looked away again and said, “Thanks, Gloria.” And waited. Another few seconds passed before he said, “Good morning, Deputy Short,” and identified himself, and asked if the sheriff was in. He listened and said, “Not all morning? All right. Well, yes, I’d call it urgent. Why don’t you have him call me as soon as he can.” He confirmed the number and hung up and sat holding the phone.
“I have his card,” Audrey said.
“His what?”
“His card. At home. With his numbers.”
Halsey nodded. “We’ll just wait here a minute for the deputy.” He looked toward the river again. His fingers were quiet on the wheel.
“Can I ask you something, Sheriff?”
“You can.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about it? When I came to see you before.”
He turned to her. “Tell you about what?”
“About Moran and Katie Goss.”
He stared at her. “What could I tell you?”
“You could’ve told me my dad went up to see her. To ask her about it.”
“I could’ve. But you wouldn’t have known any more than your dad knew. Or I knew.”
“So you knew about it—back then. About him going to see Katie Goss.”
“I knew about it. We all knew. Moran knew.”
“Moran knew?”
“Your dad asked him about that girl to his face. Confronted him with it.”
Audrey’s heart was rolling in her chest, rolling and pounding. “Were you there?”
“No, I was not. He did it in private. Then he told me about it later, also in private.”
“What did he say?”
“To me?”
“Yes.”
Halsey looked away, up the road. He shook his head, and she didn’t think he would tell her. But then he did. “He said he didn’t want to tell me what he was about to tell me, but he didn’t know what else to do. Said he needed my opinion on the matter. Then he told me what he’d asked Moran: Did he talk that girl into . . . whatever he called it so as to make it seem less than it was. So as to get an admission.”
Audrey waited. Watching him.
“That didn’t work, obviously,” Halsey said. “Moran said it was just a couple of high school girls telling stories to excite themselves. Said he’d swear to that in a court of law.”
The sheriff turned to her again.
“His word against hers,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
They sat watching each other, a long silence.
“And what did you say?” Audrey said finally.
“Told him what he already knew. Here was a girl, a young woman, who didn’t report it when it happened, allegedly, and who did not care to report it now. And here was his own deputy who flat-out denied it. Wasn’t much of a choice to make.”
“So he let him go.”
“That’s not how I would put it. Your dad made it, let’s say, difficult for Moran to stick around. And the man wasn’t so stupid or stubborn not to take the hint.”
She saw Moran again on the ice, on his elbows, the wounded-dog look in his eyes, a creature holding on to old pains, old betrayals.
“Why didn’t he—” she began. “Why didn’t my dad . . .”
Halsey waited. “Why didn’t he what?”
“Why didn’t he say something to the sheriff down in Iowa?”
“Same reason I didn’t,” said Halsey, and as he said it, the way he said it, the look in his eyes, she understood.
“Because he was a deputy,” she said. “Because he was one of you.”
Halsey said nothing. He seemed to study the back of his hand where it gripped the wheel, turning the rubbery padding in his fist. Audrey watching him, and with such intensity that his profile began to change, reshaping itself bone by bone—brow, nose, chin—and it was her father’s face pushing through, taking over Halsey’s face. She could smell him now too, the smoke of his last cigarette, the fuel of his Zippo lighter. But the voice, when he spoke again, was not his, and it all vanished.
“A story,” said Sheriff Halsey. “No witness, no corroboration whatsoever. Do you ruin a man’s life based on that? A man who’s had your back and whose back you’ve had? What if the tables were turned? What if it was you the story was about?” He turned to her. “What if it was your dad?”
Audrey looked away from his eyes. She looked at her fingers, twined and twisting in her lap.
“But Sheriff,” she said, and faltered again.
“Go on,” he said.
“Didn’t you have a feeling, though? In your gut? Didn’t you know?”
His eyes were on her but she could not look up again. So quiet in that cab she could hear her fingers