In the silence she heard her father’s watch ticking on her wrist—felt it—before she remembered she wasn’t even wearing it; it was at the jeweler’s—an old man with shaky hands who said it probably wasn’t worth the cost of fixing it. It was, she told him.
“Do you think,” she now said, and hesitated. “Do you think he would’ve gone down there like that, to Iowa, and shot that boy in the hand if it had been anyone other than Moran in that hospital room?”
The sheriff looked at her for a long while.
“I’d have to call that a damned interesting question, Audrey. I’d have to call that altogether worth considering.” He gave her a smile then, and pushed up from the chair, and Audrey stood too.
“You let me know your whereabouts,” he said, coming around the desk, “you go back down south or wherever. I want to know you’re OK out there. All right?”
“All right. Thank you, Sheriff.”
“Don’t thank me.” He opened the door. “Go on, now. I’ll see you when you get back here.”
“You will?”
“Of course I will—in court. Every day. You just look at me if you need to, and I’ll be there. All right?”
She nodded. She was about to thank him again but caught herself. She wanted to put her arms around him, just once, just quickly, but she knew it would embarrass him, alarm him even, this man with no children, no daughter of his own, and finally she just turned and walked away.
67
SHE WAS WEARING the aviators when she drove into town and she saw the town as he’d seen it himself through those lenses: the wide lanes of Main Street with the cars and trucks all parked at angles to the curb, the glass-and-brick storefronts, the Iowa sun flashing in the windows. But there was no snow in the streets now, and the smell that blew into the car’s open window was the smell of the earth and the trees and the sky, and even of the sun itself.
Her father had not written the name down in the little black notebook, or if he had he’d ripped it out and destroyed it. She might’ve asked Halsey and she might’ve asked the lawyer, Trevor, but both would’ve asked why she wanted to know. And what would she say?
The last three entries in the notebook, in that large but nearly unreadable scrawl of his, were the names and addresses of the garages, and she went to the nearest of these first, Yoder Auto Repair, and there she was met by Yoder himself, who stood wiping his hands with a red rag as she explained who she was and why she’d come. Strong smell of oil and gasoline in the garage. A radio voice talking and talking from a shelf at the back until Yoder stepped over to it and shut it off. He came back and looked at the large canvas jacket she wore, then he looked her in the eye and said, “I’m sorry for your loss, miss.”
“Thank you.”
“I only met him the one time when he came in here himself, but from what I hear he was a good man. And a good sheriff. Despite what he came down here and did. And even that… well.” He frowned. “I got a daughter myself about your age. She’s off to college down in Kansas and—” His voice caught, and he looked down at his hands. She saw a vein jump with blood in the side of his neck. He looked up again and said, “Way I see it, he let that boy off easy.”
“Yes, sir,” Audrey said. “If it was the right boy.”
Yoder frowned again. “I reckon your dad was pretty good at finding the right boy.”
Audrey said nothing. Did they even know about Holly Burke down here? Would that name, or the name Danny Young, mean anything at all? How quickly did you forget about people when they weren’t your people? When it wasn’t your town. Wasn’t your river… even though, really, it was the same river.
Yoder began wiping his hands again with the red rag. “Well, it never was in the papers,” he said, “but it might as well of been. You could of asked anybody and they’d of told you: the boy’s name is Ryan Radner. Do you know Anderson Auto, down on Frontage Road?”
“Yes, sir. I’ve got it on my phone.”
“I figured you would. But he won’t be there.”
“He won’t?”
“No, he won’t.”
“How do you know?”
Yoder tucked the rag into his hip pocket. “I’ve been in this business since I was sixteen and in all that time I’ve only known one mechanic who didn’t have two of these.” He showed her his open hands. “That was old Boots Franklin who worked for my old man. Best damn auto mechanic I ever knew but then he’d been born with just the one good hand. Now maybe getting shot in the hand isn’t much of a reason to fire a good mechanic. But then again maybe it is. In any case that boy got fired.”
“Ryan Radner,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am, but don’t ask me where he lives. I don’t know and I wouldn’t tell you if I did. I’d more likely tell the sheriff—the new sheriff. Ask him to come and have a word with you.”
“Thank you, Mr. Yoder.”
“All right. Well.” He frowned. He nodded. “You take care, young lady.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, “I will.”
THERE WAS ONLY one Ryan Radner in that town and he lived in a mobile home park a mile south of the last stoplight, and if that was his truck parked beside the trailer then he drove an old two-tone pickup truck, green and a lighter green, of a year she couldn’t even guess and nothing about it to distinguish it from any other two-tone truck she’d ever seen or ever would see. She saw her father opening it up, shining his light, searching for something he’d never seen but knew must be there, it must be…
She sat in the sedan watching the trailer, the curtained windows. It was late in the day but the sun was not yet down, the days getting longer as they got warmer, and there were kids’ toys and bikes strewn in the patches of dead grass between the trailers, but no kids. As if they’d all abandoned play and run inside at her arrival. Nothing moved anywhere but a single cat, a large orange tabby crossing the pitted and muddy road on delicate paws, and she watched as the cat made its way toward the Radner trailer, as it found a crack in the plywood that ran around the base of the trailer and stepped warily into the crack—head, body… and when the last of the tail twitched from view she reached into the glovebox and took out the .38 and slipped it into the hip pocket of the canvas jacket. She’d washed the jacket but it was still stained from the mud of the spillway and it still gave off a whiff of the river.
She got out of the car and shut the door behind her. Dogs began barking from other trailers up and down the road but no one came to the door or to the windows of the Radner trailer. From inside she heard the voices of a TV show, the applause of an audience.
She thought her heart should be pounding but it wasn’t, and she thought about Caroline with her arm raised so straight and steady, her voice steady too, Say that to my face, you slackjawed muppetfucker, and a wave of love went through her.
The three iron steps and the railing were all of a piece and they wobbled independently of the trailer as she climbed them, and there was no bell that she could see and when she rapped on the aluminum stormdoor the dogs in the other trailers barked the more crazily and were joined by other dogs and none of them visible anywhere. She rapped a second time and the TV was abruptly silenced and she thought she could see the trailer itself shuddering as footsteps neared the door. There was a window in the inside door and a curtain was drawn aside and a man’s bearded face appeared, looking out, not liking what he saw, and the curtain fell again and the inside door swung open.