“I don’t think about it,” she said. “And I never will.” Then she got into the car and started the engine and put the car into gear and drove away.
68
SHE KNEW HE was coming, he’d called her first, but even so the sight of the truck pulling into the drive made her heart rise, made it fly—until she saw the officer, the sheriff’s deputy, get out of the truck, just him, and her heart fell once again, and fell too far for such a brief rise of hope.
The sheriff pulled in behind the truck and got out of his cruiser and it was like that day ten years ago when Tom Sutter and the other deputy, Moran, had come to talk to her about Danny. A different truck then. Different case. Or the same case, really, just a new branch of it now, set in motion somehow by those two girls going into the river. The same river too, and Moran the bridge that connected Holly Burke’s death to Danny’s disappearance.
This time the sheriff’s deputy stayed behind, leaning on the cruiser and checking his phone as Sheriff Halsey came up the drive alone.
Rachel slipped into her shoes and went out to meet him in her sweater. The snow was melting and there was the smell of the earth again, of farmland and wet trees, and there were the high, giddy cries of loons in flight, and all of it terrible. Because when a son had gone missing in the hardness of winter you did not want to see the vanishing snow, or the bright shoots of the tulips, or the tender new grass, or the river flowing again from bridge to bridge without its thick shell of ice.
She came down the porchsteps and the sheriff came forward and tipped his hat and said Morning, Mrs. Young, and she said Good morning, Sheriff.
He glanced back at the truck. “Is that all right there?”
“That’s fine. We can move it if we need to.”
“Here’s the keys. Everything else is inside the cab just like we found it.”
She took the keys and held them in her fist. “Thank you, Sheriff. It’ll just sit here, like you said.”
“I appreciate that,” he said. “The deputy and I can unload it if you want.”
“No, that’s all right.”
“It’s no bother.”
“I’ll have Marky do it after work.”
He nodded. He looked up at the house and perhaps the sky beyond it. She thought he would say something about the weather, the beautiful day, but he didn’t.
She stood waiting. Holding the keys in her fist.
The sheriff cleared his throat. “We haven’t forgotten about him,” he said, and clarified: “Your son. His picture is out in four states, and between that and the posters, well. He’s a top priority, Mrs. Young. We’ll follow any lead that comes in.”
She looked him in the eye. “And Moran?”
“Sitting in that jail, ma’am, and not going anywhere. I’ve had three more girls—women—come forward with their stories. All pretty much the same as Katie Goss’s.”
“I read about that,” she said.
“And the judge read Danny’s letter, too,” he said. “Whether or not it influenced his decision to deny bail, I can’t say, but the result is the same, which is Moran sitting in that jail until trial.”
“But that doesn’t get you any closer to finding my son, does it.”
“No, ma’am, it doesn’t. I’ve got nothing to connect Moran to your son’s disappearance except that letter, and that doesn’t help us find him.”
“And that bullet hole?”
The sheriff glanced at the truck. “Well, like I said on the phone, we couldn’t find a match with Moran, so we’re continuing to run down local registrations, but that’s a lot of rifles and a lot of”—he hesitated—“innocent citizens.”
He’d been about to say dead ends, she knew.
“And it wasn’t Gordon Burke’s,” she said.
“No, ma’am. Not even the right caliber. Far as I know, the only vehicle that rifle ever shot was Moran’s.”
She nodded. She didn’t know what else there was to say. To ask. She would have to sit and wait. Get through each day. Each hour. As she’d been doing since the day he didn’t call.
The sheriff glanced back at his deputy, and the deputy put away his phone and opened the door of the cruiser.
But the sheriff didn’t go. He stood looking down at the gravel, or his boots.
“There’s just one more thing,” he said, and looked up again.
Rachel waited.
“I thought maybe you could shed a little light on something for me,” he said.
“All right.”
“I asked your son about it—I asked Marky—but he didn’t seem to understand what I was asking.”
“What did you ask?”
“I asked him why he put Moran’s cruiser up on the lift like he did. Did you know about that?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Well, he did. He was supposed to just fix the light, but then he got it up on the lift and found a leak in the pan.”
“So?”
“Oh, it’s nothing he did wrong.” The sheriff scratched at his forehead, lifting the hatbrim, dropping it again. “It’s just the thing is, if he hadn’t’ve done that, Moran would’ve been on his way to Iowa, and he might not be sitting on his ass in my jail right now.”
Rachel watched him. The sheriff watching her.
“I’m not sure I understand the question, Sheriff,” she said, and he waved his hand and said, “Well. I’m not sure I do either. I just thought maybe he’d said something to you about it, that’s all.”
Rachel shook her head. “I’m sorry, Sheriff.”
“All right then,” he said, and glanced toward his deputy. “We’d best be on our way. You have my number.”
“I have your number.”
He tipped his hat again like some old cowboy and turned and went back down the drive toward the cruiser, his boots crunching in the gravel.
When they were gone she went to the passenger side of the truck and opened the door—not glancing toward the rear tire, not seeing what was there in the otherwise-clean blue fender—and she stood looking in at the duffels, the cardboard box, the kits of tools all packed away, but not packed as he’d have done it himself. They’d searched through everything, of course, as they’d once searched his room, and this time they’d put it all back together again as best they could but it was not as he’d done it himself; it was not his work she was looking at but only his things, and before she could think too much about that she shut the door again and went back into the house to make the tea she’d been about to make when she’d seen her son’s truck pull into the drive, and a few minutes later she carried the mug up the creaking stairs and there was no dog to follow her or to carry in her arms, or to follow her into his room, wagging his old tail expectantly, as if this time he would be there, surely this time…
The bed gave a squeak when she sat on it. Same little bed the four of them had sat on one night playing cards—the five of them: she and the boys and Katie Goss and Wyatt. Danny and Katie laughing and teasing and so young.
She sat looking around the room: his desk, the bookshelves. His hockey stick and skates in the corner. The bare plaster walls. The window. After a while she got up and set her mug on the desk and went to the window and lifted—and lifted harder until the frame abruptly raised and the sash weights knocked and rang in the wall like dull bells. She’d never gotten the storm windows up in this room and it must’ve been so cold at night, the few winter nights he’d slept here.
She stood leaning on the sill and breathing in the spring and looking down on the backyard, yellow and green with the thaw. The old clothesline post and the brown patch of earth there. Her boys running around the yard and swinging from the clothesline until it had gone crooked and Grammy Olsen asking, What the heck happened to my clothesline post? and Rachel shrugging and saying, I don’t know, Grammy, maybe it was the wind.