The little girl on my caseload told me the only grown-ups she wasn’t SCARED of came up the road on NINE motorcycles.
The county handed Rylee to me in a manila folder when she was eight. Her father wanted her back.
The morning of her supervised visit, two of those riders were already waiting in the family services lobby. The front desk hadn’t called them. I hadn’t either.
I’ve worked child cases here for fourteen years, in visit rooms with a camera in the corner and a tub of broken crayons nobody replaces.
The kids start to run together after a while.
Rylee Ferrell never ran together with anybody. Custody fight, a father with a protective order in his past, and every time a car door slammed in the lot she stopped moving until it was quiet again.
I came through the double doors and found her on the plastic bench between two men in leather vests. GRAVEL SAINTS across the backs.
The older one had a gray beard to the middle of his chest and was holding her juice box for her. The younger one looked maybe thirty-five.
Somebody had taped a church bulletin over the broken water fountain.
A truck door banged outside. Rylee kept right on coloring.
Through the window, seven more bikes sat in a row by the dumpster.
“Hollis and Nate are my friends,” she said. “They walk with me sometimes.”
I said I didn’t understand.
“When Wes is at the fence, they come,” she said.
I let it go. Some clubs sit with kids at court, I told myself.
But that night I lay awake on the word sometimes. The way she said it, it had a schedule.
First thing in the morning I called her school. The secretary checked twice and had no Wes on staff, not even on the buses.
I asked Rylee who Wes was.
She put the crayon down.
“Wes watches for us,” she said. “My dad’s friend.”
I had to set my coffee on the floor.
At lunch I pulled the protective order file again. Jason Ferrell had a known associate named in an old incident report.
Wes Burkett. Stalking charges, two of them, and no club and no bike.
A grown man who’d been leaning on a school fence for weeks, watching an eight-year-old walk out at 3:05 like he had it penciled in.
I’d had those men in vests pegged as a charity program.
They’d seen a stranger watching a little girl through chain-link, and they’d started getting there BEFORE HE DID.
I drove straight back to find the gray-bearded one. He was already at the front desk with his helmet under his arm, like he’d known all day I was coming.
“Better sit down,” he said. “That two o’clock hearing has something in it nobody’s bothered to tell you.”
The Helmet on the Front Desk
I sat down on the bench where Rylee had been that morning. Hollis set his helmet on the counter between the sign-in clipboard and the lollipop jar and stayed on his feet.
“Your girl’s daddy went up to that lawyer’s office over the pharmacy at twenty to twelve,” he said. “Wes Burkett went up with him. Wes had a tie on.”
“A tie,” I said.
“Blue. Still had the fold lines from the package.” He put his hands in his vest pockets. “Nate was across the road on his bike when they came down. The lawyer shook Wes’s hand on the step. Your girl’s daddy wants that man sitting in on his visits.”
I got my phone out. My thumb missed the case system twice.
The filing was right there, stamped that morning. A motion from Jason Ferrell’s attorney, a man named Stroud, asking to move the visits out of our building and into a home. Proposed supervisor, Wesley J. Burkett, family friend.
Friend of the family.
I read it three times. There was a line for the supervisor’s address, and it was a road out past the grain elevator I’d driven a hundred times on home checks.
Gina at the front desk kept glancing at Hollis and then back down at her screen, the way people do with a big dog nobody’s introduced them to.
“Did you know it’d be his name?” I said.
“Didn’t.” He scratched under his beard. “Knew a man like Wes don’t buy a tie for a funeral. Figured it was a bank or a court, and Wes don’t have a bank.”
“The hearing’s at two,” I said.
“I know it.”
“I’ve got about ninety minutes.”
“I know that too.” He looked up at the clock over the door. “Rylee said you’d come back. She said you always come back when she tells you a thing.”
I didn’t have anything to say to that, so I did my job. I scrolled to the bottom of the filing to see who had opened it.
