Holly

July 26, 2021

When Holly pulls into the handkerchief-sized Jet Mart parking lot at quarter past three, she sees the man she wants to interview is on duty. Excellent. She pauses long enough to hunt something on her iPad, then gets out of her car. On the lefthand side of the door there’s a bulletin board under the overhang. WELCOME TO A JET MART NEIGHBORHOOD! it proclaims. It’s covered with notices of apartments to rent, cars and washing machines and game consoles for sale, a lost dog (WE LOVE OUR REXY!), and two lost cats. There’s also one lost girl: Bonnie Rae Dahl. Holly knows who put that one up, and hears Keisha Stone saying love lost but plenty of love left.

She goes in. The store is currently empty except for her and the clerk, Emilio Herrera by name. He looks to be Pete’s age, maybe a little younger. He’s perfectly willing to talk. He’s got a round face and a charmingly cherubic smile. Yes, Bonnie was a regular customer. He liked her and is very sorry that she has gone missing. Hopefully she will get in touch with her mama and her friends soon.

“She’d come in most nights around eight,” Herrera says. “Sometimes a little earlier, sometimes a little later. She always had a smile and a good word, even if it was just how are you doing or what do you think about the Cavs or how’s your wife. You know how few people take the time to do that?”

“Probably not many,” Holly says. She herself isn’t apt to be chatty with people she doesn’t know; mostly contents herself with please and thank you and have a nice day. Holly keeps herself to herself, Charlotte used to say, with a little grimacing smile meant to convey she can’t help it, you know.

“Not many is right,” Herrera says. “But not her. Always friendly, always a good word. She’d get a diet soda, sometimes one of those sweets in the rack there. She was partial to Ho Hos and Ring Dings, but mostly she’d pass them by. Young women are figure-conscious, as you probably know.”

“Was there anything unusual about that night, Mr. Herrera? Anything at all? Someone outside who might have been watching her? Maybe standing where the video wouldn’t pick him up?”

“Not that I saw,” Herrera says, after doing Holly the courtesy of giving it some thought. “And I believe I would have. Convenience stores like this, especially on quiet streets like Red Bank Ave, are prime targets for robbers. Although this place has never been hit, grace of God.” He crosses himself. “But I keep an eye out. Who’s coming, who’s going, who’s loitering. Didn’t see anyone like that on the last night that girl you’re looking for was in here. Not that I can remember, at least. She got her soda, put it in her backpack, put on her helmet, and off she went.”

Holly opens her iPad and shows him what she downloaded before she came in. It’s a picture of a 2020 Toyota Sienna. “Do you remember a van like this? That night or any other night? It would have had a blue stripe running down low, along the side.”

Herrera studies the picture carefully, then hands it back. “Seen plenty of vans like that, but it doesn’t ring a bell. You know, about that night. Which you know is now almost a month ago, right?”

“Yes, understood. Let me show you something else. It might refresh your memory.”

She plays the security video from the night of July first, and freezes it when the van is in the background. He studies it and says, “Wow. I better clean the lens of that camera.”

Kind of locking the barn door after the horse has been stolen, Holly doesn’t say. “You’re sure you don’t remember a van like that, maybe on other nights?”

“I’m sorry, ma’am. I don’t. Vans are pretty common.”

It’s what Holly expected. Another t crossed, another i dotted. “Thank you, Mr. Herrera.”

“I wish I could have been more help.”

“What about this boy? Do you recognize him?” She shows him a picture of Peter Steinman. It’s a group shot of his middle school band club, which she found online (everything’s online these days). Holly has enlarged it so that Peter, standing in the back row with a pair of cymbals, is relatively clear. Better than the Jet Mart security footage, anyway. “He was a skateboarder.”

Herrera peers, then looks up when a middle-aged woman comes in. He greets her by name and she returns the greeting. Then he gives the iPad back to Holly. “He looks familiar, but that’s all I can say. Those skateboard kids come in all the time. They buy candy or chips, then ride their boards down the hill to the Whip. Do you know the Dairy Whip?”

