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“I don’t know her num…” Barbara thinks of the message Penny Dahl left. Her number will be in Barbara’s contacts. “Never mind, yes I do. I’m more worried about Holly than I am about Bonnie Dahl’s mother.”
“Right there with you, sis. What about the police? Isabelle Jaynes?”
“What am I supposed to say? That she parked her car in the wrong space with a tire on the yellow line and forgot to turn the wall safe dial back to zero so call out the National Guard?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I see your point. But Izzy’s sort of a friend. Do you want me to call her?”
“No, I’ll do it. But before I do, tell me everything you know about the case.”
“I already—”
“You did, but I was wrapped up in my own shit, so tell me again. Because I feel like I almost know. I just can’t… I’m so upset… just go through it again. Please.”
So he does.
19
Emily comes halfway down the stairs and stops when she sees her husband lying facedown in a spreading pool of blood. “What happened?” she screams. “What happened?”
“I cut his throat,” Holly says. She’s standing against the cement wall at the far side of the cell, next to the potty. She feels remarkably calm. “Would you like to hear a joke I made up?”
Emily bolts down the final six or eight risers. A mistake. She trips on the last one and loses her balance. She puts out her hands to break her fall, and Holly hears the snap as a bone in her left arm—old and brittle—fractures. This time it’s a shriek instead of a scream, not of horror but of pain. She crawls to Roddy and turns his head. The blood from his cut throat has begun to coagulate, and there’s a sticky ripping sound as his cheek pulls free of it.
“A new millionaire walks into a bar and orders a mai-tai…”
“What did you do? WHAT DID YOU DO TO RODDY?”
“Weren’t you listening? Cut his fracking throat.” Holly bends and picks up the golden earring. “With this. It was Bonnie’s. If there was ever a case of revenge from beyond the grave, I’d say this is it.”
Emily gets up… too fast. Not a scream or a shriek this time, but a howl of agony as her back goes nuclear. And her left arm is hanging crookedly.
Broke at the elbow, Holly thinks. Good.
“Oh my God! Oh my dear God! HOW IT HURTS!”
“I only wish you’d split your crazy evil skull,” Holly tells her. She raises the earring. It glitters under the fluorescents. “Come over here, Professor. Let me put you out of your misery, which looks to be considerable. Maybe it’s not too late to catch up with your husband on his way to hell.”
Emily is bent over, haglike. Her hair, which she put up in a neat bun that morning, is coming loose and hanging around her face. Holly thinks it adds to her overall witchy-woman vibe. She wonders if the calm she feels means she’s lost her mind. She thinks not, because she’s perfectly clear on one thing: if Emily Harris can get back up to the first floor—and then back down—Holly is going to die.
At least I got one of them, she thinks, and then flashes on Bogie saying We’ll always have Paris.
Emily takes shuffling baby steps to the stairs. She grasps the rail. She looks back once, not at Holly but at her husband, lying dead on the floor. Then—very slowly, pulling herself along—she begins to climb. She’s breathing in harsh gasps.
Holly calls after her. “A new millionaire walks into a bar and orders a mai-tai. Fall and break your neck, you bitch, fall!”
But Emily doesn’t.
20
Barbara thinks there may be a solution to the mystery of Holly’s disappearance in the back of the book after all. If, that is, you think of Penny Dahl as the back of the book. There’s a MISSING WOMAN flier on a streetlight pole next to the Frederick Building’s parking lot. It’s been faded by three weeks of weather and part of it is flapping in the hot late-morning breeze, but Barbara can still see the girl’s smiling face.
Dead, she thinks. That girl is dead. Please God, Holly’s not dead, too.
She calls Penny Dahl’s number. As the phone rings, she looks at the picture of the smiling blond woman on the poster. Not much older than Barbara herself.
Be there, Mrs. Dahl. Answer your damn phone.
Penny does, sounding breathless. “Hello?”