A clerk had, at 8:50. Dawn Ferrell’s attorney had, at 9:40, and I couldn’t see that she’d done anything about it. I was the last, just now, sitting on a plastic bench with a biker standing over me.
The one before me had initialed the box marked reviewed.
LH. 10:15.
Lorna Haskins had read that name two hours before I did, and my phone hadn’t rung once.
Thirteen Afternoons in Pencil
Hollis sat down then, on the far end of the bench, and pulled a notebook out of the inside of his vest.
It was the spiral kind the feed store keeps by the register. The brown cover had gone soft at the corners, and a flat carpenter’s pencil was pushed through the wire.
“Nate’s niece is in Rylee’s class,” he said. “Brynn. She turned eight in the summer. Nate picks her up when his sister’s on second shift at the plant.”
He opened it across his knee.
“Brynn told him there was a man at the fence who knew all the kids’ names. She said he’d called Rylee over by the bike rack and Rylee wouldn’t go. Nate figured he was somebody’s grandpa. The next day the man was there again, same spot. And the day after that. And not one soul came out of that building to ask him his business.”
The pages were ruled into columns in two different handwritings. A date, a time, a truck, a plate with the last two numbers left blank where somebody couldn’t see. 2:58. 3:01. 2:55. Gray pickup, dent in the tailgate.
I counted the lines. Thirteen afternoons. The first one was in the second week of the school year.
“Nate called me after the fourth,” Hollis said. “I’m retired off the railroad. I got nothing but afternoons. We started getting there at a quarter to three.”
“The whole club?” I said.
“Whoever’s off. Some days two. Nine, one time.” Something close to a smile went through his beard. “The day it was nine, Wes left before the bell.”
I said they could have gone to the school office.
“Did,” he said. “Nate went in first. They told him it’s a public sidewalk.” He turned a page. “Then I went in, and the lady at the window looked at my vest and told me the same thing a lot faster.”
I took one picture of the page with my phone. I told myself it was so I’d know which days to look at.
Rylee drew at every visit. She used the crayons out of the tub in the visit room, the ones with the paper peeled off, and she drew the same picture every time. A house and a tree with a round top, and a fence across the bottom of the page. Standing at the fence was a stick man she colored gray from his hair to his feet, even his face.
I’d asked her once who the gray man was.
“A man,” she’d said, and reached for the green.
I wrote the date on the back of each drawing in blue pen. They go in the file under family drawings, because that’s the tab they go under. I had six of hers.
Hollis closed the notebook and held it out to me. I didn’t take it.
“Your people are going to say this is a bunch of bikers with a grudge,” he said.
“They might,” I said.
“Then don’t use ours,” he said. “Use yours.”
The Hallway by 2B
My phone rang before I’d got the car door shut.
“Gina says you sat half an hour on the lobby bench with a man in a leather vest,” Lorna said.
“I did.”
“Kim.” She let my name sit there a second. “Whatever those men told you, it does not go into anything with your name on it. I’m not having a motorcycle club’s notebook stapled to one of our reports. I mean that.”
My green log was on the passenger seat, where it always rides. I’d kept one since my second year on the job, a line for every visit and every pickup, with the time and what the kid did. Lorna used to tease me about it. She called it my diary.
“The Burkett filing has your initials on it. 10:15,” I said.
The line went quiet long enough that I checked whether the call had dropped.
“I review forty things before lunch,” she said. “A name on a form, Kim.”
“The man’s got stalking charges. Two of them.”
“Then they’re in a file somewhere, and it’s somebody else’s file. Your job is what you saw in those visits. We clear?”
I said we were clear. I drove to the courthouse.
The hallway outside Courtroom 2B has a row of oak benches bolted to the floor and a window at the end that doesn’t open. It was 1:10 when I came up the stairs.
Jason Ferrell was standing by the window with his lawyer.
I’d met him four times. He was always pressed. Clean fingernails and a job at the co-op he’d never missed a shift of. He’d shaken my hand every time and said my first name like we went to church together.
“Kim,” he said, and came over with his hand out. “Good. I want you to meet somebody.”
