I was already rising and looking for a good handhold in the rock.
I climbed, certain until the very end. He reached down and pulled me up the rest of the way.
“Look at you,” he said quietly, and did. I couldn’t breathe. “What’s your name?”
“Leeanna,” I said.
“Well, Ell, what are you going to do? There’s only one way down.”
He still held my hand. I shook it off, gazed out at the lake for a moment, and then ran toward the edge. Behind me I heard someone screaming and someone laughing. I stretched toward the water, knowing I would climb up again. Dripping, shaking, the lake water in the back of my throat. I would do it, just to fly again.
I shook off the memories and followed the road deeper into the woods, past turnoffs for a summer camp and a series of rentals with cute names. Pining for Home. Honeymoon Hideaway. Past the white arrow signs for a hundred families, and then I saw the one I’d been looking for and dreading: Levis.
The feathered arrow signs were supposed to look hand painted, but they weren’t. At least not by the owner. That kind of sign would have given me some advanced notice. Who was this Ray Levis? This lake-living, place-owning Ray Levis who wouldn’t hurt a fly? My gut twisted into a fist, but I drove through it.
At the last turn into his gravel drive, I paused. It was not too late to turn around. Up ahead I could see a clearing, a deck, and a steep drop to a lake. Trees blocked the house. Again I hoped to see Joshua strolling across the open lawn with a paper plate of sandwiches, going down to the dock. I drove up the lane into view of the house, a single-story ranch. I figured I had the element of surprise, and so parked and walked quickly to the door and knocked, all business.
When nothing happened, I turned and took a better look at the property. There was a shed to one side of the house, a neat stack of cut logs, a hammock, a picnic table. The deck that overlooked the lake stood empty but for a grill. I heard a splash down at the lakeside and followed the sound.
Steps led from the deck down to another level, with a table and chairs and more steps down to the water.
At the end of the L-shaped dock stood Joshua.
He threw a stick into the water. A black dog leapt in and paddled out to fetch it.
A sob caught in my throat. Joshua turned—
It wasn’t Joshua. Just the one person I should have been prepared to see.
Ray, wearing a ball cap and the same profile as my son, turned all the way around and stared. We regarded each other as the dog swam up from the lake to a shallow spot and launched back onto the deck. The dog dropped the stick, shook water off its coat, and, catching sight of me, bolted up the steep stairs, howling.
I turned and fled, bile rising in my throat.
“Magic!” Ray yelled. “Magic, no! Knock it off!”
I heard his footsteps up the stairs and didn’t know whether I was running from Ray or the dog.
“She won’t bite!”
I found the door of the truck before the dog could bite or not bite, and hopped inside. I was shaking: my hands, my whole body. My heart battered against the inside of my chest. The dog ran up to my window and sat below, crooning. I locked both doors of the truck just as Ray reached the top deck but couldn’t begin to roll up the window. I held onto the steering wheel to keep from shaking. He came to the driver’s side and scolded the dog. The dog’s tail thumped against his leg.
He took his time meeting my eyes. I waited, wave after wave of nausea washing over me.
“I can’t believe it,” he said. “Do you know—?” But he wouldn’t ask whatever it was.
“You had to expect I’d show up,” I said. “At some point.” I glanced toward the house to see if Joshua had come out yet. Surely the dog was doorbell enough.
“Fifteen years ago.”
“Thirteen.”
He turned to face me through the window. He was too close. I wished I’d rolled up the window while the dog was still yowling.
“Thirteen, then,” he said. “What the—what does it matter? Thirteen years ago, your friend tried to convince the cops I’d killed you and dug you a grave in the woods.”
“No, you would have weighted me down in the middle of Sweetheart Lake.”
His hand froze on the dog’s square head. I glanced toward the house again and back at Ray. Now that I’d brought it up, it felt like anything could happen. Probably best not to turn my back. I was here.
“Really, Ray, tell me that wasn’t a plan you had in the back of your mind all along.”
“I never—”
“You’d better think hard about what you never did before you say so,” I said. “There are very few things you never did.”
He contemplated the open lake. “I guess you wouldn’t take an apology.”
“Is that the apology? No, I don’t really need an apology.”
“I looked for you. I hired a private eye.”
I remembered the call. Three moves from state to state hadn’t been far enough. The call in the night, no one saying anything when I said hello. I had calmly stripped our lives out of that apartment, packed Joshua and what little I could grab, and driven through the night, looking for a place to land. I remembered every trigger, every flight. “I know,” I said.
“That was you, wasn’t it? That time.” His face stretched into an awkward, triumphant smile. “You hung up.”
“I hung up and moved to a different state.”
“But,” he said. The smile disappeared. “They thought I killed you.”
I wanted to say that he had, but he wouldn’t understand. “You almost did.”
The dog shifted and whined at Ray’s feet. He knelt on the pink dirt and scratched at the dog’s ears. “We’re going in circles here. If you’re not here for your apology—why are you here?”
I took a last look at the house, but there was no movement at the windows, no one coming out to see who was in the drive. “But—”
And then I knew. Joshua had never made it to Ray’s.