“Yes,” Holly says. “He’s missing, too. Since November of 2018.”

“Hey, you don’t think we’ve got some kind of predator in the neighborhood, do you? John Wayne Gacy type?”

“Probably not. This young man and Bonnie Dahl are probably not even related.” Although she’s finding this ever tougher to believe. “I don’t suppose you can think of any other regulars who just suddenly stopped showing up, can you?”

The woman customer—Cora by name—is now waiting to pay for an Iron City sixer and a loaf of Wonder Bread.

“Nope,” Herrera says, but he’s not looking at Holly anymore, who isn’t a customer. Cora is.

Holly can take a hint, but before moving away from the counter, she gives Emilio Herrera one of her cards. “My number’s on there. If you think of anything that might help me locate Bonnie, would you give me a call?”

“Sure,” Herrera says, and pockets the card. “Hey, Cora. Sorry to keep you waiting. What about this Covid, huh?”

Holly buys a can of Fanta before leaving. She doesn’t really want it, but it seems only polite.

Holly checks Twitter as soon as she’s back in her apartment. There is one new response, from Franklin Craslow (Christian, Proud NRA Member, South Is Gonna Rise Again). It’s brief. Ellen killed her baby and will burn in hell. Leave us alone.

Us, Holly assumes, meaning the Craslow clan from Bibb County.

She calls Penny Dahl. It’s not a call she wants to make, but it’s time to tell Penny what she now believes, that Bonnie may have been abducted. Possibly by someone in a van who was waiting for her at the former Bill’s Automotive and Small Engine Repair. Possibly by someone she knew. Holly emphasizes the may in may have been.

She expects sobs, but there are none, at least for the time being. This is, after all, exactly what Penny Dahl has been afraid of. She asks Holly if there’s a chance Bonnie might still be alive.

“There’s always a chance,” Holly says.

“Some fucker took her.” The vulgarity surprises Holly, but only for a moment. Anger instead of tears. Penny makes Holly think of a bear who’s lost a cub. “Find him. Whoever took my daughter, you find that fucker. No matter what it costs. I’ll get the money. Do you hear me?”

Holly suspects that tears will come later, when what Holly has told Penny has had a chance to sink in. It’s one thing to have the worst fear a mother can feel locked inside; it’s quite another to hear it spoken aloud.

“I’ll do my best.” It’s what she always says.

“Find him,” Penny repeats, and ends the call without saying goodbye.

Holly goes to the window and lights a cigarette. She tries to think of what her next step should be and comes to the conclusion (reluctantly) that right now she doesn’t have one. She knows of three missing people and feels their disappearances are related, but in spite of certain similarities, she has no proof of that. She’s at a dead end. She needs the universe to throw her a rope.

That evening Jerome calls from New York. He’s excited and happy, and why not? The lunch went well, the check duly handed over. His agent will deposit it to his account (minus her fifteen per cent), but he actually held it in his hand, he tells her, and ran his fingers over the embossed numbers.

“I’m rich, Hollyberry. I’m freaking rich!”

You’re not the only one, Holly thinks.

“Are you also drunk?”

“No!” He sounds offended. “I had two beers!”

“Well, that’s good. But on this one occasion, I suppose you’d have a right to get drunk.” She pauses. “As long as you didn’t get all sloppy and vomit on 5th Avenue, that is.”

“The Blarney Stone is on 8th, Hols. Near Madison Square Garden.”

Holly, who’s never been to New York and doesn’t want to go, says that’s interesting.

Then, channeling his younger sister without knowing it, Jerome tells her it’s not really the money that’s blowing his mind. “They’re going to publish it! It started as a college paper, it turned into a book, and now it’s going to be published!”

“That’s wonderful, Jerome. I’m so glad for you.” She wishes her friend—who once saved her life and Bill’s life in a snowstorm—could always be this happy, and knows that’s not the way life works. Maybe just as well. If it did, happiness wouldn’t mean anything.

“What’s going on with the case? Have you made any progress?”

