Mamie waited for Ray to say something. At last she said, “Your mother, honey. Her ashes.”
My mother had been a single passenger in a single-car accident. One car, one passenger. One tree. The tree, an old oak that had survived the American Revolution and a thousand scrapes, had to be cut down. I’d read the online news story six months after the death, sitting in a cold apartment in Ohio, and imagined my father asking after the firewood from the tree.
“Why do you—?” I heard the twist in my voice. Ray, stoic, shook his head.
Mamie said, “Your dad—”
“For God’s—don’t tell me my dad went through anger management, too.” I glanced a last time at the photo in Ray’s hands, and turned for the truck.
Mamie hurried after me. “He’s old. This might be your last chance—”
I slid inside, started the motor to block anything else Ray or Mamie wanted me to know. I’d already given last chances enough for a lifetime.
Chapter Thirty-three
On my way out, I bypassed the town. I had confronted Ray and had my mother’s ashes in a tidy box. I never had to see Sweetheart Lake again.
Within an hour, my head pounded and my stomach roared for attention. I needed gas soon, too. When one of the towns presented a gas station–slash–fast-food option, I steered for its harbor.
I dug the aspirin out of the back of the truck and, inside, bought a Coke and two fistfuls of breakfast sandwiches, each loaded with cheese and eggs and awful bacon. Hangover food. I had a hangover from being in that house, from bumping against that furniture. From trying to understand and explain. What a waste of time.
The restaurant portion of the station was busy. I found a stool by a window and tore into my breakfast. I realized I’d left the truck parked at a gas pump and didn’t feel as bad about it as I should have.
I was unwrapping the second sandwich when an old sedan pulled up behind my truck and idled there, waiting. The woman behind the wheel rested her head on her shoulder, her arm dangling out the window, patient.
A little head peered out the backseat’s window. The kid was small, jumping up and down. No seat belt or he couldn’t have been monkeying the way he was. After a few minutes the mother lost her cool and turned on the kid, slapping at him until he sat down.
The mother’s fault. Mothers took the brunt of everything that went wrong, but in this case, if she had just put the kid in his restraints, he couldn’t have been as much trouble. He was just a baby. Another day I might have said something, but I was tired of judgments and still inside the restaurant, chewing, my mouth filled with egg, when the boy in the backseat fled the woman’s hands and pressed his worried face against the window—
Aidan.
I stared, started to rise. But wait, how? The child slid out of sight and I still wasn’t sure. I stumbled off the stool.
Too late. The woman was backing up the car and pulling around the gas pump and my truck. By the time I navigated the restaurant’s tables and the other patrons to the parking lot, the car was gone.
“YOU’RE NOT SERIOUS, are you?” The dispatcher I’d bothered the night before was still on duty and tired. Tired of me, in any case. She put me through to the sheriff’s administrative office, but it was not Sherry who answered. The woman who picked up instead wouldn’t patch me through to the sheriff, either.
“He’s not on downtime,” I said. I had barricaded myself in the last known pay-phone booth in the Western world, and all the people leaving the restaurant seemed to smirk at me, cell phones casually to their ears. “Really. He’s working, and this is—he’s going to want to talk to me.”
“Think pretty high of ourselves, don’t we now?”
I had a sudden picture in my head. Deputy Lombardi. The young officer who was always watching me with junior-high eyes.
“It’s about Aidan. Aidan Ransey.”
“This conversation may be recorded to better serve you.”
“Are there any grown-ups there I could talk to?” I said.
“My break is in a half hour,” Lombardi said. “If you want to talk to your boyfriend, you might have better luck with the next shift. Although, I wouldn’t bet on it.”
I’d had enough. “Let’s talk about how you say you discovered the ransom note in the Ransey house before Charity’s body was even discovered,” I said. “Because you were there all night, with Bo.”
“Oh, look who thinks she’s a detective.”
“And who maybe had time to get over to patrol the crime scene just in time to leave that body there.”
“What are you talking about?” Lombardi said.
“Just put me through and you’ll find out—” I held the receiver away from my ear. The phone had gone dead. I really did hope the conversation had been recorded, but I didn’t think so. I stared at the receiver. Call back? But what was the use? The criminals were running the jail. I hoped all the signatures on Keller’s evidence forms led to Tara Lombardi, I really did. At last I had nothing to do but slam the phone onto the hook and get out of the booth.
The car with Aidan inside had had enough time to drive around town twice while I’d wasted precious minutes with Parks County’s finest, but I pulled out of the station parking lot with intention, going the way I thought the car had turned. It was the same strip of town I’d passed through already, but now I paid attention. I bore down on each gas station and then slowed down to sort through the cars at the pumps. I started to doubt myself. Had I passed it? Was it blue? Black? There was rust on the front passenger door—or was it the back door? Did it matter? Wouldn’t I know the thing when I saw it?
Wouldn’t I know—
Something about this situation had been nagging at me, and now it came to me in a rush. Aidan. I’d never met him back in Parks, but I’d seen him before, once. He’d been sucking his thumb on the shoulder of a woman brushing past me in Sweetheart Lake the day I’d returned to town. Outside the store that used to be a bank, Aidan had looked right at me.
I’d missed my chance to help Aidan, missed perhaps the only chance anyone would have to bring Aidan home.
I drove on, head swiveling. The road kept offering places the sedan might be—up ahead, like a shimmering mirage—and so I pushed on. The trees began to edge closer to the road. I knew where I was going. Back the way I came, back to Sweetheart Lake.
I HADN’T FOUND the car by the time I drove once again into the tidy downtown of my youth. I’d been calculating the entire ride back what evidence I had. Sitting in my truck in front of the fudge shop as the town began to wake and the shopkeepers flipped over their door signs, I wasn’t sure I had anything but doubt. Had the kid really been Aidan Ransey? What were the odds? And if the boy was Aidan, then who was the woman? How likely that a stranger had abducted Aidan and was brazenly carting him around northern Wisconsin as though he was her own?