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“No, it’s the job.” Sounding serious now. “You think they’re related, don’t you? Dahl, Craslow, the kid Jerome was tracking?”
“I think they might be.”
“Not going to talk to Isabelle about it, are you?”
“Not yet.”
“Good. You run with it, Hol. I’ll do what I can from here. Kinda quarantined, you know?”
“Yes.”
“I can be Mycroft Holmes to your Sherlock. How are you doing with your mom?”
“Getting there,” Holly says. She ends the call.
Five seconds later her phone bings with an incoming text from Pete. She waits until she gets back to her apartment to look at the picture because she wants her iPad with its bigger screen. What he’s sent is Ellen Craslow’s Bell College ID card, which is still valid—it doesn’t expire until October. The photo shows a Black woman with a cap of dark hair. She’s neither smiling nor scowling, only looking at the camera with a calmly neutral expression. She’s pretty. Holly thinks she looks like she might be in her late twenties or early thirties, which is in line with what Keisha told her. Below her name is BELL COLLEGE ARTS & SCIENCES CUSTODIAL STAFF.
“Where are you, Ellen?” Holly murmurs, but what she’s thinking now is Who took you?
3
Half an hour later she’s cruising slowly down Martin Luther King Boulevard. She’s left the stores, churches, bars, convenience stores, and restaurants behind. Pete said the address was almost as far out of Lowtown as it was possible to get and still be in it. It’s also about as far out of the city as it’s possible to get and still be in it; soon MLK will become Route 27. Ahead of her she can see fields where cows are grazing, also a couple of silos. She’s starting to think Pete must have given her the wrong address even though her GPS claims she’s going right, but then she comes to Elm Grove Trailer Park. A stake fence surrounds it. The trailers are neat and well-kept. They are in various pastel colors, a plot of grass in front of each one. There are many flowerbeds. An asphalt lane winds among the trailers. Her GPS announces that she has arrived at her destination.
At the head of this lane is a cluster of mailboxes with numbers running from 11104 to 11126. Holly drives slowly into the trailer park, stopping when a couple of kids in bathing suits, one white and one Black, chase a bouncing beachball across the lane without so much as a look. She takes her foot off the brake, then tromps it again as a small yellow dog chases after the kids. In front of a sky-blue trailer with a picture of Barack Obama taped inside the storm door, a woman wearing a sunhat against the day’s increasing heat is watering her flowers from a can.
In the middle of the trailer park is a green building with a sign over the door reading OFFICE. Next to it is another green building with a sign reading LAUNDRY. A woman wearing a headwrap is going in with a plastic basket of clothes. Holly parks, dons her mask, and goes into the office. There’s a counter with a plaque on it reading STELLA LACEY MANAGER. Behind the counter, a stout lady is playing solitaire on her computer. She glances around at Holly and says, “If you’re looking for a vacancy, I’m sorry. We’re at full occupancy.”
“Thank you, but I’m not. My name is Holly Gibney. I’m a private investigator, and I’m trying to locate a woman.”
At the words private investigator, Stella Lacey loses interest in her game and becomes interested in Holly.
“Really? Who? What did she do?”
“Nothing that I know of. Do you recognize her?”
Holly offers her phone. Lacey takes it and holds it close to her face. “Sure. That’s Ellen Caslow!”
“Craslow,” Holly says. “I wonder if you remember exactly when she left.”
“Why do you care?”
“I’d like to know where she went. She worked at the college. Bell?”
“I know Bell,” Lacey says, sounding a bit resentful—the subtext being I’m not stupid. “I think Ellen was a janitor there.”
“A custodian, yes. Ms. Lacey, I just want to make sure she’s okay.”
Lacey’s resentment—if that’s what it was, not just Holly’s imagination—disappears. “Okay, I hear that. Do you know which trailer was hers?”
“11114 is the address I have.”
“Right, right, one of the ones behind the laundry, by the kiddie pool. Just let me check.” The solitaire game goes away. A spreadsheet replaces it. Lacey scrolls, peers, puts on a pair of glasses, and scrolls again. “Here we are. Ellen Craslow. She was renting by the half-year. Paid for July through December of 2018. Then gone.”
She turns to Holly and whips off her glasses.
“I remember now. Phil—my husband—held that trailer vacant through January of ’19 because she was a good tenant. No yelling, no arguments, no loud music, no cops showing up at two in the morning. That’s the kind of tenant we prefer, and the only kind we lease to long-term.”
“I’m sure.”
