“Mrs. Blanchard?” the detective says.
“Yes.”
“Sorry for the late hour. May we come in?”
She lets them in. What else can she do? She feels herself growing colder and colder and pulls her robe more tightly around her. She begins to tremble. She finally brings herself to face them, flooded with shame. Adultery is a sin. And now everyone will know.
“We’d like to talk to your son, Ryan,” Bledsoe says. “Is he here?”
“What?” she asks. They’re not making sense. Why do they want to talk to Ryan?
“We need to talk to your son. Is he home?” Detective Bledsoe repeats.
“He’s in bed.”
“Can you get him up, please?”
She turns away from them and makes her way upstairs and opens the door to her son’s room, her mind all over the place. She’s thinking, Not again. She can’t face Ryan getting into trouble for drugs again. She flicks on the light. He doesn’t respond. She moves over to the bed and shakes him by the shoulder and says urgently, “Ryan, the police are here. They want to talk to you.”
He looks up at her groggily. “What? Why?”
“I don’t know.”
On the landing, Al appears at their bedroom door. “What’s going on?” he asks, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.
Nora says, “The police are here. They want to talk to Ryan.” She sees the immediate concern on her husband’s face.
Her husband grabs a robe and the three of them go downstairs. Nora keeps her eyes on her son, in T-shirt and pajama bottoms, his hair sticking up at odd angles. But what she notes most is how worried he looks when he sees the detectives standing in the downstairs hall.
“Let’s go into the living room,” Nora suggests, functioning on automatic pilot, something awful in the pit of her stomach. None of this feels real. She can’t do this. Not again.
They all sit down and face one another.
Detective Bledsoe says, “Ryan, do you mind telling us where you were Tuesday afternoon?”
Nora’s simmering anxiety escalates to genuine fear. What is going on here? She glances at Al, who looks alarmed. Then she looks back at Ryan, who suddenly seems very young and overwhelmed.
“I, um, I have to think,” he says.
“Take your time,” Bledsoe says, as if humoring him. Nora immediately dislikes the detective.
“My shift at work was canceled yesterday,” Ryan says, stumbling over his words. “I usually work one to nine, but they’ve been cutting back lately.”
“So where were you?”
“I was here, at home for a while.” He turns to Nora. “I was here when you left, remember?”
She nods. “That’s right. He was home.”
“And what time did you leave, Mrs. Blanchard?”
“I went to run a few errands around two or two thirty,” she says, feeling the heat rise in her face with the lie. She’d gone to the motel to meet William. But they aren’t here about her and William, she realizes. This is much worse.
“And what did you do, Ryan?” the detective asks.
“I, uh, I hung out here for a while, then I went out in my car.”
“Alone?”
Ryan nods. “Yes.” His face is flushed. He’s not meeting the detective’s eyes.
“What time would that be?” Bledsoe asks.
“I don’t know exactly. Sometime around four thirty?”
Nora sees Bledsoe give the other detective a sharp glance.
“Where did you go?”
“I drove out of town, just killing time.”
“Where, exactly?”
“I don’t know, east—onto the rural roads. I had nothing to do.”
“What car did you drive?” the detective asks.
“I have my own car, it’s a 2015 Chevy Spark.”
“Anyone see you? Did you talk to anyone?” Bledsoe asks.
Ryan swallows. “I don’t think so. I didn’t talk to anybody. I don’t know if anyone saw me.”
“Why don’t you go get dressed,” Bledsoe says. “We’d like to bring you down to the station for further questioning, if that’s all right with you.”
Nora looks on in shock, unable to grasp what is happening. All she knows is fear.
Seventeen
Ryan is petrified. His mouth is dry, and he can feel himself trembling. He had hastily thrown on a pair of jeans and a clean T-shirt and his jacket and been brought down to the station. It’s the middle of the night, and the houses on the street were dark; no one was watching, at least. He went voluntarily—he wasn’t cuffed or anything. His mother is here, somewhere in the station, but they wouldn’t let her in the interview room with him, no matter how much she insisted, because he’s not a minor anymore. They wouldn’t even let her in the detectives’ car with him. She’d had to follow in her own car. She’d demanded to know why they wanted to question him, but they wouldn’t say anything. Now she’s out there somewhere, and he’s in here, shaking and afraid.
The two detectives sit down across from him. They’ve read him his rights. It all feels completely surreal, like a bad dream. They start the videotape. His right leg begins to bounce up and down involuntarily. He’s afraid he might piss himself. Somehow he manages to say, “Am I under arrest?”
Detective Bledsoe answers him. “No. But we thought we should read you your rights before we question you, given the circumstances.”
“What circumstances?” He’s trying to keep the panic out of his voice.
“We have a witness who saw Avery Wooler getting into your car, at around four thirty Tuesday afternoon.”
Ryan feels like he might pass out. He says, “I want a lawyer.”
They have to turn off the tape.
* * *
? ? ?
Alone in the waiting room, Nora struggles to keep it together. This can’t be happening. She wishes Al were here, but someone had to remain at home with Faith. She tells herself it’s all a mistake, that it’s better to cooperate and do what the detectives ask and get it over with. And the detectives had been pleasant enough, insisting that they just wanted to talk to Ryan, ask him a few more questions. She thought they’d be done in under an hour, and they could go home.
Once they’d arrived at the station, however, things had seemed to take a darker turn. They wouldn’t let her be with him. That frightened her. She doesn’t know what’s going on in that room. Her son is an adult now, in the eyes of the law, but to her, he’s still just a child. Her child. Even after all that had happened last year. But he’d been a minor then, and it had been different.
They’ve been in there more than half an hour already. She hears rapid footsteps coming down the hall in her direction and looks up. At first, she doesn’t recognize him, because she’s never seen him in anything but a business suit. But it’s Oliver Fuller, criminal attorney, called out in the middle of the night, dressed in jeans and sneakers and a denim shirt, and carrying that familiar briefcase. He spots her in her chair and walks over to her.
“What’s this about, Nora?” he asks.
“There’s been some kind of mistake,” Nora says. “I think they’re asking him about that missing girl.”