of everybody in this town,” I say, “they made you the sheriff?”
“I’m the only one who could read and shoot straight.”
He goes about pouring me a coffee. He remembers how I take it. Black, and in a cup. The machine has either been serviced or blessed by the church because it doesn’t jam up halfway through the pour like it often used to.
“You learned to read while I was away?”
“Picture books, mostly.” He hands me a cup. It says World’s Sexiest Sheriff on the side. “What’s it been? Ten years?”
“Twelve.”
“Twelve.” Slowly he nods as that night comes back to him. We’ve never spoken a word to each other since then. “Yeah, twelve. Of course, of course. That was messed up, what you did to me back then, Noah,” he says, and then he shakes his head. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to say that.”
“You have every right to say it,” I say, and I can’t defend it. He has every right to be mad. I need to let him tell me, take what’s coming, and hope we can move on. “I’ve always wanted to apologize, but never quite knew how.”
“By picking up the phone,” he says. “I was willing to listen.”
It sounds so simple, the way he puts it. “You’re right. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”
He thinks on that. “You ever wonder where we’d be if things had gone different?”
“Every day,” I tell him.
“Every day.” And then the big smile from a few moments ago comes back. “Well, hell, it’s all water under the bridge now,” he says, even though it isn’t. He slaps me on the shoulder.
“Can we talk? I have about forty minutes before Old Man Haggerty straps me to the front of a tractor and drives me into the sunset.”
“Old Man Haggerty. You know, we actually call him that here at the station when he’s not around. If he heard he’d strap us to that same damn tractor.”
I follow him through to his office, which is Old Man Haggerty’s old office, which is along the back wall next to a fire exit that Haggerty often propped open so he could sit out on the step to have a cigarette. The office looks the same, and Drew hasn’t put his touch on it. The same painting of horses in a landscape that Haggerty hung up a hundred years ago is still there. Same aerial photograph of the town. Same map on a wooden board of the town framed by the forest. The way the town has expanded, the map must be for nostalgia, not as a reference. The only things in here that have been updated are the calendar on the wall and the computer on the desk. We sit down either side of the desk. I think about the questions I need to ask. When was the last time anybody saw Alyssa? Has she used her bank account? Has she made large withdrawals of money? Who are her friends?
“So how have you been?” he asks. “You married? Got children? What have you been up to?”
“I never got married again,” I tell him. “No kids. And I own a bar.”
“You own a bar?”
“Yeah, with a buddy of mine. We own it fifty-fifty. It’s a good bar. And I have a cat.”
“Cats are good,” he says. “So are bars. You sound happy, and you look good,” he says.
“And you? What’s new with you, other than the promotion?”
“Leigh’s good. She’s still selling houses. We have a couple of more kids since you were last here. Three in total now. So, Father Frank called you, huh?”
I take a sip of my drink. If the machine has been blessed to get it up and running, the effects don’t extend to making the result taste any better. “In a roundabout way.”
“Maggie?”
“Maggie.”
“And I take it you didn’t need much convincing,” he says. “Because you figured without you here, the rest of us don’t know what we’re doing. You figured you’d come here and save the day, while the rest of us keep rescuing cats out of trees and writing up tickets.’
His response hurts, but it’s not unexpected. “I don’t think that at all.”
“No? Then why did you come?”
“Because Maggie asked me to.”
He sips at his coffee. I’m in no hurry to take another sip of mine. “You know she’s married now, right?”
“She told me.”
“Has a couple of kids and everything.”
“I didn’t come here searching for my old life, Drew. I’ve moved on. I came back for Alyssa. That night I found her, I promised her I’d make sure nothing bad ever happened to her again.”
“And then you left,” he says.
“And then I left.”
“And now you’re back.” He fiddles with a pen between his fingers. He used to do this a lot when he was questioning people. It always made him look casual, and that, combined with his easy-going nature, made him the kind of guy you could open up to. Of course, out here career criminals are sheep stealers and tractor joyriders, not serial killers or assassins. Now he looks like he could flex his way out of his shirt and pick somebody up by their ears.
He carries on. “The thing is, Noah, we don’t need your help. I appreciate you coming all this way, and I know it was an effort and it’s sure great seeing you, but there’s no case here. I know what you’re thinking, that Alyssa wouldn’t run out on her dad like that at the end, but that’s exactly what she did.”
“You sure about that?”
He sighs, puts down the pen, and forms his fingers into steeples, tapping the front two against his lips. Then he points those front two at me, the rest folding down, so he’s now making the shape of a gun. “Yes, I’m sure, because I know how to do my job.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Look, I get you made Alyssa this promise, but the thing is, it’s a wasted trip. If Maggie had come to me first before calling you, I could have saved you both a whole lot of time. Alyssa . . . well, Alyssa didn’t disappear.”
“No?”
He starts rotating his cup on the spot, ninety degrees clockwise, then ninety degrees anti-clockwise and so on. “No,” he says. “She left town four days ago for personal reasons.”
“Personal reasons? You’re going to need to give me more than that,” I say.
“No, I don’t, Noah. I don’t have to give you anything.”
“Come on, Drew, I’m not trying to be a pain here, I’m just trying to help out. I owe her that.”
“You think we need your help?”
“I’m not saying that.”
“She left town to have an abortion.”
What he’s saying doesn’t make sense, not at first, and that’s because this whole time I’ve been keeping my promise to the Alyssa whose hand barely fit in mine. Not once have I seen her as the girl she might be today.
“Is that personal enough for you?” Before I can answer, he carries on. “Something like that, well, she’s not going to be advertising the fact on her way out of here, is she?”
“Why hasn’t she come back?”
He picks up his coffee. He takes another sip. “Says she can’t face Father Frank.”
“You’ve spoken to her?”
“Several times.”
“What, you just rang her? She answered, and