He stood in a red sweatshirt and blue jeans, his dark hair lifted and tossed and held in place by its own oils. “Can I help you?” he said through the stormdoor, the plexiglass, and it was as if there were no door at all between them. Lidded dark eyes staring out from a puffy face. The face of a man who has been sleeping and watching TV and not much else. In the bristles of his beard lay a pair of girlish lips, pink and wet. She thought she should recognize the eyes, those lips, but she didn’t. And if there were still signs of the scratches on his face these had been overgrown by the climbing, untended beard.
“Are you Ryan Radner?”
“Who’s askin?”
“Audrey Sutter.” She removed the sunglasses but she didn’t have to, he knew the name. He raised his hand to scratch at the right side of his face, at the beard. He moved his whole hand to scratch, as you would a wooden hand, and before he lowered it again she saw the wound, the bright-red puckering in the back of his hand where the bullet must have exited. He looked beyond her to the white sedan and then looked at her again through the plexiglass.
“I know that car. What are you, Daddy’s little deputy?”
She didn’t answer. Searching this face as she’d searched the faces Moran had brought her, trying now to match this one up with one of those, which was all backwards she knew, but what did it matter if there was a match?
Because it did. Because it only worked the other way.
“Hello—?” said the face, larger suddenly in the plexiglass, the wet pink lips holding the O shape perversely.
“I came to see you face-to-face,” she said. “To see if I remembered you.”
“From what?”
“The gas station. The ladies’ room.”
He smirked. He shook his head. “Just as crazy as your old man. You got a gun too? Excuse me a second while I make a quick phone call.” He patted his jeans pockets and looked around but he did not turn away from the door. As if he would not turn his back on her. He looked at her again. Thinking things over. He said, “I know you already know the case was dropped. Your daddy shot the wrong man, Little Deputy.”
She looked past him, into the cramped darkness that was his home, and she remembered opening a metal door and flicking a filthy switch, stepping out of the bright stink of the ladies’ room into darkness, into that blindness after a light is turned off, and she remembered a hand reaching out of the darkness to touch her, to stop her with its fingers, a voice—Where you goin, little girl?—and she remembered trying to duck under the hand, and the hand grabbing at her head, and there was the electric crackling and sparking of her hair suddenly… And she had not remembered that until this moment, standing here. She’d thought she’d lost it in the river, along with everything else. But he’d taken it from her there, at the ladies’ room.
Radner turned to look too, to see what she was staring at, and turned back. “What are you looking for?”
“Something you took from me.”
“For instance?”
“My cap. My black knit cap. I’d like it back.”
Dark eyebrows rose into a rumpling forehead. “You really are crazy, aren’t you.”
She waited.
He shook his head again. “A,” he said, “what would I want with your stupid cap? And B, even if I took it, do you think I’d be dumb enough to keep it?”
She said nothing, watching him. Trying once more to match this face to her memory of hands—of fingers so hard and strong as they snatched the cap from her head. As they jerked the backscratcher from her grip. As they pinned her arm against the wall. As they covered her mouth with a stink and taste that made her want to gag even now.
Radner grinned and opened the stormdoor. “Well, come on in and look for it then,” he said, and she stood looking in at the shabby, dark furnishings. A boxy old TV throwing its light on a patch of stained brown carpeting. The smell coming out of there was just awful, and she turned her face from it. There sat the two-tone truck, and it had the look of him too—dirty, run-down, mean. Like it was just waiting for the chance to do harm.
“Your daddy already searched the truck,” he said. “Him and the real sheriff. But you go ahead. Check it out. It ain’t locked.”
And that voice—she should know that voice, at least. See there, Bud? We’re all gonna be friends here.
But she didn’t. She didn’t. And the more she looked at him, and the more he talked, the less certain she became. Or the less clear her memories became, and she felt once again, as she had when Moran showed her the pictures, that she was in danger of losing her memories altogether—not just of that moment, of his hands on her, but all the moments after too: Caroline with her pepper spray, her fierceness. The pounding of their hearts as they ran for the car. The moment on the riverbank, that pause before the other car came, Caroline’s laugh. The strength of her hand as you dropped toward the ice. Your spinning hearts. The look on her face when you heard that first crack, that deep pop in the floor of the world. The light under the water and Caroline in the light, swimming so hard to come back, swimming so beautifully… And the other girls too, Holly Burke and the others, with their hair like seagrass in the current. All this was real. All this had happened and she must protect it at the cost of everything else—at the cost of certainty, even, so Caroline’s parents would see it, so they would know it when they looked in her eyes.
The dogs had not stopped barking and now they seemed inside her head, of her head’s own making, and each bark lingered and replayed over those that followed in a ringing continuum, on and on. “I’m sorry to bother you,” she said, or tried to say, and began to backstep down the wobbling steps.
“It’s no bother, honey,” he said. He’d seen the change in her, her failure to recognize, to know, and now he stepped out onto the highest step just as she stepped from the lowest. “I wasn’t kidding about coming in. I got some beers in the fridge. How about that? We can just bury the ol’ hatchet, as they say. I figure it’s the least you can do after your old man shot me and got me fired and pretty much ruined my life. What do you say?”
She kept backstepping, toward the car. The gun riding solid and heavy in the pocket at her thigh. Radner looking down on her from the top step. He took a step down and let the stormdoor slap shut behind him.
“I gotta say I like how you come out here by yourself,” he said. “I like your pluck. No partner. No backup. Even though I am not the man you think I am, still—very impressive.”
She had reached the car and she turned and put her hand on the latch. He stepped to the bottom step and stopped there. Standing in his sockfeet with his hands in his jean pockets, watching her. Then he said in a voice she almost didn’t hear over the dogs, “What made you think I wouldn’t just grab you and take you into this house, hey? If I was that man—what made you think I wouldn’t do that?”
“Because you’d figure I didn’t come out here without my father’s gun.”
He looked at the sky and laughed. And looked at her again. “You think I’m afraid of a little girl and her daddy’s gun?”
She opened the door and stood behind it, watching him.
“Want to know what I think?” he said. He took the last step down and she slipped her left hand into the pocket and took the gun into her grip. She knew that behind the curtains and behind the barking dogs someone was watching, and she knew he knew it too.
He stopped and stood as before with his hands in his pockets. Watching her. “I think you wanted me to grab you and throw you in that house,” he said. “I think that’s what you come out here for, even if you didn’t know it yourself. What do you think about that, Little Deputy?”