BACK AT THE apartment, a flat white envelope addressed to me had been propped against the wall below the mailboxes. The rest of the mail was junk and catalogs, stuff directed to past tenants and to “the customer” at this address. I paused over a flyer, one of those things that advertised appliances or rug-cleaning services on one side and used the blank spaces to put out missing kid alerts. This one was a teenager from Nevada. I had no reason at all to study the face as carefully as I did. Sometimes, when the missing kid was old enough, a runaway, I found myself admiring her ambition.
I pawed through the rest of it: a catalog of women’s clothing, all linen and large cuff bracelets as though the modern woman lived her life dressed for patio dining. I couldn’t help flipping through a few pages. Who lived this linen kind of life?
I was halfway up the stairs when I turned to the next catalog in the stack and nearly dropped the lot.
Sweetheart Lake Adventures.
My knees shook. I sat heavily on the nearest step, the rest of the mail falling and sliding to the landing.
It couldn’t be.
The photo collage on the cover contained every tourist option available to those visiting my hometown: children with chocolate faces in front of the fudge shop, a Paul Bunyan lookalike marching in a parade, fishermen lined up with their catches still on their lines, a gorgeous sunset cut through with purple and gold, and a long, scenic view of a dock with the calm, green-dark lake behind.
On the back of the magazine: my name, my address.
I pawed back through the thing, my throat hurting with tears held back. All of my childhood laid out before me so easily and—it was beautiful. The grocery store we used, the old movie theater. The long street through town toward the river, a celebration banner overhead. I had trouble believing it, really. It was a put-on. It couldn’t be real. It couldn’t still look like this.
It couldn’t be here.
How could this thing be here in my hands?
I picked up all the mail again and hurried up to the apartment. I tossed all the junk into the trash and spent a few minutes tearing the Sweetheart Lake magazine to shreds, tinier and tinier, before I put them all into a plastic bag, tied the handles, and buried it at the bottom of the bin.
After a few minutes, I dug it out and hustled down the stairs to the back door and out into the parking lot to the Dumpster and threw it in.
How? When you didn’t give out a phone number or an email or an address anywhere, turned down coupons and incentives every chance you got, never signed up for any list, ever—how could you still be located and have your heart sold back to you?
Back upstairs, I paced until I thought Margaret might pick up her broom and then finally returned to the table.
I’d saved the newspaper with the story about the sitter, Charity Jordan, and now I distracted myself by flipping through the pages. Her photo was oddly cheerful in the blank apartment. Probably chosen specifically to show how bright a young life had been snuffed out. I compared Charity’s robust good looks to Aidan’s mother again, who seemed small, almost fragile, in comparison. The police presumably had a theory about how young and buxom Charity had been felled by her delicate employer, but damned if I could come up with a different one. Maybe she was one of those women whose adrenaline allowed them to pick up the ends of Volkswagens off their imperiled children. I hoped never to have to put my own lymphatic system to the test. I had chosen flight over fight every chance I got.
I turned to the back page and caught up on the day’s announcements: arrests at the local bar, a DUI out on the interstate, some spray-paint vandalism on a bridge outside of town. I turned back to the front, hungry for more information about Leila. Nothing new had been revealed, except that the address they’d had for her in Indianapolis turned out to belong to an organization, and she’d lived not at those coordinates but in a home run by that group. The former address was not repeated; the new address was not given. The group went unnamed. The lack of details seemed to be a point of view, a throwing up of hands. Halfway house, drugs, incompetency, suspicion. Whatever it was, it was odd, wasn’t it? That a mother had left her young child in the care of other people to move into some situation—it wasn’t right. It was all there, unspoken.
When I folded the paper up again, there was Grace Mullen’s message and signature. And below it, a photo I hadn’t looked at very closely. Some civic event, an award handed out, handshakes given. And standing to the side of the activity and commendations stood Sheriff Keller.
Which reminded me that I hadn’t finished up the report that would release me from any further conversations with the man. I shook off the panic. It was all a fluke, a marketing list gone bad. This report to Keller was the real urgent project here. I opened my laptop and got to work.
BY THE TIME I realized I’d forgotten to pick up Joshua from football practice, it was too late. I heard his stamping feet on the stairs, the key in the lock. He walked through the door and dropped the dreaded backpack on the table.
“I am so sorry,” I said.
“I caught a ride with a friend,” he said. I thought perhaps he was torn between making me feel guilty I’d forgotten him and making sure I knew he had solved the problem himself. “His dad said I could ride with them every night, if I wanted. They go right by, he said.”
“Well, I would need to meet this dad, you know. That’s not how it’s done.”
Joshua wiped a shank of sweaty hair from his eyes and looked at me blankly. It’s possible that he knew—and I didn’t—that this was precisely how it was done. No need for background checks or jotting down license plate numbers. Just blind trust that the village would reach in and help raise the child? That was not how it was done around here.
“Well, he said they went right by. He said it was no trouble.”
“We can talk about it,” I said finally. What we needed to talk about was math, but that could wait until the issue was upon us and the books came out. I had a sort of after-adrenaline hangover from the magazine in the mail. “Go get cleaned up.”
He headed to the shower, pleased with himself. I hadn’t even brought up the issue of the backpack dropped where it shouldn’t be. We were speaking, at least. Why ruin it?
Also, I was shaking a little. I’d forgotten him. I’d never forgotten him before.
After a long moment, I went back to fussing over the wording of the file I would send into Keller’s office about the Ransey handwriting samples. I wanted to get it right, demonstrate the right level of professionalism—and, yes, maybe I wanted to show Keller how it was done. Before long I was engrossed again. When I next looked up, the apartment was dark and quiet around me. The backpack and the homework inside lay untouched. He’d gone to his room and his video games.
Outside Joshua’s room, I took a deep breath. We were going to talk about math?
I pounded on the door, waited for the mumble I could interpret as an invitation, and opened it. He lay on his stomach on the floor with a game controller in his hands, his headphones dangling around his neck.
“Just five more minutes, OK?” he said.
“Actually,” I said. “I have to go somewhere for a few minutes. Just a quick errand. I need to—come with me.”
“I have homework.”