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The boy with the acne shakes his head. He’s Ronnie Swidrowski. He looks solemn. “He didn’t run away and he didn’t go to Florida. He got grabbed.” He lowers his voice. “I heard it was Slender Man.”
The others break out laughing. Richie Glenman gives him a shoulder-punch. “There’s no such guy as Slender Man, you douchebag. He’s an urban legend, like the Witch of the Park.”
“Ow! You made me spill my shake!”
To Tommy Edison, who seems the brightest, Holly says, “Do you really think your friend Peter disappeared the night you last saw him?”
“Not positive, that was over two years ago, but I think so. Like I said, he wasn’t in school the next day.”
“Skippin,” Ronnie Swidrowski says. “Stinks did it all the time. Cause his mother’s a—”
“Nah, it was later,” Richie Glenman insists. “I know because I was matching quarters with him in the park after that. Over in the playground.”
They go back and forth about it and Swidrowski starts giving a reasoned and logical argument for the existence of Slender Man, who he hears also got some teacher from the college back in the old days, but Holly has heard enough. The disappearance of Peter “Stinky” Steinman (if he has in fact disappeared at all) almost certainly has nothing to do with the disappearance of Bonnie Dahl, but she intends to find out a little more, if only because the Dairy Whip and the auto repair shop are just half a mile apart. The Jet Mart, where Bonnie was last seen, is also fairly close.
Jerome gives Holly a look, and she gives him a nod. Time to go.
“You guys have a nice day,” he says.
“You, too,” Tommy Edison says.
The clown points at them with a ketchup-stained finger and says, “Veronica Mars and John Shaft!”
They all break up laughing.
Halfway across the parking lot, Holly stops and goes back. “Tommy, the night you and Richie saw him here, he had his skateboard, right?”
“Always,” Tommy says.
Richie says, “And he still had it a week later when we were matching for quarters. That lame Alameda with the crooked wheel.”
“Why?” Tommy asks.
“Just curious,” Holly says.
It’s the truth. She’s curious about everything. It’s how she rolls.
2
As they walk back up the hill to their cars, Holly takes the earring out of her pocket and shows it to Jerome.
“Whoa! Hers?”
“Almost positive.”
“How come the cops didn’t find it?”
“I don’t think they looked,” Holly says.
“Well, you win the Sherlock Holmes Award for superior detection.”
“Thank you, Jerome.”
“Which of them did you believe about Stinky Steinman? The redhead or the goofball?”
Holly gives him a disapproving look. “Why don’t we call him Peter? Stinky is an unpleasant nickname.”
Jerome doesn’t know Holly’s entire history (his sister Barbara knows more), but he knows when he’s inadvertently pressed on a sore spot. “Peter. Got it, got it. Pete now, Pete forever. So was the night they saw him at the Dairy Whip the last time they saw him, or was he matching quarters with Mr. French Fries Up the Nose in the park a week later?”
