Surely he couldn’t just leave campus without permission.
“That doesn’t seem . . . weird to you?”
“Weird is good,” he said.
Scott frowned at Reece and gestured toward Ruth’s laptop. “Do you have a scanned ID in your files? Passport, maybe? I might have put that in a folder for you when we were . . .”
Planning to go on vacation. Thailand or Vietnam, they’d never decided.
“Maybe. It takes about ten minutes just to boot this thing up.”
“Ten minutes?” Reece said. “That’s messed up.”
Scott shook his head. “He’s right. You’ve got to get that into the shop.”
“Defrag it, at least,” Reece said. “Free up some space on your hard drive.”
“You’re both right.” The computer shop was fifteen miles away, not on any bus route from this side of town. Nothing was easy or quick these days. “I’ll get to the mall this weekend.”
Scott must have heard the catch in her voice. “Reece here could do it for you, after school. Hire him for a house call. He’s a whiz at that stuff.”
“I don’t know—” she started to say, but Scott wasn’t listening.
“Reece, you know the cul-de-sac on Pine Street, behind the school? She lives in the A-frame.”
“All right, all right,” Ruth said, in a tone that meant, Stop. It’s my life now. You were liberated from the landscaping and recycling and laptop fixing. Maybe he was trying to reconnect. Still, this wasn’t his problem. It wasn’t appropriate for him to give out her address, though she hadn’t objected last spring when he’d sent over a pair of students who mowed lawns and cleaned windows.
“Scott, thank you for your concern. You should get to your class. And Reece, nice to meet you, but you’re late, too.”
“Holloway’s my last period,” Reece said. “I can tell her they won’t let you in.”
Resigned, Ruth took a deep breath and really looked at the teenager standing on her side of the guard’s station, refusing to walk through. “That would be a big help. Thanks.”
He was six inches taller than her, long arms jutting out of rolled-up flannel sleeves. There was a black infinity symbol on his forearm. Maybe a real tattoo, or maybe just a temporary pen-inked doodle.
She spotted it and, for a moment, couldn’t look away. So familiar.
The nape of her neck tingled. She didn’t know this kid, but she’d just had the sudden urge to step forward, lean in, tell him something. Something important. Thankfully, she stopped herself. But what had she wanted to say?
Blink, she told herself. Blink and breathe.
Maybe seeing her ex again was a bad idea, as Dr. Susan, her first therapist, had said. Running into him could’ve tripped some switch in her brain, even though she was nearly mended now: stable, rational, mostly delusion-free. Or maybe this was just the price for having sat behind the wheel of a car. Or for having gotten too worked up about the journal.
Hell, maybe it was all three, too much adrenaline filtered through an injured brain slowly remolding itself—a process that could take years, all the doctors said. She recorded every incident and setback on her kitchen calendar. Full-on, visually detailed attacks, plus the lesser surges of anxiety. Ripples emanating from a distant splash.
“You okay?” the boy asked. “You look dizzy.”
Without thinking, she took a step toward him to see if he smelled familiar; he did. But it was only stale cigarette smoke and a hint of deodorant spray. Most teenage boys smelled like that.
She was tempted to say, Don’t smoke, but that was none of her business. What she actually wanted to say was, I thought you’d quit. That made even less sense.
“No, I’m fine. You should get going. Thanks for telling Mrs. Holloway for me. I’m heading home and will come right back, but the class will be halfway over by then. Can you give her this, so she can have the slideshow up and ready?”
Reece took the thumb drive, nodded and started down the hallway until he was side by side with Scott. Then he swung around and walked backwards. “So, should I come fix your laptop later, then?”
Scott looked back over his shoulder, also awaiting her response.
It wasn’t so much that she wanted to please the man she’d almost married and then lost. She just wanted to reassure him and, more important, herself, that she was okay now. Not afraid or obsessed or stuck, not imagining things, not falling apart. All that was over.
“That would be fine,” she said. “Anytime.”
3
Annie
1904
Annie would never forget the first headline: August 12, 1903, from Kansas, the Salina Daily Union: annie oakley’s downfall—cocaine brings the famous rifle shot to the depths. Another, two days later, from Delaware: annie oakley stole to buy herself cocaine. The third headline was from North Carolina: annie oakley in prison.
“How could they, Mr. Fraley?” she asked the first of two lawyers she and Frank had hired when they’d decided to sue all fifty-five newspapers. “They’re such bald-faced lies. I don’t see how they’ll defend themselves.”
“They’ll say they got it off the wires. A woman using your name, or something close to it, was arrested. That part of the story is arguably accurate. How could reporters be sure it wasn’t you?”
“But that’s ludicrous. Anyone could have seen that poor wretch wasn’t me.”
“They’ll say they had good cause to believe it, with you being in the entertainment business.”
“Not that entertainment business.”
“Most juries don’t know the difference between burlesque and sport shooting in a traveling show or exhibition,” Mr. Fraley said. “Anyway, they’ll say they couldn’t stop the presses. They’ll say it wasn’t malicious and caused no damage. And when that doesn’t work, they’ll go back to the beginning and make the jury think maybe those stories had an ounce of truth, or that even if the stories were completely wrong, they could have been true.”
“You’re saying they’ll attack my character.”
Frank reached over and touched the back of Annie’s hand. “They’ll find nothing to attack.”
Frank’s comment should have calmed her, but it had the opposite effect, because even Frank didn’t know everything. When they’d become acquainted—she, a tender fifteen-year-old who could have passed for twelve—he’d thought she was the most unsullied, untouched, innocent woman he’d ever met. If he knew everything, he would think less of her. He would study their relationship anew, seeing reasons for the disappointments they never discussed. At the very least, he would pity her.