“Kent, the kid was taken by his mother,” I said. My cheek was growing hot against my cell phone. “Right? We’ve got the nanny, babysitter, whatever—spotted by the neighbors taking the kid out in her car, early. We’ve got the nanny and kid witnessed at the park. And then, poof. The woman’s dead in the broken-down ladies’ john, the kid’s gone, and the mother can’t be found.”
“The mother—yeah, I didn’t think that through, did I? Maybe she didn’t do it.” We both listened to that false tenor of his voice. “OK, I can send someone else. But you’re literally down the block. You’d be saving your nation some serious travel expenses.”
“I was thinking about charging my nation double this time,” I said. “Anything that reminds me too much of home, I charge at least time and a half.”
He laughed, but we’d both heard it. Home. I couldn’t think what to say next.
He cleared his throat. “Was there anything you wanted to know?”
I didn’t think he meant about the dead babysitter. Some things, it was better not to know. “How did she die?” I said instead.
“Badly,” he said. I could hear the grim set of his mouth. He was worried about me, or maybe it had nothing to do with me at all. “Something heavy to the back of the head—”
“Got it. Sorry I asked. Did you know Keller lied about having the note so he could try me out first? Friend of yours?”
“A little puffed up, but he’s all right—good guy, really. Just heard from him,” Kent said. “He’s got the note in hand and a few other things for you to look at. I could look into sending someone else . . .”
“I’m fine,” I said. “I have an appointment at Joshua’s school later but I can go do this early, get it over with.” I heard the words I had used and cringed. “Not that I don’t appreciate all the work.”
“There’s another package coming from me,” he said. “Human resources.”
“My favorite.” In fact, I liked the hiring cases that came through Kent less than I liked the little letters and notes people sent me from all over the country in response to a few well-placed ads of my own. My lonelyhearts. Given my preferences, I would never have to take Kent’s subcontracts or talk, really, to anyone else ever again. But a few love letters sent from prison to analyze was no way to keep a roof over our heads.
“I knew you’d be excited. Did you see that article in the Wall Street Journal about so-called smart pens saving the art of penmanship?” he said. “Published online, with no irony whatsoever.”
“I hardly go online at all,” I said. “But I’m glad someone is saving handwriting, or we’ll be out of business.” I calculated our age difference again. He’d retire in a few years, and then what would I do? Joshua still needed to go to college. All those forms asking for information, social security numbers, phone numbers. Addresses where you could expect to be for a little while. In a few years, our life would need a solidity it didn’t have just now.
I had met Kent in a university classroom. I was supposed to be cleaning it, and he had just spoken to the students there. I had listened from outside the door, rocking my sleeping newborn against my chest. Up until then, I’d been taking community center handwriting classes for fun. After the class, I let the students and then the visitor and the professor, deep in conversation, walk by and then carried Joshua in his car seat into the room. There were always so many coffee shop cups left behind. At the lectern, I found a lovely leather notebook filled with a geometric script. I was paging through it when the professor cleared his throat at the door. Kent introduced himself, eyeing the sleeping baby. “What did you see?” he said as I handed him the notebook. “Am I a serial killer?”
The professor had laughed, but then his face drew still as I told the visitor what I thought of his script: self-conscious, high-minded, literal, a little too process driven.
“High-minded?” Kent had said, grinning. “Am I really? I think you might be right.” And he had handed me one of his cards.
Now Kent said, “You OK? Seriously, Anna, I didn’t even think—”
I had taken a deep breath to calm myself, but he probably thought I was still thinking about the back of the babysitter’s head. I was glad I hadn’t heard about it while still in the sheriff’s office. “It’s fine,” I said. “Really. And send me as much human resources or whatever else as you want. I’m grateful for everything you—”
“Going to stop you there,” he said. “Get down to see Keller again today, and that will be all the thanks I need.”
All the thanks, but I never got to say them. In this way I was reminded that we weren’t friends. One of us had been a drowning person, and the other, a life raft. I was on land for the moment, and he probably only hoped he wouldn’t have to rescue me again. “I’ll go today,” I said. Not love, not friendship, in some ways not even gratitude on my part. It was relief, pure and deep relief that I might never need anyone’s help as much as I already had.
KELLER’S RECEPTIONIST SAT at her desk, listening to the local talk-radio station at a low volume. When I opened the door, she snapped the dial down and smiled with a recognition I didn’t think warranted. Keller had been mouthing off about me, I figured. “Hey,” she said, drawing out the word. “I’m Sherry.”
I waited for the punchline. Sherry and the sheriff? It was a bad ’70s sitcom, set in a diner with a laugh track and the same cop/doughnut joke in every script.
The woman was just as bright as the sticky note she’d left the day before, just as blond and ponytailed and open-faced as the dot over that i had promised. More than that, I could sense that she was sticky, too—curious, wheedling.
I didn’t have the patience, not after my repeat trip through the cattle chute of security downstairs. I hadn’t brought my laptop on purpose this time, hoping it would speed things up. But a gum-chomping uniformed woman with a nametag that read Deputy Tara Lombardi, a woman hardly older than Joshua with a pixie face and spiky black hair, had taken a long look through everything in my purse, including my Illinois driver’s license. Who would leave Chicago for this place? she had said with sneer.
I had the same feeling now, in front of this receptionist’s too-familiar smile, as I had with my purse opened to its guts on the table. “The sheriff left a packet for me,” I said, all business.
“Oh, sure, let me get it.” She pushed herself from her desk and hurried to the back.
Aidan’s missing-child poster had been tacked to the wall over the woman’s workspace. The same fluffy-headed photo from all over town. Below it, nearly hidden from public view, was a coloring-book page scratched with red and blue, with a few distended letters in green in the corner. Mommy, it read in unpracticed lines and a simple squat pumpkin of a circle. The child’s handwriting telegraphed nothing except that he drew his o’s clockwise.
Sherry returned carrying a large flat manila envelope. “I had to dig up his desk to find it,” she said. “That man, I swear.”