it was all over—your freedom, your life. Suddenly and forever done.
Moran’s cruiser was not there, and neither was the Ford—no sign of either car, but the sheriff knew the place and he pulled over short of where the cars had been and put his cruiser in park. He cut the engine and sat looking out toward the wide, frozen river, and you could see it from here in the gap between the pines: the small dark hole in the ice where she’d fallen through.
“You stay put,” he said and got out, hatless, and shut the door behind him. She watched him walk up the road with his eyes on the pavement. He looked at the place where Moran’s cruiser had sat, then he got down into a squat, then stood again and crossed the road toward the river. He stepped through the pines wide of where she and Moran had walked and he stopped at the bank and stood looking out at the ice. He looked again at the snow at his feet, then squatted again and looked more closely. After a while he stood and came back across the road.
The cruiser rocked with his weight and the door whumped shut and there was the smell of the pines and the snow on him. He looked at her and said, “Are you sure you’re OK? There’s blood in the snow.”
“It’s his,” she said, and raised the cast to remind him.
He looked at the cast. Then he turned and looked at the river again. Drumming the wheel with his fingertips.
“It’s gotta be a quarter mile from here to that spillway,” he said.
He turned to look at her, and she held his eyes. Either he believed her or he didn’t. She saw the ducks again, rising into the sky. She’d frightened them by coming up alive, and if she hadn’t been alive, if she hadn’t been able to swim, she’d have gone over the spillway maybe and continued on, under the ice again, all the way to the concrete bridge where Holly Burke had come to rest, and from there all the way down to Iowa and the other bridge where Caroline had gone under . . . all way to the Mississippi, all the way to the ocean.
“—and you didn’t get their last names?” the sheriff was saying. “Either one of them?”
It took her a moment. “No, sir, it never occurred to me. Hannah and Eric, that’s all I know.”
“And none of you thought to call 911.”
“I asked them not to. I asked them to take me home. They were just kids.”
“And why’d you do that? Why’d you ask them not to call 911?”
“Because a cop just tried to kill me.”
Halsey stared at her.
“And because I thought I’d killed him,” she said.
“You thought you’d killed him.”
“Yes, sir. He didn’t look too great, last time I saw him.”
The sheriff turned to look at the ice again. As if watching the scene play out before him. “Why wouldn’t he just let you drown, or freeze to death on your own? Why would he go on out there?” He turned back to her.
“I guess he wanted to make sure.”
“You guess. Based on what?”
She was out on the ice again, in that hole—Moran crawling on his belly, reaching for her, grabbing at her, grunting, trying to dislodge her from the ice.
“He wasn’t trying to help me, Sheriff.”
He sat watching her. Her eyes. Then he turned back to the river once again. Drumming the wheel again.
“Where do you think my car went?” she said.
“Oh, I expect it got towed,” he said. “There’s a mess of tracks out here.”
She watched him, the back of his head. The furrow of his sweatband in the thick hair. Then he stopped drumming the wheel and took his phone from the breast pocket of his jacket, worked it with his thumb and put it to his ear.
“Gloria, it’s me. Two—no, three things. Want you to have Deputy Moser stop whatever he’s doing and come out to Henry Sibley Park and find me. I’m about halfway in here, by the river. Then I want you to check with impound and see if they’ve got a white Ford Taurus, two thousand—” He glanced at Audrey and she said, “Five,” and he repeated it. “But first I want you to connect me to the Pawnee County Sheriff’s Department. Yes, in Iowa. Yes, I can hold.”
He turned to Audrey. “If he’s there, I have no idea what I’m supposed to say to the man.” He