Ready, Sheriff.
“Oh, goodness—hello, sweetie,” Gloria now said, turning from her computer with her smile. Older now. Old. Hair gone to silver, cigarette voice deeper, but the same kind eyes peeping out of the same enormous glasses. At the funeral she’d wept like a widow and hugged Audrey for so long her husband had to pry her loose.
There was no one else around, the deputies out on call, or back in the jail, or behind the closed door that once bore her father’s name on the frosted glass and now bore the name of the new sheriff, sheriff wayne g. halsey, in black-and-gold letters.
“How are you getting along, sweetie?” Gloria said, glancing at the purple cast.
“I’m doing all right,” Audrey said. “You know.”
Gloria looked at the too-big canvas jacket and shook her head. “Not a day goes by I don’t think of him.” She plucked a tissue from the box and dabbed at her eyes. Audrey thought to put a hand on her shoulder or squeeze her hand, but then Gloria sniffled loudly and tossed the tissue into a wastebasket and looked up smiling again.
“So. What can I do for you?”
“I was hoping I could talk to him for a minute. The sheriff.”
“Sheriff Halsey?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Oh, yes. I just wanted to ask him something.”
A crease appeared between the older woman’s thin, painted eyebrows. “Let me just make sure he’s not on his cell phone,” she said and picked up the handset and pushed a button, and from behind the office door they heard the beep-beep and they heard him say, “Yes?” and Gloria spoke into the handset, and her voice was in the speaker in his office at the same time, “There’s someone here to see you, Sheriff.”
“Well, who is it?”
“It’s Audrey Sutter.”
He said nothing. Then he said, “I’ll come out,” and Audrey wondered how Gloria could’ve thought he was on his cell phone with that voice of his.
Halsey himself was larger than her father, even when her father had been healthy. Taller, heavier, louder. As a deputy he’d looked more like the sheriff than her father had. He looked like he’d been raised from birth to be sheriff, although she knew for a fact that he’d been raised by two English professors at the University of Minnesota.
He walked her back to his office and she sat in the old wooden armchair and he sat in her father’s old swivel chair behind the desk. Behind him on the wall was the big map of the county, all in yellow but for the river looping through it in a blue cursive.
He watched her looking around the office and said, his voice just a little softened, “I imagine it’s not easy for you, coming back here.”
“Not easy but not bad either. I always loved it here.”
He scratched at the back of his head. His hair was dark and thick and it held the depression from the sweatband of his hat all the way around. Finally he put his hands together on the desk and said, “You’re always welcome to pay a visit, of course.”
“Thank you, I appreciate that.”
“But this isn’t a social visit. Is it.”
“No, sir.”
He checked his watch and said, “Well, I’ve got ten minutes before I have to be somewhere else, so we’d best get to it.”
“Yes, sir.” She turned her father’s watch on her wrist and then held it still. “I just wanted to ask you about Deputy Moran,” she said.
He looked at her. “You mean Sheriff Moran.”
“I mean when he was still a deputy here.”
The sheriff sat regarding her blankly. Then he stood up and came around the desk and shut the door with a quiet click and walked back and sat down again.
“What did you want to ask?”
“I wanted to ask why he left the department.”
“Why did you want to ask that?”
She was not expecting the question and she sat trying to think, her heart beating.
“Since the accident,” she said, “my accident, in the river, I’ve been thinking about Holly Burke. I’ve been thinking about her a lot.”
“I guess I can understand that,” he said.
“And I’ve gotten to know her father a little bit too—Mr. Burke.”
“I saw him at your father’s service. Was somewhat surprised by that, I have to say.”
“Well. He came to bring me firewood—this was after the funeral—and I was sick with the flu and he took me in. He took care of me.”
The sheriff moved a pen on his desk from one place to another. She could see him trying to imagine all of that. He looked up again, waiting for her to go on.
“So, I’ve gotten to know him,” she went on, “and he’s told me a little about… back then. About Holly. And I know how bad my father felt about that case. I know how much it bothered him.”
“It bothered all of us.”
“Yes, sir. Well, all of this got me thinking back to that time, and how it wasn’t long after the Holly Burke case that Deputy Moran quit the department and went down to Iowa”—she looked to the sheriff to confirm the timeline and the sheriff nodded—“and I remember asking my dad why he was leaving, why Deputy Moran was leaving, and my dad saying it wasn’t any of my concern.”
Halsey said nothing. Waiting to hear something that required his response.
“Which of course it wasn’t,” she said. “But now, after going in the river, after Caroline, and after—” She stopped, hearing the struggle in her own voice, the distress of it. A kind of choking, childhood feeling. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“It’s all right,” said Halsey. “Do you want some water?”
She shook her head. “I’m fine.” And after a moment she was: her heart no longer racing, her lungs working again.
“After everything,” she said, “I guess I just wanted to know what it was. What he wouldn’t talk to me about.”
Halsey picked up his pen and tapped it once on the desk on its ballpoint and then once on the other end, and set it down again.
“Did your dad generally talk to you about his work? About the goings-on of law enforcement?”
“Yes, sir.” She’d been his deputy herself, she wanted to remind him, but she couldn’t say that.
“And his deputies? He talked about us too?”
“Sometimes,” she said. “Not about you, though.”
“No, of course not.” He picked up the pen again and gave it a click with his thumb. He leaned back in her father’s old chair and regarded her from that new distance. “And so you’ve come here hoping I could tell you something your father wouldn’t. About Sheriff Moran. Do I have that right?”
“Yes, sir.”
He nodded. “All right.” He clicked the pen. “And why would I do that? I mean, even if I knew what he didn’t want to talk to you about, why would I talk about it?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess because that was ten years ago. I guess because what does it matter now?”
“That sounds like my argument. What does it matter now? What good can it possibly do you?”
She held his eyes. “I can’t explain it. Maybe after you tell me I can, but otherwise…” She sat watching him. The sheriff watching her.
“And what if I have nothing to tell you?”
“I don’t know. I’ll have to think about that when we get there.”
He looked at her a long while, saying nothing. Then he leaned forward again and put his forearms on the desk and sat turning the pen between his fingers, frowning at it. Her father’s watch was ticking away on her wrist. Finally the sheriff looked up and said, “I just can’t imagine what good it can do anyone to rehash any of it, but if you want to know did Deputy Moran leave because of anything having to do with the Holly Burke case, then I can tell you unequivocally and categorically no. As to whatever it was your dad didn’t want to talk to you about, I find his own words entirely… adequate. None of your concern. I don’t mean to be harsh about it, but I don’t know what else to tell you.”