I rooted around for some paper and a pen, and ended up sitting at my computer. I listened to the sheriff give road-by-road directions, staring at the address scrawled in my own careless hand. What would I say about this handwriting if I were given the assignment? That the woman who wrote it was hungover, that she was exhausted and weakened from a battle with her teenage son? That she was lost in the confusion of having been completely wrong about something she’d been certain of? The distraction of it all might have shown up in a comparison to another sample of handwriting—but the rest would be lost between the spaces of the words. I could tell so little from handwriting, after all. What value did any of it have, if the threatened men were going to die anyway? If the woman who asked about her fiancé knew all along that she would say yes when he proposed? If the company that wanted to hire an honest executive candidate turned around and made a dishonest man of him on the job?
I couldn’t tell any of them what they wanted to know, in the end. I couldn’t tell the future. That’s what they wanted: a guarantee on what will happen, how things will turn out. Madame Zonda might have her vibrations, but I didn’t know what would happen in three minutes’ time. I had only one concern: what was on the paper. And what was on the paper didn’t add up to much. Against the grim light of morning, against the reality of a man killed, it didn’t seem like anything at all.
The sheriff was saying something. “I’ll meet you there, then—”
“I’m not sure I’m as good at this as maybe you were led to believe,” I said.
“Led to believe by whom? You?”
“By everyone. I’m—I’m not sure I should be shilling what I think right now.”
“Well. How about I don’t pay you and then you won’t be shilling a thing?”
“I meant—Sheriff, I don’t know if I’m any good at this, or if this, whatever this is, is good for anyone else.”
“What happened to you?” he asked quietly.
“I made a mistake. I might have cost a man his life.”
“Everyone makes mistakes on the job,” he said. “Even doctors, and you know they’re killing way more people than you are. Police make life-and-death decisions every day. You know, so I hear. The bullets in my gun get pulled out and cleaned every week, but those same six, they’ve gotten me through some lean years.”
He was trying to make me laugh. I took it as a triumph of will that I could even recognize the effort.
“Seriously, Anna,” he said. “People mess up. I don’t know what happened, but I’m sorry it did. Listen, you have to learn how not to take your job so personally. It’s just work. You have to punch in every morning, do what you can, and punch out at night.”
“That’s what you do?” I’d seen all those people on his office walls. They needed him. They looked to him to solve their problems. I saw it clearly in an instant: I was doing the same thing to him right now. “Never mind. You probably need to get on with your day.”
“I do. But so do you. Hey, anything to say about those evidence forms yet?”
I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to say anything about those forms. “Let me spend a little more time,” I said.
“That’s fine. See you this afternoon. Oh, and wear long pants.”
“What?”
“Long pants. There’s tall grass where we’re going. Gets itchy.”
“Pants.”
“Exactly.”
The phone hung up. I retreated to the shower earlier than normal, so that I wouldn’t have to face Joshua right away. Drying off in front of the mirror, I caught sight of my naked self, and stood still, taking a closer look. I bent over the sink and studied my face. The longer I stared into my own eyes—the longer I built constellations from the freckles on my own skin—the more I was willing to believe that the woman looking back at me was someone else. I was willing to believe anything now. Anyone’s hocus-pocus, anyone at all. I’d believed in my abilities, in the science of analysis, the way that other people raised their eyes to the sky. The way some people played the lottery or the stock market. The way certain people could say they were saving for a rainy day, and believe that this day was not the rainiest. People needed to believe in something; they needed a little hocus. But my magic hadn’t saved anyone. Not the executive in Chicago. It had come too late for my mother. It had come too late for me, too. And now, it didn’t matter. I had believed that my job had saved me, but I wasn’t saved.
By the time I got out of the shower, Joshua had left for school.
At my computer with my wet hair still dripping into the neck of my T-shirt, I set aside Keller’s evidence project and called up all my notes from the executive’s threat, the original assignment, my response. I took another look at my copy of the sample, finding again the same characteristics I’d noted the first time. My phone should have rung. I traced my notes to the response, checking each detail off as I’d reported them.
Everything added up; I started to feel the fury of the wronged, until, suddenly, the bulleted list came to a stop, and one significant detail from my analysis remained. I checked again, then searched my Sent folder for the original email. All of it came up short.
The gaps. I’d never reported the likelihood of the writer’s sexual impotence.
I put my head in my arms on the table. I hadn’t been wronged; I’d been distracted. By Joshua, by the sheriff calling, Sherry, the Boosters, Jeffries, Margaret. This was what happened when you let your guard down. You got caught up. You got caught.
Tied up in personal matters, I’d made the worst sort of mistake. Not just an error, but a lapse of my authority. I’d taken what the handwriting told me and dismissed it. Dismissed a man crippled in one way from being powerful in another.
That wasn’t just bad analysis. That was bad human understanding. One or the other, and it didn’t matter. The man was dead, his killer at large, and the phone still hadn’t rung to tell me what I already feared: that my career was over, that the whole business was a bunch of bunk.
On the table, a short pile of assignments and queries sat, untouched. I brushed the top envelope with my hand to make sure it was really there. These people actually thought I had something to offer them. I’d made a mistake, but not the one Keller thought I’d made. No, the mistake had been long ago and it had nothing to do with handwriting. The mistake had been in believing that there was anywhere I could go that would change me from one kind of person to another.
I shoved the work away, shut off the computer. There was nowhere I was supposed to be, no one I could talk to. Joshua was right. I didn’t have anyone.
And all he had was me, some prize.
And worse, I’d taught him there was even a part of himself that was unspeakable. I’d taught him to hate the very thing he was becoming. To hate himself. I’d saved him from a snake, only to poison him myself.
All that work to protect him. I’d done it for him. For him, that was the part I’d wanted him to understand. Why hadn’t I been able to make him understand that last night? I was going to lose him and I deserved to. What else had I taught him, except that he didn’t need anyone else?
Chapter Nineteen