The Day I Died Read online

  “Anyway,” Keller said.

  I sat in the chair, waiting.

  He returned to his side of the desk and sat, cleared his throat. “Anyway. This is what you do?”

  “This is what I do,” I said.

  I listened to his knee bouncing under the desk. His handwriting probably had a kinetic wriggle.

  “You can really make a living out of this—what’s the word? Service? In Parks?”

  “Most of my work is federal or for large corporations. None of them are headquartered here.” I heard the tweak in my voice, not so different from the TV reporter’s that morning. “I don’t do a lot of—local jurisdiction.”

  He’d heard the tweak, too. His chin was pointed in my direction now. “I see. And what do you do a lot of? Exactly?”

  I sat back and crossed my legs. I’d promised Kent I didn’t mind going in person, but I did. I dealt with authority every day—by phone. By virtual, protected networks and hypersecure file transfer. Occasionally by sterile, anonymous package delivery. The justice and corporate work was faceless, often humanless. Under the stern control of technology and distance, the work had dignity. In the sheriff’s office, the search for justice was close and, by the looks of things, in chaos. Papers, books, and binders stacked and falling and, underneath, the smell of the lockup. There was no telling who had been dragged in to sit in this very chair and face the music. I felt the slick of their sweat and blood on the armrests and pulled my elbows in. The office was stuffy and close, reminding me of—

  The air, thick, over a Northwoods lake, blood rising like smoke in the water—

  Keller narrowed his eyes at me.

  I took a deep breath. “I’ve spent time with ransom notes, forgery, all manner of documents, prenuptial agreements, contracts,” I said. “I work a little in corporate recruitment and with the FBI—”

  “I heard you were a spy,” he said.

  “Better than fortune-teller,” I said, remembering teasing my neighbor the night before. I needed to stop making jokes about my job. They’d get made by everyone else, given enough time. “I think my son might have started the one about me being a spy.”

  “Got his handwriting all over it, huh?” The sheriff grinned. “What’s his name?”

  I shouldn’t have come. Kent should have never asked this of me. Other people got involved. Other mothers hosted pancake breakfasts. I was the kind of mother who checked the license plates of passing cars.

  “His name is Joshua,” I said.

  “Joshua,” he repeated. “How old?”

  The sheriff was perfectly within his duties to ask questions, but I was perfectly within my rights to hate the sound of my son’s name coming from a stranger’s mouth.

  “He’s thirteen. Just. I’m glad you haven’t had to meet him. Now,” I said, retrieving a notebook from my purse. “How can I help?”

  The sheriff wasn’t satisfied, I could see that. But he flipped open the cover of a binder on his desk, taking care to tip his notes away from me.

  Chapter Two

  Aidan Michael Ransey,” the sheriff began. “Age two years. His father reported him missing yesterday morning, early. And wouldn’t you know it? His mother also seems to be out rambling. She resided in Parks with the husband and son until just a few months ago and now can’t be reached.”

  I heard the squeak of Keller’s chair and looked up from my notes. He’d leaned far back in his chair to look over the wall behind him. A diploma, a few certificates with shiny seals, a sea of frames full of photos: Keller and campaign signs. Keller in a crowd of uniformed officers. Keller shaking hands, handing out accolades. In each photo, he held himself tight, his eyes focused somewhere beyond the camera. The people near him shook his hand, clasped his shoulder, leaned into him, and propped themselves up against him. Given half a chance, they might have crawled onto his back and let him carry them.

  He spun back around. “So of course the mother is of special interest here. Stealing your own kid is an excellent way to avoid a custody battle.”

  I looked down at my notes. Mother, with the t crossed distractedly. Wasn’t it not yet time for blame?

  “There’s a snag, though,” he continued. “Couple of them, actually, but one is an anonymous note threatening to take the kid.”

  Finally I saw the door through which I’d entered. Kent hadn’t given me the details. That was his style, to let me make all my own discoveries. All my own mistakes.

