Outside, the courthouse rose over the square like a castle on high. People scurried over the lawn, between a set of imposing limestone pillars, and through the doors. The mechanical chimes from the clock at the top of the rotunda counted out the hour. I crossed the street and sat on the low wall encasing the courthouse lawn, my back to all the activity.
The same baby photo from the flyer graced the front page. I flipped through the article, then searched the rest of the paper’s photos and captions, paging past high school football scores and gardening club news, chili suppers, a notice for that pancake breakfast. On the back page of the newspaper, a furniture store’s proprietor had signed his name to an advertisement as a guarantee on his low prices. His short, everyman name was embellished with a sweeping flourish. Someone had a Napoleon complex. I paused over the prices. Joshua could use a chest of drawers, but it was too early for furniture that wouldn’t fit in the back of our SUV.
None of the photos showed me the county sheriff, the man I was not rushing to meet.
At last I stood, discarded the tea, and followed the bustle of activity into the courthouse. In the lobby, under a lofty stained-glass dome, people in uniforms and with ID cards dangling from their necks outnumbered the civilians. Their faces grave and important, they rushed in and out of an area cordoned behind makeshift walls. I joined a long line snaking toward a set of metal detectors.
“Is all this fuss for that one kid?” said a man ahead of me in line.
“You know whose kid it is?” said one of the guards, taking all the cords and adapters out of my laptop bag and inspecting each piece as though we had all the time in the world. “Seen enough of them Ranseys come through here to last me the rest of my life.”
“Good to know the law will hup to for anyone at all when the time comes,” the first man said. He noticed me listening and hurried away.
The line for the elevator was short, but I took the stairs anyway. They were mottled marble, white with gray threads, worn by generations of shuffling feet. Best of all, they were empty of people, empty of pleasantries given and expected in return.
At the top of the third-floor landing, rather too quickly, the Parks County Sheriff’s Administrative Office announced itself self-importantly, gold paint on opaque glass.
I straightened my shoulders, took a deep breath. Then another. A minute ticked by. No one went in or came out.
I could tell Kent I didn’t want to do it.
But I couldn’t. Not really.
The door opened onto a wide gray room crowded with closely aligned desks, each covered with spilling files and old paper cups. At my right, a reception desk sat unmanned. Behind the door, a low black sofa suggested guests, but none were in evidence. No guests, no hosts, no one at all.
A single sticky note was pasted to the front desk. I glanced around, stepped in, and plucked it up.
Square note, yellow. In thick black felt-tip—no. I peered more closely. In thick purple felt-tip, the note said Back in a jiff! The letters were round and rolling.
At the back of the room, a light showed through an open door. I put the sticky note back and made my way there. I had raised my knuckles to the door when something inside slammed. I startled backward.
“What do you want?” a man’s voice said.
I nudged open the door. “I—”
A man in a brown uniform and black ball cap sat behind a cluttered desk, his elbows on his knees and his hands steepled in front of his face. He opened his eyes and lifted an arm, crossing-guard style, to hold me at the doorway, and jutted his chin toward his desk.
“We want the same thing you do, Russ,” a woman’s voice said, scratchy through the speakerphone.
“Do we?” he said, waving me away. I backed out of the doorway a bit but studied him. He was younger than I would have predicted—my age, give or take. I had painted all small-town police officers with the same brush as the ones I’d known growing up: pudgy, doughy, bellies hanging over their belts. This one was trim with muscular, tanned arms. Such a shame. I didn’t have time for handsome.
“The truth,” she said. “What the hell is going on over there?”
“I don’t know yet and I don’t see how jumping the gun on this will help us get to the truth of it all,” he said. “I just wish you’d give us a little more time”—his hard look turned uneasy—“to confirm some things. I haven’t talked to Erickson yet this morning, for one thing. Have you?”
“We have a deadline,” the woman said.
“You can’t tell me that it’s within the next two hours,” the sheriff said. “People are still waking up to yesterday’s paper, Kay, for crying out loud. Our deadline’s more important than yours, anyway, or you’ll be printing two—” His eyes caught mine. He lifted the receiver on the phone and swiveled in the chair, his back to me. “I can’t tell you what to do. But it’s not time for guessing. Sure as hell not time for blame. We don’t know what happened to him yet.”
A shiver went up the back of my neck. I’d watched the news again after the volunteers had gone the night before, held hostage by the kid’s brown eyes. This morning after Joshua went to school, I watched a top reporter from one of the Indianapolis stations standing with her microphone in front of a row of dirty, peeling houses with sagging porches. “Citizens of Parks, Indiana, are asking themselves today,” she’d said, giving her blond bob a punctuating dip, “how could this happen—here?”
Here—she’d said it with all the wonder and disbelief I still felt after three months.
At the newscaster’s elbow, a thick, hardy woman with gray hair falling out of a bun grimaced into the camera. “He’s a good boy,” she said, peering into the lens. Her voice sounded like concrete rolling in a mixer. Her deeply wrinkled face folded into itself in pain. The bottom of the screen announced that this was Aidan’s grandmother.
“Mrs. Ransey, have you heard anything about Aidan’s whereabouts?” the reporter asked.
In Parks, there were no forests to search, no standing bodies of water to drag. How much danger could the kid get into, here, where there was nowhere to hide except cornfields and shallow ditches and everyone so eager to help? He should have been asleep in a pile of dirty clothes or behind a closet door. They should have found him within an hour.
I’d only just pointed the remote at the set when the grandmother sobbed and grabbed at the reporter, then the camera. The world shook loose. “He needs to be home with his gramma,” she wailed, the sound terrible and mesmerizing. The camera stabilized, refocused. I turned off the TV before the smug reporter could tut-tut the story to a false conclusion.
“Thank you, Kay,” the sheriff was saying. “I appreciate that. I promise: the second I can give you anything, I will, OK?”
He leaned forward to hang up the phone, the mechanics of his chair squealing in protest. When he turned back to his desk, he seemed surprised to see I was still there. “Help you?”
“I’m Anna Winger,” I said.