As I inched forward against the blocked traffic, I remembered the sight of my arm reaching out of the barn, sunlit. And then: the same hand darting out to connect with Joshua’s face. Then: the sheriff’s hands on me, his weight pinning me to the rough blanket.
We would have to go.
Finally I was able to take an alley to get around the square toward the apartment, but when I tried to pull back out onto a street, traffic there had backed up, too. People were gathering in front of the courthouse. Before I could talk myself out of it, I threw the truck’s gear into park and pulled out the keys.
I crossed the street and waded into the crowd.
“I think they got her,” someone said.
“But did they get the boy?”
I pressed between and around people to get closer. A podium was centered at the top of the steps, bathed in TV lights, with a rope boundary keeping the crowd at bay. On the other side of the barrier, TV news crews were setting up. I found a space at the rope and craned my neck to see over a cameraman’s shoulder.
Sherry stood just inside the propped-open door at the top of the stairs. I waved, hesitant, and then with gusto until she looked my way, checked around her, and came down. She made her way through the crews and leaned over the rope to whisper in my ear.
“You look like the same kind of hell that he does,” she said. “I made him go clean the hay out of his hair.”
My face was hot. I saw the sheriff at the door now, and he did look better. His hat was gone, his hair combed. He leaned out of the door and surveyed the scene.
“Do you know what’s going on?” I said.
The cameraman backed into Sherry. “Watch it,” he said.
“Watch yourself,” Sherry said. “Or I’ll get the media pool moved to the other side of the building.”
“You don’t have that authority,” said a woman with a shell of banana-yellow hair. She held a microphone in her hand and had managed to create a two-foot space between herself and her crewman.
“Which side of the rope am I on?” Sherry said to the newscaster. She turned to me. “Nobody’s told me anything, but if I had to guess—”
“We’re live in Parks,” the reporter said, her voice stretched broad. “Where Indiana attorney general Arnold Erickson has called a press conference. We’ve been told he will be joined by Parks County sheriff Russell Keller but we don’t know yet what news the men will share with us today.”
“If I had to guess,” Sherry said, “I’d say we’ve got our woman.”
The reporter glanced our way. “Speculation has it that we might be hearing about the capture of the fugitive mother of a little boy who’s been missing from Parks for ten days. Police have been looking for Lila Ransey—”
“Leila,” I said.
“—since her son was reported missing from her estranged husband’s home here in Parks.”
Movement at the courthouse door. A man wearing a suit and tie and a foul expression came through, followed by a number of town and county men, but not the sheriff.
“Attorney general Erickson has taken the podium,” the reporter said. “Let’s listen.”
The man at the podium adjusted the mic to his mouth and dove in. “Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming. We wish we had the best news for you, but unfortunately we cannot say what we’d like to say today. Aidan Ransey, two years old, is still missing.”
I glanced at Sherry, who shook her head.
Erickson raised a hand to quiet a rising murmur. “Please let me say what I have to say. Aidan Ransey is still missing. But we do have new information that puts his situation in a different light.” Erickson’s mouth was grim, but he found the cameras in the crowd and looked deep into them with serious eyes. Projecting into the heartland for future election-year footage. “The good news is that we have safely located a person long of interest in this case. Sheriff Keller?”
They had her. They had Leila Ransey. I watched the sheriff—Russell—exit the door with someone in his wake. The crowd shuffled and strained to see.
The sheriff guided the woman out from behind him. She had lank bronze hair and wore a black, doughy coat that was much too large for her and too hot for the weather. She lurched into the middle of the men, swallowed behind the podium. Leila Ransey, no more than a girl. Skinny, even frail. Her face and neck were pale but blotchy, and her eyes darted around the crowd, past the cameras, out to the square.
