Holly

July 23, 2021

“Are you sure about the night this friend of yours disappeared?” Holly asks. Jerome has purchased the boys milkshakes and they’re sprawled on the grass in the picnic area, slurping them up.

“Pretty sure,” the redhead—Tommy Edison—says, “because his mom called my mom to see if he was staying over and he was absent from school the next day.”

“Nah,” says Richie Glenman. This is the resident clown with the disgusting habit of putting French fries up his nose. Holly has all of their names in her notes. “It was later. A week or two. I think.”

“I heard he ran away to live with his uncle in Florida,” says the boy with the hightop fade. This is Andy Vickers. “His mother’s a—” He tips an invisible bottle to his mouth and makes a glug-glug sound. “Got arrested for drunk driving once.”

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.

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?”

“If I had to guess, I’d say Tommy’s right and Richie got his times mixed up. It was two and a half years ago, after all. That’s a long time when you’re that age.”

They have reached the auto repair shop. Jerome says, “Let me work Steinman a little. Can I?”

“What about your book?”

“I told you, I’m waiting for information. Editor insists. We’re talking Chicago ninety years ago, give or take, and that means mucho research.”

“Are you sure you’re not just procrastinating?”

Jerome has a wonderful smile—mucho charming—and flashes it now. “There might be an element of that, I guess, but chasing after lost kids is more interesting than chasing after lost dogs.” Which is Jerome’s usual part-time gig with Finders Keepers. “You don’t really think Dahl and Steinman are related, do you?”

“Different ages and different sexes, over two years apart, so probably not. But what do I always say about probably, Jerome?”

“It’s a lazy word.”

“Yes. It—” She gasps and puts a hand to her chest.

“What?”

“We weren’t wearing our masks! I never even thought of it! And neither were they!”

“But you’re vaxxed, right? Double-vaxxed. And so am I.”

“Do you think they were?”

“Probably not,” Jerome says. He realizes what he’s said, and laughs. “Sorry. Old habits die hard.”

Holly smiles. Old habits do indeed die hard, which is exactly why she wants a cigarette.

Jerome says he’ll talk to the boy’s parents. He can at least pin down whether Steinman actually disappeared or went to live with his uncle or what. If Steinman’s mother was a juicer, as Andy Vickers suggested, the kid might even have been taken into foster care. The job, as Jerome sees it, is simply to confirm Steinman has nothing to do with Dahl.

Holly promises him a hundred dollars a day, two-day minimum, plus expenses. She’s pretty sure he’ll get Barbara to do the online stuff, but he’ll split with her, even-Steven, so that’s okay.

“What are you going to do?” Jerome asks.

“I think I’ll take a walk in the park,” she says. “And think.”

“You do that. It’s a skill.”

Holly finds the path shooting off to the left and follows it to the big rock overlooking Red Bank Avenue. There she sits down and lights up.

She keeps coming back to Bonnie Dahl’s bike helmet. The earring might have dropped off and been lost, but the bike helmet didn’t just drop off. If Bonnie decided, pretty much on the spur of the moment, that she was sick enough of arguing with her mother to blow town, why leave her bike and take the helmet? For that matter, why leave a fairly expensive ten-speed where it almost begged to be stolen? It was only luck that it hadn’t been… assuming Marvin Brown was telling the truth, that is, and Holly thinks she can satisfy herself on that score with reasonable certainty.

The missing bike helmet is the most compelling reason she has to believe that Dahl was abducted. Holly imagines a scenario where Bonnie tried to run from her potential kidnapper and only made it to the far end of the auto repair shop. She struggles. Her earring comes off. She’s bundled into her kidnapper’s vehicle (in her mind’s eye Holly sees a small windowless panel truck) with her helmet still on. Perhaps the man knocks her out, perhaps he ties her up, maybe he even kills her right there, either on purpose or by accident. He leaves a printed note taped to the seat of the bike: I’ve had enough. If someone steals the bike, good. If no one steals it, the assumption will be that she decided to leave town—also good.

Holly doubts if it happened exactly that way (if it happened at all), but it could have; nearing dark, not much traffic on Red Bank Avenue, a brief struggle that might look like nothing but a conversation or a lovers’ embrace to someone passing by… sure, it could have.

As for the other possibility, leaving town on the spur of the moment, how likely is that, really? A teenager might suddenly decide it was all too much and bug out, Holly entertained such fantasies herself while in high school, but a twenty-four-year-old woman with a job she apparently enjoyed? What about her last paycheck? Is it sitting in her boss’s office? And no suitcase, just the stuff in her backpack? Holly doesn’t believe it, and she’s sure Isabelle Jaynes doesn’t, either. But if anyone can give her a state-of-mind check, it will probably be Bonnie’s friend and co-worker, Lakeisha Stone.

Holly finishes her cigarette, butts it, and puts it in her little tin box with the other dead soldiers. There are butts scattered all around the big rock, but that doesn’t mean she has to add her own filth to the general litter.