Wes Burkett was on the bench behind him. Blue tie, the fold lines still in it. He was younger than I’d pictured and heavier, with a phone in both hands, and he didn’t look up.
“Wes has known Rylee since she was in a car seat,” Jason said. “Practically an uncle. This is going to make life easier on everybody, your office included. Fewer hours for you people to cover. Stroud’s going to ask about starting at Wes’s place this weekend, if the judge is fine with it. Gets her out of that little room with the camera. She hates that room. Seen it yourself.”
“I’ve seen it,” I said.
“This is a dad who wants a normal weekend with his kid.” He was still smiling. “I heard some motorcycle club’s been hanging around the school. Somebody ought to look into that. Wes says they follow him.”
Wes put the phone in his lap then. He looked at the lanyard around my neck, and then at my face.
“She still wearing that purple sweatshirt?” he said.
The Green Log
I didn’t go into the courtroom. I went back down the stairs to the bench outside the copy room and opened the log across my knees.
I had forty minutes, the green log, the working file in my bag, and one picture of Nate’s page on my phone.
I did the school pickups for Rylee’s visits myself, twice a week, 3:05 at the side door by the bike rack. Each pickup had a line.
I put my finger on Nate’s first date and turned to the same day in mine.
3:07. R. got in fast. Asked me to lock the doors.
I’d written that and forgotten it.
Nate’s third date. My line said 3:05, R. would not look out the window, sat on her hands the whole drive.
His ninth. R. asked if I could park on the other side next time.
My pickups landed on six of Nate’s thirteen days. On five of them Rylee had done something in my car that I’d written down in my own hand and never once set beside anything else.
Then the drawings. I took them out of the file one at a time and turned them over.
The dates on the backs were the same six days. Blue pen, my writing, and on five of the fronts the gray man at the fence.
The sixth was dated the afternoon Nate had written a nine in the margin. I turned it face up. The same house and tree and fence. The gray man wasn’t anywhere on it. She’d drawn a row of black circles along the bottom of the page instead, and I counted them twice.
Wheels, eighteen of them. Nine bikes.
My log for that day said 3:05. R. waved at a man on a motorcycle across the road. Laughed in the car.
I pulled up the old incident report on my phone. Under vehicle, the deputy had typed gray Chevy pickup, damage to tailgate.
I wrote the addendum by hand on a legal pad at the counter in the clerk’s office, standing, because my hand was steadier standing. Dates and times. My log lines, word for word. Rylee’s words on the bench about the fence, and her words the next morning about who watches for her. The six drawings, copied front and back so the dates showed. The vehicle line from the old report.
I read it through. Each line of it was something I’d seen or heard myself. Lorna couldn’t have faulted one word.
Then I held my phone out and had the clerk print Nate’s page. I stapled it on the back, and under it I wrote: Provided to me by Nate Kessler, uncle of a classmate. I have not checked the plate. Kim Oster.
The clerk looked at the top sheet and then at me.
“This hasn’t got a supervisor’s initials,” she said.
“Mine are on it,” I said.
Courtroom 2B
Hollis and Nate came in at 1:58 and sat in the back row with their helmets under the bench. Nate took his cap off and held it on his knee.
Wes Burkett sat right behind Jason, close enough to put a hand on his shoulder, and did.
Dawn Ferrell was at the other table with her attorney, a young woman named Pratt who kept writing on the same line of her legal pad. Dawn didn’t turn around. She hadn’t turned around at a single hearing I’d sat through.
Judge Albers came in at 2:04 with my addendum on top of her stack. I could see the staple from where I sat.
Mr. Stroud went first. He talked about a father who had done every class and hadn’t missed a visit in eleven months. He talked about a family friend willing to give up his weekends. He used the word normal four times. I counted.
When he was done, the judge held up my addendum and said, “Have you seen this?”
“I’ve had it five minutes, Your Honor,” Stroud said. “A caseworker’s diary and some kid drawings, and one page from what I’m told is a motorcycle club.”
