Page 63 of Leave No Trace
She nodded and turned away. ‘She is now.’
While he wiped Lucas’s brow with a cool cloth, she told him the doctors had given her a prescription for Tamiflu. Josiah asked if he could use the phone.
‘It’s not in service.’
Then he asked if he could use her car as soon as business hours began. She nodded and disappeared out the front door. Ten minutes went by, then twenty. After the night he’d endured, he wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d simply collapsed into the shadows of the woods. There was something spent about her, as if she’d given away all her vital organs and the frame that was left was fragile, unsupported. Just as the sun cleared the trees, though, she returned with a thermometer and a small manual, a medical reference book they used to look up influenza, its symptoms and treatment. The hallucinations, Josiah hoped, were the product of a fever that the thermometer read to be a hundred and two degrees. Since his breathing was normal and skin didn’t have a bluish tinge, he didn’t appear to be in immediate danger. He just needed fluids and medicine. The woman didn’t have any Tylenol – she didn’t seem to own much of anything the more Josiah looked around – but she handed him her car keys.
‘Would you go?’ He took a step back toward the bedroom. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t want to move him again yet. I’ll give you money.’
‘They won’t give me the prescription.’ She moved to a window, her silhouette ghostly in the half-light of the morning.
‘Shit.’ He didn’t want to make Lucas endure a doctor’s visit.
‘It’s okay to leave him here. I’ll watch him until you get back.’
He pulled his boots on and was halfway out the door before stopping and turning back. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Jane,’ she said and he couldn’t tell whether or not she was lying.
He glanced at the bedroom behind her, realizing that for the first time in nine years he was going to leave his son with a total stranger. She dropped her head, shirking his stare and making him hesitate further, but the longer he stood around the longer Lucas went without medicine. He slammed the door and raced to the car.
When he got into town, driving seventy in a thirty-mile-an-hour zone, the doctor’s office still wasn’t open yet so he stopped by the duplex to pick up extra clothes. Two squad cars were waiting in the driveway. Before Josiah could process what was happening, the officers took him down to the station to question him about Heather’s disappearance and when he lied and said he hadn’t seen her – because who the fuck cared about Heather Price, he needed to get medicine back to his son – they threw him in jail for obstruction of justice. They flashed his record, as if that would scare some bullshit confession out of him, and played a game of bad cop/bad cop that had more to do with him than about finding Heather Price. He’d run into local boys like this all his life, the ones who stared at the same few miles of land so much they thought they owned anyone who dared to walk on it. Cooperating, he described the fight he’d had with Heather, leaving out the part where he’d shoved her into the walls, and asked them to dust his apartment for fingerprints.
‘She probably took the money straight to her dealer.’
‘Heroin?’ Sergeant Coombe, the overfed desk cop who seemed to be in charge, chewed on that idea like it had a funny taste he couldn’t identify. ‘We don’t have an opioid problem up here.’
An opioid problem. Josiah bit back the impulse to ask him if they didn’t have ‘the Internets,’ either. ‘Maybe that’s why Heather didn’t have any friends.’
‘It’s easy preying on a woman with no friends, isn’t it?’
He felt a flash of panic, not over Heather – all he’d ever done to Heather was say no, thank you – but about the hollow-eyed woman who paddled alone in the dead of night. He’d left her cabin hours ago and the more time that passed, the less he could remember about her. The color of her hair, the pitch in her voice, the expression on her face when she looked at Lucas: all of it wavered out of his memory, leaving a dark outline that could be inhabited by any manner of person. And Lucas – what would Lucas think when he woke up? If he woke up? The fever might have spiked again. A dozen possibilities competed for the worst-case scenario as Josiah stared at the beige on beige ceiling, crumbled at the corners and hacked up with holes for electrical equipment and video surveillance. He loathed it more with every minute he sat underneath it in handcuffs.
‘I’ve cooperated, haven’t I? I’ve told you everything that happened that day, so there’s no grounds to hold me anymore. I’m not hiding anything.’
‘No, you’ve been pretty straight with us about giving a missing woman money so she could buy illegal drugs.’
‘I paid her rent. What she did with the money after that is her business.’
Sergeant Coombe flipped a paper over and scanned it. ‘What about your son?’
Josiah went cold. ‘What about him?’
‘Would he agree with your version of events? Neighbors claim you’re two peas in a pod. They never see one of you without the other.’
‘Lucas has nothing to do with this. Leave him out of it.’
‘Listen here, Brad Pitt.’ Sergeant Coombe leaned over the interrogation table. ‘I’m sure you get away with ordering people around like that in most areas of your life, but I’m the one wearing the badge. I’m the one who’s going to find out what happened to Miss Price. And I hope – I really, truly hope – that you had something to do with it, because I would love to see your pretty face behind bars.’
‘Really?’ Josiah mirrored him, leaning in over his cuffed hands. ‘Because if I were you, I’d hope Miss Price was found alive.’
The sergeant slapped Josiah’s file on the table. Neither man blinked.
‘I know your type. I arrest your type. You might as well say goodbye to that kid of yours because one day you’re going to give me a reason. Maybe not today. Maybe not even this case, but if you decide to stick around my town it’ll happen. And I guarantee you I’ll be there when it does.’
They threw him back in the cell to wait out the entire twenty-four hours before they had to either charge or release him, and by the time he got out it was Saturday and all the doctors’ offices were closed. He grabbed four boxes of Tylenol, Popsicles, and a wilting rose at the gas station, then raced back to Jane’s cabin, hitting the steering wheel and cursing Heather Price the entire way.
‘How is he?’ He burst through the door and past Jane into the bedroom, where Lucas was alive and sleeping. His skin seemed cooler, but nowhere near normal. Fumbling with the packages, he read the dosing instructions. The adult ones started at age twelve so he switched to the pediatric, but they were based on age and weight. Did he have to know both? Jesus, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d weighed his son. ‘Do you have a scale?’
