I didn’t trust it.
“You’re not,” I said, my voice rasping and slicing at the words. “Wearing your hat.”
“No,” Russ said. “I’m a gentleman.”
“Paying respects. To the dead.”
“I don’t think we’re quite ready to get out the shovels.”
I concentrated on the ceiling, willing this to be real. “Dead,” I whispered, remembering how the tops of the pines nodded at me.
“Nope.” He brought a chair to the side of the bed and sat with his hands in his lap. He fidgeted, boot heels tapping against the leg of the chair.
“Can’t. Sit still,” I said.
He looked at me sadly. “Go ahead and rest. I’ll try to stop jangling.”
I reached out my hand. Tethered.
He shifted to the front of his chair and smoothed my hand back down. “You’re on some tubes. They want you to stay as still as you can. We’ll try together, OK?” He held my hand in his. His warm hand.
He was here. He had come all this way. He had come all this way to—bring news.
I tried to swallow the bile rising in my throat. “Joshua?”
He didn’t say anything. I squeezed his hand as best I could. He tried on a bemused smile. “Bo Ransey said you were pretty tough.”
Ransey.
“Bea,” I whispered. My throat burned from the effort. “Aidan. The lake.”
He hushed me until I had to rip my hand away.
“Bonnie. Aunt. Steve.” I tried to rise from the bed. The back of my skull had some screaming to do.
Somewhere behind me, a machine beeped.
Russ squinted at the contraptions to the side of my bed and leaned in closer. “If they see you all worked up,” he said in his horse-trainer voice, “they are going to make me leave.”
I lay back. We regarded each other.
“You don’t want me to leave?”
I remembered the moment when I had mistaken Bo Ransey for him. The wave of relief that was more than what it should have been.
“I don’t want to leave, either.” He took my hand again. “But I’m going to have to. It’s been nothing but paperwork since you rousted that kidnapper I’ve been looking for.”
I could barely mouth the word. “Aidan.”
“He’s doing fine, Anna. He’s just fine. I’m just going to trust that you didn’t go looking for him because you thought I wasn’t doing my job well enough. Again.”
I shook my head, regretted it.
“Stay still, now.”
“Joshua.”
“I wish you hadn’t gone off on your own like that. When I saw your truck being pulled out of the water—”
I couldn’t follow him. He’d been in town before Bo had found me, my truck already dragged out. He had been here for something else, and now Aidan was safe and so was I. And Bo was—
“Bo?”
“Shh. I’ll tell you, if you just be still, is that a deal? I came up here on a lead. Bo Ransey followed me up here, vigilante that he is, and found you with your skull bashed in. Far from home but strangely not so far from an old stretch of property his family fishes and hunts from. Illegally, of course. They don’t own that garage she put you in. They don’t really own the house, either, which is how it never got tossed for Aidan. It’s still in Granddaddy’s trust, buried in legalese and decades of tax evasion.”
I tried to rise up from the bed, but Russ gave me a look. “Bo,” I said, trying to convey more meaning than I was capable of. He was part of it, and he’d convinced everyone. I tried to remember everything Bea had said. There was something nagging at me, something not right among the things she’d told me.
“Bo found you, stopped by the old place to grab something to stop your bleeding all over his truck, finds his kid, his sister, and his mother, and she’s mad as hell,” Russ said. “And you know what Big Mama said?”
I remembered Bo’s bright rage at the news conference. He’d really believed that his wife had taken Aidan. He’d believed with everything he had that Leila would produce their child if he yelled, if he pushed, if he pleaded. No matter what his handwriting said, he would have done anything for Aidan. Maybe, I realized, his resentment lines had come from his rotten mother. And Leila, caught in a failing marriage made worse by her controlling mother-in-law. What if she had been scared not of Bo but of what it meant to leave the Ransey family, to defy Mama Ransey?
“She did it,” I squeaked. “For him.”
