Holly

July 27, 2021

Holly drives down Ridge Road to a two-hour parking zone, opens her window, and lights a cigarette. Then she calls the Harris residence. A man answers. Holly gives her name and occupation and asks if she could drop by and ask a few questions.

“What’s this onguarding?”

“Pardon me?”

“I said what’s this regarding, Miss—?”

Holly repeats her name and says she’s interested in Cary Dressler. “I’ve been working on a case where Mr. Dressler’s name came up. I went by the bowling alley where he worked—”

“Strike Em Out Lanes,” he says, sounding impatient.

“That’s right. I’m trying to track him down. It has to do with a series of auto thefts. I can’t go into the details, you understand, but I’d like to talk to him. I saw the picture of your bowling team with Mr. Dressler in it, and I just thought you might have some idea where he got off to. I’ve already talked to Mr. Clippard and Mr. Welch, so since I’m nearby, I—”

“Dressler has been stealing cars?”

“I really can’t go into that, Mr. Harris. You are Mr. Harris, aren’t you?”

“Professor Harris. I suppose you can come by, but don’t plan on staying long. I haven’t seen young Mr. Dressler in years and I’m quite busy.”

“Thank y—”

But Harris is gone.

Roddy puts his phone down and turns to Emily. Her sciatica has relented a bit and she no longer needs the wheelchair, but she’s using her cane, her hair needs combing, and Roddy has an unkind thought: She looks like the old witch in a fairy tale.

“She’s coming,” he says, “but not about the Dahl girl. It’s Dressler she’s interested in. She says.”

“You don’t believe that, do you?”

“Not necessarily, but it makes a degree of sense. She claims to be investigating a series of car things.” He pauses. “Thefts, car thefts. It could be. I doubt very much if private detectives work just one case at a time. It wouldn’t be payable.” Is that the right word? Roddy decides it is.

“She’s got separate cases involving two of the people we’ve taken? That would be a very large coincidence, wouldn’t it?”

“They happen. And why would investigating Bonnie Dahl lead Gibson to the bowling alley? That elf-girl was no bowler.”

“Her name is Gibney. Holly Gibney. Perhaps I should talk to her when she comes.”

Roddy shakes his head. “You didn’t know Dressler. I did. It’s me she wants to talk to, and I’ll handle it.”

“Will you?” She gives him a searching look. “You said onguarding instead of regarding. You… I don’t exactly know how to say this, my love, but…”

“I’ve slipped a cog. There. I’ve said it for you. Did you think I wasn’t aware? I am, and I’ll make allowances.” He touches her cheek.

She presses her hand over his and smiles. “I’ll be watching from upstairs.”

“I know you will. I love you, muffin.”

“I love you, too,” she says, and makes her slow way to the stairs. Her ascent will be even slower, and painful, but she has no intention of having a chairlift installed, like the one in the house of the old bitch down the street. Em can hardly believe Olivia is still alive. And she stole that girl, who appeared to have some talent.

Especially for a black person. For a negress.

Emily likes that word.

Holly mounts the Harris porch and rings the bell. The door is opened by a tall slim man wearing dad jeans, mocs, and a polo shirt with the Bell College logo on the breast. His eyes are bright and intelligent, but beginning to sink in their sockets. His hair is white, but far from the luxuriant growth Hugh Clippard sports; pink scalp peeks through the comb-strokes. There’s the ghost of a bruise on one cheek.

“Ms. Gibney,” he says. “Come into the living room. And you can take off the mask. There’s no Clover here. Assuming there is such a thing, which I doubt.”

“Have you been vaccinated?”

He frowns at her. “My wife and I observe healthy protocols.”

That’s answer enough for Holly; she says she’ll be more comfortable with her mask on. She wishes she’d worn a pair of her disposable gloves as well, but doesn’t want to take them out of her pockets now. Harris is obviously cocked and locked on the subject of Covid. She doesn’t want to set him off.

“As you wish.”

Holly follows him down the hall into a big wood-paneled room lit by electric sconces. The drapes are pulled to keep out the strong late-afternoon sun. Central air conditioning whispers. Somewhere light classical music is playing very quietly.

“I’m going to be a bad host and not ask you to sit,” Harris says. “I’m writing a lengthy response to a rather stupid and badly researched article in The Quarterly Journal of Nutrition, and I don’t want to lose the thread of my argument. Also, my wife is suffering one of her migraines, so I’d ask you to keep your voice low.”

“I’m sorry,” says Holly, who rarely raises her voice even when she’s angry.

“Besides, my hearing is excellent.”

