”

  A shiver went up the back of my neck. I’d watched the news again after the volunteers had gone the night before, held hostage by the kid’s brown eyes. This morning after Joshua went to school, I watched a top reporter from one of the Indianapolis stations standing with her microphone in front of a row of dirty, peeling houses with sagging porches. “Citizens of Parks, Indiana, are asking themselves today,” she’d said, giving her blond bob a punctuating dip, “how could this happen—here?”

  Here—she’d said it with all the wonder and disbelief I still felt after three months.

  At the newscaster’s elbow, a thick, hardy woman with gray hair falling out of a bun grimaced into the camera. “He’s a good boy,” she said, peering into the lens. Her voice sounded like concrete rolling in a mixer. Her deeply wrinkled face folded into itself in pain. The bottom of the screen announced that this was Aidan’s grandmother.

  “Mrs. Ransey, have you heard anything about Aidan’s whereabouts?” the reporter asked.

  In Parks, there were no forests to search, no standing bodies of water to drag. How much danger could the kid get into, here, where there was nowhere to hide except cornfields and shallow ditches and everyone so eager to help? He should have been asleep in a pile of dirty clothes or behind a closet door. They should have found him within an hour.

  I’d only just pointed the remote at the set when the grandmother sobbed and grabbed at the reporter, then the camera. The world shook loose. “He needs to be home with his gramma,” she wailed, the sound terrible and mesmerizing. The camera stabilized, refocused. I turned off the TV before the smug reporter could tut-tut the story to a false conclusion.

  “Thank you, Kay,” the sheriff was saying. “I appreciate that. I promise: the second I can give you anything, I will, OK?”

  He leaned forward to hang up the phone, the mechanics of his chair squealing in protest. When he turned back to his desk, he seemed surprised to see I was still there. “Help you?”

  “I’m Anna Winger,” I said.

  He pulled his cap low over his eyes. “You got a lead, headquarters is moved out into the lobby. You couldn’t’ve missed it.”

  “No, I’m—” I struggled to say the right thing. The introduction would set the tone. “Kent Schaffer asked me to come by.”

  I let the sheriff take his time placing Kent’s name, remembering the offer Kent must have made and the specialty service I could provide. When he looked away in impatience, I knew he’d put the pieces together.

  “You’re a fed?” he said.

  “A . . . subcontractor.”

  He snorted, shook his head. But befo
re he said anything else, before he stood and introduced himself or shook my hand, before he did anything at all, he did what they all did. He surveyed his desktop, closed a folder. He selected a single page from the mess of papers and files on his desk and turned it over.

  I crossed his office to the window and blinked into the sun. Below, my neighbors made their way to the bank, the café. I could see the trophies in the window of the karate studio. I could see for a mile, actually. I’d read central Indiana had once been a dense forest, but I didn’t buy it. A lone tree on the courthouse green had begun to change its colors.

  “Well, OK, Mrs. Winger,” the sheriff said finally. He came around his desk with his hand outstretched.

  “Ms. Winger, please. Sheriff Keller, let’s be clear.” I let my hand glance off his. “I’m not here to analyze your handwriting.”

  He stayed straight-backed, level-eyed. The brassy details of his uniform seemed to make him taller than he was, though he was tall. The features I had discerned as handsome faded against the razor’s edge of his demeanor. He was as hard and stern as a billy club, and probably considered it part of his job not to look away.

  “I had no idea Schaffer was into this mumbo jumbo,” he said.

  “He’s a leading international expert,” I said.

  “In bunk,” he said. “And how did you become—whatever level of expert you are?”

  “Training and apprenticeship, certifications—the way you become anything else.”

  “But you didn’t become anything else,” the sheriff said.

  We considered each other. “I can go,” I said.

  “Kent Schaffer wanted you to help.” The sheriff squinted at me so I would know that he didn’t. He brushed past, swept a pile of newspapers and folders off the guest chair, and nodded toward it. “I’m in no position to turn away volunteers. The entire Indiana law enforcement community is camped out downstairs, and they’ve taken every resource we’ve got. I’m down to just me and my secretary.”

  I remembered the sticky note in the lobby. Back in a jiff! I could have told him his secretary was someone who couldn’t quite control her emotions, someone who might be inappropriately confidential with a stranger, who might say too much or the wrong thing entirely. Probably the worst sort of person to have working with confidential information, but then no one had asked for that assessment. I didn’t give it away for free.