She takes her phone out of her purse. She’s had it on Do Not Disturb since leaving her office, and she’s missed two calls since then, both from someone named David Emerson. The name rings a faint bell, something to do with her mother. He’s left a VM but she ignores it for the time being and calls Jerome. She doesn’t want to distract him while he’s driving, so she keeps it brief.

“If you speak with Peter Steinman’s mother, and if the boy is really gone, ask if she has his skateboard.”

“Will do. Anything else?”

“Yes. Watch the road.”

She ends the call and listens to the voicemail.

“Hello, Ms. Gibney, this is David Emerson. Call me back as soon as convenient, please. It concerns your mother’s estate.” After a pause he adds, “So sorry for your loss, and thank you for your remarks at her final gathering.”

Now Holly knows why the name was familiar; her mother mentioned Emerson on one of their FaceTime calls after Charlotte was admitted to Mercy Hospital. This was before they put her on a ventilator, when she could still talk. Holly thinks only a lawyer would find a fancy way around saying funeral. As for Charlotte’s estate… Holly hasn’t even thought about it.

She doesn’t want to speak to Emerson, would like to have one day when she doesn’t have to think about anything but chasing the case, so she calls back immediately, pausing only long enough to light another cigarette. Her mother’s ironclad dictum, badgered into Holly from the time she was a toddler: What you don’t want to do is what must be done first. Then it’s out of the way. This has stuck with Holly, as many childhood lessons do… for better or worse.

It’s Emerson himself who answers, so Holly guesses he is one of many now working from home, without the layers of help professional people took for granted pre-Covid.

“Hello, Mr. Emerson. This is Holly Gibney, returning your call.” Spread out below her is half a mile of Red Bank Avenue. It interests her quite a bit more than the lawyer.

“Thanks for calling back, and once again, I’m very sorry for your loss.”

Everything over there abandoned except for the U-Store-It, she thinks, and that doesn’t look like it’s doing much business. On this side of the street you have the least-used section of the park, where upright citizens fear to tread except in broad daylight. If you planned to grab somebody, what better place?

“Ms. Gibney? Did I lose you?”

“No, I’m here. What can I do for you, Mr. Emerson? Something about my mother’s estate, wasn’t it? There can’t be much to discuss there.” Not after Daniel Hailey, she thinks.

“I did legal work for your Uncle Henry before he retired, so Charlotte engaged me to write her will, and made me executor. This was after she began to feel unwell and a test showed she was positive for the virus. There’s no need for a reading at a family gathering…”

What family? Holly thinks. With cousin Janey dead and Uncle Henry vegetating in Rolling Hills Elder Care, I’m the last pea in the pod.

“…left to you.”

“Pardon me?” Holly says. “I lost you there for a second.”

“Sorry. I said that with the exception of a few minor bequests, your mother left everything to you.”

“The house, you mean.”

She’s not pleased by the idea; she’s dismayed. The memories she has of that house (and the one preceding it, in Cincinnati) are dark and sad, for the most part, leading up to that final Christmas dinner where Charlotte insisted that her daughter wear the Santa hat Holly had worn for the holiday as a child. It’s tradition! her mother had exclaimed as she carved the dry-as-Sahara turkey. So: fifty-five-year-old Holly Gibney in a Santa hat.

“Yes, the house and all the furnishings therein. I’m assuming you’ll want to sell?”

Of course she will, and Holly tells him so. Her business is based in the city. Even if it weren’t, living at her mother’s house in Meadowbrook Estates would be like living in Hill House. Meanwhile, Counselor Emerson has continued—something about keys—and she has to ask him again to rewind.

“I said I have the keys, and I think we should agree on a time when you can come up here and inspect the property. See what you want to keep and what you want to sell.”

Holly’s dismay deepens. “I don’t want to keep any of it!”

Emerson chuckles. “That’s not an unusual first reaction in the wake of a loved one’s death, but you really must do a walk-through. As Mrs. Gibney’s executor, I’m afraid I have to insist on that. To see what repairs might need to be made before selling, for one thing, and based on years of experience, I think you will find things you want to keep. Could you possibly do it tomorrow? I know that’s short notice, and it’s a Saturday, but in these situations sooner is usually better than later.”

Holly wants to demur, to say she has a case, but her mother’s voice again intrudes: Is that a reason, Holly, or just an excuse?

To answer that she has to ask herself if the disappearance of Bonnie Dahl is an urgent case, a race against time case, like when Brady Hartsfield was planning to blow up the Mingo Auditorium during a rock concert. She doesn’t think it is. Bonnie dropped out of sight over three weeks ago. Sometimes missing people who’ve been abducted are found and saved. More often they are not. Holly would never say so to Penny, but whatever happened to Bonnie Rae has almost certainly already happened.

“I suppose I can do that,” she says, and takes a final monster drag on her cigarette. “Can you possibly send someone up there today to disinfect the house? I suppose that sounds overly cautious, maybe even paranoid, but—”

“Not at all, not at all. We don’t really understand this virus yet, do we? Terrible thing, just terrible. I’ll call a company I’ve done business with before. Insurance issues, you know. I think I can have them in at nine. If so, shall we meet at eleven?”

