“I’m not going to disturb her,” a man was saying. Not Russ. Not Ray, thank goodness. “Just need to drop off a few belongings.”
Footsteps. I struggled to wake, my eyelids fluttering open to see Shane Mullen letting a large plastic bag slide off a clipboard onto the windowsill. The bag held a pound or more of gray sand. No, not sand. Ash.
“Yeeeyuk,” he murmured. He pulled a pen off the clipboard and tapped his pen a few times on the paper there. Tap-tap. I was reminded of Margaret, poor Margaret. But who was the invalid now? “I’ll just . . .” Mullen said, tapping a few more times on the board before writing something on the form and putting the pen back. He turned and saw that my eyes were open. “Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you. I just—I brought you, uh, your mom, I think?” He shuffled nervously from foot to foot. “You’re in no shape—I mean, you look great, but . . . I took care of the form for you. Do you need anything?”
I closed my eyes in answer. After I was sure he was gone, I opened them again. The bag of ashes sat in thin stripes of light from the window shades. Ashes in a bag, bag in a box, box in a truck, truck in a lake. My computer, my photos, Joshua’s things, all lost.
The stitches in the back of my head itched. My wrists were sore, and they had begun to itch, too.
The spare white room made me think of all the white walls I had never painted, the white blank page of a life I faced if Joshua didn’t turn up.
I’d had the nurse turn off the television, close the blinds. The magazines the volunteers brought slid to the floor.
Later, I heard one of the nurses in the hallway use the word depressed. A nice round word, with the clip tsk of diagnosis to it.
“Hell, yes, she’s blue,” Russ boomed. “She’s got sixteen stitches in her noggin and her son is missing. Give her a break. Give us both a break.”
He left the nurse in the hallway and brought a chair around to face me. He held an officer’s hat and a manila folder between his knees.
“How are your gabbing muscles today?”
I shrugged.
“Don’t let’s make that nurse right about you being depressed, OK? Do you want to be loaded up with zonk-out pills?”
“Fine,” I said.
“Good.” He opened the folder. “I came to commend you on your policing.” He held out the folder like a platter, offering a wrinkled piece of pink paper.
“What is it?”
“You tell me. You had it on you when you were found.”
Tramping through the woods, palming trees. Lying on the floor of Aidan’s room, the back of my head open. I could have sworn that Joshua had been with me there. My memory couldn’t be trusted. “I don’t know.”
“Well, let me tell you, then. Seems you found the other part of Leila Ransey’s so-called ransom note.” He held it up, showed me the dark pink hearts along the edges. It was ripped along one edge. “You never liked that note, did you? It never added up.”
I remembered the pile of papers, clothes, dirty dishes on the Ransey’s table, Bonnie sitting across from me, calculating the value of her time. “I took it.”
“Damn right you did. That note wasn’t for ransom. It was for help.” He held out the paper. Unhooked from most of my wires, I could sit up on an elbow.
Mama Ransey, I don’t know how to thank you. We do need a fresh start, like you said. Both of us. Actually, all of us. But you know
Same hand as the first note and the grocery list. I couldn’t remember the exact wording of the original piece. Something about keeping Aidan with her and money.
“Bea offered to help Leila take a break,” I said. “Only Leila didn’t want a break from Aidan. Bea gave her a credit card and then turned Leila in for stealing it. This is why,” I said, running a finger across the ragged edge of the paper. “This is why we don’t like to work with copies. Copies flatten the texture, the tears on the page. It’s easy to forget you don’t have the full story.”
“You have a curious obsession with originals given your faked Social Security card, but point taken. On that note, I brought you a little gift,” he said, holding out a short stack of papers. The evidence forms, again, but this time the originals. I turned my head. “Oh, you don’t care about my missing drugs anymore?”
I didn’t care about anything but Joshua. Why couldn’t he understand that?
“Well, I’m going to leave these here,” he said. “We’ll just see.”
“I don’t want to work with law enforcement anymore,” I said. “Or with people, really. Except the lonelyhearts. They’re all I have since I can’t work with corporations anymore, either.” I lay back, letting Leila’s note drop to the covers.
“Lonelyhearts,” he murmured, taking back the note. “And why not corporations?”
“Just some—mistake. I got sloppy.”
“My experience is that you’re paying closer attention than anyone has a right to. When you asked me about the powder? The drugs that weren’t drugs? I was—fuming would not be too harsh a word. But you know what it was?”
He put the folder aside and went to the window. Pulled the blinds up.
“Hey,” I said, wincing from the light.
“It’s good for you. You need to get yourself together or they’ll never let you leave.”
“I’m healing like a good little human.”
“Psychologically speaking, I mean. Your doc wants to put you in that place in town. River-something.”
I made a noise in my throat.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“You didn’t guess,” he said.
I looked at him.
“The substances back in the evidence room that should have been cocaine and heroine. Results came back this morning. I think you can guess. Mostly starch, sugars, a little milk protein.”
I thought about it. If I could guess, and he was certain I could—
“Dehydrated barley,” I said. “Malt powder.”
“And ice milk crystals.” He beamed and counted off on his fingers. “Kidnapping, murder, attempted murder, and, forgive me for this one given the topic, but the cherry on top: drug trafficking between Parks, Indiana, and Sweetheart Lake, Wisconsin, out of the back of shitty little ice cream stands.”
Russ came back to the chair and, sighing deeply, put himself into it. “And probably with drugs stolen from my evidence locker, but I don’t have the link yet.”
“Tara Lombardi,” I said. “She was dating Bo.”
“She told me,” he said. “There’s no accounting for taste. But Bo’s clean.”
I made a face. Bo had been added to the list of people I owed my life, and I didn’t care for the taste of that.
“I know what you think, but I’m telling you—he’s not in on it. This is Bea’s ship. The trouble is, I’m still not sure she’s strong enough to have killed Charity.”
“I assure you she is.”
“You saw her? You saw her swing at you?”
I had to admit that I hadn’t.
“But more importantly,” he said. “Why? Why kill the nanny at all?”