It had always bothered me. I was right that Leila had no reason to, but who had? “She had Aidan,” I said, prospecting.
“But Bea’s the grandmother. She could have gotten Aidan any number of ways, pretended he’d wandered off . . .”
We both sat with it for a minute.
“You’re trying to trick me into doing more business for you,” I said. “I told you—no more law enforcement, only drippy love notes and hopeful prison pen pals.”
“What’s wrong with working with the likes of me? I’m all right.” He took in the bag of ashes on the sill and looked away. “What mistake did you make? Are you talking about that guy who got himself killed in Chicago?”
“Not sure if we’d be talking about the same guy.”
He lifted his chin, nodded at the ceiling. “We are. Kent called. The only way I knew to get the whole of Vilas County looking for you was he had some crazy voicemail you left him.”
Kent. I owed him again. The whole county searching—
I remembered the sound of the trees’ song to me in the dark, imagined Ray and Mamie and Betty Spaghetti tramping through the woods, calling out my names. Well, at least I hadn’t been going insane. Even if I felt a little sad to have the trees’ song explained. The trees had guided me, kept me on my feet. If I didn’t want the strangeness explained away logically, how was that a fault? A little magic when I didn’t have any.
“Kent says to tell you that guy’s wife had him killed.”
“Because he—” Because he was impotent? Wait, no. It wasn’t the CEO who was sexually frustrated, but the author of the note. “Because she—”
“Because he was cheating on her with his assistant. Kent says you sent them the secretary. When she broke down under questioning, they went back to the wife, and then she broke. A real detective you’re turning into.” He looked me over. “Maybe just one more case before you’re retired?”
Tired being the part I felt most keenly. The tubes were gone, but I hadn’t regained an appetite or the will to get out of bed. There was talk of putting my IV back in if I didn’t start eating.
“One more investigation together,” he said. “I’ll spring you from this place for an hour or two.”
I blinked at him. “You can get me out?”
“I told them I had you under arrest.”
“Oh.” I glanced into the hallway. “I’ll never be able to almost die in this place again.”
“Your reputation is completely soiled. You might as well go.”
“My head,” I said.
“You’re doing fine.”
“Can’t walk.”
“You haven’t tried.”
Out the window, it was sunny, probably warm enough. I didn’t care where I was. “Steal a wheelchair,” I said.
He went to arrange for my release while I still agreed to it and I lay back, trying to avoid looking in the direction of the bag of ashes. I would have to do something with them, something more like kindness than I had felt toward my mother in a long time. My eyes fell on the evidence forms and traveled over the signatures again. The same markers, over and over—the same hand. I looked more closely, then picked up the top page and wiped it with my hand. The dust marks from the copier—they were still there. They hadn’t been dust. Here they were, on the originals, tiny taps of ink at the beginning of each signature as the author chose the identity he would use instead of his own.
I put the form back, gently, trying to let everything flooding my dizzy head take its turn.
Tap-tap. The hesitant hand of someone about to deceive.
All the notes and checks and receipts that had passed before me during the last few weeks—where had I seen that?
At last I located the blots of ink—dabs of indecision as someone either professed or denied a love, written in reluctance but later torn and burned and tossed into a dead girl’s trash.
I reached for the call button and pressed it frantically. Mullen’s second home, Russ had called it. Checking in on the Ranseys. Bea’s million-dollar ice cream stand. Mullen, signing my name to the form releasing my mother’s ashes.
“Get him back,” I said to the nurse who hurried into my room. “The sheriff. Get that man back now.”
Chapter Forty-four
Russ was quiet in the truck, his face gray.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Nothing for you to be sorry about,” he said.
Only that he’d had to arrest his best guy, his second-in-command. Only that he probably felt like a fool. There would be an investigation, of course, into the missing evidence, the chief deputy’s finances and relationship with the dead woman. We both expected Bea Ransey to throw Mullen in for Charity’s murder, and we were both fairly sure she wouldn’t be lying. Bea Ransey, after all, had been establishing an alibi. She never left Parks during the time Aidan went missing. She was on the TV, in the sheriff’s office, in the ice cream stand.
It was Mullen who had a little R&R scheduled that week, a trip cut short—and yet the sunburned hands of a man who might have driven all the way to northern Wisconsin and back that day. He was always at the Ransey house, Russ had said. Always at the Ransey house to keep an eye on the Ranseys, to find himself in the path of a cute young babysitter. By the time they met in the secluded Sugar Creek Park that morning, a neighbor spotting the cruiser “patrolling” the area, Charity had already decided on breaking things off. She left her bag at home and burned his letter. She brought along Aidan—as a guarantee, maybe, to keep things civilized. Maybe she had threatened to tell his wife, to spill everything she’d learned about the ice cream business from being in the Ransey home. But she didn’t know how much Mullen himself had to lose, how much stake he had in that ice cream shack. I remembered Bea saying how “things” had fallen together. Charity’s murder was the first domino, after all, and nabbing Aidan away from a custody battle had been secondary. A crime of convenience, a cherry on top.
Russ was keeping his own thinking to himself, so I kept quiet, too, going along with whatever happened now, waiting for someone to push me toward a next move. But when his truck turned off Railroad Street onto the access road and found without any problem the parking lot of Riverdale Convalescence Center, I reached for the door handle.
“You going to jump?”
“I can’t go in there,” I said. How had he figured out where my dad was? How had he figured out I had a dad and what did it matter to him, anyway?
“I’m not getting you a bed,” he said.
“No, I—I just can’t.”
“With all the victories you’ve claimed today? I think you’ve got it in you for one more.”
Two wheelchairs and their hunched occupants sat out front, a woman in scrubs standing nearby.
“I don’t want to.”
Russ got out and came around to my side. He brought the folded wheelchair out from the back of his truck, popped it open, and opened my door.
“It’s not a mystery,” I said. “I already know.”
“You can solve cases before they’re even presented to you?”