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“This is Barbara Robinson, Mrs. Dahl.”
“Did you get my message? Have you found her? Is she all right?”
Barbara doesn’t know if she’s talking about Bonnie or Holly. In either case, the answer is the same. “Still missing. I know you and Holly were supposed to talk last night. Did she send you a report instead? Have you checked your email?”
“I did, and there was nothing.”
“Would you check again?”
Penny Dahl tells her to hold on. Barbara stands looking at the picture of this woman’s missing daughter as she does. Blond all-American cheerleader type, every white boy’s dream. She waits, with sweat rolling down her cheeks. She keeps remembering the combination dial. Sorry, wrong number, she thinks.
Penny comes back. “No. Nothing.”
So if there’s a report, it’s probably locked inside the Finders Keepers computer system. Barbara thanks Penny and calls Pete Huntley. He answers himself, having hectored his daughter into giving up custody of his phone.
“Pete, it’s Barbara, and before you ask, she’s still gone.” She tells him about the un-Hollylike parking job at the apartment building and the combination dial oddity. Then she asks the big question: does he have the company computers’ password, which was automatically reset on July first?
She has to wait through a coughing fit before he can answer. “Hell, no. Holly takes care of all that stuff.”
“Are you sure she didn’t give it to you?”
“Yes. I would have written it down if she did. And before you ask, I don’t have the combo to the safe, either. She gave it to me a few months back, and that I did write down, but I lost the paper I wrote it on. I never use it, anyway. Sorry, kiddo.”
Barbara is disappointed but not surprised. She thanks him, ends the call, and stands staring at the smiling blond on the MISSING poster. The heat has mastered her antiperspirant and sweat is now trickling down from her armpits. She doubts if there’s a hard copy in the safe, anyway. Holly is particular about keeping it all in “the box”—which is what she calls her computer—until she’s sure the case is over. She hates having to reprint after making changes or additions; it’s another of her tics. If she did write a report and filed it to the cloud, it’s going to stay there until an IT guy—one with high-powered skills—can open the Finders Keepers computers, and by then it may be too late. Will probably be too late.
Jerome said she should call Isabelle Jaynes and Barbara said she would, but to what purpose? Holly has been missing for less than twenty-four hours. There’s no blood or sign of a struggle in her apartment or her office. She can’t even ask Izzy to put out a BOLO alert on Holly’s car, because it’s in Holly’s apartment building garage. Just parked in the wrong space, and people do that all the time.
Not Holly. She wouldn’t.
Barbara decides to go home. Her parents won’t be there, and she doesn’t want to upset them with this at work. What she wants is Jerome, and when she gets to the house, she calls him. The message she gets says he can’t answer because he’s driving. Barbara tells herself that’s good, but it doesn’t feel good. Nothing does.
21
Maybe she’ll collapse upstairs, Holly thinks. Broken arm, bad back… it could happen. But she doesn’t believe it will.
She waits, and just as she’s beginning to hope, a shoe appears. Then another. Then the hem of the crazy lady’s skirt. She comes down slowly, one step at a time, panting and holding tightly to the stair-rail with her right hand. Her left dangles. Her face is so pale it could be the face of a corpse. Tucked into the waistband of her skirt is a gun. Although Holly can only see the butt, she’d know that gun anywhere. Emily intends to kill her with Bill Hodges’s .38.
“You bitch,” Emily rasps. She has reached the foot of the stairs. “Your snooping has ruined everything.”
“It was ruined long before I came on the scene.” Holly backs up slowly until she can back no more. She even raises her hands, much good that will do. “It was the placebo effect all along, Emily. Expectation aids body chemistry. I’m a little bit of a hypochondriac, so I know. And I’ve seen the numbers. Scientists have known about the placebo effect for years. I’m sure that in his heart, your husband did, as well.”
If Holly hoped to provoke the sort of rage that caused this woman’s husband to act so rashly, she’s disappointed. If she hoped Emily might shoot herself in the stomach while taking the .38 out of her waistband, she’s similarly disappointed. In truth, Holly isn’t aware of feeling anything at all, but her senses are sharply—almost supernaturally—attuned. She sees everything, hears everything, right down to the slight rattle in Emily Harris’s throat as she draws each quick breath. Holly wonders if everyone, at least those who see death coming for them, experiences this divinely sharp focus, the brain’s last attempt to take in everything before everything is taken away.
Emily is looking down at her husband. “Alas, poor Roddy,” she says. “I knew him well.”
“Listen to you,” Holly says, her back to the wall, her hands splayed against the concrete. “A cannibal quoting Shakespeare. That deserves a place in the Guinness Book of—”
“Shut up. Shut up!”
Holly has no intention of shutting up. She has been a meek mouse too much of her life. Her mother: Speak when spoken to. Uncle Henry: Children should be seen and not heard. Well, frack them. No, fuck them. In a matter of seconds this woman is going to shut her up forever, but as with Roddy, she means to have her say first.
“I’ve been trying to tell you a joke I made up. A new millionaire walks into a bar, and—”
“Shut up!”
Emily raises the gun and fires. Although it’s a revolver of relatively small caliber, the report is deafening in the basement. A spark jumps from one of the home-welded bars (Roddy found a video on YouTube and followed it with excellent results). Holly sees a chip fly upward from the cement wall above the blue plastic potty. She thinks, I didn’t even have time to duck.
“—and asks for a mai—”