The sheriff held the woman at her elbow as though she might fall over and leaned into the microphone. “We’d like to thank Mrs. Ransey for coming in today, as soon as she heard we were looking for her,” he said. “Mrs. Ransey has been very cooperative. We’ll be leading a renewed search effort in conjunction with state and federal agencies, revisiting all witnesses, all interviews. If you have information, any information at all that might have a bearing on this matter, we ask you to come forward now. We need all the assistance this town, this county, this state, even the nation, has to offer to Aidan and his parents.”
Aidan and his parents. I had to dodge the cameraman to see Leila again. This was the woman they thought killed someone with brute strength? There was so little to her. The collective group seemed to be holding its breath, not sure what to believe.
“I’d like to apologize to the Ransey family for any semblance of lack of effort on my or my office’s part. That is not the case. Not at all. But from here on out, we will not be making any assumptions. We will be bringing Aidan home.” He stopped to clear his throat and turned a degree to include more of the crowd. For just a blink, his eyes landed on mine, then bounced away. When he began again, he seemed less certain. “We will do everything in our power to bring Aidan home. We’d like to thank Mrs. Ransey again for coming forward. Mrs. Ransey, would you like to say anything?”
The sheriff gestured the young woman to the podium and stepped back. She seemed drunk, or high, or—scared. When she raised her clasped hands to her mouth, the long sleeves of the coat covered her pinkies.
“Please bring Aidan back,” she said, her voice low and raw.
The attorney general and the rest of them eyed the crowd.
Leila gripped the sides of the podium and stood on her tiptoes to speak into the mic. Her voice rang out, loud. “Why would you take him away from the rest of us? What have you done with my baby?”
The sheriff was watching Leila uneasily. His eyes flicked into the crowd, straight to me this time, and back.
“You bring him back, or I swear to God—” Leila Ransey lowered her head in anguish, one long wail rising out of the speakers, bouncing off the buildings across the street, and washing back over the gathered crowd.
The sheriff reached out to guide her away, but then came a screech of tires. The sound seemed to come from everywhere at once.
“Liar!” Someone raged across the courthouse lawn and through the throngs.
Sherry poked me in the side. Bo Ransey had left his truck in the street, the door wide, and was running toward the podium. “Liar!” The cameraman swiveled to capture the scene and struck me in the shoulder. I tottered and fell to my hands and knees, putting my fingers in the path of some heavy hiking boots.
“Hey, ow!”
The crowd surged. Sherry pulled me to my feet, guiding me under the rope to the other side.
“You liar!” The people parted for Bo even as the sheriff’s men rushed in and the camera crews crushed closer. Bo Ransey, sweaty-faced and pale, dressed in paint-spattered pants. He made a move on the rope, and was met with force by a phalanx of officers. The pixie-faced deputy, Tara Lombardi, reached out and grabbed Bo’s arm, almost tenderly. “You lying bitch—” Bo spat, shaking her off. Two more uniformed men grabbed him and marched him toward the courthouse, the young deputy running behind. Leila Ransey was scooped up and taken back inside, the official party gone within moments and the podium left empty under the lights.
Sherry ran up the steps behind the group, casting a wordless shrug over her shoulder at me. I watched after them until
they were all inside. There was something in the scene that worried at me, but I couldn’t place it.
The cameraman swung around to train the lens on the crowd and found me, solo and inside the barrier. Before I realized what was happening, I was staring into the camera lens and the reporter with the yellow hair was reaching in with a microphone to ask me for my thoughts. I only had one thought—my face showing up on the bar TV at the Clipper in Sweetheart Lake, Wisconsin—and reached for the lens. I pictured Bea Ransey sending the TV camera stuttering with a haymaker and reached now to do the same.
WITH NO ONE to stop me, I ran up the steps to the courthouse door and let myself in. I’d scraped my hands during my fall outside and had a small rivulet of blood on one palm. One of Keller’s jailers stood to the side of the ladies’ washroom. He took one look at the blood dripping from my hand and went back to his phone.