Holly sighs and stubs out her cigarette. “That sounds all right. I imagine the disinfecting will be expensive. Especially on a weekend.”

Emerson chuckles again. It’s a pleasant one, easy on the ears, and Holly supposes he uses it often. “I think you’ll be able to afford it. Your mother was quite well off, as I’m sure you know.”

Holly isn’t exactly shocked to silence, but she’s certainly surprised. Shock will come later.

“Holly? Ms. Gibney? Still there?”

“I’m afraid I know no such thing,” Holly says. “She was well off. My Uncle Henry was, too. But that was before Daniel Hailey.”

“I don’t know that name, I’m afraid.”

“She never mentioned Hailey? The can’t-miss Wizard of Wall Street investment counselor that took everything my mother and my uncle had and ran off to one of those non-extradition islands? Along with God knows how many other people’s money, including most of mine?”

“Pardon me, Ms. Gibney, but I’m not following.”

“Really?” Holly realizes the lawyer’s perplexity makes a degree of sense. When it came to unpleasant truths, Charlotte Gibney was a master of omission. “There was money, but it’s gone.”

Silence. Then: “Let’s rewind. Your cousin Olivia Trelawney died…”

“Yes.” Committed suicide, in fact. Holly had actually driven her much older cousin’s Mercedes for awhile, the automotive guided missile Brady Hartsfield used to kill eight people at City Center and wound dozens more. For Holly, fixing up the Benz, changing its color, and driving it was an act of healing. And, she supposes, defiance. “She left a considerable amount of money to her sister Janey. Janelle.”

“Yes. And when Janelle died so suddenly…”

That’s one way of putting it, Holly thinks. Brady Hartsfield blew Janey up, hoping to get Bill Hodges.

“The bulk of her estate went to your Uncle Henry and your mother, with a trust fund set aside for you. It’s Henry’s share that is paying for his current, um, residence, and will for however long he lives.”

Something is beginning to dawn on Holly. Only that’s the wrong metaphor. Something is beginning to dark on her.

“Henry’s estate will also come to you upon his passing.”

“My mother died rich? That’s what you’re saying?”

“Quite rich indeed. You didn’t know?”

“No. I knew she was rich at one time.”

Holly thinks of dominoes falling over in a neat line. Olivia Trelawney’s husband made money. Olivia inherited it. Olivia committed suicide. Janey inherited it. Janey got blown up by Brady Hartsfield. Charlotte and Henry inherited it, or most of it. The money getting steadily whittled away by taxes and attorneys’ fees, but still an extremely tidy sum. Holly’s mother had invested her money and Henry’s money with Daniel Hailey of Burdick, Hailey, and Warren. Later, she had also invested most of Holly’s funds, with Holly’s agreement. And Hailey had stolen it.

So Charlotte had told her daughter, and her daughter had had no reason to disbelieve.

Holly lights another cigarette. How many is that today? Nine? No, eleven. And it’s only lunchtime. She’s thinking of something in Janey’s will that had made her cry. I am leaving $500,000 in trust for my cousin Holly Gibney, so she can follow her dreams.

“Ms. Gibney? Holly? Still there?”

“Yes. Give me a moment.” But she needs more than a moment. “I’ll call you back,” she says, and ends the call without waiting for a reply.

Did her cousin Janey know that as a frightened, lonely girl, Holly had poetic ambitions? She wouldn’t have known from Holly herself, but from Charlotte? From Henry? And what does it matter? Holly wasn’t a good poet, no matter how much she desperately wanted to be. She had found something she was good at. Thanks to Bill Hodges, she had another dream to follow. A better one. It came late, but better late than never.

One of her mother’s pet sayings clangs in her head: Do you think I’m made of money? According to Emerson, Charlotte had been. Not early but later, after Janey died, yes. As for losing it, and losing Henry’s, and losing most of Holly’s trust fund to the dastardly Daniel Hailey? Holly quickly googles Daniel Hailey, adding Burdick and Warren, the other two partners. She gets nothing.

How had Charlotte been able to pull it off? Was it because Holly had been so grief-stricken at the passing of Bill Hodges and at the same time so entranced by the business of detection, of chasing the case? Was it because she trusted her mother? Yes to all three, but even so…

“I saw stationery,” she whispers. “A couple of times I even saw asset sheets. Henry helped her trick me. He must have.”

Although Henry, now deep in dementia, would never be able to tell her so, or why.

She calls Emerson back. “How much are we talking about, Mr. Emerson?” This is a question Emerson is duty-bound to answer, because what Charlotte had is now hers.

“Adding in her bank account and the current value of her stock portfolio,” David Emerson says, “I’d put your inheritance at just over six million dollars. Assuming you outlive Henry Sirois, there will be another three million.”

“And it was never lost? Never stolen by an investment specialist who had my mother’s and uncle’s power of attorney?”

“No. I’m not sure how you got that idea, but—”

In a growl utterly unlike her usual soft tone of voice, Holly says, “Because she told me.”