Jason stood up without anybody asking him to.
“Mind if I say something? I’m going to say something.” He put his hand flat on the table. “Wes has been in that little girl’s life since the day we brought her home from the hospital. Wes put her car seat in. The men back there have been following him for a month. They sit on their bikes across the road from the school and stare at him like he’s something on their boot. Nine of them one day. Nine. And now a county worker who’s supposed to be neutral is stapling their homework to a court paper. Any kid draws a fence. My kid draws a fence because we have a fence. She likes gray. I’m her father, and I know what she likes.”
The judge let him finish. Then she turned my drawings over one at a time and read the backs.
She said my name. “Did you write these dates the day of each visit?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“That pen?”
“Blue pen. The same afternoon.”
She turned to the last one, the one with the wheels, and looked at it a long time.
“Mr. Burkett,” she said. “Please stand up for me.”
Wes stood. He had to take his hand off Jason’s shoulder to do it.
“Sir, what do you drive?”
“A truck,” Wes said. “Half this county drives a gray truck.”
The judge hadn’t said gray.
I heard Nate let his breath out in the back row.
Judge Albers didn’t approve Wes Burkett to supervise anything. She kept the visits in our building, in the little room with the camera, and set another date. Wes was out the door before she’d finished the sentence. Jason went after him, and Stroud packed his briefcase slower than any man I’ve ever watched.
Lorna was standing at the top of the stairs when I came out.
“My office,” she said. “Eight o’clock.”
The Bench by the Water Fountain
Lorna didn’t raise her voice. She had the reprimand typed already, one page, and she slid it across the desk with a pen on top.
Filing without supervisory review. Attaching unverified outside material to a court document.
“I told you not to,” she said.
“I know,” I said.
“The Ferrell case goes to Paul Everly. Paul’s careful.” She folded her hands on the desk. “Take the last pickup and introduce them, and then it’s his. The father’s lawyer is going to stand up next time and say you picked a side, and he’ll be right, and I’d rather it be Paul’s name he can’t find anything on.”
I signed it. I asked if I could keep the working file until the pickup. She said no.
Paul rode with me to the school at a quarter to three. He was young and he’d brought a notebook of his own, a black one, and I didn’t say anything about it.
The fence by the bike rack was empty. Across the road, two bikes sat at the curb. Nate was leaning on one of them, and Brynn was on the seat of the other, eating crackers out of a sleeve.
Rylee came out the side door at 3:05 and walked straight to my car. She didn’t ask me to lock the doors. She looked at Paul in the passenger seat for a long time.
“Got a green book too?” she said.
“Black,” Paul said.
She thought about that and put her seat belt on.
Hollis was on the lobby bench when we came in, helmet beside him, reading glasses on the end of his nose, doing the crossword in the free paper. The church bulletin was still taped over the water fountain. Gina brought the crayon tub out without being asked.
Rylee drew for ten minutes while Paul signed forms at the counter. She did the house first, and the round tree, and the fence along the bottom. Then she held the gray crayon over the fence for a while and put it back in the tub.
She drew a woman by the house instead. Brown hair, a green square in her hand.
“Your book’s in it,” she said, and gave it to me.
I turned it over and got my blue pen out of my bag and took the cap off.
Then I put the cap back on.
I folded the drawing once and slid it inside the cover of the green log, which has never belonged to the county. Paul held his hand out, and Rylee took it, and at the visit room door she looked back at me one time and then went in.
Hollis got up off the bench. He didn’t say anything. He walked ahead of me and held the glass door open, and I went out under his arm into the lot, past the bikes, to my car.
Send this one to somebody who keeps a notebook about a kid nobody else is watching.
If you’re interested in more stories about tough kids and the grown-ups who care for them, check out My Son Had Slept in His Sneakers Thirteen Nights Running and My Son Hooked His Fingers in the Chain-Link and Faced the School, or for a different kind of family, Brent had Walt’s Harley running by noon the day after we buried Irene.
