The Name on the Broadcast novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Call Home

A detective says a four-year-old's memory isn't evidence and promises to call the county sheriff, the man who eats Sunday dinner at Laney's grandmother's table, and that night her father calls.

The state police post was a low brick building with a flag out front and a vending machine that only took exact change.

Frances had called ahead at six in the morning.

By eight we were sitting in a little room with a detective in a tan sport coat.

He had Annie's file on the desk. It was thick and soft at the corners.

"Mrs. Wooler," he said. "I know this file. Every detective in this post knows this file."

"Then you know I don't waste your time," Frances said.

He turned to me.

"Tell me what you told her."

I told him the short version, the one I'd told Frances.

He wrote some of it down.

Not all of it.

When I finished, he set his pen across the notepad.

"Ms. Haskett, I believe that you believe this."

Ben shifted in the chair next to me.

"But you were four," the detective said. "That's a memory from when you were four. And a nursery song."

"I also have a photograph," I said.

"Of a young woman holding a child on a porch. With a first name on the back."

"In Annie's handwriting," Frances said.

"I don't doubt it's her. I'm saying it's a photograph. It doesn't tell me what happened."

"What does?" I said.

He looked at me.

"Remains," he said. "A witness who saw something as an adult. A record. Something I can hold."

"And until then?"

"Until then I reach out to the county sheriff up there. It's his jurisdiction. He knows the families. He can do a welfare visit, ask some questions."

My whole body went cold.

"No," I said.

"Excuse me?"

"The sheriff eats Sunday dinner at my grandmother's table. Every Sunday. He says grace there."

The detective's face closed.

"I've worked with that man for fifteen years."

"Then you've never eaten pie at our house," I said.

Ben coughed into his fist.

Frances put her hand flat on the desk.

"Detective. If you call that sheriff, what happens to her?"

He looked from her to me.

"Nothing happens to her. She's a grown woman in a college three hours away."

"And what happens to the women still up there?" I said.

He didn't answer that.

He stood up and opened the door for us.

"I'll be in touch," he said. "Leave the photo with me. I'll make a copy."

"No," Frances and I said at the same time.

Out in the parking lot, Frances sat in her car with the door open and her feet on the asphalt.

She called her son.

She put him on speaker so I could hear. I don't think that was an accident.

"They're calling the local sheriff," she told him. "That's it. That's twenty-six years."

"Who's the girl?" said a man's voice. Tired, a little rough.

"Her name is Laney."

"Laney what?"

Frances looked at me.

"Haskett," I said, loud enough for the phone.

There was a pause.

"So it's her family," Annie's brother said.

"Yes," I said.

"Her family bought my sister."

"Yes."

"She's Annie's daughter, honey," Frances said. "She's your niece."

"She's a Haskett." His voice went flat. "She said so herself. And she just remembered? Today? After twenty years in their house, eating their food?"

"Honey," Frances said.

"No, Mom. Where was she last year? Where was she when Dad died on that road looking?"

His voice cracked hard on the last word.

I stood by the car with my arms crossed tight.

"I was in their house," I said. "I was eighteen when I left. I'm sorry it took me six more years to hear it."

He didn't say anything.

"I'm not asking you to like me," I said. "I'm going to find her. That's all."

The line went dead.

Frances lowered the phone into her lap.

"He's not cruel," she said. "He was twenty-two. He drove his father to every search."

"He's right, though."

"He's half right. Half right is the worst kind of wrong." She swung her feet into the car. "Get in. Both of you. I'm buying breakfast and you're going to eat it."

Ben leaned on the roof of his hatchback while Frances backed out.

"You know you just told a state detective he's never eaten pie at your house," he said.

"I panicked."

"It was the best line I've heard all year. I wish I'd had the mic on."

I almost laughed.

It came out as a breath.

We ate pancakes at a truck stop. Frances made Ben eat a second stack because, she said, he looked like a coat rack somebody had put glasses on.

He ate them.

Afterward she drove home to wait by her phone.

Ben drove me back to campus.

"What are you going to do?" he asked at my door.

"I don't know yet."

"That isn't true."

"No," I said. "It isn't."

That night I sat on my bed with my laptop open to nothing.

At eleven-forty my phone lit up on the blanket.

DADDY.

He never called. Grandma Verna called on Sundays, and he sometimes said hello in the background.

I picked up.

"Laney."

His voice was thick, the way it got after the third beer.

"Hi, Daddy."

There was a long pause. I could hear the kitchen clock at home. I'd know that tick anywhere.

"Your grandma says you been talking to people," my father said.

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