Aidan and his parents. I had to dodge the cameraman to see Leila again. This was the woman they thought killed someone with brute strength? There was so little to her. The collective group seemed to be holding its breath, not sure what to believe.
“I’d like to apologize to the Ransey family for any semblance of lack of effort on my or my office’s part. That is not the case. Not at all. But from here on out, we will not be making any assumptions. We will be bringing Aidan home.” He stopped to clear his throat and turned a degree to include more of the crowd. For just a blink, his eyes landed on mine, then bounced away. When he began again, he seemed less certain. “We will do everything in our power to bring Aidan home. We’d like to thank Mrs. Ransey again for coming forward. Mrs. Ransey, would you like to say anything?”
The sheriff gestured the young woman to the podium and stepped back. She seemed drunk, or high, or—scared. When she raised her clasped hands to her mouth, the long sleeves of the coat covered her pinkies.
“Please bring Aidan back,” she said, her voice low and raw.
The attorney general and the rest of them eyed the crowd.
Leila gripped the sides of the podium and stood on her tiptoes to speak into the mic. Her voice rang out, loud. “Why would you take him away from the rest of us? What have you done with my baby?”
The sheriff was watching Leila uneasily. His eyes flicked into the crowd, straight to me this time, and back.
“You bring him back, or I swear to God—” Leila Ransey lowered her head in anguish, one long wail rising out of the speakers, bouncing off the buildings across the street, and washing back over the gathered crowd.
The sheriff reached out to guide her away, but then came a screech of tires. The sound seemed to come from everywhere at once.
“Liar!” Someone raged across the courthouse lawn and through the throngs.
Sherry poked me in the side. Bo Ransey had left his truck in the street, the door wide, and was running toward the podium. “Liar!” The cameraman swiveled to capture the scene and struck me in the shoulder. I tottered and fell to my hands and knees, putting my fingers in the path of some heavy hiking boots.
“Hey, ow!”
The crowd surged. Sherry pulled me to my feet, guiding me under the rope to the other side.
“You liar!” The people parted for Bo even as the sheriff’s men rushed in and the camera crews crushed closer. Bo Ransey, sweaty-faced and pale, dressed in paint-spattered pants. He made a move on the rope, and was met with force by a phalanx of officers. The pixie-faced deputy, Tara Lombardi, reached out and grabbed Bo’s arm, almost tenderly. “You lying bitch—” Bo spat, shaking her off. Two more uniformed men grabbed him and marched him toward the courthouse, the young deputy running behind. Leila Ransey was scooped up and taken back inside, the official party gone within moments and the podium left empty under the lights.
Sherry ran up the steps behind the group, casting a wordless shrug over her shoulder at me. I watched after them until they were all inside. There was something in the scene that worried at me, but I couldn’t place it.
The cameraman swung around to train the lens on the crowd and found me, solo and inside the barrier. Before I realized what was happening, I was staring into the camera lens and the reporter with the yellow hair was reaching in with a microphone to ask me for my thoughts. I only had one thought—my face showing up on the bar TV at the Clipper in Sweetheart Lake, Wisconsin—and reached for the lens. I pictured Bea Ransey sending the TV camera stuttering with a haymaker and reached now to do the same.
WITH NO ONE to stop me, I ran up the steps to the courthouse door and let myself in. I’d scraped my hands during my fall outside and had a small rivulet of blood on one palm. One of Keller’s jailers stood to the side of the ladies’ washroom. He took one look at the blood dripping from my hand and went back to his phone.
At the sink I rinsed the scratch thoroughly, waiting until the blood stopped. When I turned off the water to reach for a paper towel, I heard a noise behind me and realized one of the stall doors was closed. A woman was crying behind it.
“Are you OK?” I said.
She didn’t answer. I heard a sniffle, then some toilet paper being pulled from the roll.
What did I care? I patted my hands dry and just as I was about to throw the towel away and leave, the stall door opened and Leila Ransey stood there in her overwarm coat.
“No, I’m not OK,” she said.
Words failed me. I had nothing to say to this woman, nothing to ask her. Maybe I was projecting something upon her that had been put there by other people, or maybe I was projecting something more personal upon her, something quite like self-loathing. I was less sorry for her, up close.
She was unsteady on her feet as she washed her face and hands. Leila, face dripping, found me watching her in the mirror and decided she knew which side I was on. “He’s not such a big family man as you want him to be,” she spat. “Just enough to do whatever she—”
The door to the hallway swung open and struck the wall with a bang. Leila and I both startled backward. Deputy Lombardi stood there, her eyes narrowed at me. “Aren’t you an interested citizen lately?” she said. When she turned to Leila, her expression sharpened even further. “Mrs. Ransey,” she said. “You’ve already taken so much of everyone’s time, so how about you hustle through your nervous breakdown and let’s go?”
Leila hurried by me with a look backward that I couldn’t read. When they were gone, I stood in the quiet bathroom and worried for Aidan, perhaps for the first time. I’d been pinning my hopes on his mother, and now—now I didn’t know who the kid could come back to when or if he ever did make it home. His grandmother, but then she’d raised his father in the first place. And now this frail, bloodless woman who let life pull her along. Leila Ransey was no match for the kind of life I thought we had in common and, if she had killed the woman to steal the child and was somehow fooling everyone, I had to agree with Grace Mullen. I didn’t feel as charitable as I once had.
Chapter Twenty-one
I hurried through the crowd and then the traffic as best I could, the clock in the dash ticking away the minutes as well as the moral high ground I usually enjoyed when telling Joshua he always had to let me know where he was. I tapped my fingers on the steering wheel. Something from what I’d seen pulled at me.
Leila didn’t have Aidan, at least not with her. Bo didn’t have Aidan. Bo thought Leila was a liar. Leila thought—
What have you done with Aidan? You bring him back.