  “They’re trying to pull prints off the note now,” he said. “So all I can get you is a copy of—”

  “A copy isn’t good enough.”

  A flat stare from Keller. “Sorry?”

  “A copy isn’t good enough,” I said. “I’ll need to see the real thing.”

  “Well, I’m not likely to get my fingerprints on the real McCoy until tomorrow sometime,” he said, slapping the desk. Annoyed with either the question or the answer he’d had to give. “Don’t even have a copy yet, to tell you the truth.”

  “I’m surprised Kent didn’t tell you I would need the original.”

  “No, he did,” he said. “I just—”

  I sensed some piece of his pride was at stake here. Perhaps he hadn’t wanted to admit that the only real crime likely to pass over his desk this year—maybe in his entire tenure—had been taken away from him, that he couldn’t lay his hands on his own evidence. “You just?”

  “I just wanted to get a look at you first.”

  I froze, but inside I was taking flight, my heart pattering. I glanced at the door. “Excuse me?”

  The sheriff closed his notes with a snap. “Wanted to make sure I didn’t let any . . . woo-woo in the door.”

  “And how do I stack up?” I said, willing myself to calm down. “Right amount of woo for you?”

  “Now, don’t take it personal—”

  “To take it personally,” I said, “I would have to care significantly more than I do about your opinion. As it is, I only care professionally—but if you don’t trust that my profession exists outside the realm of voodoo, I’m not sure what I can do for you.”

  “You can prove me wrong,” he said.

  “Seems like you’re pretty sure about most things,” I said. I glanced up at the wall of accolades and adoration. “What don’t you already know?”

  He didn’t like me shopping his wall. “Where that boy is, first off.”

  “What do you think the note might tell us about Aidan’s whereabouts?”

  “This is your area. They say. But the whole thing tells me to get nervous.” He nudged his cap crooked on his head to draw his hand over his face. He needed a shave. “Not a lot of kids go missing and almost every one of them turns up somewhere on a play-date everyone forgot about or, if they’re actually gone, with the noncustodial parent, simply being withheld. It doesn’t make a lot of sense—to me.”

  I looked back at my notebook.

  He said, “I do worry that the note seems to be . . . vague on details. And demands, actually. There was no ransom mentioned.”

  I nodded. Without comparing it to a sample of someone’s handwriting, the note was a big unknown in the center of a lot of unknowns. Anyone could have written that note. If the father wrote it, he could be covering his own tracks. The kid could be in danger or hurt. Or dead. And the mother. Was she just not answering the phone or was she in a quick grave somewhere?

  I turned my head. From where I sat, Keller’s office window was filled with a span of perfect blue sky. Just the other day I’d been thinking: maybe. Maybe it didn’t have to be so hard. I remembered hot dock slats under my legs, a warm arm thrown around me as the sun dipped into the lake.

  “So I’m nervous, all right,” the sheriff said. “I’m nervous that kid is really gone. Pedophile gone, or—but forgive me if I hope it’s the mother who’s got him. You know why, Ms. Winger? Not because it’s easier to solve, but because it’s so much more likely we’ll bring Aidan back home, soon and safe.”

  I kept my face passive. Sometimes
when I needed to keep my mouth shut, I ran my tongue over the backs of my teeth and counted off the states. Tennessee, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Ohio. One of my teeth had cracked at some point, inviting rot, and I’d finally had it rooted and capped in Cincinnati. I always tried to land on that tooth when Ohio’s turn came along. Then Illinois, now Indiana. I looked up. “What was the other snag?” I said.

  “What’s that?” he said.

  “You said there were a couple of snags.”

  I didn’t think he was going to tell me. No sample, not enough info. And now a stonewalling look instead of letting me in on what I was up against. There was no reason for him to treat me as a peer, but I didn’t have to put up with being treated like a circus freak. I stood and reached into my purse.

  “The other snag is the babysitter,” he said. “She was missing, too.” I waited, a business card in my hand. It was a quality card, simple, with only my name and number pressed into smooth, white paper.

