by Tim Johnston
“Ryan Radner,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am, but don’t ask me where he lives. I don’t know and I wouldn’t tell you if I did. I’d more likely tell the sheriff—the new sheriff. Ask him to come and have a word with you.”
“Thank you, Mr. Yoder.”
“All right. Well.” He frowned. He nodded. “You take care, young lady.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, “I will.”
There was only one Ryan Radner in that town and he lived in a mobile home park a mile south of the last stoplight, and if that was his truck parked beside the trailer then he drove an old two-tone pickup truck, green and a lighter green, of a year she couldn’t even guess and nothing about it to distinguish it from any other two-tone truck she’d ever seen or ever would see. She saw her father opening it up, shining his light, searching for something he’d never seen but knew must be there, it must be . . .
She sat in the sedan watching the trailer, the curtained windows. It was late in the day but the sun was not yet down, the days getting longer as they got warmer, and there were kids’ toys and bikes strewn in the patches of dead grass between the trailers, but no kids. As if they’d all abandoned play and run inside at her arrival. Nothing moved anywhere but a single cat, a large orange tabby crossing the pitted and muddy road on delicate paws, and she watched as the cat made its way toward the Radner trailer, as it found a crack in the plywood that ran around the base of the trailer and stepped warily into the crack—head, body . . . and when the last of the tail twitched from view she reached into the glovebox and took out the .38 and slipped it into the hip pocket of the canvas jacket. She’d washed the jacket but it was still stained from the mud of the spillway and it still gave off a whiff of the river.
She got out of the car and shut the door behind her. Dogs began barking from other trailers up and down the road but no one came to the door or to the windows of the Radner trailer. From inside she heard the voices of a TV show, the applause of an audience.
She thought her heart should be pounding but it wasn’t, and she thought about Caroline with her arm raised so straight and steady, her voice steady too, Say that to my face, you slackjawed muppetfucker, and a wave of love went through her.
The three iron steps and the railing were all of a piece and they wobbled independently of the trailer as she climbed them, and there was no bell that she could see and when she rapped on the aluminum stormdoor the dogs in the other trailers barked the more crazily and were joined by other dogs and none of them visible anywhere. She rapped a second time and the TV was abruptly silenced and she thought she could see the trailer itself shuddering as footsteps neared the door. There was a window in the inside door and a curtain was drawn aside and a man’s bearded face appeared, looking out, not liking what he saw, and the curtain fell again and the inside door swung open.
He stood in a red sweatshirt and blue jeans, his dark hair lifted and tossed and held in place by its own oils. “Can I help you?” he said through the stormdoor, the plexiglass, and it was as if there were no door at all between them. Lidded dark eyes staring out from a puffy face. The face of a man who has been sleeping and watching TV and not much else. In the bristles of his beard lay a pair of girlish lips, pink and wet. She thought she should recognize the eyes, those lips, but she didn’t. And if there were still signs of the scratches on his face these had been overgrown by the climbing, untended beard.
“Are you Ryan Radner?”
“Who’s askin?”
“Audrey Sutter.” She removed the sunglasses but she didn’t have to, he knew the name. He raised his hand to scratch at the right side of his face, at the beard. He moved his whole hand to scratch, as you would a wooden hand, and before he lowered it again she saw the wound, the bright-red puckering in the back of his hand where the bullet must have exited. He looked beyond her to the white sedan and then looked at her again through the plexiglass.
“I know that car. What are you, Daddy’s little deputy?”
She didn’t answer. Searching this face as she’d searched the faces Moran had brought her, trying now to match this one up with one of those, which was all backwards she knew, but what did it matter if there was a match?
Because it did. Because it only worked the other way.
“Hello—?” said the face, larger suddenly in the plexiglass, the wet pink lips holding the O shape perversely.
“I came to see you face-to-face,” she said. “To see if I remembered you.”
“From what?”
“The gas station. The ladies’ room.”
He smirked. He shook his head. “Just as crazy as your old man. You got a gun too? Excuse me a second while I make a quick phone call.” He patted his jeans pockets and looked around but he did not turn away from the door. As if he would not turn his back on her. He looked at her again. Thinking things over. He said, “I know you already know the case was dropped. Your daddy shot the wrong man, Little Deputy.”
She looked past him, into the cramped darkness that was his home, and she remembered opening a metal door and flicking a filthy switch, stepping out of the bright stink of the ladies’ room into darkness, into that blindness after a light is turned off, and she remembered a hand reaching out of the darkness to touch her, to stop her with its fingers, a voice—Where you goin, little girl?—and she remembered trying to duck under the hand, and the hand grabbing at her head, and there was the electric crackling and sparking of her hair suddenly . . . And she had not remembered that until this moment, standing here. She’d thought she’d lost it in the river, along with everything else. But he’d taken it from her there, at the ladies’ room.
Radner turned to look too, to see what she was staring at, and turned back. “What are you looking for?”
“Something you took from me.”
“For instance?”
“My cap. My black knit cap. I’d like it back.”
Dark eyebrows rose into a rumpling forehead. “You really are crazy, aren’t you.”
