“We all need something we don’t have,” said the woman coming up behind her in a matching Dairy Bar shirt. I recognized the old woman from somewhere and decided she must have been the one smoking out the back door earlier that day, a long shift. The woman’s eyes were sunken and her voice scratchy. “Give the lady some dimes, peach. Dimes is spending money, aren’t they?” The woman looked over at me with a smile that didn’t reach beyond a grimace.
I waved the dimes away, but the girl was insistent it would mess up her drawer. I remembered that all-encompassing concern and took pity, waiting. By the time the change had been sorted out, I’d lost sight of Joshua.
“He’s over here.” Grace stood at the edge of the lot in the spotlight of a streetlamp overhead, waving me over. A few faces had turned to see who was yelling and who’d been yelled at, and they all seemed to be watching openly as I made my way over. “He and mine are tight, I guess,” Grace said. She had a big cup of something icy in her hand and gestured with it toward a picnic table where Joshua sat with an assortment of kids, including one who might have been one of the boys from the school hallway. “Shane Junior or Shay, we call him,” she said, pointing with the cup again. “I wanted to name him Brad Pitt after his daddy, but my husband wouldn’t hear of it. Here he comes.”
I turned into a chest of brown polyester and brass buttons. In the sheriff’s path again. Then I saw that the collar of the uniform shirt was unbuttoned and pulled open to reveal a beefy red neck and the face of the same cop who had handed the sheriff his strawberry malt earlier. “She told you the kid’s George Clooney’s or whoever’s, right?” he said around the mouthful of chili dog, his cheek distended. “Every time I meet someone new, they’re embarrassed for me. Shane Mullen.” He wiped one of his hands on the hip of his uniform pants and held it out. I shook it, reading his nametag.
“Chief Deputy Mullen.”
“Just Shane is fine,” he said. “Unless you run up against the law before I get this dog finished.”
“No plans to,” I said. “Anna Winger.”
“Oh, I know,” he said. He had chili at the side of his smile. Grace reached in and swiped at him with a napkin, rolling her eyes at me. “The whole courthouse is talking about you coming in,” he said. “Exciting week.”
“I would imagine, what with a murder and a kidnapping already this week, my visit wouldn’t inspire much notice.”
“We notice when the boss starts dealing in witchcraft—”
“Shane, shut up,” Grace said. “Brad Pitt would not be such an asshole.”
“—or magic or whatever you call it,” Shane said. “The sheriff’s a straight shooter, one of the old kind of cops, like you see in the westerns. White-hat dude, for sure.”
Grace had missed a small patch of chili sauce on her husband’s cheek. I stared at it. “I would have thought all the sheriff’s office would be white-hat dudes,” I said. “The good guys. And gals, I guess,” I added, thinking of the sullen Deputy Lombardi.
“I’ve always gone in for a nice pearl gray, myself,” he said. Grace went in with the napkin again, and he grabbed it from her. “Woman, watch the sunburn. Brad Pitt would never put up with this. Let’s get a move on so the kid can get his homework done. He’s supposed to be grounded this week, I thought. What are we even doing here?”
“Getting chili down the front of your uniform, for one thing,” Grace said. Shane walked off toward the boys. “He was supposed to be gone this week golfing and fishing but then shit hit the fan here and he got called back. All he got was a scenic drive and a sunburn he can whine about. All I got for my trouble is a morning off before he’s back wanting dinner.” She looked at me. “I liked what you said today about my handwriting. About me. I don’t believe it for a second—but it was nice.”
“If I spent more time with the sample, maybe I’d find something else to add,” I said.
“Something I wouldn’t like as much, I bet,” she said. “I’d have you look at Shane’s handwriting, but I don’t think I want to know him that well. You could set up a booth right here, though, doing what you do and the line would go around the block.”
“A booth—oh, you mean—” Like a kissing booth? Like a sideshow? I was stunned by that image in my head. “I don’t think so,” I said. Her husband, instead of wrenching his son away, had settled in to talk with the boys. “Joshua doesn’t want me to do that kind of thing. In public. It horrifies him.”
“Mine is horrified that I’m even seen in public,” Grace said. “We come here for a little air and ice cream, he’s never met me before. That’s fine,” she said, sipping at her cup. “I get to catch up on the happenings. Have you heard the latest?”
“Probably not,” I said. “I’m only a subject of the grapevine, not actually attached to it.”
“They’re saying that girl, the one who got killed . . . maybe she was Bo’s live-in something else.”
I made a contemplative noise. I had seen the handwriting of the man sending notes of love to Charity, and it wasn’t Bo. Those could be old notes, set on fire because of a new man in her life. But I also remembered how careful the Spectator had been to say she lived with her parents. “Maybe.”
“And maybe the reason the wife moved out?”
“So then your theory—one woman comes back for her kid and kills the girlfriend, not the babysitter.”
“It fits,” Grace said.
“It would also fit if someone wanted to get rid of both the girlfriend and the mother and the kid all at once,” I said.
Grace turned to me, stricken. “What do you mean?”
“The mother is missing,” I said. “Until they find her, alive, with no kid, she’s not just a possible suspect. She’s a possible victim.”
“You mean Bo,” she said, shaking her head. “You don’t even know him.”
“I don’t know any of you,” I said, waving it away.
Shane and Shay were heading off toward a showy black SUV in the back of the lot. Everyone seemed to have a black truck here. “Hey, Angelina Jolie,” he yelled. “You walking?”
“I got the keys, smartass,” she hollered back. “Bo’s OK. He’s—I’ve known him since we were all kids together.” She watched Shay all the way to their truck. “He was Aidan’s age two blinks ago, you know? Well, of course you know.”
“They’ll find him,” I said.
“They’ll find her,” she said. “Look, I know that what you said about me at the café today was wrong. You know why? Because when I think about that young girl with her head cracked open, I don’t feel charitable toward the one who did it at all. Not even a little bit.”
TO THE DAIRY Bar and back to the white-walled blank of the apartment, greasy bags in our fists, I replayed the image of Joshua’s hand swiping mine away.
At home, he ate everything, including the malt and burger I had ordered for myself but didn’t want. He sat at the kitchen table with his propped-open math book serving as a screen between us. He flipped to a blank page in his notebook and glared at me.