“Based on certain indicators in his handwriting, particularly in the descenders, I would say that the letter writer had some—” I paused, watched Jim’s hand scratching across the page. “Sexual shortcomings.”
Jim lifted his eyes to mine and tipped his notebook away.
“That’s interesting,” Kent said. He rubbed at his cheek. “I’ll have to think about that. Was there a reason why you left it out?”
“Like I said, it was a mistake. I meant to include it in the end, but—well, I was distracted. Like I said.”
“Joshua?”
I swallowed hard. I was pretending to be myself, sitting here and talking in a code I’d already started to forget. But I hadn’t forgotten for a moment that he was gone. His empty room seemed to ring silence down the hall. My phone, in my pocket, was a brick. I was as distracted as I’d ever been. Talking about murder—and the only thing that mattered to me was the silence.
“Yes,” I croaked.
Kent and his partner exchanged looks again. Jim flipped his notebook closed and stood. “I’ll be at the car. Thank you for your time, Mrs. Winger.” He fidgeted with the notebook. I noticed he left it in his right hand to avoid having to shake mine or to avoid having to decide if he should. That was fine. I was tired and didn’t want to be touched anymore today. “I hope your boy gets home. Soon. And safe.”
I remembered those words, used for another boy. “Thank you,” I said.
Kent waited for the door to close. “I have a son about Joshua’s age.”
“You do?”
“How long have we known each other, and you had no idea our kids were the same age?”
“I wouldn’t say—”
“What?” he said.
“I wouldn’t say we know each other.”
Kent nodded. “I guess I wouldn’t, either. But I know thirteen-year-old boys.” He took a wallet out of his jacket and flipped through a few photo holders. “This is my third, my runt.”
I leaned in to take a look. I didn’t want to. The snapshot was of all three boys, all tall and thin like their father, standing in a patch of grass with the sun in their eyes. The youngest had pronounced ears and a military haircut. His arms, dangling at his sides, were painfully thin. “Good-looking boys,” I said, with effort. “Three. I can’t imagine.”
“No one can imagine your life very well.”
I stared at him.
“I mean—no one can imagine another person’s life very well.”
If Kent weren’t here, I would have checked my phone for reception already. Four times. “Did any of your boys run away from home?”
He cleared his throat and put his wallet away. “No. No, you’re right. I don’t know the first thing about what it’s like from that side.”
We sat in silence for a minute. Finally, he said, “Impotence, then? Is that what you meant?”
“Do you think it has any significance for your investigation?”
“It was significant to my investigation,” he said with raised eyebrows. “But now that it’s a homicide—”
“Right, of course. Different investigation.”
“But it might mean something. I don’t think you have to have testicles—pardon me for the bluntness—to know that a man’s sexual health can affect the rest of his self-worth. We’ll have to throw that piece into the mix and see what comes up. It could be nothing.” He folded his hands over his crossed knee and stared at his own fingers for a moment. “It could mean nothing.”
“But you don’t think so.”
“Everything means something to someone, right? Some kid gets rapped on the knuckles by the nuns in grade school and a quiver shows up in the handwriting two decades later?”
I granted him a small smile. “One of the Booster Club moms suggested I set up a sort of kissing booth for handwriting analysis. She wanted me to find the quiver in her handwriting.”
His mouth twisted into a hesitant smile. “Did you find one in Joshua’s?”
I was caught off guard, even so. I nodded, unable to speak.
Kent stood up and ambled to the window, his hands in his pockets. “I always wonder what my kids really think about it all.”
“He hid from me, wouldn’t write anything down.”
“Doesn’t mean he was doing anything illicit,” he said. “Normal thing for a teenage boy to want privacy.”
“He’s gotten in with a bad crowd.”
Kent considered this and the street outside the window. “But then what do the parents of those in the bad crowd tell themselves?”
A stone seemed to lodge itself in my throat. Kent knew better than anyone living where Joshua had come from. “What are you trying to say?”
He left the window. “Your son’s not the bad crowd or the good crowd. He’s not much of anything but thirteen. They have tempers outsized for their bodies. And desires you don’t even want to know about. Pent up like firecrackers, and just as dangerous to themselves. He’s just a boy.”
“I just want him home.”
“He’ll be back soon. But that will only be the beginning. If they bring him home kicking and screaming—” Kent looked away, and I had to wonder if he had not lived through something, too. “If they bring him home before he’s come to some conclusions on his own, he might be hard to handle. He might not be the boy you raised.”
I imagined the scene. I’d rush to Russ’s office or to the juvenile hall in Indianapolis or wherever they had him. I’d run to him, elated at the sight of him again, and he would shrug his shoulders. He would let the fringe of hair shadow his eyes. This was what I expected, even as I realized how little I’d come to expect.
“He’s the boy I raised, all right. The very one.”
“Well, then. Let’s bring him home. If there’s anything I can help you with, you know to call me? Yes? Good.” He walked to the door and stood there with a hand on the knob. “I wonder—”
I stood, felt for my cell phone through my pocket. “What?”