She waited.
He shook his head again. “A,” he said, “what would I want with your stupid cap? And B, even if I took it, do you think I’d be dumb enough to keep it?”
She said nothing, watching him. Trying once more to match this face to her memory of hands—of fingers so hard and strong as they snatched the cap from her head. As they jerked the backscratcher from her grip. As they pinned her arm against the wall. As they covered her mouth with a stink and taste that made her want to gag even now.
Radner grinned and opened the stormdoor. “Well, come on in and look for it then,” he said, and she stood looking in at the shabby, dark furnishings. A boxy old TV throwing its light on a patch of stained brown carpeting. The smell coming out of there was just awful, and she turned her face from it. There sat the two-tone truck, and it had the look of him too—dirty, run-down, mean. Like it was just waiting for the chance to do harm.
“Your daddy already searched the truck,” he said. “Him and the real sheriff. But you go ahead. Check it out. It ain’t locked.”
And that voice—she should know that voice, at least. See there, Bud? We’re all gonna be friends here.
But she didn’t. She didn’t. And the more she looked at him, and the more he talked, the less certain she became. Or the less clear her memories became, and she felt once again, as she had when Moran showed her the pictures, that she was in danger of losing her memories altogether—not just of that moment, of his hands on her, but all the moments after too: Caroline with her pepper spray, her fierceness. The pounding of their hearts as they ran for the car. The moment on the riverbank, that pause before the other car came, Caroline’s laugh. The strength of her hand as you dropped toward the ice. Your spinning hearts. The look on her face when you heard that first crack, that deep pop in the floor of the world. The light under the water and Caroline in the light, swimming so hard to come back, swimming so beautifully . . . And the other girls too, Holly Burke and the others, with their hair like seagrass in the curr
ent. All this was real. All this had happened and she must protect it at the cost of everything else—at the cost of certainty, even, so Caroline’s parents would see it, so they would know it when they looked in her eyes.
The dogs had not stopped barking and now they seemed inside her head, of her head’s own making, and each bark lingered and replayed over those that followed in a ringing continuum, on and on. “I’m sorry to bother you,” she said, or tried to say, and began to backstep down the wobbling steps.
“It’s no bother, honey,” he said. He’d seen the change in her, her failure to recognize, to know, and now he stepped out onto the highest step just as she stepped from the lowest. “I wasn’t kidding about coming in. I got some beers in the fridge. How about that? We can just bury the ol’ hatchet, as they say. I figure it’s the least you can do after your old man shot me and got me fired and pretty much ruined my life. What do you say?”
She kept backstepping, toward the car. The gun riding solid and heavy in the pocket at her thigh. Radner looking down on her from the top step. He took a step down and let the stormdoor slap shut behind him.
“I gotta say I like how you come out here by yourself,” he said. “I like your pluck. No partner. No backup. Even though I am not the man you think I am, still—very impressive.”
She had reached the car and she turned and put her hand on the latch. He stepped to the bottom step and stopped there. Standing in his sockfeet with his hands in his jean pockets, watching her. Then he said in a voice she almost didn’t hear over the dogs, “What made you think I wouldn’t just grab you and take you into this house, hey? If I was that man—what made you think I wouldn’t do that?”
“Because you’d figure I didn’t come out here without my father’s gun.”
He looked at the sky and laughed. And looked at her again. “You think I’m afraid of a little girl and her daddy’s gun?”
She opened the door and stood behind it, watching him.
“Want to know what I think?” he said. He took the last step down and she slipped her left hand into the pocket and took the gun into her grip. She knew that behind the curtains and behind the barking dogs someone was watching, and she knew he knew it too.
He stopped and stood as before with his hands in his pockets. Watching her. “I think you wanted me to grab you and throw you in that house,” he said. “I think that’s what you come out here for, even if you didn’t know it yourself. What do you think about that, Little Deputy?”
“I don’t think about it,” she said. “And I never will.” Then she got into the car and started the engine and put the car into gear and drove away.
68
She knew he was coming, he’d called her first, but even so the sight of the truck pulling into the drive made her heart rise, made it fly—until she saw the officer, the sheriff’s deputy, get out of the truck, just him, and her heart fell once again, and fell too far for such a brief rise of hope.
The sheriff pulled in behind the truck and got out of his cruiser and it was like that day ten years ago when Tom Sutter and the other deputy, Moran, had come to talk to her about Danny. A different truck then. Different case. Or the same case, really, just a new branch of it now, set in motion somehow by those two girls going into the river. The same river too, and Moran the bridge that connected Holly Burke’s death to Danny’s disappearance.
This time the sheriff’s deputy stayed behind, leaning on the cruiser and checking his phone as Sheriff Halsey came up the drive alone.
Rachel slipped into her shoes and went out to meet him in her sweater. The snow was melting and there was the smell of the earth again, of farmland and wet trees, and there were the high, giddy cries of loons in flight, and all of it terrible. Because when a son had gone missing in the hardness of winter you did not want to see the vanishing snow, or the bright shoots of the tulips, or the tender new grass, or the river flowing again from bridge to bridge without its thick shell of ice.
