Timothy Johnston - The Current

Radner turned to look too, to see what she was staring at, and turned back. “What are you looking for?”

“Something you took from me.”

“For instance?”

“My cap. My black knit cap. I’d like it back.”

Dark eyebrows rose into a rumpling forehead. “You really are crazy, aren’t you.”

She waited.

He shook his head again. “A,” he said, “what would I want with your stupid cap? And B, even if I took it, do you think I’d be dumb enough to keep it?”

She said nothing, watching him. Trying once more to match this face to her memory of hands—of fingers so hard and strong as they snatched the cap from her head. As they jerked the backscratcher from her grip. As they pinned her arm against the wall. As they covered her mouth with a stink and taste that made her want to gag even now.

Radner grinned and opened the stormdoor. “Well, come on in and look for it then,” he said, and she stood looking in at the shabby, dark furnishings. A boxy old TV throwing its light on a patch of stained brown carpeting. The smell coming out of there was just awful, and she turned her face from it. There sat the two-tone truck, and it had the look of him too—dirty, run-down, mean. Like it was just waiting for the chance to do harm.

“Your daddy already searched the truck,” he said. “Him and the real sheriff. But you go ahead. Check it out. It ain’t locked.”

And that voice—she should know that voice, at least. See there, Bud? We’re all gonna be friends here .

But she didn’t. She didn’t. And the more she looked at him, and the more he talked, the less certain she became. Or the less clear her memories became, and she felt once again, as she had when Moran showed her the pictures, that she was in danger of losing her memories altogether—not just of that moment, of his hands on her, but all the moments after too: Caroline with her pepper spray, her fierceness. The pounding of their hearts as they ran for the car. The moment on the riverbank, that pause before the other car came, Caroline’s laugh. The strength of her hand as you dropped toward the ice. Your spinning hearts. The look on her face when you heard that first crack, that deep pop in the floor of the world. The light under the water and Caroline in the light, swimming so hard to come back, swimming so beautifully… And the other girls too, Holly Burke and the others, with their hair like seagrass in the current. All this was real. All this had happened and she must protect it at the cost of everything else—at the cost of certainty, even, so Caroline’s parents would see it, so they would know it when they looked in her eyes.

The dogs had not stopped barking and now they seemed inside her head, of her head’s own making, and each bark lingered and replayed over those that followed in a ringing continuum, on and on. “I’m sorry to bother you,” she said, or tried to say, and began to backstep down the wobbling steps.

“It’s no bother, honey,” he said. He’d seen the change in her, her failure to recognize, to know, and now he stepped out onto the highest step just as she stepped from the lowest. “I wasn’t kidding about coming in. I got some beers in the fridge. How about that? We can just bury the ol’ hatchet, as they say. I figure it’s the least you can do after your old man shot me and got me fired and pretty much ruined my life. What do you say?”

She kept backstepping, toward the car. The gun riding solid and heavy in the pocket at her thigh. Radner looking down on her from the top step. He took a step down and let the stormdoor slap shut behind him.

“I gotta say I like how you come out here by yourself,” he said. “I like your pluck. No partner. No backup. Even though I am not the man you think I am, still—very impressive.”

She had reached the car and she turned and put her hand on the latch. He stepped to the bottom step and stopped there. Standing in his sockfeet with his hands in his jean pockets, watching her. Then he said in a voice she almost didn’t hear over the dogs, “What made you think I wouldn’t just grab you and take you into this house, hey? If I was that man—what made you think I wouldn’t do that?”

“Because you’d figure I didn’t come out here without my father’s gun.”

He looked at the sky and laughed. And looked at her again. “You think I’m afraid of a little girl and her daddy’s gun?”

She opened the door and stood behind it, watching him.

“Want to know what I think?” he said. He took the last step down and she slipped her left hand into the pocket and took the gun into her grip. She knew that behind the curtains and behind the barking dogs someone was watching, and she knew he knew it too.

He stopped and stood as before with his hands in his pockets. Watching her. “I think you wanted me to grab you and throw you in that house,” he said. “I think that’s what you come out here for, even if you didn’t know it yourself. What do you think about that, Little Deputy?”

“I don’t think about it,” she said. “And I never will.” Then she got into the car and started the engine and put the car into gear and drove away.

SHE KNEW HE was coming, he’d called her first, but even so the sight of the truck pulling into the drive made her heart rise, made it fly—until she saw the officer, the sheriff’s deputy, get out of the truck, just him, and her heart fell once again, and fell too far for such a brief rise of hope.

The sheriff pulled in behind the truck and got out of his cruiser and it was like that day ten years ago when Tom Sutter and the other deputy, Moran, had come to talk to her about Danny. A different truck then. Different case. Or the same case, really, just a new branch of it now, set in motion somehow by those two girls going into the river. The same river too, and Moran the bridge that connected Holly Burke’s death to Danny’s disappearance.

This time the sheriff’s deputy stayed behind, leaning on the cruiser and checking his phone as Sheriff Halsey came up the drive alone.

Rachel slipped into her shoes and went out to meet him in her sweater. The snow was melting and there was the smell of the earth again, of farmland and wet trees, and there were the high, giddy cries of loons in flight, and all of it terrible. Because when a son had gone missing in the hardness of winter you did not want to see the vanishing snow, or the bright shoots of the tulips, or the tender new grass, or the river flowing again from bridge to bridge without its thick shell of ice.

She came down the porchsteps and the sheriff came forward and tipped his hat and said Morning, Mrs. Young, and she said Good morning, Sheriff.

He glanced back at the truck. “Is that all right there?”

“That’s fine. We can move it if we need to.”

“Here’s the keys. Everything else is inside the cab just like we found it.”

She took the keys and held them in her fist. “Thank you, Sheriff. It’ll just sit here, like you said.”

“I appreciate that,” he said. “The deputy and I can unload it if you want.”

“No, that’s all right.”

“It’s no bother.”

“I’ll have Marky do it after work.”

He nodded. He looked up at the house and perhaps the sky beyond it. She thought he would say something about the weather, the beautiful day, but he didn’t.

She stood waiting. Holding the keys in her fist.

The sheriff cleared his throat. “We haven’t forgotten about him,” he said, and clarified: “Your son. His picture is out in four states, and between that and the posters, well. He’s a top priority, Mrs. Young. We’ll follow any lead that comes in.”

She looked him in the eye. “And Moran?”

“Sitting in that jail, ma’am, and not going anywhere. I’ve had three more girls—women—come forward with their stories. All pretty much the same as Katie Goss’s.”