“Ms. Winger,” he said.
“Sheriff,” I said. The nod I gave might have clicked in its efficiency.
Sherry said, “Sheriff, before you go, two calls came in for you. A little dispute over land at the Karpowicz house with the Martins. And then this one from the prosecutor. It didn’t seem urgent, so I didn’t interrupt.”
“What’s the—did you say land dispute?” he said.
“Yeah.” She smiled. “The Karpowiczes’ dog has been—violating some boundaries.”
“Oh, hell.”
“Yeah.”
Keller laid the paper back on Sherry’s workspace. “Can you?”
“Yep.”
“Thanks.”
The man certainly had some hocus-pocus of his own. First the citizen promenaded out of the office and now a secret language, half unspoken, with his assistant.
The room seemed close, stuffy. I’d been too friendly, too open with both Sherry and her boss. I’d have to pull back.
The sheriff sighed and took a look all around the office before turning to me. “Well, Ms. Winger. Let’s go have a talk.”
Was that a question? Or a command? I’d already lost this one, already run over when bidden. I should have made an appointment later in the day, called the shots.
I started walking toward his office, letting him follow me.
Inside his office, the sheriff started right in. “I hear that you had an accidental face-to-face with Bo Ransey,” he said.
This pitch was a few feet wide of my expectations. We sat. “Yes, when I went to my son’s school, I ran into him. Literally.”
“Did you get anything from that meeting?”
Another throw, another few feet. “Get anything?” I said. “You mean, like vibrations?”
“That’s not what I meant. You don’t get vibrations, by the way, do you?” He was looking at me mock appraisingly. “That might be a useful talent to have in my arsenal.”
His arsenal. He could believe whatever he wanted.
“No, I didn’t get anything—well.” The memory of the meeting in the school hallway came back in sudden dramatic clarity. I felt something bright hiding in that dull scene and stretched for it. “Well, I guess that’s not true, now that I think about it. I learned that he has another boy in his house, a nephew my son’s age. They seemed to get along fine, I suppose. Although that kid is probably a menace to neighborhood pets. If the Karpowicz dog goes missing, check the Martins’ backyard for shallow graves and then head straight over to talk to that kid.”
“Yes, I’ve met young Master Ransey before. I don’t know about his way with animals, but he does have quite an artistic talent. With a can of spray paint.” He tugged at the bill of his cap, like the punctuation of his own joke, paused, and then offered, “That was his grandmother who was just in here.”
I couldn’t make out what he was saying, and then all the pieces snapped into place. “That lady was—?” The woman clawing at the TV camera in anguish the night Aidan went missing. The woman who’d fed the Dairy Bar counter girl change the night before. And today, in her church dress, unrecognizable. Each woman seemed like a different one.
“Mother of our friend Bo, grandmother to both the spray-can artist and his cousin, Aidan,” he said.
“Huh.” I had crossed my legs, and now the dangling foot jiggled a bit as I thought this information through. With effort, I forced my foot still. “She seems to . . . like you.”
“Mrs. Ransey and I go way back. Well, as far back as I’ve been here,” he said. “I guess the former sheriffs have always had the opportunity to get to know the Ransey family. Bobby comes from a long line of hell raisers.”
“Bobby?”
“Bo’s real name,” he said. “His mother, she calls him Bobby.”
The sheriff began to dig under some file folders.
Bo Ransey was a guy you didn’t turn your back on, but Bobby? Sugar wouldn’t melt in his mouth. Names had power, or a lack. Like Joshua’s name, which was an itchy collar my kid wanted to yank off now. Someday he’d be happy to have it.
I hated that anything about Bo Ransey reminded me of Joshua.
Keller found what he’d been looking for and slid it across his desk. “The Ranseys are about all I can handle right now,” Keller said. “One of them calls me twenty times an hour. His mother has stolen, with her concern and her grandmotherly theories, most of my morning. There’s a thirteen-year-old who seems to want nothing more than to spend the rest of his youth in my little jail, as is his legacy. And now—” He tapped a finger on the page in front of him. “One of them is starting to get sloppy.”
I leaned in. The page had a small receipt copied into its center, the edges scratchy from having been faxed. It was for a credit card used at a motel in Indiana. If the total included lodging, the place was a fleabag. At the very bottom, a cramped, small script read Beatrice Ransey. “Beatrice?” I said.
“Bea Ransey, who you saw leaving my office just now, was taken aback to hear that she spent the night upstate this week. Nor does she remember signing her name quite in that way, ever in her life. Your expertise says?”
I hardly had to look. “Some of the markers look . . . familiar.”
“Thought so. Seemed like it was about time Leely popped up.”
I gulped, hard. The room seemed to tilt, the wall of photos leaning toward me.
Too strange. Too much. Not possible.
“Who—what did you call her?”
I imagined my face was white. I felt white. I felt as though a door had slammed somewhere, and I was on the other side. Somewhere else entirely, where doors slammed, and precious things were thrown up against them. One barking voice, gruff and animal, and then another voice, a woman’s, in the rise and fall of a keening, desperate song.
I couldn’t still be in the sheriff’s office, because these sounds didn’t belong here, or now. They were from long ago, so far back in years that I wasn’t sure I’d ever really heard them. I had tried not to listen, because that’s what my mother had told me to do. But now I remembered the wailing sound, a song with one word, drawn out long and ugly so that no one else could understand it. I knew the word: my own name. My mother begging, and the only thing she could or would beg for was her daughter, for a girl who didn’t exist anymore, not in this room and not anywhere. My mother begged only for Lee-Lee, Leeanna, who was now me, the woman who had almost forgotten that song.
“Leely is the name Mrs. Ransey uses for her daughter-in-law,” he said, watching me. “Leely and Bobby. I guess I took it up when she was here . . . do you need a drink of water?”