“No, it’s fine,” Audrey said, lifting the forearm and giving it a squeeze herself with her other hand. “Good as new.”
“It may feel fine,” Gloria said, sternly, “but my Ginny broke her arm when she was ten and the doctor said you have to be careful when the cast comes off. You have to be very, very careful.”
“I know. I will.” She looked over the woman’s gray head toward the gray metallic door in the back wall—nothing to indicate what it led to unless you noticed how different it was from all the other doors, all of which were wood and frosted glass and wobbly brass knobs. The gray metallic door was always shut, its latch handle always locked, and for a window there was only the small square of glass with wire mesh in it, too high for a little girl to look into unless she dragged a chair over there to stand on.
The sheriff’s door was shut too.
“Is he in there?” she said, and Gloria’s eyes lit up behind the big lenses.
“You bet your sweet fanny he is.”
“I mean the sheriff,” said Audrey. “I mean Sheriff Halsey.”
“Oh,” said Gloria, putting her fingertips to her lips. “He’s in there. He’s expecting you. Let me just buzz him.” But before she could do so the sheriff’s door swung open and there he stood.
“Sheriff, this young lady is here to see you.”
“I see that, Gloria. Thank you. Come on in here, young lady.”
She did, and Halsey shut the door behind her, then sat down at the old desk, in the old swivel chair with the big map of the county behind him, and Audrey sat down in the wooden armchair facing him.
The sheriff watched her. Taking her in as if he’d not seen her in a long time. Then he opened a drawer to his right and pulled something out and placed it on the blotter and slid it across to her and sat back again. After a moment she reached for it and collected it and held it under her hand on her lap. It was her father’s little black notebook.
“Thank you,” she said.
“I see you got your cast off.”
“Yes, sir.”
He picked up his pen and tapped it once on each end and set it down again. “Do you want to see him?” he said, nodding toward the wall to his right.
She thought about that, about going back there again. She’d only been that one time when she was ten, maybe eleven—her father unlocking the metallic door and walking her down the narrow aisle between the empty cells. Stainless steel toilet bowls sitting out in the open. Little stainless steel sinks jammed into the corners. No mirrors. Bunks of bolted steel and thin, scuzzy-looking mattresses. Concrete everything—floor, walls, ceiling.
That’s it, he said. That’s all there is.
Thick stink of dog kennel back there, if dogs smelled also of barf and cigarettes and feet and underarms.
Any questions?
Who feeds them?
Who feeds them? The county feeds them. Three times a day.
I mean who brings it to them.
I do. Or one of the deputies.
She tried to see that, her father bringing food to some filthy, stinking man in a cage. Did they speak? Hey, Sheriff. Hey, prisoner.
He’d stood behind her, silent, as she took the bars in her fists. Cold. Scaly, like the bars on an old jungle gym. After she let go and stepped back again he said, Ready, Deputy?
Ready, Sheriff.
OK, let’s wash those hands and hit that pizza.
To Halsey she now said, “No, sir. I don’t need to see that,” and the sheriff nodded.
“I expect you’ll see plenty of him at the trial.”
“I expect so.”
He sat studying her. “It won’t be any picnic,” he said. “His lawyer won’t take it easy on you. Just the opposite. But I guess Ms. Kelley has already told you that.”
“Yes, she has.” Like Mr. Trevor, the county attorney wanted Audrey to call her by her first name—Deirdre—but Audrey couldn’t do it. She didn’t want to be the woman’s pal; she wanted to be her witness.
“And I guess you know you won’t be alone either,” said Halsey.
She looked at him.
“The other women,” he said. “Three of them now, not even counting Katie Goss.”
Audrey nodded. She looked beyond him, to the big county map. So many roads. So many young women driving them.
She looked at the black notebook in her lap. How far back did it go? Would she find Holly Burke’s name there? Katie Goss’s? Danny Young’s?
She looked up and Halsey was watching her.
“I guess you’d tell me if you’d found him yet,” she said.
It took him a moment. “I’d tell you,” he said.
She was silent. Then she said, “Do you think he’s still alive?” and the sheriff frowned, and nodded.
“Yes, I do.”
Audrey nodded too, although she knew he had to say it—had to think it, even. That it was his job to think it until he had proof otherwise.
She looked down again at the notebook. “Sheriff,” she said. Turning the notebook in her hands, rubbing her thumbs over the worn, leathery surface. “Sheriff—do you regret it?”
“Regret what?”
“Letting him go down to Iowa like that. Moran. Back then.”
She looked up and he held her eyes. Finally he picked up his pen again and stood it on its tip, as if about to write something on the desk blotter. It was a plain blue Bic, the kind she’d used for school all her life. The kind she’d once loaned to Caroline Price.
“Do I regret it?” said Halsey. “As a man, as a human being, yes, I regret it. But would I have done anything differently?” He frowned again. He shook his head. “We got him out of our county. Out of our state. We knew it was the best deal we were gonna get.”
He set down the pen and put his hands together.
“And down there in Iowa?” he said. “It’s like I told you before: the man did his job. If he was doing any of that other business, pulling girls over… well, we never heard one peep about it up here.”
Audrey nodded again. She wiped her cheeks with her fingertips. “OK,” she said. And sat there. Halsey watching her.
“Your dad never knew the whole story, Audrey. Remember that. He never knew about Moran and Holly Burke, or any other girls. All he knew was one story he couldn’t prove, and so he did what he thought was the best he could do, given what he didn’t know. And still it dogged him. I know it did.” He looked down again and shook his head. “I remember the day we heard he was running for sheriff down there—Moran. I remember the day we heard he’d been elected. Your dad and me, everyone here… none of us said a word. It was like… Hell, I don’t know what it was like. We just got on with it. We got back to work.”
She looked up again and she saw something more of his eyes, or in them, than she’d seen before. Like stepping through that gray metallic door for the first time.
“I can’t even imagine what it was like for your dad,” he said, “seeing Moran—Sheriff Moran—standing in your hospital room like that, asking you questions.”
She held his eyes. He’d joined the department after Moran and the other deputies, Halsey had, her father’s youngest, greenest deputy, and he’d never known how to talk to her, how to even be around her. This big young man with no idea about children, about little girls. His technique was to pretend he didn’t see you.