At the sink I rinsed the scratch thoroughly, waiting until the blood stopped. When I turned off the water to reach for a paper towel, I heard a noise behind me and realized one of the stall doors was closed. A woman was crying behind it.
“Are you OK?” I said.
She didn’t answer. I heard a sniffle, then some toilet paper being pulled from the roll.
What did I care? I patted my hands dry and just as I was about to throw the towel away and leave, the stall door opened and Leila Ransey stood there in her overwarm coat.
“No, I’m not OK,” she said.
Words failed me. I had nothing to say to this woman, nothing to ask her. Maybe I was projecting something upon her that had been put there by other people, or maybe I was projecting something more personal upon her, something quite like self-loathing. I was less sorry for her, up close.
She was unsteady on her feet as she washed her face and hands. Leila, face dripping, found me watching her in the mirror and decided she knew which side I was on. “He’s not such a big family man as you want him to be,” she spat. “Just enough to do whatever she—”
The door to the hallway swung open and struck the wall with a bang. Leila and I both startled backward. Deputy Lombardi stood there, her eyes narrowed at me. “Aren’t you an interested citizen lately?” she said. When she turned to Leila, her expression sharpened even further. “Mrs. Ransey,” she said. “You’ve already taken so much of everyone’s time, so how about you hustle through your nervous breakdown and let’s go?”
Leila hurried by me with a look backward that I couldn’t read. When they were gone, I stood in the quiet bathroom and worried for Aidan, perhaps for the first time. I’d been pinning my hopes on his mother, and now—now I didn’t know who the kid could come back to when or if he ever did make it home. His grandmother, but then she’d raised his father in the first place. And now this frail, bloodless woman who let life pull her along. Leila Ransey was no match for the kind of life I thought we had in common and, if she had killed the woman to steal the child and was somehow fooling everyone, I had to agree with Grace Mullen. I didn’t feel as charitable as I once had.
Chapter Twenty-one
I hurried through the crowd and then the traffic as best I could, the clock in the dash ticking away the minutes as well as the moral high ground I usually enjoyed when telling Joshua he always had to let me know where he was. I tapped my fingers on the steering wheel. Something from what I’d seen pulled at me.
Leila didn’t have Aidan, at least not with her. Bo didn’t have Aidan. Bo thought Leila was a liar. Leila thought—
What have you done with Aidan? You bring him back.
What did Leila think? What did Leila believe? I knew who I believed. The mother’s confusion had been real, her grief alive. She seemed just like a woman who had been blindsided by the news that her son was missing. But she also seemed to believe her son was out there, that he could be returned. Maybe she hadn’t had time to process it; maybe she didn’t know about the odds of a child missing for this long coming back unharmed. Maybe she just had a mother’s hope that it would all work out. Or maybe she knew where he was.
You bring him back. That demand seemed oddly—directive. It was like seeing Joshua’s scrawl on the barn wall. LIAR GO TO HELL—it wasn’t a statement. It was a direction: you, you go to hell. And of course he meant me.
And then I knew what had really caught my attention. Deputy Tara Lombardi’s gentle reach for Bo Ransey’s arm. I’d seen her do that before, seen him shake her off on the courthouse steps when she was escorting him off the premises. He’d shaken the smug look off her face, for once.
But what if that wasn’t the whole story? What did I know about either of them? Only that Deputy Lombardi hadn’t thought much of the suggestion that Bo and Charity were a couple. Only that Deputy Lombardi didn’t think much of Leila Ransey, Mrs. Ransey, either.
I thought back over all the times Tara Lombardi had passed through my life, her eyes slashing and her doll-baby voice full of suggestion.
I’d seen her name somewhere, too, and struggled to remember. The newspaper? No. That evidence form Keller had given me placed Lombardi at Bo’s house early the morning Aidan was taken. So early as to be ahead of the call to 911?
But then I remembered the neighbor walking his dog in Sugar Creek Park. The park was normally safe as houses, he’d said. A sheriff’s car had been patrolling even that morning. The very morning before Charity’s body was discovered.