“I just wonder—what’s Joshua running from? In particular, I mean. Maybe you have some ideas. But could he have been running toward something? They’re asking you these things, I hope.”
“They’ve already asked. About—Chicago.” He’d loved it there.
“And before that?”
I looked away. “They’ve been nothing if not thorough.”
“Of course, of course.”
“Just say whatever it is, Kent.”
He came away from the door. “The police are being thorough, Anna, but they are just strangers following a checklist. You know him.” He looked around the room. I saw him noticing the bare walls, the single framed photo of Joshua in the corner. “If he doesn’t come back—” His eyes dug into mine to make sure I understood the possibility. “If he doesn’t come back and you’ve done nothing but wait for someone else to rescue him?”
I took a shaking breath. I couldn’t even be insulted that Kent still knew I needed his help. “What do I do?”
Kent smiled gently. How lucky his boys must be, his wife. “I would say do what you’ve always done,” he said. “Whatever you have to.”
KENT HAD ALREADY left when I realized I could have shown him the evidence forms from the sheriff. They were confounding me for some reason. I’d never figure it out now.
I was supposed to rest, but couldn’t. I was supposed to stay near home, but no one came through the door. I was supposed to keep my cell phone close, but it didn’t ring. My assignment was to do nothing. The world seemed quite content to go on without me, without Joshua.
My skin was itchy, jumpy. Something had to happen today. Joshua had to come home today. He had to.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket, put it back. These motions didn’t give me even a second of satisfaction. I pulled out the phone again to dial Russ, but put it back down. I wouldn’t do it.
Whatever you have to.
Down the hall, Joshua’s room radiated emptiness. I walked to it, opened the door. I looked again in the boxes
he’d never unpacked, opened the closet door again. Got on my hands and knees and bowed to the dust bunnies under the bed. The police had been over the room; I’d been over the room—who had not been over the room?
I fell back on his beanbag chair and looked around. His desk was dusty. His game system was gone, though I didn’t understand why.
From the closet, the spines of his textbooks mocked me. Huckleberry Finn—oh, God, he was a runaway, wasn’t he?—math, Our World and Its People.
I reached for the social studies book and flipped through the pages, stopping once to stare longingly at a note Joshua had made in the margins.
The text was all agriculture and war, famine and migration patterns. I shook the book upside down. Nothing fell out. I ran the book’s pages like a flip book forward and backward, checked the blank pages inside the back cover.
What had Joe said? History was a freshman class.
I flicked through the pages one at a time, willing the book to tell me what I could almost understand. And then I did.
Chapter Twenty-five
The school secretary didn’t want to tell me where the library was. “You understand, of course,” the woman said. She was younger than I was, pudgy cheeked, her hair cut short and matronly. “We can’t have just anyone running around the school.”
“I’m not just anyone. I’m a parent.”
“You wouldn’t want people running loose in the school, with your child—” The woman had the decency to stop talking. She blushed.
“So you know that my child is not in the building, and at the moment I couldn’t care a lick who’s running loose. I need to talk to your librarian. Urgently. I urgently need to talk—”
“It’s not a good time right now.” The woman pushed her chair back a few inches, as though readying for me to launch myself at her. “It’s lunchtime, and Mrs. Chandler is busy.”
“I don’t want to talk to the principal. I want to talk to—is Joe Jeffries here?”
The woman picked up her phone. At last. I stepped back from the desk. Now that I was getting my way, I could give a few inches.
While the secretary spoke quietly into the phone—I could tell it wasn’t Joe she’d reached and wondered whether there was such a thing as small-town school security—I glanced around. In the back was the principal’s office, the door closed. Around the corner was probably the nurse’s office and sickroom, the vice principal’s office. I might be able to find Joe’s office on my own. There was a student sitting with his back to me, waiting for one of the doors to open and a figure of authority to wave him in. Health trouble or trouble trouble? And then realized the boy was Steve Ransey.
I walked over and stood in front of him. “Steve,” I said.
He was hunched over, his elbows on his knees. He didn’t look up, so I knew he’d recognized me before I had him. “They already talked to me,” he said.
“I’m not the police. I have different questions.”
He kicked at the carpet. He wore work boots, as though seventh grade was a break from his job on a road crew. Or a chain gang. He was bigger than Joshua, heavier and thicker.
“What?” he asked, voice cracking.
Still thirteen years old, though, no matter how tough the uniform.
“You don’t know where he might have gone?”
“That’s the same question.”
“OK,” I said, sitting in the chair next to him. “When did he start spray painting on barn walls?”
Steve’s eyes shifted all around without alighting.
The secretary walked up to us. “I don’t think we can allow this.”
“Allow what?” I said. “This is my son’s friend. We’re just consoling each other, isn’t that right, Steve?”
Steve nodded at his boots.
The secretary made a small sound and hurried off.
“She’s going to go get the principal or the vice,” Steve said.
“Let her. I’m not doing anything. And neither are you at the moment. Why are you sitting here?”
“Waiting on the nurse,” he mumbled.
“Are you OK?”
He managed to look at me for a beat, then away. “Yeah.”
