Robert B. Parker’s Revenge Tour

Sixty-Two

“Surprised to see me?” I asked when she opened the door.

“As a matter of fact, yes,” Holly Hall said.

The name had begun to sound sillier and sillier to me.

“What are you doing here?” she said.

“You neglected to tell me that your late and extremely horny husband got Jennifer Price pregnant before she left town,” I said.

“I’m sure I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said.

She started to shut the door. I was wearing Dr. Martens boots with extremely sturdy toes. I put my foot out to stop her.

“This is not a moment when you want to annoy me,” I said. “You saw how that went with your old friend Lisa.”

“You think you can force yourself into my home?” she said.

“You bet!” I said.

“I could call someone.”

“Please do,” I said. “While you’re doing that I’ll call Tom Gorman and give him an idea for an interesting piece he might write about a certain dead professor, and the former student who killed herself over him. And either gave away their child or worse. You hearing this, Holly? It’s starting to sound like a bad Melanie Joan novel, as redundant as that probably sounds to you.”

She turned and walked ahead of me into the house. I asked how her trip had gone. She said it was none of my goddamn business. I asked where she’d gone. She gave the same answer.

“And here I thought we’d been bonding,” I said.

“Obviously you’re not the detective you think you are,” she said.

She sat down on the sofa, motioned me into one of the chairs across from it.

“Let’s get this over with,” she said. “I’ve got somewhere I need to be.”

She was wearing a T-shirt and bike shorts that showed off legs that looked even longer than they did in jeans.

“He got her pregnant,” I said. “The timeline makes perfect sense. He got her pregnant and rejected her, and the baby, and she left.”

She stared at me, expressionless.

“He knew why she left and I’m sure he told you, even though you neglected to mention that to me,” I said.

“I honestly don’t know where she ended up,” Holly said.

“But I do,” I said. “A little dot of a town on the map called New Ashford, Mass. About three hours from here. I know because I just drove here from there.”

I smiled.

“How am I doing so far?” I said.

“Swell,” she said. “But I didn’t keep track of all of my late husband’s ex-girlfriends.”

“Would it be all right with you if I keep going?” I said.

“Do I have a choice?”

“Nah.”

“I saw a picture of her,” I said. “Jennifer Price. An old staff picture on one of the library walls. The one where she was working when she slit her wrists. That day when I showed up here, and the old fool collapsed, he thought I was her, didn’t he?”

She shook her head, almost sadly.

“Didn’t he?” I said.

My tone got her attention.

“Maybe he did,” she said. “And maybe he didn’t.”

“As much screwing around as he did with college girls,” I said, “getting one pregnant would have been a game-changer, wouldn’t it, even in the more permissive times you so wistfully remember?”

“I suppose,” she said.

“Gotta admit, Holly, you sold yourself short as a storyteller,” I said. “Because you made up a bunch of bullshit about Jennifer Price, didn’t you? The one he loved and lost?”

“I may have mentioned this before,” she said. “But he thought he loved us all.” She looked at her watch. “There was no reason to tell you the truth, frankly. At that point I was only interested in getting rid of you. I would have said anything.”

I leaned forward, elbows on knees, hands clasped together. Firmly. I stared at her, as if she were the one coming into complete focus now.

“He didn’t care about his own child, did he?” I said.

She started to say something, then hesitated. I studied her even more closely, looking for some kind of tell. But got none.

“He told me that she called him once, after the child was born,” Holly said.

“Was it a boy or girl?” I said.

“I’m not sure he even asked,” she said. “He told me that he told her to never call him again, that she’d never meant anything to him, he thought he’d made that clear before she left Whitesboro.”

Holly Hall gave a tiny roll of her shoulders.

“And then she died,” she said.

“How did the son of a bitch even know that?” I said.

“He said a friend of hers called,” she said. “A woman. She said Charles’s number was one of just a few Jennifer had in her Filofax.”

“Did you ever ask what had happened to the child?”

“Why would I?” she said. “Jennifer had always been his problem, not mine. Why should I have cared about her kid?”

“Why, indeed?” I said.

Then I was up and out of my chair and leaning across the coffee table and slapping her across the face.

Before she could say anything, I said, “That was for you and your husband.”

“I’m tired of people slapping me,” she said. “Now, get the hell out of my house.”

I could see her face reddening where I’d hit her, same as it had with Lisa Karlin at the gym that day. But she hadn’t touched the place with her hand, or moved.

“One more question.”

“How many ways do I have to tell you that I’m done talking to you?”

“Did Jennifer Price write a book?” I said.

And Holly Hall smiled.

“That’s all you care about, isn’t it?” she said. “Not the poor, tortured little flower. Not what happened to a missing child. Just your awful client.”

“Humor me,” I said.

“She wrote something,” Holly Hall said. “I don’t know if it was a book book. But whatever it was, it was the reason she left, not the pregnancy.”

“And why is that?”

“Charles said that the only way to get her out of his life was to tell her she had no talent,” she said. “That the only reason he ever told her she did have talent was to get her into bed. There. Are you happy now?”

“Not one single part of this makes me happy,” I said.

“Charles told her that he couldn’t believe he’d ever wasted his time on her in the first place,” she said. “That was when poor Jennifer left.”