I’d only seen that stark image of Leila Ransey but now she came to life in my mind: wrung out, dark-eyed, anxious under the constant demands of her two-year-old. Maybe the little boy’s cries rang out along the hallway of that cheap motel. I knew how alone she must feel, how in need of a trustworthy friend to tell her what to do. I knew the right thing to do, the lawful thing that any good friend should tell her.
Turn yourself in. Get a lawyer. Cooperate.
But if I were the friend, I wasn’t sure what I would tell her.
Would I tell Leila Ransey how hard the years ahead of her would be on her own? Would I tell her how it would feel not to have anyone—really, absolutely no one? How almost anyone Leila knew would turn her in? How almost any move she made from here on out could lead to her capture? That, someday, something would?
“Ms. Winger,” the sheriff said. “Are you OK?”
Leely. Not possible. Not funny.
Or would I tell her to do the only thing that had occurred to me? To run?
Yes, run. Stop using the credit card and run. And hide. And try not to pop your head out again. Live an unexceptional little life somewhere crowded and noisy, so that your presence will be drowned out by the cyclone of activity around you, and no one will think to ask you questions, but if they do, run again.
Or move to another town, a small one, and keep your head turned from the street, and try not to gather too many pieces of a life or too many objects or too many friends or too many hours in one place. You need to keep light, and fast. Because you will need to run again.
“Anna?” the sheriff asked gently. “Does the name Leely mean something to you?”
I remembered signing the form for Margaret, not even once thinking about the name I once used. You could slough off another life, but it took a little practice.
“No,” I said, straightening my spine and focusing all my effort on meeting the sheriff’s eye.
This is what I mean. Look them in the eye, until you can’t. Then run. “I don’t know a single person by that name,” I said.
Chapter Eleven
It took me a while to recover from the surprise of Leila Ransey’s nickname. The sheriff left the office and came back with a little plastic cup of cold water.
“Why am I here?” I said.
Keller had been giving me all of his attention, and yet he still seemed to look even more closely now. He took off his cap and threw it in the corner of his desk. I’d never seen him without it. “You don’t want to be here?” he said.
“That’s not what I said. I don’t have any work to do here—do I? That receipt? That was all?” My voice rose. Sherry was probably listening, as well as Shane Mullen and the other one. I started over, lightly. “My time isn’t too precious to try and help here, but I don’t feel like I’m doing all that much.”
The sheriff rubbed his scalp with the flat of his palm for a second, reached for his hat. He sighed. “I know.”
“You—what do you mean, you know?” My voice grew again, and this time I didn’t care who heard.
“I don’t mean you’re not pulling any weight. That’s not what I meant,” he said, holding up his hands in the universal signal for whoa, girl. “What I meant to say is—here’s the problem. You and I are not very central to what’s going on right now.”
I thought it through. I’d seen the unmarked cars lined up outside. “The feds took over, you mean.”
“The feds, sure, and they’ve got first dibs on every guy I have. But it’s Leila’s game right now. Her move, for the moment. Here I sit.” He sat silently with his hands folded on his desk.
I wanted to stand up and give the guy a chance to pull himself together. I’d seen this hands-up weakness: my mother, standing at the sink with her back to me. Someday, I would be an eighty-year-old woman and all I’d remember of my mother would be her back, her hands slack at her side. An entire life, worn down to a single moment.
“Leila Ransey is playing a game of chess against lots of opponents, least of all me,” the sheriff said. “We got things rolling here, got the Amber set up, got a lot of local guys out combing the outskirts, the roads, the cornfields. And then got Aidan listed in all the places he should be listed and talked to about a hundred people about what I should be doing. I mean—” He stopped and seemed to remember I was there. He nodded and leaned over the desk, as though just now deciding he was all in, penny or a pound. “Remember when I said all that stuff about—how kids go missing, but they’re never very far?”
From our first meeting. He’d seemed confident, almost cocky. His message had come in loud and clear. He was the guy who ran the place day in and out. He was in charge. “I remember,” I said.
“Well, here’s the thing. If the kids who’ve gone missing aren’t really missing, as I said, how did that prepare me?”
“For when the child is really gone,” I said.
“We get about five or six reports a year. Most of them just teenagers taking a walk. On purpose or not, they never get very far. Only one was gone for more than a day, and that was because he’d stolen a car that happened to have a full tank of gas.”
“No little kids? Babies?”
“Zero,” he said.
I glanced above his head at the wall of people, all of them depending on him. If all his officers were currently in the service of finding Aidan, who was out there keeping the faith with them all? Who was patrolling Sugar Creek Park, as that neighbor had assured me they had? “So what did you do? How did you know what to do?”
“You can’t laugh,” he said.
“Fine.”
“Really now. This is a secret between you and me. How did I know what to do when the time finally came?” His knees bounced against the underside of his desk. “I got out the manual. I read a damn book.”
I tried not to laugh but had to hide a smile. “That’s not . . . awful,” I said.
“Oh, yeah? You want to know that the guy you elected to protect you from the hazards of the modern world has to get out the instruction manual?” But he was smiling back. “I should have sworn you to silence first, I reckon. Too late now.”
“Sheriff, really. Who am I going to tell?”
I had meant to keep the joke going, but the sheriff seemed to know how deep the truth was to this admission. He could see right through me and the empty spots on either side of me where others had been and no longer stood. Now I was embarrassed again, this time for myself. But then I thought of Sherry gossiping over her desk, of Grace rolling her eyes at me in the parking lot of the Dairy Bar, of Margaret tucked into her couch with a tattered quilt. And now, as stern as I’d wanted to be, here I was laughing with the sheriff, again. Things were changing, and it was my own fault. My own weak will, letting them in.
“I have something you can help me with,” he said.
“Oh. No. That’s not necessary at all. I have a job, you know. I’m sort of behind, actually—”
“Because I keep calling you in here.”
“Not just that. Joshua—” The sheriff already knew about my visit to the school. Probably knew the reason, too. The grapevine, after all. “Joshua is in an epic battle with algebra.”