Holly fills him in on everything. Most of it is about Ellen Craslow, but she doesn’t neglect Tom Higgins being out of the picture. When she finishes, Jerome says, “I’d give a hundred bucks to know who the old lady was. The one who cleaned out Ellen Craslow’s trailer. Wouldn’t you?”

“Yes.” Holly’s thinking (and with a smile) that Jerome could actually afford to give a thousand, considering his recent windfall. For that matter, so could she. She is dives puella—a rich girl, just like in the Hall and Oates song she used to love. “To me the most interesting thing is all the Black people living in that trailer park. Not surprising, because it’s at the western edge of Lowtown, but the old lady was white.”

“What’s next for you?”

“I don’t know,” Holly says. “How about you, Jerome?”

“I’m going to stay in New York awhile longer. Until Thursday at least. My editor—I love saying that—wants to talk about some stuff, a few changes in the manuscript, plus he wants to brainstorm a book jacket concept. He says the head of publicity wants to talk about a possible tour. A tour! Do you believe that?”

“I do,” Holly says. “I’m so glad for you.”

“Can I tell you something? About Barb?”

“Of course.”

“I’m pretty sure she’s writing, too. And I think she’s getting somewhere with it. Wouldn’t it be crazy if we both turned out to be writers?”

“No crazier than the Brontës,” Holly says. “There were three of them. Charlotte, Emily, and Anne. All writers. I loved Jane Eyre.” This is true, but the one Holly especially loved as an unhappy teenager was Wuthering Heights. “No idea what Barbara might be writing?”

“I’d say poetry. Just about has to be. It’s about all she’s been reading since she was a sophomore. Listen, Holly, I want to go for a walk. I think I could fall in love with this city. For one thing, they get it—there are actually pop-up vaccine sites.”

“Well, don’t get mugged. Keep your wallet in your front pocket, not the back. And call your mother and father.”

“Already did.”

“What about Barbara? Have you talked to her?”

“I will. If she’s not too busy with her secret project to take my call, that is. I love you, Holly.”

This isn’t the first time he’s said it, but it always makes her feel like crying. “I love you, too, Jerome. Enjoy the rest of your big day.”

She ends the call. She lights a cigarette and goes to the window.

She puts her thinking cap on.

Much good does it do her.

Roddy Harris comes back from his usual Monday evening visit to Strike Em Out Lanes around quarter to nine. He and Emily take good care of themselves (often in ways of which dimwitted society would not approve), but his once strong hips have grown rather fragile as he advances deeper into his eighties, and it’s been almost four years since he last rolled a ball down a hardwood lane. He still goes on most Mondays, though, because he likes to root for his team. The Golden Oldies play in the Over 65 League. Most of the men with whom he bowled when he joined the Oldies are gone, but a few are left, including Hugh Clippard, once of the Sociology Department. Hugh has to be pushing eighty himself these days, he’s made a pile in the stock market, and he’s still got a wicked hook. Too bad it’s to the Brooklyn side.

Emily comes out of her little office as soon as she hears the front door close. He kisses her on the cheek and asks how her evening was.

“Not wonderful. We may have a slight problem, dear. You know I monitor certain people’s tweets and posts.”

“Vera Steinman,” he says. “And the Dahl woman, of course.”

“I also check in every now and then with the Craslows. There’s not much and they never talk about Ellen. Nobody asks about Ellen, either. Until yesterday.”

“Ellen Craslow,” Roddy says, shaking his head. “That bitch. That…” For a moment the word he wants escapes him. Then it comes. “That intransigent bitch.”

“She certainly was. And someone calling herself LaurenBacallFan has been asking for information about her on Twitter.”

“After almost three years? Why now?”

“Because I’m positive that LaurenBacallFan runs a private investigation firm. Her real name is Holly Gibney, the firm is called Finders Keepers, and Penelope Dahl has engaged her services.”

He is paying close attention now, looming over her upturned face. He’s seven inches taller than Emily, but she’s his equal in intellect, maybe in some ways his superior. She’s… again the word dances away from him, but he catches it as he always does. Almost always.

Emily is sly.

“How did you find out?”

