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She thinks, The daughter of a liar walks into a bar and orders a mai-tai.
Of course a mai-tai. On the rare occasions when she orders a drink, that’s the one Holly orders because it makes her think of palm trees, turquoise water, and white sand beaches. Sometimes in bed at night (not often, but sometimes) she imagines a bronze lifeguard in tight bathing trunks sitting up on his tower. He looks at her and smiles and what follows, follows.
Holly has her key, but she has no urge to go in and see that china Pinocchio with his Alpine hat and his leering little smile that says I know all about your fantasy lifeguard, Holly. I know how you dig your fingernails into his back when you—
“When I come, so what, who cares,” she mutters as she sits on the step to wait for the lawyer.
In her mind, her mother replies, sad as always when her untalented and unglamorous daughter fails to come up to the mark: Oh, Holly.
Time to open the door, not to the house but in her mind. To think about what happened and why it happened. She supposes she already knows. She’s a detective, after all.
2
Elizabeth Wharton, mother of Olivia Trelawney and Janelle “Janey” Patterson, died. Holly met Bill Hodges at the old lady’s funeral. He came with Janey, and he was kind. He treated Holly—gasp!—as a regular person. She had not been a regular person, isn’t a regular person now, but she’s closer to regular than she was. Thanks to Bill.
Janey died after that funeral. Brady Hartsfield blew her up. And Holly—a forty-something lonely woman with no friends, living at home with her mother—actually helped to catch Brady… although as it turned out, Brady wasn’t done with any of them. Not with Bill, not with Holly, not with Jerome and Barbara Robinson.
It was Bill who convinced her she could be her own person. He never said it out loud. He never had to. It was all in the way he treated her. He gave her responsibilities and simply assumed she would fulfill them. Charlotte didn’t like that. Didn’t like him. Holly barely noticed. Her mother’s cautions and disapprovals became background noise. When she was working with Bill, she felt alive and smart and useful. Color came back into the world. After Brady there was another case to chase, another bad guy to go after, Morris Bellamy by name. Morris was looking for buried treasure and willing to do anything to get it.
Then…
“Bill got sick,” Holly murmurs, lighting a fresh cigarette. “Pancreatic.”
It still hurts to think of that, even five years later.
There was another will, and Holly discovered Bill had left her the company. Finders Keepers. It hadn’t been much, not then. Nascent. Struggling to get on its feet.
And me struggling to stay on mine, Holly thinks. Because Bill would have been disappointed if I fell down. Disappointed in me.
It was around then—she can’t remember exactly, but it had to be not long after Bill passed—that Charlotte called her in tears and told her the dastardly Daniel Hailey had scarpered off to the Caribbean with the millions Janey had left to her and to Henry. Also with most of Holly’s trust fund, which she had thrown into the pot at her mother’s urging.
There was a family meeting where Charlotte kept saying things like I can’t forgive myself, I’ll never be able to forgive myself. And Henry kept telling her it was all right, that they both still had enough to live on. Holly did as well, he said, although she might consider giving up her apartment and living on Lily Court with her mother for awhile. Taking up residence in the guest room, in other words, where her mother had more or less replicated Holly’s childhood room. Like a museum exhibit, Holly thinks.
Had Uncle Henry really said easy come, easy go at that meeting? Sitting on the step, smoking her cigarette, Holly can’t remember for sure, but she thinks he did. Which he could say, because the money actually hadn’t gone anywhere. Not his, not Charlotte’s, not Holly’s.
And of course you’ll have to close the business, Charlotte had said. That Holly can remember. Oh yes. Because that was the purpose of it all, wasn’t it? To put a stop to her fragile daughter’s crazy plan to run a private detective agency, an idea put into her head by the man who had almost gotten her killed.
“To get me back under her thumb,” Holly whispers, and mashes her cigarette out so hard that sparks fly up and bite the back of her hand.
3
She’s thinking about lighting another one when Elaine from next door and Danielle from across the street come over to tell her how sorry they are for her loss. They both attended the funeral. Neither are wearing masks, and they exchange an amused look (an oh, Holly look for sure) when Holly quickly pulls hers up. Elaine asks if she’s going to list the house for sale. Holly says probably. Danielle asks if she is perhaps thinking of having a yard sale. Holly says probably not. She’s feeling the onset of a headache.
That’s when Emerson pulls up in his no-nonsense Chevrolet. A Honda Civic parks behind him, two women inside. Emerson is also early, only by five minutes or so, but thank God. Danielle and Elaine head off to Danielle’s house, chatting away, exchanging gossip plus whatever invisible creepy-crawlies might or might not be colonizing their respiratory systems.
The women who exit the Honda are roughly Holly’s age, Emerson quite a bit older, sporting showy white wings on the sides of his swept-back hair. He’s tall and cadaverous, with dark circles under his eyes that suggest to Holly either insomnia or an iron deficiency. He’s toting a very lawyerly briefcase. She’s glad to see all three are wearing no-frills N95 masks, and instead of his hand, he offers an elbow. She gives it a light bump. Each of the women raises a hand in greeting.
“Pleased to meet you face to face, Holly—may I call you Holly?”
“Yes, of course.”
“And I’m David. This is Rhoda Landry, and the pretty lady next to her is Andrea Stark. They work for me. Rhoda’s my notary. Have you been inside yet?”
“No. I was waiting for you.” Did not want to face Pinocchio and the Pillsbury Doughboy alone, she thinks. It’s a joke, but like many jokes it’s also true.
“Very kind,” he says, although why it would be Holly doesn’t know. “Would you like to do the honors?”
She uses her key, the one her mother gave to her with great ceremony, telling her for goodness sake take care of it, don’t lose it like the library book you left on the bus. The library book in question, A Day No Pigs Would Die, was recovered from the bus company’s lost and found the next day, but Charlotte was still bringing it up three years later. And later still. At sixteen, eighteen, twenty-one, in her fifties, God save the Queen, it was still remember the time you lost that library book on the bus? Always with the rueful laugh that said Oh, Holly.
