He opened the door below the sink and swiped the cracker dust into the trash can, then let the door bang shut. I tried to remember. In Chicago—but I only came up with Joshua watching out the window as the children from next door played basketball on the sidewalk or chased each other down the block. Pennsylvania—I wouldn’t let him have a bicycle because it was too dangerous, the hills obscuring riders until it was too late. Ohio. I remembered all the times I went to pick him up from school, finding him alone and anxious. I had enjoyed how much he wanted my company, but now I wondered why I hadn’t noticed. I was all he had.
“I’ve been here,” I said. “I’ve been focused solely on you for your entire life. See, here’s the thing you don’t understand—” I was warmed up now, ready to tell him what kind of life he might have had. He needed to hear the whole truth, because this grass-is-greener defense didn’t work and he needed to realize it. All I’d given up. I was angrier than I had ever been, and I was tired of having to explain myself. He had no idea what I’d saved us from. “You have no idea—”
“Mom,” he said, his voice strong and clear. He had a hand on the doorway to the hall, making his escape. “I’ve never had a single friend until now. All those schools. Not a single one.”
“I—never knew that.”
“That’s the problem. How come you never figured it out?”
“That you didn’t have any friends?” My heart was wrung out.
“No, I mean…” He searched the ceiling for the words.
“Figured out you and me,” I said, hesitant. “That just you and me wasn’t enough?”
He wouldn’t look at me. He didn’t say anything, but I knew that I had hit my target as well.
Why hadn’t I ever figured that out? How had my son come to the conclusion so far ahead of me? And then I remembered. “You were always enough. For me.”
But that, too, was a lie.
Maybe he could tell. Maybe he could see right through me.
Joshua swiped at his dangling hair, and turned on his heel toward his room. “Don’t bother ordering anything,” he called over his shoulder. “I’m not hungry anymore.”
Chapter Eighteen
Lying in bed in the dark, I saw my hand reach out again and again and slap Joshua’s face.
I finally got out of bed and went to the kitchen to pry open the cork from the wine bottle. Filled the glass, took a big gulp, topped it off. To hell with precaution, with moderation, with tiny steps and looking both ways.
Reach, slap. The image was maddening. Reach, slap. I had held that infant boy, newborn and wailing, with that same hand.
In desperation, I reached for the packet of signed forms the sheriff had sent and forced myself to read, line by line, to pay attention to dates and times, to codes I didn’t understand. I got out a pen and pad and made some notes.
After almost an hour, I had calmed down enough to understand the forms. The first line was the intake, the evidence showing up on the docket as it arrived from the arrest. The second line was the next person to have their hands on the evidence, and so on. Seizure to storage to testing and all the transportation between these stations, each step signed off by one of the members of the county’s office or by a lab tech. The forms were easy enough to follow once I had the idea, to watch each packet move from the possession of the accused through the system of testing. Presumably until the arresting officer and the evidence went to the courtroom—except that each of these forms stopped short of that step, incomplete. I could understand suddenly how important this chain was. Without assurances that the chain was unbroken, the case could never hold up, once the drugs weren’t drugs, according to the tests. Charges dropped, time wasted, tax dollars down the drain—and of course there was the problem of the drugs back out on the street once they were switched out with the white powdery substitute.
Someone was taking a lot of risk. I wrote down in my notes: How much money at stake? Then: Powder identified? Then: Who/when/how drugs discovered missing?
But that last question I thought I could answer myself. Each form stopped right around the time the evidence left storage for testing. I pawed through all the forms again and came up with one that stood out. The ringer Keller had mentioned. I set it aside. All the others held true to the theory: someone was breaking the chain prior to testing. The implication might be that the drugs were never really drugs. The arrest had been made on the evidence of a white powder that turned out to be baking soda or something.
It was genius, really, to swap out the drugs so early in the process. After testing, there was proof that the drugs were actually drugs. Before testing, it was just a bad arrest. A ding to the office’s arrest record but a fattening of someone’s wallet.
The form that didn’t quite fit the mold had a long line of signatures, starting with Deputy Tara Lombardi’s logging in a piece of evidence at 9:00 a.m. on one day and a series of signatures I didn’t recognize and then to Sherry, signing the piece back in. I studied the form’s details until I realized what I had: the evidence form for the supposed ransom note found in the Ransey house. I went back over the ins and outs. What had Sherry been doing with it? Oh, right. Taking it to the copy shop for the likes of me, when the original was obviously available.
Nice one, Sheriff.
I went back over the chain: Lombardi plucks it up at the house first thing, signs it over to evidence. So early. Had Aiden even been missing that early? Then, a day in, someone whose name I didn’t recognize jumped in to claim it. Probably one of the feds, dusting it for prints. I went through it all, timing and dating it as though I was building an Aidan Watch time line. The chain was clean. The evidence hadn’t been stolen or lost, but then the street value on a badly phrased ransom note was pretty low these days.
I drank deeply from my wine and checked the clock with bleary eyes. When I finally slipped between the sheets this time, I wanted to be so tired, so wrung out, or so drunk that I could slip off without seeing or hearing anything from tonight’s mistakes. I kept my hand on the glass and turned to the signatures in the larger stack of the forms.
Some of them were purposefully complicated. Others were hurried. Some mechanical. There were a lot of tiny dust marks from the copier down the page near the signature column. Should have taken it to the copy shop, because the copier he’d used on these was throwing off too much toner.
I studied each signature in turn, my own hand stilled over my notes. There was something odd, but—I rubbed my eyes, looking toward the clock. Pushed the wine glass away and tried again.
Light had started showing at the edges of the living room blinds before I finally gave up, squared up the forms and put them away, poured out the dregs of wine, and took myself to bed. I hadn’t forgotten what I’d done to Joshua, but my preoccupation had shifted enough that I might be able to sleep. I had a lot to put right in the morning in my own home. After that, I could worry about the sheriff’s evidence locker.