Russ stared at me. “You mothers are a hard lot. She said, ‘Get the gun from my coat.’ Bo got the gun, his kid, and you out of there. We found Bea and Bonnie heading south. I think you covered more ground with your head caved in than they did in that stretch car of theirs.” He didn’t smile. “I just can’t believe—what were you thinking going into that house?”
“Police,” I said. “Nobody.” This was a good place to be a criminal, for all the attention you could raise. A good place to amass a million dollars in net worth out of ice cream.
He nodded. “That Vilas County cop thought you were a crank. I was out with the county chief when you came by. They just don’t get that many missing Indiana kids in one week.”
“Joshua.” I was suddenly done with anything having to do with Ranseys. All I wanted was my son. Before I could stop the rush of misery, I was crying.
“We’ll find him.” He was nearly off his chair, on his knees. “I swear, Anna. I can’t believe your kid. He’s like a Green Beret. Did you teach him that?”
I cut a look his way.
“Oh, yeah. I know all about it now. You’re quite the marathoner yourself, aren’t you? None of that anymore, right? None of that jumping around, your ass on fire.”
I let my eyes close. So tired. I listened to his breath, felt the weight of his hand on mine.
He hadn’t known to look for Aidan here. He’d been here already. Another case, and there was really only one other case it could be.
He’d come all this way. For Joshua.
After a few minutes, Russ slid his hand away from mine. I wasn’t asleep, but couldn’t open my eyes or say a word. I felt him leaning over me, a light touch at my temple.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I thought he’d be here.”
He came all this way. For me.
Chapter Forty-three
Drowsing, I became aware of an argument in the hall.
“I’m not going to disturb her,” a man was saying. Not Russ. Not Ray, thank goodness. “Just need to drop off a few belongings.”
Footsteps. I struggled to wake, my eyelids fluttering open to see Shane Mullen letting a large plastic bag slide off a clipboard onto the windowsill. The bag held a pound or more of gray sand. No, not sand. Ash.
“Yeeeyuk,” he murmured. He pulled a pen off the clipboard and tapped his pen a few times on the paper there. Tap-tap. I was reminded of Margaret, poor Margaret. But who was the invalid now? “I’ll just . . .” Mullen said, tapping a few more times on the board before writing something on the form and putting the pen back. He turned and saw that my eyes were open. “Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you. I just—I brought you, uh, your mom, I think?” He shuffled nervously from foot to foot. “You’re in no shape—I mean, you look great, but . . . I took care of the form for you. Do you need anything?”
I closed my eyes in answer. After I was sure he was gone, I opened them again. The bag of ashes sat in thin stripes of light from the window shades. Ashes in a bag, bag in a box, box in a truck, truck in a lake. My computer, my photos, Joshua’s things, all lost.
The stitches in the back of my head itched. My wrists were sore, and they had begun to itch, too.
The spare white room made me think of all the white walls I had never painted, the white blank page of a life I faced if Joshua didn’t turn up.
I’d had the nurse turn off the television, close the blinds. The magazines the volunteers brought slid to the floor.
Later, I heard one of the nurses in the hallway use the word depressed. A
nice round word, with the clip tsk of diagnosis to it.
“Hell, yes, she’s blue,” Russ boomed. “She’s got sixteen stitches in her noggin and her son is missing. Give her a break. Give us both a break.”
He left the nurse in the hallway and brought a chair around to face me. He held an officer’s hat and a manila folder between his knees.
“How are your gabbing muscles today?”
I shrugged.
“Don’t let’s make that nurse right about you being depressed, OK? Do you want to be loaded up with zonk-out pills?”
“Fine,” I said.
“Good.” He opened the folder. “I came to commend you on your policing.” He held out the folder like a platter, offering a wrinkled piece of pink paper.
“What is it?”
“You tell me. You had it on you when you were found.”
Tramping through the woods, palming trees. Lying on the floor of Aidan’s room, the back of my head open. I could have sworn that Joshua had been with me there. My memory couldn’t be trusted. “I don’t know.”