  Was. Was missing. I sat back down.

  “Until this morning,” he said, “when her body was discovered in an out-of-service latrine at Sugar Creek Park.”

  ON THE WAY home, I took a detour. There was absolutely no reason for my going there, but when I saw the sign for the park, I turned in. Under the canopy of trees, I took a deep breath. I drove slowly but no children darted into the lane.

  The road abruptly ended in a parking lot with empty playground equipment on the far side. Beyond that, a concrete block structure sat surrounded by more trees and, this morning, several cruisers, local and state, with their lights turned off. A couple of unmarked vehicles—a dark SUV and a panel van, black, maybe a crime scene unit—sat nearby. I parked just in view of the taillights and got out, wandering over to a park bench in the grass and sitting at an angle to the activity.

  Why this place? Of all the parks to bring a kid for a day out, this one seemed the least likely. Fall was thinning out the leaves overhead as well as the nice-weather days left in the season. This particular park also seemed out of the way and abandoned, given the better-kept Memorial Park right downtown, mere blocks from where the Ranseys lived.

  A hundred feet away or so, an older man in a rumpled sweater stood in the grass with a small white dog on a leash. “Come on, Trix,” he was saying. “Come on.”

  He startled at seeing me and then recovered with a gesture toward the goings-on at the facilities. “Bad business in that latrine,” he said. “Safe as houses, this place is supposed to be.”

  “The park?”

  “The whole town. And the park.”

  “You spend time here, I guess,” I said, looking at the dog.

  “Until this week, I never bothered taking her anywhere else,” he said. “We used to have druggie types around but the sheriff’s deputies are always coming through, waving. After a couple of town meetings, you understand. But now they haunt it well enough, keep things tidy. They patrolled it this morning, for heaven’s sake, before the body was found. Now my wife won’t let our daughter bring the kids up to visit, not until this is sorted.”

  After a few minutes, the little dog did its business and the man picked up the mess with an inside-out plastic bag over his shaking hand.

  On the way out of the park, I met another dark SUV coming in and turned my head. Safe as houses, except I’d only known houses to be as safe as anyplace else. Which is to say, not a guarantee.

  “JOSHUA,” I CALLED from the front door. “I’m home.”

  The bare white walls seemed to bounce my voice back to me. All that talk of the missing and the dead gave me the shivers. I felt equal parts relieved and silly when I spotted his backpack on the dining room table. Not where it should be, as usual, but here. Here.

  “Joshua? Are you home?” I listened for the telltale sounds of his video games, but then he’d be using the new headphones he’d gotten for his birthday. His games were quieter and more private now, which kept Margaret from whacking her broom at us or, worse, from shuffling upstairs in her slippers to snoop and have her say.

  Right now all I cared about was he was here. I’d just spent a good deal of the day talking about a little boy gone missing and a woman found dead. Keller had given me a look behind that cordoned area in the courthouse lobby, where it seemed most of his staff and several other battalions of law enforcement now holed up. No one offered credentials to make my next visit any easier. Outside again, I’d taken a slow walk around the square, stopping to look at listings in a real estate office’s window. Cheap real estate was of no more interest to me than outlandishly expensive real estate, but I dutifully read the details on farmhouses and split-level ranches until an agent came out to chat me up. After the park I’d driven to the school to catch the end of junior high football practice, only to discover the field empty.

  All the way home, I had felt the low sizzle of my nerves. Aidan Ransey was missing, and now any boy could go missing. Maybe I was being a little overdramatic, but that was fine. I had decided years ago to be anything I wanted to be.

  But you didn’t become anything else. That’s what the sheriff thought. He was wrong, but it was better if he didn’t know it.

  I dropped my bag on the table. At Joshua’s room, I pressed my ear to the door. The clacking of his thumbs on the game controller gave him away.