“Mrs. Dahl is very chatty on social media.”

“Chatty Penny,” he says. “That girl, that Bonnie, was a mistake. Worse than the goddam Mexican, and we can excuse ourselves for that, because—”

“Because he was the first. I know. Come in the kitchen. There’s half a bottle of red left from dinner.”

“Wine before bed gives me acid. You know that.” But he follows her.

“Just a splash.”

She gets it from the fridge and pours—a splash for him, a bit more for her. They sit facing each other.

“Bonnie probably was a mistake,” she admits. “But the heat brought back my sciatica… and the headaches…”

“I know,” Roddy says. He takes her hand across the table and gives it a gentle squeeze. “My poor dear with her migraines.”

“And you. I saw you struggling so for words sometimes. And your poor hands, the way they were shaking… we had to.”

“I’m fine now. The shakes are gone. And any… any mental muddiness I might have been dealing with… that’s gone, too.”

This is only half-true. The shakes are gone, true enough (well, sometimes the minutest tremble when he’s very tired), but there are those words that sometimes dance just out of reach.

Everyone sometimes has those blank spots, he tells himself when it happens. You’ve researched it yourself. It’s a temporarily fouled circuit, transient aphasia, no different from a muscle cramp that hurts like Satan and then lets go. The idea that it might be incipient Alzheimer’s is ridiculous.

“In any case it’s done. If there’s fallout, we’ll deal with it. The good news is that I don’t believe we’ll have to. This Gibney woman has had some notable successes—yes, I looked her up—but when those occurred she had a partner, ex-police, and he died years ago. Since then she mostly looks for lost dogs, chases bail-jumpers, and works on a contingency basis with certain insurance companies. Small ones, none of the majors.”

Roddy sips his wine. “Apparently she was smart enough to find Ellen Craslow.”

Emily sighs. “That’s true. But two disappearances almost three years apart don’t make a pattern. Still, you know what you always say—the wise man prepares for rain while the sun shines.”

Does he always say that? He thinks he does, or used to. Along with one monkey don’t make no sideshow, a thing his father used to say, his father had that fabulous sky-blue Packard—

“Roddy!” The sharpness of her tone brings him back. “You’re wandering!”

“Was I?”

“Give me that.” She takes the jelly glass with its splash of wine from in front of him and pours it down the sink. From the freezer she takes a parfait glass containing a cloudy gray concoction. She sprays whipped cream from a can on top and puts it in front of him with a long-handled dessert spoon. “Eat.”

“Do you not want to share?” he asks… but his mouth is already watering.

“No. You have it all. You need it.”

She sits across from him as he begins to spoon the mixture of brains and vanilla ice cream greedily into his mouth. Emily watches. It will bring him back. It has to bring him back. She loves him. And she needs him.

“Listen to me carefully, love. This woman will hunt around for Bonnie, find nothing, take her fee, and go her way. If she should present a problem—one chance in a hundred if not in a thousand—she is unmarried and seems to have no significant other, based on what I’ve read. Her mother died earlier this month. Her only other living relative, an uncle, is in an elder care center with Alzheimer’s. She has a business partner, but he’s apparently hors de combat with Covid.”

Roddy eats a little faster, wiping a dribble that runs down a seam at the side of his mouth. He believes he can already sense a greater clarity in what he’s seeing and in what she’s saying.

“You found all that on that Twitter platform?”

Emily smiles. “There and a few other places. I have my little tricks. It’s like that TV show we watch. Manifest. Where the characters keep saying ‘everything is connected.’ It’s a silly show, but that’s not silly. My point is simple, dear one. This is a woman who has no one. This is a woman who must feel quite normally depressed and grief-stricken after losing her mother. If a woman like that were to commit suicide by jumping in the lake, leaving a suicide note behind on her computer, who would question it?”

“Her business partner might.”

“Or he might understand completely. I’m not saying it will come to that, only—”

“That we should prepare for rain while the sun is shining.”

“Exactly.” The parfait is almost gone, and surely he’s had enough. “Give me that.”

She takes it and finishes it herself.

