Timothy Johnston - The Current

The sheriff watched her. Taking her in as if he’d not seen her in a long time. Then he opened a drawer to his right and pulled something out and placed it on the blotter and slid it across to her and sat back again. After a moment she reached for it and collected it and held it under her hand on her lap. It was her father’s little black notebook.

“Thank you,” she said.

“I see you got your cast off.”

“Yes, sir.”

He picked up his pen and tapped it once on each end and set it down again. “Do you want to see him?” he said, nodding toward the wall to his right.

She thought about that, about going back there again. She’d only been that one time when she was ten, maybe eleven—her father unlocking the metallic door and walking her down the narrow aisle between the empty cells. Stainless steel toilet bowls sitting out in the open. Little stainless steel sinks jammed into the corners. No mirrors. Bunks of bolted steel and thin, scuzzy-looking mattresses. Concrete everything—floor, walls, ceiling.

That’s it , he said. That’s all there is .

Thick stink of dog kennel back there, if dogs smelled also of barf and cigarettes and feet and underarms.

Any questions?

Who feeds them?

Who feeds them? The county feeds them. Three times a day .

I mean who brings it to them .

I do. Or one of the deputies .

She tried to see that, her father bringing food to some filthy, stinking man in a cage. Did they speak? Hey, Sheriff. Hey, prisoner .

He’d stood behind her, silent, as she took the bars in her fists. Cold. Scaly, like the bars on an old jungle gym. After she let go and stepped back again he said, Ready, Deputy?

Ready, Sheriff .

OK, let’s wash those hands and hit that pizza .

To Halsey she now said, “No, sir. I don’t need to see that,” and the sheriff nodded.

“I expect you’ll see plenty of him at the trial.”

“I expect so.”

He sat studying her. “It won’t be any picnic,” he said. “His lawyer won’t take it easy on you. Just the opposite. But I guess Ms. Kelley has already told you that.”

“Yes, she has.” Like Mr. Trevor, the county attorney wanted Audrey to call her by her first name— Deirdre —but Audrey couldn’t do it. She didn’t want to be the woman’s pal; she wanted to be her witness.

“And I guess you know you won’t be alone either,” said Halsey.

She looked at him.

“The other women,” he said. “Three of them now, not even counting Katie Goss.”

Audrey nodded. She looked beyond him, to the big county map. So many roads. So many young women driving them.

She looked at the black notebook in her lap. How far back did it go? Would she find Holly Burke’s name there? Katie Goss’s? Danny Young’s?

She looked up and Halsey was watching her.

“I guess you’d tell me if you’d found him yet,” she said.

It took him a moment. “I’d tell you,” he said.

She was silent. Then she said, “Do you think he’s still alive?” and the sheriff frowned, and nodded.

“Yes, I do.”

Audrey nodded too, although she knew he had to say it—had to think it, even. That it was his job to think it until he had proof otherwise.

She looked down again at the notebook. “Sheriff,” she said. Turning the notebook in her hands, rubbing her thumbs over the worn, leathery surface. “Sheriff—do you regret it?”

“Regret what?”

“Letting him go down to Iowa like that. Moran. Back then.”

She looked up and he held her eyes. Finally he picked up his pen again and stood it on its tip, as if about to write something on the desk blotter. It was a plain blue Bic, the kind she’d used for school all her life. The kind she’d once loaned to Caroline Price.

“Do I regret it?” said Halsey. “As a man, as a human being, yes, I regret it. But would I have done anything differently?” He frowned again. He shook his head. “We got him out of our county. Out of our state. We knew it was the best deal we were gonna get.”

He set down the pen and put his hands together.

“And down there in Iowa?” he said. “It’s like I told you before: the man did his job. If he was doing any of that other business, pulling girls over… well, we never heard one peep about it up here.”

Audrey nodded again. She wiped her cheeks with her fingertips. “OK,” she said. And sat there. Halsey watching her.

“Your dad never knew the whole story, Audrey. Remember that. He never knew about Moran and Holly Burke, or any other girls. All he knew was one story he couldn’t prove, and so he did what he thought was the best he could do, given what he didn’t know. And still it dogged him. I know it did.” He looked down again and shook his head. “I remember the day we heard he was running for sheriff down there—Moran. I remember the day we heard he’d been elected. Your dad and me, everyone here… none of us said a word. It was like… Hell, I don’t know what it was like. We just got on with it. We got back to work.”

She looked up again and she saw something more of his eyes, or in them, than she’d seen before. Like stepping through that gray metallic door for the first time.

“I can’t even imagine what it was like for your dad,” he said, “seeing Moran—Sheriff Moran—standing in your hospital room like that, asking you questions.”

She held his eyes. He’d joined the department after Moran and the other deputies, Halsey had, her father’s youngest, greenest deputy, and he’d never known how to talk to her, how to even be around her. This big young man with no idea about children, about little girls. His technique was to pretend he didn’t see you.

In the silence she heard her father’s watch ticking on her wrist—felt it—before she remembered she wasn’t even wearing it; it was at the jeweler’s—an old man with shaky hands who said it probably wasn’t worth the cost of fixing it. It was, she told him.

“Do you think,” she now said, and hesitated. “Do you think he would’ve gone down there like that, to Iowa, and shot that boy in the hand if it had been anyone other than Moran in that hospital room?”

The sheriff looked at her for a long while.

“I’d have to call that a damned interesting question, Audrey. I’d have to call that altogether worth considering.” He gave her a smile then, and pushed up from the chair, and Audrey stood too.

“You let me know your whereabouts,” he said, coming around the desk, “you go back down south or wherever. I want to know you’re OK out there. All right?”

“All right. Thank you, Sheriff.”

“Don’t thank me.” He opened the door. “Go on, now. I’ll see you when you get back here.”

“You will?”

“Of course I will—in court. Every day. You just look at me if you need to, and I’ll be there. All right?”

She nodded. She was about to thank him again but caught herself. She wanted to put her arms around him, just once, just quickly, but she knew it would embarrass him, alarm him even, this man with no children, no daughter of his own, and finally she just turned and walked away.

SHE WAS WEARING the aviators when she drove into town and she saw the town as he’d seen it himself through those lenses: the wide lanes of Main Street with the cars and trucks all parked at angles to the curb, the glass-and-brick storefronts, the Iowa sun flashing in the windows. But there was no snow in the streets now, and the smell that blew into the car’s open window was the smell of the earth and the trees and the sky, and even of the sun itself.

Her father had not written the name down in the little black notebook, or if he had he’d ripped it out and destroyed it. She might’ve asked Halsey and she might’ve asked the lawyer, Trevor, but both would’ve asked why she wanted to know. And what would she say?