  In my bedroom, I traded the skirt and blouse for a pair of sweats and a T-shirt. I pulled my hair into a bun, pausing to gather myself in front of the full-length mirror some unkind soul had attached to the inside of the closet door. The sweats did nothing for the waist I’d ended up with after thirteen years sitting behind a computer, and the T-shirt was plain and dumpy. The uniform of a stay-at-home spy.

  In the hall, I hesitated at Joshua’s door, then knocked. No response. I knocked again. Either he couldn’t hear me or he didn’t want to.

  When I finally opened the door, he was sprawled on the floor on his back, his head propped against his red beanbag chair. His thick brown hair, always too long, hung into his long eyelashes, flicking when he blinked. I loved his eyelashes, and of course the eyes, a deep brown with flecks of colors that had yet to be named. I loved everything about him. I even loved the profile, the straight nose and high cheekbones inherited from another face.

  At that moment, he grimaced at something happening on the screen. His nose sneered, his lip curled in disgust, and everything about him turned into his father. He tossed the game controller to the floor, disappointment changing his face back into his own. Then he saw me at the door, and his scowl twisted back into place.

  “Mom, God, what?” he said, his voice too loud for the room.

  I gestured for him to take off the headphones. He sat up and pried them off. “I wasn’t even being loud,” he said.

  “No, I know.”

  He swiped the hair out of his eyes with the back of his wrist, irritated. At the game or at me, I couldn’t tell.

  “I just wondered how your day was,” I said.

  He rolled his eyes. “How my day was?”

  Sometimes he reminded me to get mad in return. Sometimes he pushed me to a raw anger that made me almost understand things I’d never understood, and then the heat would rush away, replaced by emptiness. That hollow feeling explained a few things, too. Wouldn’t I do almost anything to keep from experiencing it? I would. I had.

  “Yeah,” I said, swallowing everything else I might have said. I leaned against the doorframe, crossing my arms. I wished I’d kept my business clothes on. Maybe the scent of the jail would have still been on them. “Your day. We humans mark time in twenty-four-hour allotments. How was yours?”

  He gave a sharp-shouldered shrug. “’s OK.”

  I glanced at the alarm clock next to his bed. “No football practice tonight, I guess.”

  He looked up at me, considered, then decided on a shake of the head. I didn’t press the issue of having driven out to fetch him. He wanted a cell phone, and I was pushing off any evidence that he needed one.

  “Well, I guess I’ll go mak
e dinner, and you’ll do your homework,” I said.

  Joshua sighed. “Fine.”

  “I’ll call you in just a few minutes, and I don’t want to see that gentleman again tonight,” I said, nodding toward the TV, where a muscled military man was frozen in midfrenzy, mouth wide in the rage of attack. The headphones hadn’t been for Margaret’s sake alone.

  “I said fine.”

  I closed the door. Another twenty-four-hour allotment, another chance to see how much I could screw this up.

  In the kitchen, I opened the fridge and stared in, going over its contents and the conversation again. It had gone off the rails, but where? At last I had to admit that it was the moment he’d seen me.

  Normal teenage stuff. We’d always been close, but his wingspan was wider now. He wanted more rights—more than permission to get himself to school, to join sports teams, to have a TV and games in his own room, to let his hair grow. He wanted his own life.

  Of course I would worry how far this would go, how fast. I worried. When he was little, I had feared dropping him, not feeding him well enough, mysterious fevers. In elementary school, he came home scuffed up and knees torn. From playing, he said, but I wasn’t fooled and worried that he didn’t fit in.

  I had worried most that he would never feel safe and, now, that I’d made him feel too safe. I had protected him so well he had no idea what it was to be afraid. I was the only one on notice, so I got to be the warden. I got to be the bad guy.

  Which was life’s little joke on me.

  But lately—the recoil when I tried to touch him, the appraising look he gave me when he thought I couldn’t see, as though we were strangers. That’s how it felt: the boy in this apartment wasn’t the boy I’d raised, the playful one, the artist, the one who could be tickled into hiccups, the boy he had been not that long ago.