Holly

July 25, 2021

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.

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.

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.

There are only two stories to this house, but it rambles all over the place, as if the original builder could never bring himself to stop. There are five cars crammed into the driveway, bumper to bumper and side by side. A sixth is on grass which strikes Holly as too tired and near death to complain.

A young guy sits on the concrete front step, head hung low, smoking either a cigarette or a doob. He looks up when Holly gets out of her car—blue eyes, black beard, long hair—then lowers his head again. She weaves her way through the flamingos, which probably struck some young man or men as the height of Juvenalian wit.

“Hello there. My name is Holly Gibney, and I wondered—”

“If you’re a Mormon or one of those Adventists, go away.”

“I’m not. Are you by any chance Tom Higgins?”

He looks up at that. The bright blue eyes are threaded with snaps of red. “No. I am not. Go away. I have the world’s worst fucking hangover.” He waves a hand behind him. “Everyone else is still sleeping it off.”

“Saturday Night Fever followed by Sunday Morning Coming Down,” Holly ventures.

The bearded young man laughs at that, then winces. “You say true, grasshopper.”

“Would you like a coffee? There’s a Starbucks down the street.”

“Sounds good, but I don’t think I can walk that far.”

“I’ll drive.”

“And will you pay, Dolly?”

“It’s Holly. And yes, I will pay.”

Having a strange man—big, bearded, and hungover—in her car might have put Holly’s nerves on edge under other circumstances, but this young man, Randy Holsten by name, strikes her as about as dangerous as Pee-wee Herman, at least in his current state. He rolls down the passenger window of Holly’s Prius and holds his face out into the hot breeze, like a shaggy dog eager for every passing scent. This pleases her. If he throws up, it will be outside rather than in. Which makes her think of Jerome’s drive to the hospital with Vera Steinman.

The Starbucks is thinly populated. Several of the customers also look hungover, although perhaps not as severely as young Mr. Holsten. She gets him a double cap and an Americano for herself. They take chairs outside in the scant shade of the overhang. Holly lowers her mask. The coffee is strong, it’s good, and it takes the curse off the motel brew she drank earlier. When Holsten begins showing signs of slightly improved vitality, she asks him if Tom Higgins is also sleeping it off in the House of Flamingos.

“Nope. He’s in Lost Wages. At least as far as I know. Billy and Hinata went on to LA, but Tom stayed. Which doesn’t surprise me.”

Holly frowns. “Lost wages?”

“Slang, my sister. For Las Vegas. A town made for such as Monsewer Higgins.”

“When did he go there?”

“June. Middle of. And left owing his share of the rent. Which I can tell you was Tom all over.”

Holly thinks of Keisha’s short and brutal summing up of Tom Higgins’s character: Wimp. Loser. Stoner.

“You’re sure it was the middle of June? And these other two went with him?”

“Yeah. It was just after the Juneteenth block party. And yeah, the three of them went in Billy’s ’Stang. Tom Terrific is the kind of dude who’ll suck on his fellow dudes until there’s nothing more to suck. I guess they wised up. Speaking of sucking on people, can I have another one of these?”

“I’ll pay, you get. One for me, too.”

“Another Americano?”

“Yes, please.”

When he comes back with their coffees, Holly says, “It sounds like you didn’t like Tom much.”

“I did at first. He’s got a certain amount of charm—I mean, the girl he was going with was way out of his league—but it wears off in a hurry. Like the finish on a cheap ring.”

“Nicely put. You’re feeling better, aren’t you?”

“A little.” Holsten shakes his head… but gently. “Never again.”

Until next Saturday night, Holly thinks.

“What’s this about, anyway? What’s your interest in Tom?”

Holly tells him, leaving Ellen Craslow and Peter Steinman out of it. Randy Holsten listens with fascination. Holly is interested to see how quickly the red is leaving his eyes. The older she gets, the more the resilience of the young amazes her.

“Bonnie, yeah. That was her name. She’s missing, huh?”

“She is. Did you know her?”

“Met her is all. At a party. Maybe once or twice before. The party must have been New Year’s. She was steppin dynamite. Legs all the way up.” Holsten shakes one hand, as if he’s touched something hot. “Tom brought her, but our place wasn’t exactly her milieu, if you know what I mean.”

“Didn’t like the flamingos?”

“They’re a new addition. I haven’t seen her since that party. She broke up with him, you know. I talked to her a little. You know, just your standard party blah-blah—and I think the breakup was like, happening then. Or about to happen. I was in the kitchen. That’s where we talked. Maybe she came out to get away from the babble, maybe to get away from Tom. He was in the living room, probably trying to score dope.”

“What did she say?”

“Can’t remember. I was pretty drunk. But if you’re thinking he might have done something to her, forget it. Tom isn’t the confrontational type. He’s more the can-you-loan-me-fifty-until-next-Friday type.”

“And you’re sure he hasn’t been back since June?” She tells him what she told Keisha. “I’m just crossing t’s and dotting i’s here.”

“If he did I haven’t seen him. Don’t think so. Like I said, Vegas is his kind of town.”

“Do you have his number?”