I flung open the door to the building and ran up the stairs, fumbling for my keys just as Margaret swept open her door and started yelling about the noise. At the top of the stairs stood Joe Jeffries.
I glanced down at myself. I could smell the raw scent of my afternoon: hay, wool, sweat, sex.
“I thought—was it tonight? I thought—”
He turned. “Anna—”
“I’m running incredibly late,” I said, opening the door wide and gesturing him inside. “And I haven’t even told Joshua I’m going out.”
“Anna—”
“Maybe we’d better reschedule—I might be needed at the sheriff’s—did you hear? Or, look, the truth is—”
“Anna, listen.” He waited for me to pay attention. “I’m here because I heard something troubling. I don’t know if it’s . . . is Joshua here?”
“Of course. Or he might be . . . well, I guess not practice.”
“He didn’t come to school today.”
I stopped. “What are you talking about? I heard him leave this morning. He was on time, for once.”
The hallway was dark, and beyond that, Joshua’s door was closed. He’d be in there until I rousted him out, the headphones on, the hair in his eyes.
Joe took a step toward me, and I backed away. I could still smell the sheriff’s cologne on my skin.
“Is he here?” Joe said.
“Probably in his room. Who said he didn’t show up to school?”
“I’m saying he didn’t show up. He was reported absent in homeroom, but that’s nothing to get alarmed about. But then—”
“I’ve been out all afternoon, but I was in this morning. He didn’t stay home today.” But then I remembered the in-service day. He hadn’t stayed home that day, either. “Let me—wait, let’s just check.”
The hall, only ten paces, grew longer; by the third step, my mind had turned toward the time that had passed since I’d seen him. I was just being paranoid. Aidan was missing, so any boy could go missing.
When I reached Joshua’s door, I could feel the quiet beyond. I knew the room would be empty. I swung the door open.
His bed was unmade, the floor littered with magazines and video game cords. The boxes that still held his clothes, open and overflowing.
“One of his friends was spreading a rumor today,” Joe said.
“Which friend?”
He stared at me, his mouth slightly open. “It’s the rumor you need to care about.”
“What did he say? Where’s Joshua?”
“His friend was saying—look, I don’t want to upset you. But it was all over football practice today that
Joshua was running away.”
“That’s—” Absurd. Completely wrong.
But I couldn’t say it. I saw the look on Joshua’s face as he called me a liar. I felt the black force of the words meant for me on the barn wall.
Jeffries cleared his throat. “Have you seen him since this morning?”
Besides the call to the phone in the early hours, I hadn’t talked to him since last night, not since he’d blown up at me. Not since—not since I’d hit him. “No.” I opened Joshua’s closet door. The mess that met me there seemed right. “No. He couldn’t have run away. It’s ridiculous.”
“He hasn’t been having any troubles lately? At home?”
I glared at him. “You know he’s had some issues lately. At school. Where could he be?” I pushed past Joe into the hallway. “Joshua? Are you here?” I pushed open my bedroom door hopefully: dark. The bathroom: dark. The front room was wide open, not a single hiding place.
Joe came up behind me. “I know he’s had some problems with his schoolwork. But to run away? Does that seem like Joshua to you?”
I turned in a slow circle, taking in the empty room. Something wasn’t right. What was it? And then I saw. His backpack was missing from the table. “His backpack.”
“What?”
“I don’t know,” I said. A shrill alarm began to ring in my ears, and I raised my voice to be heard over it. “I don’t know.”
“OK,” Joe said. “Let’s be calm. What about his backpack?”
“It’s not on the table. It’s always, always on the table.” I thought of the pack’s dense bulk, the thump it made when he set it down. “He hasn’t been home.” I ran back down the hall to his room and pulled back the sliding door of his closet again. On the floor sat a stack of books: Our Land and Its People, math.
Oh, God.
The Day I Died Page 17