I had the feeling the author was taking care to be clear—legible as well as firm in the message itself. I spent a long time on each curve, on the spaces between words.
Tearing myself away was like rising out of water. I looked around me, stretched. The sheriff hadn’t returned. No one had come through the door. I pulled a notebook and pen from my purse.
About the first two samples, I knew what I had to say. I smoothed the paper and bent to the task, but the words wouldn’t come. At last I had to admit that I didn’t want them to. I pictured the sheriff coming back to a handwritten analysis, poring over my self-conscious script to find something to mock.
The librarian who’d taught me my first little bit of analysis had warned me. “It will mess up your own handwriting for a while,” he’d explained to that small group of curiosity seekers at the community center. Kentucky. Everyone there had a slow drawl that twisted words into new formations. “You’ll have to stop thinking about handwriting,” he had said, “just to get the check for the light bill written out.”
Aidan’s mom’s handwriting swam in front of my eyes. I hadn’t brought my laptop because of the lobby security, and now I couldn’t bring myself to leave behind anything handwritten. I would go home to type my report. It would take longer to be done with the project, but I still needed these precautions, these rituals. The sheriff would understand, or at least think he did.
I LEFT THE samples behind with Sherry, but thought about them as I left the courthouse and retrieved my truck from the square. Outside, the sky was still bright and inviting, one of those perfect fall days, maybe one of the last of its kind. When the turn came to return to the apartment, I drove on.
I meandered through the town, letting my hand dangle out the open window. At the end of town, real estate signs attached to fences enclosed fallow fields. They’d be a development of starter homes before too long. Parks was a nice place to start. Back in town, I found an enclave of older, nicer houses and turned in to shop them. Parks, it seemed, was a nice place to end up, too.
I drove back through town and out the other side, still restless. Passing over the highway, I slowed to watch the cars rushing along the ribbon of gray toward the horizon. On the other side of the interstate, I pulled into the parking lot for the Dairy Bar and sat with the key still in the ignition. This was the place in town I felt most at home. That was the embarrassing truth of the matter—more at home at the local ice cream shop than even the place I lay my head at night. I’d worked at a place just like this, same name, back when I was a kid. It was the only explanation for why I’d let this little ice cream shed dictate where Joshua and I would land this time around.
We had left Chicago that morning early with no plan. Maybe Ohio again. Ohio was quiet, and far. But not Cincinnati. Smaller towns were better. I took a different direction there, too, dipping south into Indiana with the notion of swinging around Indianapolis and then east until we found something suitable.
Only a few hours into the drive, though, we were miserable, baked to the seats and battered by the highway wind coming through the windows. When a patch of roadside facilities presented itself, we stopped to fill the tank and stretch. Then I spotted the Dairy Bar sign. The same lettering for the neon sign and everything.
“They have the best burgers,” I said to Joshua through the window. “I used to work at the one back in Wisconsin.” I allowed an image to climb through the opening in my memory: my best friend, Theresa, leaning into the sliding window to order a malted milkshake big enough to ruin dinner and maybe breakfast the next day, too. Making faces at me as I worked. Theresa, once a real person, was now only a regret. When she came to mind, I stuffed her back down into the locked bin of my mind. A lot of people lived there, but wondering about Theresa only led to black thoughts and bad dreams. Theresa and my mother. “I had no idea these were a chain,” I said.
Joshua glared at the sign and back at me. He didn’t want a cheeseburger or a hot dog. He didn’t want anything, not even the chocolate malt I bought him. He wanted to be furious. He didn’t remember being mad about moving to Chicago, didn’t know that he would attach himself to the next place, too. And of course he didn’t understand why we’d had to leave in the first place, why we always had to leave. After I finished my burger, I drove us not back to the highway but into the town. At the courthouse square, I admired the white pillars and bought a paper at the little newsstand café.
Joshua hadn’t said more than a few words all morning, but he broke his silence when I returned to the truck and opened the paper to the ads. “You’re going to pick a town based on a crappy malt?” he said.
“I’m picking a town based on cheap rent,” I said. “And I think my friend Kent lives not too far away.”
He narrowed his eyes. “You don’t have any friends.”
“My colleague, then. The crappy malt is just a bonus.”
Not a bonus but a salvageable piece of my childhood, something I could keep, something I could return to, for crying out loud. What was the harm in that? One good memory—was it too much to ask?
Now I leaned into the sliding service window to order. The woman inside wore the familiar Dairy Bar–pink golf shirt, the logo over the breast. I could see through the store out the back door to another woman, much older and stooped, smoking a cigarette and wearing the same logo pink shirt. I had once owned that shirt, had once had the seventeen flavors of malted milkshakes memorized. On the hand-painted menu at my shoulder now, the flavor count appeared to be a little higher. Next to the menu, Aidan Ransey’s face peered out from one of his posters. I turned my back on him and watched the traffic.
I was sipping my milkshake at a picnic table when a county cop car pulled in next to my truck. The driver hopped out and headed for the window. I watched after him. I was starting to recognize a few of the faces from the courthouse lobby. Then the passenger door opened and the sheriff emerged.
“You on a stakeout?” he called. He wore sunglasses, his black ball cap pulled low over them. “Or shake out, I should say.”
I raised my cup in a toast, hoping he wouldn’t feel that he needed to be friendlier than that. He came over anyway.
“Did you get a chance to look at the ransom note?”
“The copy of the note,” I said. “I’ll do my best with the partial information I’ve received to get you a report this afternoon.”
“Why don’t you report right now?”
“Don’t want to keep you from your malted,” I said.
His eyebrows rose. He took off the glasses and hung them in the pocket of his shirt. “We’re here on county business.”
Free malteds, then. I made a noncommittal noise around my straw.