Jonah crept the truck down the street and eased past a crowd of cars parked outside the rectory. State police cruisers; six TV vans. Six times the number of TV vans than twenty-five years ago. Where did they all come from? Maybe it had to do with what the cashier had said about online and the internet.
Jonah spotted Lucinda speaking with the sheriff. Jonah had forgotten she was, technically, a part-time deputy, a position she’d inherited against her will, or so she’d confided in Jonah when she’d first been a write-in candidate. She could have refused the post but hadn’t. A glorified crossing guard, she’d claimed. Whatever happens around here that a deputy is really needed anyway? she’d let slip, her face reddening with mortification as she’d apologized to Jonah for her stupidity. I didn’t mean— she’d said. Of course there are times. Jonah had told her not to fret. If anyone had been affected more deeply by Sally disappearing than Jonah, it was Lucinda. Young people, it was claimed, weathered trauma better than adults because their minds are more malleable and they lack perspective to know the severity and permanence of a situation. But Jonah had witnessed Lucinda’s devastation and bewilderment when she’d finally understood her friend was likely never coming back. Her scars were deep and did not know the bounds of time, despite the good face she put on it now as a young woman. Anger bit into him at the thought of Lucinda sending him from the Grain & Feed.
As Jonah drove the truck slowly by the crowd, no one paid him any mind.
The girl moved to sit up on his truck seat. Jonah put his hand on her head. Her scalp was dry and crusted. Scabbed. Lice. Thick with lice.
He pulled his hand away.
“Be still,” he said.
What are you doing? the voice said. Pull over. Drop her off.
What was he going to do, drop her off in front of reporters and cameras? The recluse suspected of murdering his wife and child twenty-five years ago? Was he just going to open the truck door and say, Here she is, I found her. A girl they believed had been abducted.
He couldn’t.
You have to, the voice said.
Jonah drove past, thinking. His jaw hurt, his mind hurt. What to do, what to do, what to do? He considered dropping her off somewhere safe yet private, without being seen. But what if she could speak and she described him to law enforcement. That was worse, surely.
Even if he gave her back safely and he was cleared of wrongdoing, he could not return her to those “parents,” to a system that had failed her and would fail her again and again. He knew that system. He knew it.
At the Grain & Feed he turned the truck around and started back the way he’d come.
He drove past the crowd and caught a look at a couple engaged with the sheriff. The scabby little man stabbed a finger at the sheriff’s face. The woman shrieked at the sheriff, face distorted.
With one glance, Jonah knew the man and woman were the girl’s foster parents, knew what they were capable of doing, and why the girl had been in the woods.
End it here. Now, the voice said. Drop her off, explain the facts. The truth.
The truth. How had that served him in his past life?
If she had been lost to good parents, he’d pull over now, speculation and persecution be damned. He’d be ecstatic to give her back to parents with whom he shared a miserable bond of a child missing.
But to give her back to these people. To this system.
The woman and man barked and howled at the sheriff, spittle flew from their mouths.
Jonah pulled the blanket farther up over the girl and drove back through town, past his old house toward the covered bridge.
The girl jolted awake, sat up, rubbed her eyes with balled fists before Jonah could get a hand on her. She stared past him out his side window.
“Home,” she said, her voice soft as bird down.
“You want to go home?” Jonah said.
You’re mad, a voice said. Take her back to the cabin and it will be the end of you.
The voice was right. There would be no explaining it, despite how reasonable the argument he made to himself. Once he took her back up to the cabin, he destroyed any legal defense for himself. But this was not about doing what was legal.
This was right. For her.
For you, you mean.
They would not stay at the cabin. They would go back so he could regroup, figure out what to do next, where to go next.
“Home,” she said.
“Lie back down,” he said. “Rest.”
She looked out his window.
“You want to go back?” he said. “To your foster parents?”
She shook her head furiously. No.
“You want to be with me?” he said.
Whatever her answer he’d abide.
She nodded. “Home,” she said.
“Okay,” he said.
And he knew then that upon buying the crayons he’d never intended to give her back.