Timothy Johnston - The Current

“It may be less than a year by law, Sheriff, but it’s still ten years that I didn’t say a word.”

Halsey nodded. He looked around the apartment again. The little girl just out of view.

“I’ll say one last thing, ma’am, and then I’ll be on my way.”

She waited.

“If a man commits a certain kind of crime,” he said, “if he commits a certain kind of offense that is motivated by his sexual impulses, and he gets away with it, then he doesn’t just quit. He doesn’t just call it a day and become an upstanding, law-abiding citizen thereafter. That same impulse—”

Katie Goss raised a hand to stop him, then lowered it again. “I’m familiar with the argument, Sheriff. I just wish you’d made it to some other girl a long time ago.”

“Yes, ma’am. So do I.”

He collected his hat from the empty chair and began to get up.

“Which degree?” she said.

“Ma’am?”

“Which degree would he be charged with?”

He sat down again. “Well, that would depend on a number of things.”

“I know what it would depend on. It wasn’t just contact, Sheriff,” she said, citing the distinction.

And to spare her saying the other word aloud, in her own kitchen— penetration —he said, “I understand that, Miss Goss. It would also depend on whether or not he was armed with a deadly weapon.”

“He was. But he never pulled it. He never threatened me with it.”

Halsey nodded. She’d read the codes carefully. “Then how did you know he was armed?” he said.

“Because he was wearing it on his belt.”

“In plain sight.”

“Yes.”

Halsey opened up his hands again. “If that doesn’t constitute fear of bodily harm I don’t know what does. So there’s three of the conditions for first-degree right there. And that’s just the one statute. Any prosecutor worth their salt would also make the case for criminal sexual predatory conduct, which could tack on another twenty-five percent of jail time.”

“If he goes to jail.”

“If he goes to jail, yes, ma’am.”

“Mommy?” They both looked over. The little girl had come around the pony wall and stood holding a plastic Appaloosa by its hind legs.

“Yes, baby?”

“I’m hungry.”

“All right, we’re gonna eat in just one minute.”

“I believe that’s my cue,” said Halsey, getting to his feet. “Miss Goss, I’ve said what I came to say. I appreciate you hearing me out.”

She rose too and walked him to the door. She opened the door and he stepped out and put his hat on and tipped it to her in farewell and turned to go.

“Sheriff,” she said, and he turned back. The little girl had come to stand next to her again, to watch him go. To make sure he went, maybe.

“Yes, ma’am?”

Katie Goss held his eyes. “Aren’t you supposed to give me your card? In case I want to get ahold of you?”

Halsey hesitated—and stepped back to her. “Yes, ma’am. I’ve got one right here.”

THE WOOD HE’D brought her burned most of the night but in the morning the logs were down to their smoky bones, and she lay under the blankets watching them pulse in the drafts, the tossing thread of smoke, before sitting up finally and pushing the blankets off. She hurt just everywhere. It was hard to swallow and when she did she tasted the river.

Weak light of dawn in the windows. Her wet clothes, her boots, her father’s jacket, lay on the floor like a scene from some frantic disrobing, which it was—her hands almost too numb to make the fire, to flick the flintwheel, her body spasming, and she should go upstairs and take a hot shower but she didn’t want water on her skin, she wanted the fire and the blankets, and finally the flame took and the kindling crackled and the firewood burned bright and hot as she lay shaking under the blankets—she remembered all of that.

And she remembered Moran, fighting him on the river… and going under the ice. Drifting, pulled along in the current, the wobbling moon following overhead. The feel of the underside of the ice. The girls of the river. Caroline… But how had she gotten home?

Then she remembered the birds—two ducks, drake and hen, crying and beating their wings in panic and dragging tails of light behind them, pieces of light falling back to earth as the dark shapes climbed the sky.

But before that… Before that there’d been a different kind of light—not the light of the moon but a yellow light trembling like a thin cloth, like silk—and the light was stuck, the yellow light wasn’t moving and she was going toward it, her fingers tracing the ice, but when she reached the yellow light her fingers fell through it, tearing it, and she followed her fingers, her arms, up into the light and she broke through it and suddenly she was above the ice again, sucking in the air and watching the two ducks rise into the sky.

She was in a kind of pool, in the woods, and the yellow light came from a single streetlamp beyond the water, and there was a straight, smooth edge that lay across the water. Then, over her own sounds, her splashing and gasping, she heard the hissing sound of the water spilling over the straight edge—it was a dam, but not the one she knew, not the one she’d fished at with her father—and she knew by that sound that she must swim or else be carried over the dam herself: over it and down into churning water, into the undertow, and from there under the ice again.

And so she swam. In the wet heavy jacket and the boots like concrete she swam for the bank, splashing and kicking, until her fingers clawed at silt and her knees banged against stones and she was climbing up out of the water and heaving herself ashore like a great fish, retching river water from her guts, from her lungs, so much water! And she lay there inhaling the smell of frozen mud, the smell of the woods and even the animals in the woods… But get up, get up now Audrey or freeze … and she’d gotten slowly to her feet, and it was then the other light came, the bright twin beams that could only be headlights, and she thought, first, her heart failing: Moran . Moran had come to see if she’d washed up here.

But it was two headlights, and Moran only had the one.

She raised a hand, but the lights were backing away—they swung away and the car was turning around. It showed her its taillights and off it went down the unplowed road. It was no car she knew and it was leaving her. She tried to call out but her throat was frozen, or raw from retching, and the sound that came out was not even human. What had the driver seen? What kind of drowned, white-faced thing had come up out of the water before him in this remote place, in this yellow gloom? She hung her head to look at herself, and ropes of hair swayed and clicked like beads against her face.

When she looked up again the taillights were still there. The car had stopped. A white fog chugging from its tailpipe. Then: reverse lights. The car backing, returning! Brake lights. A door swinging open and a woman shuffling toward her in winter boots—Oh my God, are you all right? Not a woman but a girl, sixteen maybe, and a boy coming up behind her at his own pace, wary, not yet convinced that this thing before him wasn’t what he’d first thought: a dead girl or her ghost, risen from the water.

The other girl turning now to the boy and saying, Should we call 911?

No, Audrey answered, coughing. I’m all right.

Into the car with her then, into the back seat, but not before the boy spread the blanket out to keep her from soaking the fabric. Audrey pulling the blanket up around her shoulders, thick woolen emergency blanket that still held their warmth, their smells in its dusty fibers—deodorant and perfume, and deeper scents she didn’t want to know about.