“I guess you know the Ransey family runs this place—”
The straw dropped out of my mouth. “They do?” The other officer stood at the service window, leaning low to talk to someone inside. Out of all the things I might have learned, the fact that the Ranseys dealt in ice cream startled me. I’d picked up a certain global disdain for the Ranseys that no one had yet explained—that surprise that anyone might “hup to” for them—but maybe I was only protective of the Dairy Bar for my own reasons. I had been elbow-deep in the ice cream cooler for a full summer, breaking in my teenage back rolling big bins of chocolate sauce and hauling heavy bags of powdered malt and ice milk crystals in and out of the storage room. My first job, my first chance at freedom.
“You didn’t know? You come here often?”
Could he even hear himself? He could. He was blushing up to his hat.
“Once in a while,” I said. “We had one of these places where I grew up.”
“Oh?” He looked up at the Dairy Bar sign. “Where’s that?”
I slurped at my shake for a time. “Did you want that report?”
The sheriff hitched a boot over the seat on the other side of the table and sat sideways to me.
“OK, first off, the two photocopied samples,” I said. “I identified some markers—are you going to write this down?”
He grinned at me. “Are you?”
“I identified some markers in the two pink samples that lead me to believe the author is a single individual,” I said. “Some of the letter shapes are highly idiosyncratic, even though the author wrote them in what seems like two different situations. Different pens, different styles, maybe with different levels of urgency. If you’d asked someone to produce two handwriting samples that looked completely different from one another, they couldn’t have done a better job. But—definitely the same hand.”
“The same hand,” he said.
“The same person,” I said. “I’m assuming that’s what you wanted to know.”
“So the mother took him?”
At the Dairy Bar service window, the other officer was leaning in, flirting with the girl behind the counter.
“I can’t tell you that,” I said. “I never said I could.”
“The ransom note—”
“Did you read that note?” I said. “I’m less interested in the script than I am in where the rest of that note is. The actual note, not a reasonable facsimile.”
He glared at me. “You can’t tell me because the thing’s ripped or what?”
“Because it doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “The third sample, the little pieces of nothing, make more sense than that note.”
“OK, the pieces,” he said. “What about them?”
“Different hand,” I said. “But you probably didn’t need me for that. Written by a man, I think, but that’s a bit of a guess. Someone hesitant to say what he was trying to say, sort of—halting and stunted. Labored. He probably spent a lot of time on it, maybe started over a couple of times? He does this thing before his words where he taps the paper a few times with his pen, and then goes on. He might have been lying or saying something difficult—or both. That one was from the Ransey house, too?”
He didn’t want to answer. “The nanny’s room. From the garbage.”
When did a young woman burn a letter with the word love in it? Either the love was over, going bad, or forbidden.
“Would you recognize the handwriting in the pieces again if you saw it?” the sheriff said.
“Out of context? It’s hard to say.” I remembered back to the feeling of sinking below the surface of the shredded sample into another life, a story not mine. “I had the feeling that he was being careful to be clear. His handwriting might be smaller and tighter in this note than in something he was just dashing off. But maybe.”
“That doesn’t leave us with much, does it?”
“Well, we didn’t start with much, did we?” I said. “Here’s what I can tell you. The same person wrote the first two samples, the list and the partial. If you say one is from Aidan’s mother, then both are. If it’s the nanny—” I recalled the slight slant to Aidan’s name in the grocery list. No one else could have written that list. “Fine. The mother wrote them both. But that doesn’t mean she took him. Or if she took him—”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Keller pulled his other leg over the bench and faced me. “Is there more?”
Was it professional courtesy to tell him I could rule out Aidan’s dad as the source of the third sample, having seen his heavy, thudding hand already? Or was it just stepping in a pile of trouble? Either way—I’d done the work I’d been hired to do. I had a lot of questions about the household the child was missing from, but not questions I had a right to ask.
“That’s all,” I said.
I could tell he didn’t believe me. We both turned to see his partner coming across the parking lot with a malt in each hand. His knuckles had that particular splotchy pink sunburn across them I recognized from a long day spent with hands on the steering wheel. The burn ran down to both wrists. The officer nodded to me and held out one of the cups to Keller.
“I got you strawberry,” he said.
The sheriff took the cup sternly. His ears were strawberry colored, too. He didn’t glance my way until he’d dismounted the picnic table and reached the passenger door of the cruiser. “You’ll send that all in a formal report,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
It wasn’t a question for me, either. I wanted nothing more than to be done with the Ranseys and this man. I stood and fed my cup into the trash bin. “Yes, sir,” I said to the retreating car.
Chapter Five
The junior-senior high school sat among harvested cornfields just outside of town, a sprawling single-story outlet mall of a place inconvenient to almost everyone. Joshua took the bus to school, but I could tell by the station wagons with mismatched doors and repurposed farm trucks in the lot that the older students drove themselves.
I checked in at the front office, got a pass, and was led to a waiting area for the guidance counselor. I didn’t want to wait. The student receptionist glanced at my tapping foot. When the counselor’s door finally opened, a lanky man emerged with his arm around the back of a young woman with puffy eyes. The man, dressed in a sleek gray suit more stylish and probably more expensive than anything I’d seen in town so far, shot me a conspiratorial smile and escorted the girl out of sight. In a few minutes, he was back with his hand extended.
The grip was loose, as though I might be in the same delicate state as the crying girl.