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Holly ends the call and goes back to looking at the ceiling. She checks her phone to see if Penny has sent her the pics of her daughter. Not yet. She gets down on her knees.
“God, please help me do the best I can for Penny Dahl and for her daughter. If someone took that young woman, I hope she’s still alive, and it’s your will I should find her. I’m taking my Lexapro, which is good. I’m smoking again, which is bad.” She thinks of Saint Augustine’s prayer and smiles into her clasped hands. “Help me to stop… but not today.”
With that taken care of, she opens her Covid drawer. There’s a box of fresh masks beside the box of wipes. She takes one and heads out to begin her investigation into the disappearance of Bonnie Rae Dahl.
2
Twenty minutes later Holly is driving slowly up Red Bank Avenue. Just short of Deerfield Park she passes a Dairy Whip where a bunch of kids are skateboarding in the nearly deserted parking lot. She passes John-Boy’s Storage Center, Rates By Month And By Year. She passes an abandoned Exxon station that’s been sprayed with tags. There’s a Quik-Pik, also abandoned, the front windows boarded up.
After a weedy vacant lot, she comes to the auto repair shop where Bonnie’s bike was discovered. It’s a long building with a sagging roof and rusty corrugated metal sides. The cement parking area out front is sprouting weeds and even a few sunflowers through its cracked surface. To Holly it doesn’t look like a building worth saving, let alone buying, but Marvin Brown must have felt differently, because there’s a SALE PENDING sign in front. The sign features a photo of a smiling moon-faced man who is identified as George Rafferty, Your City Real Estate Specialist. Holly parks in front of the roll-up doors and notes down the agent’s name and number.
She keeps a box of nitrile gloves in the console. Barbara Robinson special-ordered them for her as a birthday present, and they’re covered with various emojis: smiley faces, frowny faces, kissy faces and pissy faces. Quite amusing. Holly snaps on a pair, then goes around to the back of her little car and opens the trunk. There’s a neatly folded raincoat on top of her toolbox. She won’t need that, the day is sunny and hot, but she wants her red rubber galoshes. It isn’t Covid she’s worried about out here in the open, but there are bushes on both sides of the deserted repair shop, and she’s very susceptible to poison ivy. Also, there might be snakes. Holly hates snakes. Their scales are bad, their beady black eyes are worse. Oough.
She pauses to consider Deerfield Park across the street. Most of it is a landscaper’s dream, but over here on the edge of Red Bank Ave, the trees and bushes have been allowed to grow wild, with greenery actually poking through the wrought-iron fence and invading the space of sidewalk strollers. She sees one interesting thing: a rough downward slash, almost a ravine, topped by a slab of rock. Even from across the street Holly can see it’s been heavily tagged, so kids must gather there, possibly to smoke pot. She thinks that rock would have a good view of this side of the avenue, including the auto repair shop. She wonders if any kids were there on the evening Bonnie left her bike, and thinks of the ones she saw goofing off in the parking lot of the Dairy Whip.
She pulls on her galoshes, tucks her pants into them, and walks along the front of the building—past the three roll-up garage doors, then the office. She doesn’t expect to find anything, but stranger things have happened. When she reaches the corner she turns and goes back, walking slowly, head bent. There’s nothing.
Now for the hard part, she thinks. The poopy part.
She starts up the south side of the building, moving slowly, pushing aside the bushes, looking down. There are cigarette butts, an empty Tiparillo box, a rusty White Claw can, an ancient athletic sock. The going is faster along the back, because someone has dumped oil (a big no-no) and there are fewer bushes. She sees something white and pounces on it, but it turns out to be a cracked sparkplug.
Holly turns the far corner and starts wading through more bushes. Some of them have reddish leaves that look suspiciously oily, and she’s glad she wore the gloves. There is no bike helmet. She supposes it might have been cast far over the chainlink fence behind the shop, but Holly thinks she’d probably still see it, because it’s another vacant lot over there.
At the front corner of the building something glitters deep in a patch of those suspiciously oily leaves. Holly pushes them aside, careful that no leaf should touch her bare skin, and picks up a clip-on earring. A gold triangle. Surely not real gold, just an impulse buy at T.J. Maxx or Icing Fashion, but Holly feels a hot burst of excitement. There are days when she doesn’t know why she does this job, and there are days when she knows exactly why. This is one of the latter. She’ll have to photograph it and send it to Penny Dahl to be sure, but Holly has no doubt the earring belonged to Bonnie Rae. Perhaps it just fell off—clip-on earrings do that—but maybe it was pulled or jolted off. Possibly in a struggle.
And the bike, Holly thinks. It wasn’t out back or around one of the sides. It was in front. I’ll have to confirm that, but I don’t think Brown and the real estate man went wading through the bushes like I just did. To her mind, there’s only one scenario where that makes sense.
She tightens her grip on the earring until she feels its sharp corners biting into her palm, and decides to reward herself with a cigarette. She tweezes off her emoji-decorated nitrile gloves and puts them in the footwell of her car. Then she leans against the passenger-side front tire, where hopefully no one passing on the avenue will see her, and fires up. She considers the empty building while she smokes.
When she’s finished her cigarette, she butts it on the concrete and tucks it away in a tin cough drop box she keeps in her purse as a portable ashtray. She checks her phone. Penny has sent the pictures of her daughter. There are sixteen of them, including the one of Bonnie on her bike. Holly cares about that one most of all, but she scrolls through the others. There’s one of Bonnie and a young man—likely Tom Higgins, the ex-boyfriend—with their foreheads pressed together, laughing. They are in profile to the camera. Holly uses her fingers to enlarge the picture until all she can see is the side of Bonnie’s face.
And there on her earlobe, sparkling, is a gold triangle.
3
Holly is much better at talking to strangers—even interrogating them—than she ever thought she would be, but the idea of introducing herself to those laughing, trash-talking boys at the Dairy Whip brings back unpleasant memories. It brings back trauma, if you want to call a spade a spade. She was relentlessly teased and made fun of by boys like that in high school. Girls, too, who have their own brands of poisonous cruelty, but Mike Sturdevant was the worst. Mike Sturdevant, who started calling her Jibba-Jibba, because she was (he said) jibba-jibba-gibbering. Her mother allowed her to switch high schools—Oh, Holly, I suppose—but for the rest of her nightmare years of secondary education, she lived in fear that the nickname would follow her like a bad smell: Jibba-Jibba Gibney.
What if she started jibba-jibba-gibbering when talking to those boys?
I wouldn’t, she thinks. That was another girl.
But even if that were true (she knows it isn’t, not entirely), they might talk more easily to a young man not much older than themselves. Holly has enough self-awareness to know that while this might be so, it’s also a rationalization. Nevertheless, she calls Jerome Robinson. At least she won’t be interrupting his work; he always pushes back by noon, and it’s almost noon now. Isn’t 10:50 pretty close to noon?
“Hollyberry!” he exclaims.
“How many times have I told you not to call me that?”
“I never will again, I solemnly promise.”
“Bullshit,” she says, and smiles when he laughs. “Are you working? You are, aren’t you?”
“Stopped dead in the water until I make some calls,” he says. “Need information. Can I help you? Please say I can. Barbara’s clacking away down the hall, making me feel guilty.”
“What is she clacking away on in the middle of summer?”
“I don’t know, and she gets grumpy when I ask. And this has actually been going on since last winter. I think she’s having meetings with someone about it, whatever it is. I asked her once if it was a guy and she tells me to chill, it’s a lady. An old lady. What’s up with you?”
Holly explains what’s up with her and asks Jerome if he would take the lead in questioning some boys skateboarding at the Dairy Whip. If they’re still there, that is.
