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She doesn’t say who she might be thinking of, and Barbara doesn’t need her to. She has what she needs and doesn’t expect to return to the Harris house again.
July 25, 2021
1
Holly walks into her office and all the furniture is gone. Not just the desk and the chairs, but her desktop computer, the TV, and the carpet. Her mother is standing at the window and looking out, just as Holly does when she has—Charlotte’s phrase—her thinking cap on. Charlotte turns around. Her eyes are sunken deep in their sockets and her face is a grayish yellow. She looks as she did the last time Holly spoke to her in the hospital, just before she slipped into a coma.
“Now you can come home,” Charlotte says.
2
When Holly opens her eyes she’s at first not sure where she is, only relieved that it’s not in her empty office. She looks around and the world—the real one—clicks into place. It’s a room on the second floor of a Days Inn, halfway back to the city. Her mother is dead. I’m safe is her first waking thought.
She goes into the bathroom to urinate, then just sits on the toilet for a little while with her face in her hands. She’s a terrible person for equating safety with her mother’s death. Charlotte’s lies don’t change that.
Holly showers and puts on her clean underwear while her mother tells her that new-bought garments should always be washed before they’re worn; Oh, Holly—you don’t know who may have handled it, how many times have I told you that?
Two slips of paper have been pushed under her door. One is the bill for her night’s stay. The other is headed BREAKFAST BUFFET NOTICE. It says that if the room’s occupants are vaccinated, they are free to enjoy the breakfast buffet “in our pleasant dining area.” If not, will they please take a tray back up to their room.
Holly has never exactly enjoyed a motel breakfast buffet, but she’s hungry, and since she’s been vaxxed, she eats it in the little dining area, where the only other occupant is an overweight man staring at his phone with sullen concentration. Holly skips the scrambled eggs (motel breakfast buffet eggs are always wet or cooked to death) in favor of a single rubbery pancake, a cardboard bowl of Alpha-Bits, and a cup of bad coffee. She takes a breakfast pastry in a cellophane wrapper and eats it next to the ice machine after her first cigarette of the day. According to the time-and-temperature sign in front of the bank across the service road, it’s already seventy-five degrees at only seven in the morning. Her mother is dead and it’s going to be a scorcher.
Holly goes back to her room, figures out the little coffee maker—one cup won’t be enough, not after that awful dream—and opens her iPad. She finds the Jet Mart security video and looks at it. She wishes the fracking lens of the camera wasn’t so fracking dirty. Did no one ever think to clean it? She goes into the bathroom, shuts the door, turns off the lights, sits on the lid of the toilet, and looks at the footage again, holding the iPad three inches from her face.
She leaves the bathroom, pours herself some coffee—not as bad as the buffet coffee but almost—and drinks it standing up. Then she goes back, closes the bathroom door, turns out the light, and looks at the video for a third time.
8:04 PM on the night of July first, a little more than three weeks ago. Here comes Bonnie, riding down Red Bank Avenue from the direction of the college at the top of the ridge. Off with the helmet. Shake out the hair. Helmet placed on the seat of a bike which will later be found abandoned further down the avenue, just begging to be stolen. She walks into the store—
Holly backs the footage up. Off with the helmet, shake out the hair, and freeze it. Before Bonnie’s hair falls back against the sides of her face, Holly sees a flash of gold. She uses her fingers to enlarge the image and there can be no doubt: one of the triangular earrings Holly found in the undergrowth.
“That girl is dead,” Holly whispers. “Oh God, she’s dead.”
She re-starts the video. Bonnie gets her soda from the cooler, inspects the snacks, almost buys a package of Ho Hos, changes her mind, goes to the counter. The clerk says something that makes them both laugh and Holly thinks, This is a regular stop for her. Holly needs to talk to that clerk. Today, if possible.
Bonnie stows her drink in her backpack. Says something else to the clerk. He gives her a thumbs-up. She leaves. Puts on her helmet. Mounts up. Pedals away with a final quick wave to the clerk. He raises his in return. And that’s it. The time-stamp at the bottom of the screen says 8:09.
