Only one image came to mind: Leila Ransey, shadowed face, hunched shoulders, shackles at hand and foot. Arms empty. “I don’t know. Madame Zonda could tell you.”
“I was really counting on that woman to be full of shit.” He waved me toward the ladder, holding the top rung. Body sore, I took my time. He followed, quick, skipping the last rung with a stretching step to the dirt.
“Look, before I go . . .” At the barn door opening, I reached my hand out into the sun. “Those forms—they’re not originals.”
“Oh, come on now. This again?”
“That’s not what I meant.” What I wanted to know, really, was if he needed them back. When we left in the night with all our things packed around us, did I need to drop them into the mail? “I’m not sure I understand it all yet but—I’ll have something for you soon.”
I crouched to slide out the door, but he grabbed my arm and pulled me back into the barn. “What?” I said.
“Don’t—don’t leave it here.” He stepped closer, pressing the length of his body against mine, his lips against my temple. “You know what I mean.”
I closed my eyes and accepted the full embrace of his breath and touch, enjoying the way my body felt stretched and skinned. Bruised, even.
I knew what he meant, but it was already gone. I broke away and slipped out of the barn, the sun in my eyes.
WE DROVE THE dirt roads like teenagers, kicking gravel and skidding at corners. Near downtown Parks, we parted ways. I decided to take an extra turn around the courthouse to see if Joshua was using my absence to hang out with his artisan friends, but the square was busy. One side of the street had been blocked off, a series of media trucks parked in a row and guarded by a variety of uniforms.
As I inched forward against the blocked traffic, I remembered the sight of my arm reaching out of the barn, sunlit. And then: the same hand darting out to connect with Joshua’s face. Then: the sheriff’s hands on me, his weight pinning me to the rough blanket.
We would have to go.
Finally I was able to take an alley to get around the square toward the apartment, but when I tried to pull back out onto a street, traffic there had backed up, too. People were gathering in front of the courthouse. Before I could talk myself out of it, I threw the truck’s gear into park and pulled out the keys.
I crossed the street and waded into the crowd.
“I think they got her,” someone said.
“But did they get the boy?”
I pressed between and around people to get closer. A podium was centered at the top of the steps, bathed in TV lights, with a rope boundary keeping the crowd at bay. On the other side of the barrier, TV news crews were setting up. I found a space at the rope and craned my neck to see over a cameraman’s shoulder.
Sherry stood just inside the propped-open door at the top of the stairs. I waved, hesitant, and then with gusto until she looked my way, checked around her, and came down. She made her way through the crews and leaned over the rope to whisper in my ear.
“You look like the same kind of hell that he does,” she said. “I made him go clean the hay out of his hair.”
My face was hot. I saw the sheriff at the door now, and he did look better. His hat was gone, his hair combed. He leaned out of the door and surveyed the scene.
“Do you know what’s going on?” I said.
The cameraman backed into Sherry. “Watch it,” he said.
“Watch yourself,” Sherry said. “Or I’ll get the media pool moved to the other side of the building.”
“You don’t have that authority,” said a woman with a shell of banana-yellow hair. She held a microphone in her hand and had managed to create a two-foot space between herself and her crewman.
“Which side of the rope am I on?” Sherry said to the newscaster. She turned to me. “Nobody’s told me anything, but if I had to guess—”
“We’re live in Parks,” the reporter said, her voice stretched broad. “Where Indiana attorney general Arnold Erickson has called a press conference. We’ve been told he will be joined by Parks County sheriff Russell Keller but we don’t know yet what news the men will share with us today.”
“If I had to guess,” Sherry said, “I’d say we’ve got our woman.”
The reporter glanced our way. “Speculation has it that we might be hearing about the capture of the fugitive mother of a little boy who’s been missing from Parks for ten days. Police have been looking for Lila Ransey—”
“Leila,” I said.
“—since her son was reported missing from her estranged husband’s home here in Parks.”
Movement at the courthouse door. A man wearing a suit and tie and a foul expression came through, followed by a number of town and county men, but not the sheriff.
“Attorney general Erickson has taken the podium,” the reporter said. “Let’s listen.”
The man at the podium adjusted the mic to his mouth and dove in. “Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming. We wish we had the best news for you, but unfortunately we cannot say what we’d like to say today. Aidan Ransey, two years old, is still missing.”
I glanced at Sherry, who shook her head.
Erickson raised a hand to quiet a rising murmur. “Please let me say what I have to say. Aidan Ransey is still missing. But we do have new information that puts his situation in a different light.” Erickson’s mouth was grim, but he found the cameras in the crowd and looked deep into them with serious eyes. Projecting into the heartland for future election-year footage. “The good news is that we have safely located a person long of interest in this case. Sheriff Keller?”
They had her. They had Leila Ransey. I watched the sheriff—Russell—exit the door with someone in his wake. The crowd shuffled and strained to see.
The sheriff guided the woman out from behind him. She had lank bronze hair and wore a black, doughy coat that was much too large for her and too hot for the weather. She lurched into the middle of the men, swallowed behind the podium. Leila Ransey, no more than a girl. Skinny, even frail. Her face and neck were pale but blotchy, and her eyes darted around the crowd, past the cameras, out to the square.
The sheriff held the woman at her elbow as though she might fall over and leaned into the microphone. “We’d like to thank Mrs. Ransey for coming in today, as soon as she heard we were looking for her,” he said. “Mrs. Ransey has been very cooperative. We’ll be leading a renewed search effort in conjunction with state and federal agencies, revisiting all witnesses, all interviews. If you have information, any information at all that might have a bearing on this matter, we ask you to come forward now. We need all the assistance this town, this county, this state, even the nation, has to offer to Aidan and his parents.”