Ray stood, saw the look on my face. “What?” He stepped up to the truck. I slid away from the window. “Oh. Look,” he said. “I’m not that guy anymore.”
I took a deep breath and let it shudder out. “Why would I believe that?”
“I guess you wouldn’t.” He backed away, his hands raised. “But it’s true.”
I thought of my dad, angry as long as I’d known him and probably before I’d been born. I didn’t believe him. I couldn’t.
The dog barked and darted out from under Ray’s hand to meet a small white car pulling into the drive. Ray went to meet the driver. A woman got out, scratched the dog’s ears, and straightened to accept a cheek kiss from Ray.
“It’s been a weird couple of minutes,” he said to her. The woman watched Ray with concern as they walked up to the truck. I unlocked the door and slid out, the dog racing over to sniff at my legs.
Ray swept his hand in my direction. “Mamie, this is Leeanna Winger.”
We looked each other up and down, me looking for signs that Mamie was the same kind of girlfriend I had once been. No bruises visible. She was sturdy, almost plump. Her hair was a fading blond, cut short and left to do whatever it wanted.
Mamie’s mouth fell open. “You mean—”
Ray nodded and Mamie jumped into his arms. When she twisted her head on Ray’s chest to see me, there were tears in her eyes. “It’s been such a long road,” she said.
“You can’t be serious,” I said.
The couple parted slowly, their dog wedging in between their feet. “It’s just,” Mamie said. “Well, you wouldn’t believe the looks he gets in town. The way our neighbors would pull their daughters away from him on the street. It was just—we had to move.”
A hot rage was beginning to boil in my belly. “You had to move? Out to the lake? You poor, poor people.” I had moved six times, eight, whenever a cloud looked a little too gray, whenever someone gave me that don’t-I-know-you look.
“You don’t unde
rstand—”
“No, I don’t think you understand,” I said.
“My wife knows everything about me,” Ray said. “She knows what I did.”
“Oh, really? There’s nothing I could tell her that would surprise her? That you beat me? That you broke my arm?” I turned to the woman, who was nodding. She had the decency to look ashamed, as though she’d let him do these things. “That you kept me so tightly under your thumb that I was afraid to breathe? That you threatened my life? That you did, in fact, try to murder me?”
Mamie said nothing, but she was clearly not alarmed.
“I told her everything,” Ray said. “And I told her that I didn’t kill you. She’s the only one to believe me.”
“Well, Mamie,” I said, giving her a wicked smile. “I guess it’s lucky you were right.”
The woman stiffened. “I loved him. And I believed in love.”
“I used to love him, too. Believe me, it was no good place to be.”
“He’s done counseling and anger management, and he’s just really worked on—”
“Oh, God,” I cried and pressed my hands over my ears. “I care so little. I’m glad you can parade up and down Pine Street with your head held high now, really I am. I’m so very happy that you’re fulfilled and counseled and managed. But I didn’t come here for this.”
“So, why did you come?” Mamie said.
I dropped my hands, helpless. If Joshua wasn’t here, then where in the world was he?
I hesitated, looking between the two of them. Mamie had taken Ray’s hand, and Ray was as lost as I’d ever seen him. A little saggy at the corners of his eyes, a little thicker through the waist. And—diminished, I supposed, in his baggy shorts and tennis shoes. He didn’t look so big or so strong. He seemed a little square, actually, the exact kind of guy he would have made fun of back when we were together, and if the guy had any balls and defended himself against Ray’s taunts, the kind of guy Ray would have beaten to a meaty pulp.
The man standing before me now was a mystery. He seemed genuinely happy to see me alive, curious to see why I’d come. I wondered: Is it possible? Can he be this different? I might have doubted my memory, except that Ray and Mamie had confirmed the facts with their grim silence. Can he be different enough? Can he deserve what I was about to give him?
I said, “I have news that should surprise you both.”
Magic sat at my feet and swept the dirt with her tail until I reached out and laid a hand on her black head.
Chapter Thirty-one
Ray raged, silent, at the kitchen table.
Mamie reached for him, but he drew his arm out of her grasp. The house was small, tightly furnished. I was the thing out of place and kept banging my knees on things until we sat down to have tea. Like civilized people. I gazed in wonder at the framed cross-stitch of a basket of fruit on the wall, the ruffle-edged throw pillows on the couch.
Ray had begun to resemble the man I remembered. And then he went pale.
“What?” I pushed away from the table, hard enough to make the ice in my tea clink against the glass.
Ray put his palms on the tabletop and regarded them. “How old is he?”
“Thirteen, honey,” Mamie said. “She’s been gone—”
“But he’s practically—” His mouth opened and closed like a fish pulled out of the lake. “How tall is he?”
Mamie laughed. I managed to turn the corners of my mouth up. I was sure it was charming for his wife to see him so flummoxed—an understandable reaction from a man finding out he’d fathered a son he didn’t know about. But it was not the reaction I had expected, or even hoped for. Already I felt closed in by Ray’s interest, by this place. I’d only come here to find Joshua, and now that he wasn’t here, I wanted to be out the door and down the road. I had phone calls to make and a nine-hour drive to compress as tightly as I could. I hadn’t come all this way to make Ray a father.