Holly gets up, reaches for the bathroom light switch, then settles back onto the closed lid of the john. She starts the video again, this time ignoring Bonnie and the clerk. She wishes the security camera had been mounted a little lower, but of course the purpose was to catch shoplifters, not monitor the traffic on Red Bank Avenue. At least she doesn’t have to watch the traffic going uphill, just the vehicles going in the direction of the abandoned auto shop where the bike was found. She can only see their lower halves; the top of the store’s front window cuts off the rest.
Bonnie’s abductor—Holly no longer doubts there was an abductor—could have already been in place at the auto shop, but he might also have followed her, then gone ahead to get in place while she made her regular halfway-point stop.
Doing it that way would minimize the time he was parked and waiting for her, she thinks. Less chance of being noticed and possibly attracting suspicion.
Eight o’clock on a weeknight, and the turnpike extension has sucked most of the downtown traffic away. Which is, she thinks, why so many of the businesses on that stretch of Red Bank are closed, including the gas station, the Quik-Pik, and the auto repair shop.
She counts only fifteen cars going downhill past the store, plus two pickup trucks and a van. Holly rewinds the footage and goes again, this time stopping as the van passes. Bonnie is frozen at the snack rack. The clerk is putting cigarettes into one of the slots in the display behind the counter.
Holly once more brings the screen close to her face and uses her fingers to enlarge the image. Damn dirty camera lens! Plus the top half of the van is cut off by the top of the store window. She can make out the driver’s left hand on the wheel and it’s a white hand, if that were any help, but it’s really not. She shrinks the image back to its original size. The van is either dirty white or light blue. There’s a stripe down the side, along the bottom of the driver’s side door and the body of the van. The stripe is definitely a dark blue. She wonders if either Pete or Jerome could tell her what kind of van it is. She doesn’t really think so, but if you were going to kidnap a young woman, a van might be just the thing. God, if only she could see the license plate!
Holly sends the vid to Pete and Jerome, asking if either of them can identify the make of the van, or at least narrow it down. The WiFi is better this morning, and before checking out she goes to the city PD’s Reported Missing website, specifying 2018. There are almost four hundred thousand residents of the city by the lake, so she’s not surprised to find over a hundred names on the list. Peter Steinman’s is among them. Ellen Craslow’s is not, probably because she had no one to report her gone; Keisha just assumed she’d quit her job, probably to go back to Georgia. Next to the names of five souls who were reported missing is the date they were found, along with one word: DECEASED.
3
On her drive back to the city, Holly is nagged by the thought of her Dollar General underwear, bought new but unwashed, and it comes to her that her mother really isn’t dead after all and won’t be until Holly herself dies. She gets off at the Ridgeland exit, checks her iPad notes at a red light, and drives to Eastland Avenue, which is not far from Bell College. It doesn’t escape her that Bonnie’s case keeps leading her back to the area of the college.
On the south side of the ridge are those stately Victorian homes curving down to the park; on this side there’s student housing, mostly three-decker apartment buildings. Some have been kept up pretty well, but many more are running to seed with peeling paint and scruffy yards. There are discarded beer cans in some of those yards, and in one there’s a twenty-foot-high balloon man, bowing and scraping and waving its long red arms. Holly guesses it might have been pilfered from a car dealership.
She passes through a two-block commerce area aimed at college students: three bookstores, a couple of head shops (one called Grateful Dead), lots of pizza-burger-taco joints, and at least seven bars. On this hot Sunday, still shy of noon, most of the joints are closed and there’s little foot traffic. Beyond the shops, restaurants, and dive bars, the apartment houses recommence. The lawn of 2395 Eastland has no balloon man out front; instead there are at least two dozen flamingos stuck in the parched grass. One wears a beret that’s been tied on with a piece of ribbon; the head of another is buried in a cowboy hat; a third is standing in a fake wishing well.
College student humor, Holly thinks, and pulls in at the curb.