She came down the porchsteps and the sheriff came forward and tipped his hat and said Morning, Mrs. Young, and she said Good morning, Sheriff.
He glanced back at the truck. “Is that all right there?”
“That’s fine. We can move it if we need to.”
“Here’s the keys. Everything else is inside the cab just like we found it.”
She took the keys and held them in her fist. “Thank you, Sheriff. It’ll just sit here, like you said.”
“I appreciate that,” he said. “The deputy and I can unload it if you want.”
“No, that’s all right.”
“It’s no bother.”
“I’ll have Marky do it after work.”
He nodded. He looked up at the house and perhaps the sky beyond it. She thought he would say something about the weather, the beautiful day, but he didn’t.
She stood waiting. Holding the keys in her fist.
The sheriff cleared his throat. “We haven’t forgotten about him,” he said, and clarified: “Your son. His picture is out in four states, and between that and the posters, well. He’s a top priority, Mrs. Young. We’ll follow any lead that comes in.”
She looked him in the eye. “And Moran?”
“Sitting in that jail, ma’am, and not going anywhere. I’ve had three more girls—women—come forward with their stories. All pretty much the same as Katie Goss’s.”
“I read about that,” she said.
“And the judge read Danny’s letter, too,” he said. “Whether or not it influenced his decision to deny bail, I can’t say, but the result is the same, which is Moran sitting in that jail until trial.”
“But that doesn’t get you any closer to finding my son, does it.”
“No, ma’am, it doesn’t. I’ve got nothing to connect Moran to your son’s disappearance except that letter, and that doesn’t help us find him.”
“And that bullet hole?”
The sheriff glanced at the truck. “Well, like I said on the phone, we couldn’t find a match with Moran, so we’re continuing to run down local registrations, but that’s a lot of rifles and a lot of”—he hesitated—“innocent citizens.”
He’d been about to say dead ends, she knew.
“And it wasn’t Gordon Burke’s,” she said.
“No, ma’am. Not even the right caliber. Far as I know, the only vehicle that rifle ever shot was Moran’s.”
She nodded. She didn’t know what else there was to say. To ask. She would have to sit and wait. Get through each day. Each hour. As she’d been doing since the day he didn’t call.
The sheriff glanced back at his deputy, and the deputy put away his phone and opened the door of the cruiser.
But the sheriff didn’t go. He stood looking down at the gravel, or his boots.
“There’s just one more thing,” he said, and looked up again.
Rachel waited.
“I thought maybe you could shed a little light on something for me,” he said.
“All right.”
“I asked your son about it—I asked Marky—but he didn’t seem to understand what I was asking.”
“What did you ask?”
“I asked him why he put Moran’s cruiser up on the lift like he did. Did you know about that?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Well, he did. He was supposed to just fix the light, but then he got it up on the lift and found a leak in the pan.”
“So?”
“Oh, it’s nothing he did wrong.” The sheriff scratched at his forehead, lifting the hatbrim, dropping it again. “It’s just the thing is, if he hadn’t’ve done that, Moran would’ve been on his way to Iowa, and he might not be sitting on his ass in my jail right now.”
Rachel watched him. The sheriff watching her.
“I’m not sure I understand the question, Sheriff,” she said, and he waved his hand and said, “Well. I’m not sure I do either. I just thought maybe he’d said something to you about it, that’s all.”
Rachel shook her head. “I’m sor
ry, Sheriff.”
“All right then,” he said, and glanced toward his deputy. “We’d best be on our way. You have my number.”
“I have your number.”
He tipped his hat again like some old cowboy and turned and went back down the drive toward the cruiser, his boots crunching in the gravel.
When they were gone she went to the passenger side of the truck and opened the door—not glancing toward the rear tire, not seeing what was there in the otherwise-clean blue fender—and she stood looking in at the duffels, the cardboard box, the kits of tools all packed away, but not packed as he’d have done it himself. They’d searched through everything, of course, as they’d once searched his room, and this time they’d put it all back together again as best they could but it was not as he’d done it himself; it was not his work she was looking at but only his things, and before she could think too much about that she shut the door again and went back into the house to make the tea she’d been about to make when she’d seen her son’s truck pull into the drive, and a few minutes later she carried the mug up the creaking stairs and there was no dog to follow her or to carry in her arms, or to follow her into his room, wagging his old tail expectantly, as if this time he would be there, surely this time . . .
The bed gave a squeak when she sat on it. Same little bed the four of them had sat on one night playing cards—the five of them: she and the boys and Katie Goss and Wyatt. Danny and Katie laughing and teasing and so young.
She sat looking around the room: his desk, the bookshelves. His hockey stick and skates in the corner. The bare plaster walls. The window. After a while she got up and set her mug on the desk and went to the window and lifted—and lifted harder until the frame abruptly raised and the sash weights knocked and rang in the wall like dull bells. She’d never gotten the storm windows up in this room and it must’ve been so cold at night, the few winter nights he’d slept here.