But if someone was curious, all they’d need was a bit of know-how, a little bit of access, maybe a few hundred dollars for a private investigator. It wouldn’t even take someone good. It wouldn’t even take the investigative powers of the sheriff.
I suddenly had the feeling that someone did know. Maybe not the person who wrote the note and took the effort to place it in our mailbox. Maybe that person was just guessing well, like the sheriff said. But if anyone knew, it was Sheriff Keller. He had the world of investigation at his disposal, databases and background checks and all that. Hadn’t he been referred by Kent to begin with? And he had a reason for checking on me—he had to keep the woo under control.
If he knew, how soon before someone else? Sherry? Sherry and then her friends, her neighbors. Stephanie and Grace and the Boosters, the guidance counselor Mr. Jeffries, the school, the students, the Ranseys, all of them. The grapevine.
Or maybe Sheriff Keller would keep it to himself—in his arsenal, wasn’t it? What had he said about the Ranseys the day he’d parked behind us on the street and knocked on my window? That he was just trying to make his town a better place to live? His town? His town, his citizens, his problems when they got into fights and lit things on fire and drove too fast down his streets—and yet here was one of his people—one of those little pink stick figures in the game of Life, if that’s how he wanted to play it. One of his own in trouble, and he didn’t seem as interested in making the town a better place for me.
Our problems had come in the night and could be packed upon our backs and taken away again, if the sheriff decided that his town couldn’t harbor them, if he decided that his town would be better for everyone else, would run just a little more smoothly, if we weren’t in it.
I was being irrational, and I knew it. My head was thrumming with anger, but beneath that was a feeling in my gut I didn’t like, something alive and crawling that made me want to duck under the table or into a corner. An old instinct.
I held my body tense, willing it to keep still, just now, just this once. The sheriff was not going to hurt me. That wasn’t his game. But if he had his own motives, whatever they were, they had nothing to do with me. I wouldn’t let him have anything to do with me.
“Nothing, Joshua,” I said. “The sheriff was just leaving.”
I HADN’T MADE anything good for dinner after all, but it didn’t seem to matter. We both picked at our plates, and I reached again and again for my water glass in an attempt to wash the brackish taste from the back of my throat. The old taste to go with the old fears. No amount of water would drown it out. Joshua poked at his food. “What was he doing here, anyway?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Was it because of that letter?” he asked. “Or something else?”
“It’s not really anything for you to worry about.”
“But you were yelling.”
“I said—”
“Why won’t you tell me?” he said. “I live here, too.”
“Fine, Joshua. Fine.” I went to the kitchen and found a bottle of wine. I returned to the table and pushed my plate away so that the full goblet had its rightful place in the center of my vision. I had never been much of a drinker—alcohol hadn’t done much for my life. But I suddenly understood how a drink could be the thing to reach for when other things were lacking: lover, friend, mother. Life. Safety.
“The letter,” I said. “I just wanted the sheriff’s opinion on it.”
Joshua’s fork dropped to his plate with a clatter. “What did he say?”
“He thinks I’m overreacting.” I swirled the wine, watching its color cling to the inside of the glass. I could already feel my desire for the rest of the bottle recede. There would be no hangover tomorrow. There would only be sharp, acrid clarity and the damn sun in the window again. “He might be right.”
Joshua scooted his plate to the side and crossed his arms in its place, nesting his chin there. “I have to ask you a question.”
“Sure.”
“You won’t like it,” he said.
“Now I can’t wait.”
“Mom, stop trying to make it funny. It’s not funny.” His chin slid deeper into the hollow of his arms. His voice became a mumble.
“What?”
“I said,” he said, sitting up so I could hear his exasperation. “I said I have to ask you about Dad.”
“Oh. You have to?” Sometimes I wished I’d killed Ray off. Ray could have died a glorious death in the military, in a fire, rescuing small children or puppies. But I never could have lived with those stories. Ray as hero.
I steadied myself. “OK,” I said.
“It’s for a project at school.”
“What do you mean? Like—”
“It’s a family tree. They’re making us do it in history class, like, personal history, you know, what’s it called?”
“Genealogy,” I said, my voice stretched thin.
“Yeah. We have to try to research our family as far back as we can.” He rolled his eyes. “My teacher would wet his pants if I could trace my family back to the Mayflower or Spain or something.”
“We are not from Spain.”
“But what about Dad?”
I hated that word. It was too familiar. Why couldn’t he use something less—affectionate?
“Your father was not from Spain.”
“That’s what he isn’t. I need to know what he is.”
True. “So what do you need to know?”
He reached for his backpack. After a little digging, he came up with a notebook with frayed corners and a mechanical pencil. He gave the pencil a few clicks. “Well, I need to know his name.”
Something inside me plummeted. I’d kept every shred to myself. Sweetheart Lake and all that had happened there—it belonged to me, didn’t it?
But I could have spared him a name. Names had power, but even this I’d withheld. I could have spared him, even just a little, but I hadn’t.
“Ray.”
“Winger?”
“Oh. No.” I didn’t want to say it. Magical thinking again. “Give me your notebook.”
With my own pen from the cup on the table, I wrote out Ray’s name in thick, clear letters that reminded me of the typewriter hand Joshua had adopted. At the last moment, I misspelled his last name. As bad as I felt about keeping secrets, I didn’t want to open up this particular vault.
He leaned closer to see what I had written. “What about his parents’ names?”
I drew two branches and supplied the names of Ray’s mother and father, using the same fake name. I’d never known them; they’d died before we met. Across the table, Joshua nodded his approval. “What about his sisters and brothers?”
I looked up from the notebook. I didn’t know. Or I couldn’t remember. “He didn’t have any,” I said. Best to keep it simple, in case I had to be responsible for these facts later.
“Do you know anybody before that?”
“No. No, that’s all I know.” I drew a line from Ray and added a name carefully: Joshua. I added another branch from Joshua’s name and added my own.
Joshua pushed up from the table with his elbows to see what he’d collected. “That’s not very much.”
“We’re a small family, I guess.”
“Well, what about you?”