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Keisha gives a delighted laugh. “Lord, no. He’s what my mama calls a stuffed string. Bonnie outweighs him by at least thirty pounds. If Matt grabbed her ass, she’d flip him over her shoulder or hip him into the wall.”
“She knows judo, or some other martial art?”
“No, nothing so serious, but she took a self-defense class. I took it with her. That was something else her mother bitched about. Called it a needless expense. Bon just couldn’t do anything right in her mother’s eyes. And when it came to Mrs. D. wanting her to work at her bank, they had a couple of real screamers.”
“No love lost.”
Keisha considers this. “You could say that, sure, but there was plenty of love left. Do you get that?”
Holly thinks of the dog-eared poetry notebooks in the drawer of her mother’s night table and says she does.
“Keisha, would Bonnie have left town to get away from her mother? All that constant carping and complaining, those arguments?”
“There was a woman police who asked me that same question,” Keisha said. “Didn’t come see me, just called on the phone. Two or three questions and then it was thanks, Ms. Stone, you’ve been a great help. Typical. The answer to your question is not a chance. If I gave you the idea that Bon and Mrs. D. were at each other’s throats, I didn’t mean to. There was arguing and sometimes yelling but no physical stuff, and they always made up. So far as I know, at least. What went on between them was more like a stone you can’t get out of your shoe.”
Holly is struck by this, wondering if that was what Charlotte was to her: a stone in her shoe. She thinks of Daniel Hailey, a thief who never was, and decides it was quite a bit more.
“Ms. Gibney? Holly? Are you still there, or are you gathering wool?” Keisha is smiling.
“I guess I was. Did she have a cash reserve that you know of? I ask because there’s been no action on her credit card.”
“Bonnie? No. What she didn’t spend went into the bank, and I think maybe she had a few investments. She liked the stock market, but she was no plunger.”
“She didn’t have any clothes at your place? Ones that are now gone?”
Keisha’s eyes narrow. “What exactly are you asking?”
Holly is a shy person as a rule, but that changes when she’s chasing a case. “I’ll be blunt. I’m asking if you’re covering for her. You’re her best friend, I can tell you’re loyal to her, and I think you’d do it if she asked.”
“Kind of resent that,” Keisha says.
Holly, who has gotten hesitant of touching since Covid, puts a hand on the young woman’s arm without even thinking about it. “Sometimes my job means asking unpleasant questions. Penny and Bonnie may not have had an ideal relationship, but the woman is paying me to find her because she’s half out of her mind.”
“All right, I hear you. No, Bon didn’t keep any clothes at my place. No, she didn’t have a secret cash stash. No, Matt Conroy didn’t grab her. He also asked around—college employment office, campus security, a few library regulars. Did his due diligence, I’ll give him that. The note she supposedly left? It’s bullshit. And leave her bike? She loved that bike. Saved for it. I’m telling you someone stalked her, grabbed her, raped her, killed her. My sweet Bonnie.”
This time the tears fall and she lowers her head.
“What about the boyfriend? Tom Higgins. Know anything about him?”
Keisha utters a harsh laugh and looks up. “Ex-boyfriend. Wimp. Loser. Stoner. Bonnie’s mother was right about him, at least. Definitely not the kidnapping type. No idea what Bon saw in him to begin with.” Then she echoes Penny: “The sex must have been great.”
Holly is back on someone stalked her. That seems more and more likely, which would mean it wasn’t an impulse crime. Ergo, Holly needs to look at the Jet Mart footage again, very carefully. But it ought to wait until tomorrow, when her eyes and mind are fresh. This has been a long day.
“Have you been a private detective for long?”
“A few years,” Holly says.
“Is it interesting?”
“I think so, yes. Of course there are dull stretches.”
“Is it ever dangerous?”
Holly thinks of a certain cave in Texas. And of a thing that pretended to be a man falling down an elevator shaft with a diminishing scream. “Not often.”
“It’s interesting to me, you being a woman and all. How did you get into it? Were you on the cops? You don’t seem like the cop type, is all.”
Another clang from the horseshoe pit followed by yells of delight. The kids in the meeting hall are now singing “Tonight,” from West Side Story. Their young voices soar.