Barbara Robinson is in her bedroom, reading in her jammies by the light of her bedside lamp, when the phone rings. The book is Catalepsy, by Jorge Castro. It isn’t as good as The Forgotten City, and the title seems deliberately off-putting—a writer’s declaration that he is “literary”—but it’s pretty good. Besides, the working title of her book—Faces Change—isn’t exactly Favorite Fireside Poems for Young & Old.

It’s Jerome, calling from New York. It’s quarter past eleven where she is, so it must already be tomorrow in the eastern time zone.

“Hey, bro. You’re up late, and you’re not partyin, unless it’s with a bunch of mutes.”

“No, I’m in my hotel room. Too excited to sleep. Did I wake you?”

“No,” Barbara says, sitting up in bed and propping an extra pillow behind her. “Just reading myself to sleep.”

“Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton?” Teasing.

“A novel. The guy who wrote it actually taught up the ridge for awhile.” Up the ridge meaning Bell College. “What’s going on with you?”

So he tells her everything he already told his parents and Holly, spilling it out in an exuberant rush. She is delighted for him, and says so. She marvels over the hundred thousand dollars, and squeals when he tells her about the possible tour.

“Bring me along! I’ll be your gofer!”

“I might take you up on that. What’s going on with you, Barbarella?”

She almost tells him everything, then holds back. Let this be Jerome’s day.

“Barb? You still there?”

“It’s been pretty much the same old same old.”

“Don’t believe it. You’re up to something. What’s the big secret? Spill.”

“Soon,” she promises. “Really. Tell me what’s up with Holly. I kind of blew her off the other day. I feel bad about that.” But not too bad. She has an essay to write, it’s important, and she hasn’t made much progress. Much? She hasn’t even started.

He recaps everything, ending with Ellen Craslow. Barbara says yes and wow and uh-huh in all the right places, but she’s just half-listening. Her mind has drifted back to that damned essay again, which has to be in the mail by the end of the month. And she’s sleepy. She doesn’t connect the disappearances J is telling her about with the one Olivia Kingsbury told her about, even though Jorge Castro’s novel is facedown on her comforter.

He hears her yawn and says, “I’ll let you go. But it’s good to talk to you when you’re actually paying attention.”

“I always pay attention to you, my dear brother.”

“Liar,” he says, laughing, and ends the call.

Barbara puts Jorge Castro aside, unaware that he is part of a small and extremely unlucky club, and turns out her light.

That night Holly dreams of her old bedroom.

She can tell by the wallpaper it’s the one on Bond Street in Cincinnati, but it’s also the museum exhibit she imagined. Those little plaques are everywhere, identifying objects that have become artifacts. LUDIO LUDIUS next to the sound system, BELLA SIDEREA beside the wastebasket, CUBILE TRISTIS PUELLA on the bed.

Because the human mind specializes in connectivity, she wakes thinking of her father. She doesn’t often. Why would she? He died a long, long time ago, and was never much more than a shadow even when he was home. Which was seldom. Howard Gibney was a salesman for Ray Garton Farm Machinery, Inc., and spent his days traveling the Midwest, selling combines and harvesters and Ray Garton TruMade tractors, all in bright red, as if to make sure nobody mistook Garton farm gear for John Deere equipment. When he was home, Charlotte made sure he never forgot who, in her words, kept the home fires burning. In flyover country he might have been a sales dynamo, but at home he was the original Mr. Milquetoast.

Holly gets up and goes to her bureau. The records of her working life—the life she has made for herself—are either at Finders Keepers on Frederick Street or in her little home office, but she keeps certain other records (certain artifacts) in the bottom drawer of this bureau. There aren’t many, and most bring back memories that are a mixture of nostalgia and regret.

There’s the plaque she received as second prize in a speaking contest in which several city elementary schools participated. (This was when she was young enough and still confident enough to stand up in front of large groups of people.) She recited a Robert Frost poem, “Mending Wall,” and after complimenting her, Charlotte told her she could have won first prize if she hadn’t stumbled over several words halfway through.

