Second Chance at Five

Chapter 2 The Folder in the Drawer

My mother's desk was in the corner of her bedroom, a small wooden thing with three drawers and a lock that did not work. She kept bills in the top drawer and stamps in the middle and the folder in the bottom. When I was twelve, in the first version of my life, I had opened that drawer looking for a pen and found the folder and spent an hour reading it on the floor with my back against the bed.

I knew exactly where it was. I knew exactly what was in it. And I knew that if I wanted to catch the man before he hurt someone else, I was going to need evidence that did not depend on the memory of a five-year-old.

The problem was that I could not read.

I mean that I could read. My mind knew the letters, knew the words, knew how to move my eyes across a page. But my body was five, and five-year-olds could not read well, and if my mother caught me reading a newspaper like an adult she would have questions I could not answer. So I had to be careful. I had to be a child in front of her and something else when she was not looking.

The first week was the hardest. I had forgotten how much of a five-year-old's life was waiting. Waiting for meals. Waiting for the bathroom. Waiting for my mother to finish talking to someone on the phone. I sat on the floor with my crayons and drew houses and trees and watched the clock and counted the minutes until she went to work.

She worked three days a week at a dentist's office across town. On those days Aunt Dana watched me. On the other days my mother stayed home and did laundry and paid bills and read paperback mysteries on the couch. I followed her around the house and listened to everything she said on the phone and tried to figure out how to get my hands on the folder.

It was a Thursday afternoon when I finally managed it. My mother was in the kitchen making dinner. I was supposed to be in my room. I walked down the hallway on bare feet and slipped into her bedroom and opened the bottom drawer of the desk.

The folder was there. Manilla, worn at the corners, held shut with a rubber band. I pulled it out and sat on the floor with my back against the bed and opened it.

I could read. That was the strange gift of it. My eyes moved across the pages the way they always had. The words made sense. I had to concentrate to keep my face still, but the reading itself was easy.

Inside were printouts from a state database. Court records. A list of addresses going back ten years. A photocopy of a driver's license. His name was Ronald Kessler. He was thirty-nine years old. He had been arrested twice before, once for trespassing and once for a misdemeanor assault that had been plea-bargained down to disturbing the peace. He had worked for four different HVAC companies in three states.

And at the bottom of the folder, in my mother's handwriting, was a single line.

He moved to Wilmington in March.

That was the first version of my life. In this version, the folder did not exist yet. My mother had not started tracking him. As far as she knew, nothing had happened. But I knew his name now, and I knew where he had worked, and I knew that he had done this before and would do it again.

I closed the folder and put it back exactly where I had found it and went back to my room and lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling.

Ronald Kessler.

I said the name in my head over and over. I wanted to remember it. I wanted to burn it into the part of my brain that had already lived through this once and failed to stop it.

The hard part was that I could not just walk into a police station and tell them. I was five. No one would listen to me. And even if they did, there was nothing to charge him with. He had come to our house and fixed the air conditioner and left. That was the truth of this version of the story, and the truth was useless without evidence.

I needed him to do something. Or I needed to find something he had already done.

The second option felt better. If he had hurt someone before, there would be a record. There would be a woman somewhere who had called the police, or a case file, or a hospital report. My mother had found part of it. I could find the rest.

But I was five. I did not have a car. I did not have a phone. I did not have money or a way to leave the house without my mother noticing.

I had my aunt, though.

Dana came over on Fridays to watch me while my mother worked. She brought candy bars and a paperback novel and a cheerful energy that filled whatever room she was in. She was twenty-eight and she worked at a drugstore and she had a boyfriend named Paul who was kind and steady and who she would marry in three years. In the first version of my life, he had married her anyway, after. He had stayed. He had held her hand in the hospital at the end.

I did not want to think about the end. I wanted to think about how to keep her from getting there.

"Hey, bug," she said when she walked in that Friday. "What do you want to do today?"

"Read," I said.

She laughed. "You can't read yet."

"I can look at the pictures."

She sat on the couch and pulled me onto her lap and opened her paperback and I looked at the pages and pretended to follow along. I could actually read every word. The book was a mystery about a woman who ran a bakery and solved crimes on the side. It was terrible. I loved it.

"Can we go to the library?" I asked.

"Sure. You want to pick out some books?"

"Yes."

She drove me to the public library in her little blue car and I sat in the back seat and watched the streets go by and memorized the names of everything. I had not remembered how small this town was. The library was on Main Street, next to the post office, in a brick building with a green awning.

Inside, I walked straight to the computers.

"Ellie, those are for grown-ups. Come look at the picture books."

"I want to look at this first."

She sighed and sat down in a chair nearby and opened her paperback. I climbed onto the chair in front of the computer and moved the mouse. The screen lit up. I typed slowly, one finger at a time, watching the letters appear.

I did not search his name. That would leave a record. Instead I searched the state court database, which was public and which I knew how to use from my adult life. I typed in the names of the towns near us and read through the results. It took me twenty minutes. My aunt checked on me twice. I pretended to be playing a game.

And then I found it.

A woman named Theresa Lang had filed a police report in a town forty minutes north of us, eighteen months ago. The report was vague. It said that a repairman who had come to her house for a service call had behaved inappropriately and that she had asked him to leave. No charges had been filed. The report was closed.

I read the name of the town and memorized it. Then I closed the browser and climbed down from the chair and walked over to my aunt.

"Done," I said.

She looked up. "Find a book?"

"Yes."

We checked out three picture books and drove home. I sat in the back seat and stared out the window and thought about Theresa Lang and the town forty minutes north and the fact that I was five years old and could not drive.

I needed help. Someone who would believe me without asking why a five-year-old knew what I knew.

There was only one person in the world who fit that description. My mother. And she was not ready to hear it yet.

I would have to make her ready.