That much is true, Em thinks. She’s in the spare bedroom, watching them on her laptop. A teacup-sized camera is hidden behind knickknacks on the mantel. Emily’s most immediate concern is that Rodney will give something away. He’s still sharp most of the time, but as the day grows late, he has a tendency to misspeak and grow forgetful. She knows this is common in those who are suffering the onset of Alzheimer’s or dementia—the syndrome is called sundowning—but she refuses to believe that can be true of the man she loves. Still, a seed of doubt has been planted. God forbid it should grow.

Holly tells Harris the car-theft story, which she has refined on the way over—like the little girl in the Saki story, romance at short notice is her specialty. She should have used the story with Clippard and Welch, but it came to her too late. She certainly plans to use it when she talks to Ernie Coggins, who interests her the most: still bowling and still married. The wife probably not suffering from sciatica, but it’s possible, it’s possible.

Barbara goes down to their father’s old office. Jerome’s computer is now on the desk, with papers piled on both sides of it. She assumes the thick stack on the right is the manuscript of his book. She sits down and thumbs through it to the last page: 359. Jerome wrote all of this, she marvels, and thinks of her own book of poems, which will run to perhaps a hundred and ten pages, mostly white space… assuming it’s published at all. Olivia assures her it will be, but Barbara still finds it hard to believe. Poems not about “the Black experience,” but about coping with horror. Although sometimes there may not be that much difference, she thinks, and gives a short laugh.

The orange flash drive is where Jerome said it would be. She turns on the computer, types in Jerome’s password (#shizzle#), and waits for it to boot up. The wallpaper is a picture of Jerome and Barbara kneeling on either side of their dog Odell, who has now gone to wherever good dogs go.

She plugs in the drive. There are drafts of his book numbered 1, 2, and 3. There’s correspondence. And a file labeled PIX. Barbara opens it and looks at a few photos of their notorious great-grandfather, always dressed to the nines and always wearing a derby hat slightly cocked to the right. Signifying, she thinks. There are also photos of an all-Black nightclub where dressed-to-the-nines patrons are jitterbugging (or maybe Lindy Hopping) while the band is knocking it out. She finds the one of the Biograph Theater, and then one of John Dillinger himself, lying on a mortuary slab. Oough, as Holly would say. Barbara closes the PIX file, drags it to an email addressed to her brother, and sends it off with a whoosh.

To the left of the computer is a litter of notes, the one on top reading Call Mara abt promo. The ones directly underneath appear to be about Chicago, Indianapolis, and Detroit in the thirties, each with many references to books about those places during Prohibition and the Depression. Hope you’re not overdoing it, J, Barbara thinks.

Beneath the notes is a MapQuest printout of Deerfield Park and the surrounding area. Curious, Barbara picks it up. It has nothing to do with Jerome’s book and everything to do with Holly’s current case. There are three red dots with Jerome’s neat printing below each of them.

Bonnie D, July 1 2021 is on the east side of the park, across from the overgrown few acres known as the Thickets.

The dot for Ellen C, November 2018 is on the Bell College campus, placed directly on top of the Memorial Union, home of the Belfry. Barbara and some of her friends sometimes go there for burgers after using the Reynolds Library. As high school students they don’t have check-out privileges, but the reference room is good, and the computer room is awesome.

The last red dot is for Peter S, Late November 2018. Barbara also knows this location: it’s the Dairy Whip, considered déclassé by high school students, but a favorite hangout of the younger fry.

One of them could have been me, she thinks. There but for the grace of God.

Her chore in here is done. She shuts down the computer and gets up to leave. Then she sits down again and picks up the MapQuest printout. There’s a coffee mug filled with pens on the desk. She takes the red one Jerome must have used to mark the map. She makes another dot on Ridge Road, across from Olivia Kingsbury’s house. Because that’s where she saw him the night she was thinking about the poem she says was her last good one.

Beneath the dot she prints: Jorge Castro, October 2012. Even as she does it, she feels she’s being silly.

Probably Castro just said “Fuck this stupid English Department” and left. Also “Fuck Emily Harris and her unsuccessfully disguised homophobia, too.”

But with Castro added to Jerome’s map, she sees something interesting and a tiny bit disturbing. The dots almost seem to circle the park. It’s true that Bonnie’s came a bit sooner than the others, summer instead of fall, but didn’t Barbara see somewhere—maybe on that Netflix show Mindhunter—that homicidal maniacs have a tendency to wait a shorter and shorter time between their kills? Like drug addicts shooting up at ever more frequent intervals?