“Well, let me tell you, then. Seems you found the other part of Leila Ransey’s so-called ransom note.” He held it up, showed me the dark pink hearts along the edges. It was ripped along one edge. “You never liked that note, did you? It never added up.”
I remembered the pile of papers, clothes, dirty dishes on the Ransey’s table, Bonnie sitting across from me, calculating the value of her time. “I took it.”
“Damn right you did. That note wasn’t for ransom. It was for help.” He held out the paper. Unhooked from most of my wires, I could sit up on an elbow.
Mama Ransey, I don’t know how to thank you. We do need a fresh start, like you said. Both of us. Actually, all of us. But you know
Same hand as the first note and the grocery list. I couldn’t remember the exact wording of the original piece. Something about keeping Aidan with her and money.
“Bea offered to help Leila take a break,” I said. “Only Leila didn’t want a break from Aidan. Bea gave her a credit card and then turned Leila in for stealing it. This is why,” I said, running a finger across the ragged edge of the paper. “This is why we don’t like to work with copies. Copies flatten the texture, the tears on the page. It’s easy to forget you don’t have the full story.”
“You have a curious obsession with originals given your faked Social Security card, but point taken. On that note, I brought you a little gift,” he said, holding out a short stack of papers. The evidence forms, again, but this time the originals. I turned my head. “Oh, you don’t care about my missing drugs anymore?”
I didn’t care about anything but Joshua. Why couldn’t he understand that?
“Well, I’m going to leave these here,” he said. “We’ll just see.”
“I don’t want to work with law enforcement anymore,” I said. “Or with people, really. Except the lonelyhearts. They’re all I have since I can’t work with corporations anymore, either.” I lay back, letting Leila’s note drop to the covers.
“Lonelyhearts,” he murmured, taking back the note. “And why not corporations?”
“Just some—mistake. I got sloppy.”
“My experience is that you’re paying closer attention than anyone has a right to. When you asked me about the powder? The drugs that weren’t drugs? I was—fuming would not be too harsh a word. But you know what it was?”
He put the folder aside and went to the window. Pulled the blinds up.
“Hey,” I said, wincing from the light.
“It’s good for you. You need to get yourself together or they’ll never let you leave.”
“I’m healing like a good little human.”
“Psychologically speaking, I mean. Your doc wants to put you in that place in town. River-something.”
I made a noise in my throat.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“You didn’t guess,” he said.
I looked at him.
“The substances back in the evidence room that should have been cocaine and heroine. Results came back this morning. I think you can guess. Mostly starch, sugars, a little milk protein.”
I thought about it. If I could guess, and he was certain I could—
“Dehydrated barley,” I said. “Malt powder.”
“And ice milk crystals.” He beamed and counted off on his fingers. “Kidnapping, murder, attempted murder, and, forgive me for this one given the topic, but the cherry on top: drug trafficking between Parks, Indiana, and Sweetheart Lake, Wisconsin, out of the back of shitty little ice cream stands.”
Russ came back to the chair and, sighing deeply, put himself into it. “And probably with drugs stolen from my evidence locker, but I don’t have the link yet.”
“Tara Lombardi,” I said. “She was dating Bo.”
“She told me,” he said. “There’s no accounting for taste. But Bo’s clean.”
I made a face. Bo had been added to the list of people I owed my life, and I didn’t care for the taste of that.
“I know what you think, but I’m telling you—he’s not in on it. This is Bea’s ship. The trouble is, I’m still not sure she’s strong enough to have killed Charity.”
“I assure you she is.”
“You saw her? You saw her swing at you?”
I had to admit that I hadn’t.
“But more importantly,” he said. “Why? Why kill the nanny at all?”
It had always bothered me. I was right that Leila had no reason to, but who had? “She had Aidan,” I said, prospecting.
“But Bea’s the grandmother. She could have gotten Aidan any number of ways, pretended he’d wandered off . . .”
