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“Holly.” A woman who kneels to rub lotion into her husband’s feet can call her by her first name anytime. “Please call me Holly. And no, that was it.”
“Why the interest in Professor Harris?” Evelyn asks… and wrinkles her nose a little. It’s just a small tell, but Holly sees it.
“Did you know him?”
“Not really, but after the tournaments were over there was always a meal at someone’s house. You know, like a celebration, win or lose. With Vic’s team it was mostly lose.”
Anderson gives a rusty chuckle and his jerky nod.
“Anyway, when it was our turn we had a barbecue in our backyard, and the prof basically took over the grill. He said… actually said… that I was doing the burgers all wrong. Cooking the nutrients out of them, or something. I was polite about it, let him take over, but I thought it was very rude. Also…”
“Aw!” Anderson interjects. His grin is simultaneously awful and charming. “Aff-aw!”
“That’s right,” Evelyn says. “They were half-raw. I couldn’t eat mine. Why are you so interested in Professor Harris? I thought it was Cary you were investigating.”
Holly puts on her best perplexed expression. “It is, but I keep thinking if I talk to enough members of the bowling team, I’ll find a thread I can pick up and follow. I’ve already talked to Mr. Welch and Mr. Clippard.”
“Oowee,” Anderson says. “Oo-dole Oowee-a-Cli!”
“Good old Hughie the Clip,” Evelyn says absently.
“Yes, I got that. Vic, did Professor Harris drive a van?”
Anderson does that chewing thing again as he mulls this over. Then he says, “Oobayoo.”
“I didn’t get that, hon,” Evelyn says.
Holly did. “He says it was a Subaru.”
6
At the desk she tells Mrs. Norman she’ll be back to see her uncle shortly, but she forgot something in the car. This is a lie. What she wants is a cigarette. And she needs to think.
She smokes in her usual position—driver’s door open, head down, feet on the pavement, freebasing nicotine before going back inside to see Uncle Henry, who somehow missed Covid and continues to exist in what must be a twilight world of perplexity. Or maybe even perplexity is gone. He still has occasional brief periods of awareness, but these have grown farther and farther apart. His brain, once so adept at names and numbers and addresses—not to mention at hiding money from his niece—is now your basic carrier wave that gives an occasional blip.
She’s glad she came to see Vic Anderson, partly because it cheered her to see such long-term affection between a husband and wife, but mostly because it casts a fascinating light on Rodney Harris. He drives a Subaru instead of a disability van—no big surprise, since he’s obviously not disabled—but to Holly he looks more and more like someone who might be covering for the Red Bank Predator. Or abetting him.
According to Professor Harris, he and Cary Dressler were mere acquaintances. According to Vic Anderson, they sometimes had beers together at the bar next door—hops and grains apparently not defiling Harris’s ideas of nutrition the way that marijuana did. Anderson said Harris encouraged Dressler to talk about himself “because no one else ever did.”
Just a kindly old professor drawing out a lonely young man? Possible, but if so, why had Harris lied about it? The idea that Rodney Harris had a letch for Dressler, just as Keisha said Harris’s wife might have had a letch for Bonnie, occurs to Holly, but she dismisses it. The possibility that Harris was information-gathering seems more likely.
Harris isn’t killing people, not at his age, and the idea that his wife is helping him do it is ridiculous, so if what Holly is thinking is true, they must be covering for someone. She needs to check and find out if they have children, but right now she has to bite the bullet and see the human vegetable who still looks like her uncle.
But as she gets up, something else occurs to her. Holly doesn’t like Facebook and only goes on it once in awhile under her own name so her account won’t molder, but she goes there often as LaurenBacallFan. She does so now, and visits Penny Dahl’s page. She should have gone there sooner, and isn’t entirely surprised to see her own name. She is described as “noted local detective Holly Gibney.” She hates the word detective, she’s an investigator. And she should have told Penny not to post her name but didn’t think of it.
She wonders if Professor Harris knows she’s also investigating Bonnie Dahl’s disappearance. If he has been, in other words, one step ahead of her.
“If he is, I just caught up,” Holly says, and goes back into Rolling Hills Elder Care to visit her uncle.
7
A new millionaire walks into an old folks’ home suite, Holly thinks after giving a token knock on the door, which is already ajar. Some of the rooms in the Rolling Hills facility are single-occupancy; the majority are doubles, because it saves walking for the hard-working nurses, orderlies, and on-call doctors. (And doubtless maximizes profit.) There are also four two-room suites, and Uncle Henry has one of those. If the thought of how Henry Sirois, retired accountant, could afford such pricey digs has ever crossed Holly’s mind (she can’t remember if it ever did), she supposes she must have thought he had been a saving soul, just in case his old age should come to this.
Now she knows better.
Henry is sitting in his living room, dressed in a checked shirt and bluejeans that bag on a skinny body that used to be plump. His hair is freshly clipped and his face is smooth from a morning shave. Morning sun shines on his chin, which is wet with drool. There’s some sort of a protein drink with a straw in it on the table beside him. An orderly she passed in the hall asked Holly if she would like to help him with it and Holly said she’d be happy to. The TV is on, tuned to a game show hosted by Allen Ludden, who went to his reward long ago.
Looking around at the sparse but very nice furnishings, including a king bed with hospital rails in the second room, Holly feels a dull and hopeless anger that is very unlike her. She was a deeply depressed teenager and still suffers bouts of depression, and she can be angry, but lacking Holly hope? Not her style. At least usually. Today, though, in this room, circumstances are different.