I’d used the mom tone on him, I realized too late. “Did the police ask you about the spray paint? And the barn?”
“Yeah.”
“Then I guess I can’t ask you about that. Did they ask you about . . . social studies?”
His face shifted subtly, curious. “No?”
“Are you in social studies with Joshua?”
“Different periods.”
“But the same teacher?”
“Mrs. Grivner. She’s kind of a bitch.”
“I like her already. Did she ever assign you a project where you had to map out your family? Make a family tree?”
He laughed, a snaky little hiss of a noise. “Wow, that’s lame. We did that in, like, second grade.”
“Oh, yeah?” I said, my mind trying to race ahead, to make sense of it.
“And it wasn’t fair. Some people had, like, really simple families.”
The secretary marched back into the room and past us looking triumphant. Someone equally tiresome would be here soon to there-there me out of the building.
The poor kid. Living not with his own parents but his uncle. And what a jerk I’d been, to judge his family. “Joshua’s family tree was too simple,” I said finally, knowing I was admitting to the very thing I had denied when Joshua suggested it. “Where’s the library?”
He shrugged toward the door the secretary had come through. “Down there, on the right. But it’s closed. It’s lunch.”
Lunch. Hadn’t Joe said something about lunch monitoring? With the librarian?
“Where’s the cafeteria?”
“Follow the smell. And the noise.”
“The whole place smells like cabbage to me. Why aren’t you eating?”
He shrugged and turned his head away.
“Did you spend all your money on spray paint? Is that the kind of sick you are?” I remembered the sad gray house where the Ranseys lived and, from my own family history, the shame of reduced-price lunch, or of not having even that much. Like a sign hanging from my neck: special case. The last year of school I’d hidden out behind a bank of lockers during lunch, munching from a box of generic-brand saltines with Theresa, who started bringing things from home to share.
I opened my wallet, found a five, and held it out to Steve.
He made the snaky sound again, but it wasn’t a laugh. “I’m not going to take your money.”
“Why not? If I’m giving it to you.”
He shrugged. I missed Joshua so much, my chest hurt. “What does Joshua eat for lunch?”
He sat silently for so long that I thought he might have decided against another word. His boots shuffled on the floor. The secretary coughed to remind us she was nearby.
“French fries. He has them, like, every day.”
I nodded. “You’d tell me if you knew. Where he was?”
“Yeah.”
“Have you seen your aunt yet?”
He shook his head slowly.
“Can I buy you some French fries?”
“OK.”
He let the money be placed into his hand and hastened away. I stood, gave the secretary a look, and followed the smell and the noise before someone came along and told me I couldn’t.
I FOLLOWED THE low buzz of voices until the sound grew into an unrestrained roar, meeting only a few students on the way. No one gave me more than an eyes-quickly-away glance. Down a long hallway, past rooms with small windows cut into them so that I could see they were dark, past framed photos of sports teams, the athletes with knobby knees, and portraits of proud and baby-faced class valedictorians, past a trophy case that was hopeful in its near emptiness.
A great blaring bell rang overhead, and students flooded around the corner and past me, around me, until I was an island in a fierce current of elbows and backpacks. I stepped back into t
he lee of the trophy case and waited, looking back when the students noticed me and stared. I didn’t recognize any of the kids, but at last came Joe Jeffries’s perfectly styled hair.
“Ms. Winger, what—? Is there news?”
I appreciated that we had returned to formality. “No, I need to talk to the librarian. You said she talked to you. About Joshua.”
“The sheriff’s already been all over—”
“I know, I know. I’m just trying to work out this one loose thread about the history project.”
He looked at me with a grim mouth. I could see how I must look to him. I was a sad and desperate sack of a woman who was about to waste a lot of time when I should be at home. Resting and waiting.
“Look, I know. But I have to do something.”
He sighed and watched the last of the students disappearing down the hallway. “Did you check in with the front desk?”
“Yes.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“I’ve gone a bit renegade. Don’t make me go talk to that secretary again.”
“This way.” He took off, leaving me to follow. We passed the portraits again, the wide, unsuspecting eyes of so much youth. Past the classrooms, their doors now propped open and the bustle of the students starting to fade as they settled at their desks. Before we reached the front office and watchdog secretary, Joe turned and led us down a narrower hallway. Another turn and I was rewarded with a long stretch of windows that revealed shelves of books.
“I don’t know what you’re going to find out,” he said over his shoulder in a library-appropriate voice.
The library was high ceilinged and cold. I followed Joe across a wide expanse of tables and study carrels, some of them manned by kids in headphones or thumbing at their phones. They all had phones. Now I saw how odd it was that Joshua didn’t.
The librarian stood behind the desk, smiling expectantly. She was wan, her cheekbones sharp in her long face. Her hair, curling and long, had been twisted up and into a sloppy bun.
“Milah,” Joe said.
Before he could continue, I put out my hand. “I’m Joshua Winger’s mother.”
The woman reached into the handshake but ended up holding my hand. “Oh,” she said, covering her mouth with her other hand. “Has anything happened?”
The Day I Died Page 20