We both sat with it for a minute.
“You’re trying to trick me into doing more business for you,” I said. “I told you—no more law enforcement, only drippy love notes and hopeful prison pen pals.”
“What’s wrong with working with the likes of me? I’m all right.” He took in the bag of ashes on the sill and looked away. “What mistake did you make? Are you talking about that guy who got himself killed in Chicago?”
“Not sure if we’d be talking about the same guy.”
He lifted his chin, nodded at the ceiling. “We are. Kent called. The only way I knew to get the whole of Vilas County looking for you was he had some crazy voicemail you left him.”
Kent. I owed him again. The whole county searching—
I remembered the sound of the trees’ song to me in the dark, imagined Ray and Mamie and Betty Spaghetti tramping through the woods, calling out my names. Well, at least I hadn’t been going insane. Even if I felt a little sad to have the trees’ song explained. The trees had guided me, kept me on my feet. If I didn’t want the strangeness explained away logically, how was that a fault? A little magic when I didn’t have any.
“Kent says to tell you that guy’s wife had him killed.”
“Because he—” Because he was impotent? Wait, no. It wasn’t the CEO who was sexually frustrated, but the author of the note. “Because she—”
“Because he was cheating on her with his assistant. Kent says you sent them the secretary. When she broke down under questioning, they went back to the wife, and then she broke. A real detective you’re turning into.” He looked me over. “Maybe just one more case before you’re retired?”
Tired being the part I felt most keenly. The tubes were gone, but I hadn’t regained an appetite or the will to get out of bed. There was talk of putting my IV back in if I didn’t start eating.
“One more investigation together,” he said. “I’ll spring you from this place for an hour or two.”
I blinked at him. “You can get me out?”
“I told them I had you under arrest.”
“Oh.” I glanced into the hallway. “I’ll never be able to almost die in this place again.”
“Your reputation is completely soiled. You might as well go.”
“My head,” I said.
&n
bsp; “You’re doing fine.”
“Can’t walk.”
“You haven’t tried.”
Out the window, it was sunny, probably warm enough. I didn’t care where I was. “Steal a wheelchair,” I said.
He went to arrange for my release while I still agreed to it and I lay back, trying to avoid looking in the direction of the bag of ashes. I would have to do something with them, something more like kindness than I had felt toward my mother in a long time. My eyes fell on the evidence forms and traveled over the signatures again. The same markers, over and over—the same hand. I looked more closely, then picked up the top page and wiped it with my hand. The dust marks from the copier—they were still there. They hadn’t been dust. Here they were, on the originals, tiny taps of ink at the beginning of each signature as the author chose the identity he would use instead of his own.
I put the form back, gently, trying to let everything flooding my dizzy head take its turn.
Tap-tap. The hesitant hand of someone about to deceive.
All the notes and checks and receipts that had passed before me during the last few weeks—where had I seen that?
At last I located the blots of ink—dabs of indecision as someone either professed or denied a love, written in reluctance but later torn and burned and tossed into a dead girl’s trash.
I reached for the call button and pressed it frantically. Mullen’s second home, Russ had called it. Checking in on the Ranseys. Bea’s million-dollar ice cream stand. Mullen, signing my name to the form releasing my mother’s ashes.
“Get him back,” I said to the nurse who hurried into my room. “The sheriff. Get that man back now.”
Chapter Forty-four
Russ was quiet in the truck, his face gray.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Nothing for you to be sorry about,” he said.
Only that he’d had to arrest his best guy, his second-in-command. Only that he probably felt like a fool. There would be an investigation, of course, into the missing evidence, the chief deputy’s finances and relationship with the dead woman. We both expected Bea Ransey to throw Mullen in for Charity’s murder, and we were both fairly sure she wouldn’t be lying. Bea Ransey, after all, had been establishing an alibi. She never left Parks during the time Aidan went missing. She was on the TV, in the sheriff’s office, in the ice cream stand.
The Day I Died Page 31