There’s a photograph of her trick-or-treating with her father when she was six, he in a suit, she wearing a ghost costume that her father made. Holly vaguely recalls that her mother, who usually took her (often dragging her from house to house), had the flu that year. In the picture, Howard Gibney is smiling. She thinks she was smiling, too, although with that sheet over her head it’s impossible to tell.

“I was, though,” Holly murmurs. “Because he didn’t drag me so he could get back home and watch TV.” Also, he didn’t remind her to say thank you at every house but simply assumed she would do so. As she always did.

But it isn’t the plaque she wants, or the Halloween photograph, or the pressed flowers, or her father’s obituary, carefully clipped and saved. It’s the postcard. Once there were more—at least a dozen—and she assumed the others were lost. After discovering her mother’s lie about the inheritance, a less palatable idea has come to her: that her mother stole these souvenirs of a man Holly can remember only vaguely. A man who was under his wife’s thumb when he was there (which was seldom) but who could be kind and amusing on the rare occasions when it was just him and his little girl.

He took four years of Latin in high school and won his own award—first prize, not second—for a two-page essay he wrote in that language. The title of his essay was “Quid Est Veritas—What Is Truth?” Over Charlotte’s strong, almost strident, objections, Holly took two years of Latin in high school herself, all that was offered. She did not shine, as her father had done in his pre-salesman days, but she carried a solid B average, and remembered enough to know that tristis puella was sad girl and bella siderea was star wars.

What she thinks now—what is clear to her now—is that she took Latin as a way of reaching out to her father. And he had reached back, hadn’t he? Sent her those postcards from places like Omaha and Tulsa and Rapid City.

Kneeling in front of the bottom drawer in her pajamas, she searches through these few remnants of her tristis puella past, thinking even that last card is also gone, not filched by her mother (who had completely erased Howard Gibney from her own life) but lost by her own stupid self, probably when she moved to this apartment.

At last she finds it, stuck in the crack at the back of the drawer. The picture on the front of the card shows the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. The message, no doubt written with a Ray Garton Farm Machinery ballpoint, is in Latin. All of his postcards to her were written in Latin. It was her job—and her pleasure—to translate them. She turns this one over and reads the message.

Cara Holly! Deliciam meam amo. Lude cum matre tua. Mox domi ero. Pater tuus.

It was his one accomplishment, something that made him even prouder than selling a new tractor for a hundred and seventy grand. He had told her once that he was the only farm machinery salesman in America who was also a Latin scholar. He said that in Charlotte’s hearing, and she had responded with a laugh. “Only you would be proud of speaking a dead language,” she said.

Howard had smiled and said nothing.

Holly takes the card back to bed and reads it again by the light of the table lamp. She can remember figuring out the message with the help of her Latin dictionary, and she murmurs the translation now. “Dear Holly! I love my little girl. Have fun with your mother. I will be home soon. Your father.”

With no idea she’s going to do it until it’s done, Holly kisses the card. The postmark is too blurry to read the date, but she believes it was sent not too long before her father died of a heart attack in a motel room on the outskirts of Davenport, Iowa. She remembers her mother complaining—bitching—about the cost of having the body sent home by rail.

Holly puts the card on the bedside table, thinking she will restore it to the bureau drawer in the morning. Artifacts, she thinks. Museum artifacts.

She’s saddened by how few memories she has of her father, and dully angry at the realization that her mother’s shadow has all but blotted him out. Did Charlotte steal the other cards, as she had stolen Holly’s inheritance? Only missed this one, perhaps because a younger and much more timid version of Holly had been using it for a bookmark or put it in the satchel (tartan, of course) that she carried everywhere back then? She will never know. Did he spend so much time on the road because he didn’t want to come home to his wife? She’ll never know that, either. What she does know is that he was always glad to come home to cara Holly.

What she also knows is they gave a little life to a dead language. It was their thing.

Holly turns out the light. Goes to sleep.

Dreams of Charlotte in Holly’s old bedroom.

“Remember who you belong to,” Charlotte says.

She goes out and locks the door behind her.