Ellen C and Peter S don’t fit the pattern; they came close together. Maybe because the killer didn’t get whatever he wanted from one of them? Because he or she didn’t fully turn on the killer’s bloodlight?

You’re giving yourself the creeps, Barbara thinks. Seeing monsters—like Chet Ondowsky—where there’s really nothing but shadows.

Still, she probably should pass on the information about Jorge Castro. She picks up her phone to call Holly, and it rings in her hand. It’s Marie Duchamp. Olivia is in Kiner Memorial with a-fib. This time it’s serious. Barbara forgets about calling Holly and hurries downstairs, telling her mother that she needs to use the car. When Tanya asks why, Barbara says a friend is in the hospital and she’ll explain later. She has good news, but that must also wait until later.

“Is it a scholarship? Did you get a scholarship?”

“No, it’s something else.”

“All right, dear,” Tanya says. “Drive carefully.” It’s her mantra.

Holly asks Rodney Harris if he has any idea where Cary Dressler may be now. Did he talk about plans to leave the city? Did he sometimes (this is a fresh bit of embroidery) appear to have large amounts of cash?

“I know he had a drug habit,” she confides. “Thieves often do.”

“He seemed like a nice enough fellow,” Harris says. He’s staring into space, a slight frown creasing his brow. Picture of a man trying to remember something that will help her. “Didn’t know him well but I knew he used drugs. Only cannabis sativa, so he said, but there may have been other ones…?”

His raised eyebrows invite Holly to confide, but she only smiles.

“Certainly cannabis is a known gateway for stronger substances,” he goes on in a pontifical tone. “Not always, but it is habituating, and impairs cognitive development. It also causes adverse structural changes to the hippocampus, the temperature lobe’s center of learning and memory. This is well known.”

Upstairs, Em winces. Temporal lobe, dear… and don’t get carried away. Please.

Gibney doesn’t appear to notice and it’s as if Roddy has heard Em. “Pardon the lecture, Ms. Gibson. I will now climb down from my hobby horse.”

Holly laughs politely. She touches one of the gloves in her pocket and wishes again she could put them on. She doesn’t want Professor Harris to think she’s Howard Hughes, but the idea that everything she touches could be crawling with Covid-19 or the new Delta variant won’t go away. Meanwhile Harris continues.

“Some of the other members of my team used to go out back with Dressler and ‘blow the joint,’ as they say. So did some of the women.”

“The Hot Witches?”

Harris’s frown deepens. “Yes, them. And others. One guesses they fancied him. But as I may have said, I didn’t really know him. He was friendly enough, and he sometimes subbed in for a wounded warrior, so to speak, but we were mere acquaintances. I had no idea of his cash situation and I’m afraid I have no idea where he may have gone.”

Leave it there, love, Emily thinks. See her to the door.

Roddy takes Holly’s elbow and does just that. “Now I’m afraid I must return to my labors.”

“I totally understand,” Holly says. “It was a long shot at best.” She reaches into her bag and gives him her card, careful not to touch his fingers. “If you think of anything that might help, please give me a call.”

When they reach the door, Emily switches to the hall camera. Roddy asks, “May I ask how you plan to proceed?”

Don’t, Emily thinks. Oh, don’t, Roddy. There may be quicksand if you go there.

But the woman—who seems too innocuous for Emily to be too worried—tells Roddy she really can’t talk about it, and offers her elbow. With a smile that says he must suffer fools, Roddy touches it with his own.

“Thank you very much for your time, Mr. Harris.”

“Not at all, Ms…. what was your name again?”

“Gibney.”

“Enjoy the rest of your day, Ms. Gibney, and I wish you success.”

As soon as Holly hears the front door close behind her, while she’s still on the walk, she’s reaching deep in her pocket for the hand sanitizer underneath the nitrile glove she wishes she’d worn. Forgetting her mask with the Dairy Whip boys was bad, but at least they were outside; her conversation with Rodney Harris happened in a room where the central air conditioning could waft the virus that had killed her mother anywhere, including into her nose and thus down to her smoke-polluted lungs.

You’re being silly and hypochondriacal, she thinks, but that is the voice of her mother, who died of the fracking virus.

She finds what she was looking for, a little bottle of Germ-X, and pulls it out of her pocket. She squirts a dollop into her palm and rubs both hands vigorously, thinking that the sharp smell of alcohol, which used to terrify her as a child because it meant a shot was coming, is now the smell of comfort and conditional safety.

Upstairs, Emily is watching this and smiling. Not much can amuse her these days, given the constant pain in her back and down her leg, but seeing that mousy little bitch frantically dry-washing her hands? That’s funny.