“Do you have a picture?”
“In the truck.” When I stood to go get it, Ray’s face slackened around hard eyes. He looked just like Joshua, calling me a liar.
“I’ll bring it back.” Not that the escape plan hadn’t occurred to me.
I dug through two or three of the bags in the back of the truck before I found the framed photo from the apartment. At the door, I hesitated. I really could jump in the truck and be halfway to Oshkosh before anyone noticed. They didn’t know where I lived—and I didn’t even live there anymore. Let them find my ransacked apartment, my old phone bills and full trash bins. Let them talk to Margaret and the sheriff. What would it gain them? I was already free from that place, and the next time I alighted, maybe I’d ask Kent about changing my last name, too.
I looked at the photo in my hand. Except. As long as Joshua was gone, I was stuck being who I was, where I was.
Inside, Ray took the frame with shaking hands. “He has my—”
“Everything,” I said. “He looks just like you.”
Mamie studied Joshua over his shoulder. “I can see a little of you in him, too, Leeanna.”
This was going to be a long night, if I had to start with Leeanna. “Can I use your phone? I’m afraid it’s going to be long distance.”
MAMIE SENT ME to their bedroom for privacy.
Ray had a startlingly normal bedroom. Sky-blue walls, quilt on the bed. It was crammed with a giant four-poster and accompanying suite. Another room furnished with pieces from another, bigger house.
The dispatcher wouldn’t put me through. “Is this an emergency?” the woman asked. I had never met any of the dispatchers and couldn’t picture her. “I can call a unit in to assist you. But the sheriff’s off radio at the moment. He’s entitled to some downtime.”
“He put an alert on my license plate,” I said. “If he’s so interested in where I am, then I think he’ll take my phone call.”
On hold, I took the opportunity to look around. On the dresser sat a framed snapshot of Ray and Mamie standing with their arms around each other. It was recent, candid. They didn’t seem aware of the camera. Some friend had taken it at a social gathering, maybe. Ray had a friend. He went to social gatherings. I waited for the dispatcher or Russ, trying not to tally my life against Ray’s.
When Russ finally answered, he didn’t sound interested at all. “I’m a busy man, Ms. Winger.”
“Spray-painting blazes on all the cars of Parks County? Just in case they, you know, leave the area?”
“I don’t have time for this.” His voice was distant, as though he’d put me on speakerphone. I hated that.
“Do you have time for a check-up on my case? Or does my missing son cut into your downtime?”
“I’m not sure a woman who left the town her son was missing from is so concerned about getting her kid back.”
“Don’t be an ass—” A huge noise cut me off. It was the siren rising and falling with the flick of a switch. He was driving. Using his privileges to bypass red lights, probably. I was sick to think of the day in the barn now. I hated everything about him and that little kingdom of his.
“That is not the way to get a public servant on your side,” he said when the siren cut out.
“I thought he was here.”
He waited.
“He’s not,” I said.
“Where are you?”
“I’d rather not say. I might—”
“What?”
“Nothing.” I might need Sweetheart yet. Now that I knew I didn’t have much to fear here, what was to stop me from bringing Joshua back? We could get our own place. I imagined it for a moment, surrounded again by the pines.
“You should get your son back before you start burrowing in,” he said.
“Has he called?”
“No.” He sounded tired.
“Do I have to ask—or can you help me out here?”
“Nothing has changed about your case. We don’t know anything more.”
“Are you trying to know more?”
“This is at least the
third time you’ve called my professional abilities into question,” he said. “If you’ll remember, I haven’t found that characteristic charming in the past.”
“It’s just—I thought he was here.”
He sighed. “I understand.”
“I banked everything on him being here.”
“Come back to Parks.”
“There’s nowhere else I can think of—”
“Come back,” he said. “We’re doing everything we can, but you should be here when he gets here. And he will.”
“I don’t understand it. This is where he should be.”
The sheriff hit the siren again, and for a moment all I could hear was the giant white noise overpowering the phone line. When the siren cut out, the silence was keen.
“Hello?” I said, oddly panicked that I’d lost him.
He said, “He should be with you. Wherever you are.”
I was so exhausted. The phone felt heavy in my hand. “I’ll start home tomorrow.”
“Your cell phone doesn’t work up there, huh?”
“Trying to keep better tabs on me?”
“Keep you better updated,” he said. “When you’re back, I’ll send Mullen over to go through everything again. Maybe there’s something we’re missing.”
“Mullen?” The distance in his voice was no longer just physical.
“I’m out of the area a day, two at the most, and then I’ll stop by myself. If that’s—if you want me to.” He cleared his throat. “I’m chasing down a goose on the Ransey case.”
Aidan’s image came to me. By now the thought of him out there on his own hurt me almost as much as missing Joshua. I imagined Aidan’s small body in his mother’s arms on the town square, his head against her shoulder, his thumb in his mouth. I didn’t know why that’s how I saw him, but the image made me worry for him even more.
The Day I Died Page 24