I did not hook it. I backed off to my cab, and I called the police, because twenty years of reading abandoned cars told me this one was wrong in a way that was not mine to sort out, and keys in the ignition and a purse on the seat and an empty child seat in the back is a thing you hand to people who can find out what happened, not a thing you tow away.
I told the dispatcher everything, the open door, the weeks of dust, the car seat. She thanked me and told me to sit tight, and within twenty minutes there were officers standing in that cornfield with me.
What they found, once they ran it all, was not the nightmare the empty car seat had built in my chest while I waited.
The woman and her baby were alive, both of them, safe two states away, and the car in the cornfield was the last piece of the worst night of her life, not the end of it.
The police traced the plate and the purse, and it led them to a womans family, and through the family to the woman herself. Weeks back, the officer told me later, she had been running, in the middle of the night, from a man in her own home who had finally become too dangerous to stay near. She had grabbed her baby and driven into the dark with nothing but her purse, and when the car had given out and stuck nose-first in that field, she had done the only thing that mattered. She got her child out, left everything else where it sat, doors open, keys in it, and got to safety on foot and by the kindness of a stranger who stopped.
She had made it to a shelter, and then to relatives far away, and she and the baby had been safe the whole time. She left the car because getting out of that county alive with her child was worth more than any car ever could be.
The reason it sat for weeks with the door open was that she was building a new life a thousand miles from it and never wanted to lay eyes on it again, and who could blame her.
The police, good people, made sure the man she ran from was dealt with the right way, so that the road she had to walk toward stayed clear.
They asked if I would still tow the car, once it was cleared. I did. And when I learned where the woman had landed, I made sure her purse and the things in it, the photos, the babys papers, got sent on to her, because a person rebuilding a life should not have to lose the small things too.
Twenty years I have hauled cars and never let myself wonder about them. That day I wondered, and I called it in instead of hooking it, and a mother and her baby stayed a story with a safe ending instead of one nobody ever solved.