He finds it on his phone and Holly adds it to her notes, but she’s already close to taking Tom Higgins off her list of possible suspects, and he was never high on it anyway. Not that she has a list.

“If you call him, you’ll get one of those robots that just repeats the number and tells you to leave a message.”

“He monitors his calls.”

“Guys like Tom, that’s what they do. He owes money, I think. Not just the back rent.”

“How much of that does he owe?”

“His share for two months. June and July. Five hundred dollars.”

Holly gives him a card from her purse. “If you think of anything, maybe something she said when you were talking at the party, give me a call.”

“Man, I don’t know. I was pretty fried. All I can be sure of is that she was fine-looking. Out of Tom’s league, like I said.”

“I get it, but just in case.”

“Okay.” He puts the card in the back pocket of his jeans, where Holly guesses it will probably stay until it goes through the wash and comes out lint. Randy Holsten smiles. It’s charming. “I think Tommy was starting to bore her. Ergo, breakup.”

Holly gives him a lift back to the rambling apartment building. He’s improved enough to keep his head inside. He thanks her for the coffee and she asks him again to call her if he thinks of anything, but it’s just a rote exercise. She’s pretty sure she’s gotten everything from Holsten that he has to give, which amounts to nothing but a phone number that will probably lead nowhere.

Still, when she gets back to the commerce area of Eastland Avenue, she pulls into an empty parking space—there are plenty—and calls Tom Higgins’s number. It’s two hours earlier in Las Vegas, but not that early. There’s one ring, followed by the robo-voice Holsten warned her of. Holly identifies herself, says Bonnie Dahl has disappeared, and asks if Tom will call her back (she calls him Mr. Higgins). Then she drives home, showers again, and throws her Dollar General underwear in the washing machine.

While the washer is doing its thing, Holly gets on Twitter and plugs in the name Craslow. She’s not expecting a long list—it’s not a name she’s ever heard before—and only gets a dozen hits. Two Twitter Craslows feature thumbnail pictures of Black people, a man and a woman. Two are whites, both women. The other eight feature either blank silhouettes or cartoon avatars.

Holly uses Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter routinely in her work. Bill didn’t teach her; he was old-school. She can send messages on Twitter to the dozen Craslows from one of her several social media aliases, something simple: I’m looking for information about Ellen Craslow, from Bibb County, Georgia. If you know her, please reply. Even if the Craslow from whom she’s hoping to get information isn’t on Twitter, chances are good one of the twelve is related and will pass the message on. Easy-peasy, nothing to it, she’s done it before when looking for missing people (mostly bail-jumpers) and lost pets. There’s no reason not to now, but she pauses, frowning at the list of names on her desktop computer.

Why the hesitation?

No concrete reason she can think of, but her gut says don’t do it. She decides to table this logical next step and think it over. She can do that while she makes a trip to Jet Mart and talks to the clerk who waited on Bonnie.

Her phone rings as she’s leaving. She thinks it will be either Penny, asking for another update, or possibly Tom Higgins calling from Las Vegas, assuming that’s where he is. But it’s Jerome, and he sounds excited.

“You think someone grabbed her in that van, Holly. Don’t you?”

“I think it’s possible. Can you tell me anything about it?”

“I’ve looked at a lot of car sites, and it might be a Toyota Sienna. Might be. The lens of that surveillance camera was mighty dirty—”

“I know.”

“—and you can only see the bottom half. But it’s not a Chevy Express. Take that to the bank. Could be a Ford, but if it was Final Jeopardy, I’d say it was a Sienna.”

“Okay, thanks.” Not that it’s much help.

“There was something funny about it.”

“Really? What?”

“I don’t know. I’ve looked at it a dozen times and I still don’t know.”

“The stripe? The blue one down low?”

“No, not that, lots of vans have stripes. Something else.”

“Well, if you figure it out, let me know.”

“Wish we had a license plate.”

“Yes,” Holly says. “Wouldn’t that be nice?”

“Holly?”

“I’m still here.” Now heading for the elevator.

“I think it’s a serial. I really do.”

She’s pulling out of the parking garage when her phone rings again. The screen says UNKNOWN NUMBER. She puts her car in park and takes the call. She’s pretty sure Mr. Unknown Number is Tom Terrific.

“Hello, this is Holly Gibney, how can I help?”

“Tom Higgins.” In the background she can hear electronic boops, electronic beeps, and jangling bells. Casino sounds. Any doubt that Tom Higgins isn’t in Las Vegas departs. “You can help by telling me what you mean about Bonnie being missing.”

“Wait one. Let me park.” Holly pulls into a vacant space. She never talks on her phone while she’s driving unless she has absolutely no choice and thinks people who behave otherwise are idiots. It’s not just against the law, it’s dangerous.

“Where did she go?”

Holly thinks of asking him what part of missing he doesn’t understand. Instead, she tells him that Bonnie’s mother hired her, and what she’s found out so far. Which isn’t much. When she finishes there’s a long moment of silence. She doesn’t bother to ask if he’s still there; the boops and beeps continue.

At last he says, “Huh.”

Is that all you’ve got? Holly thinks.

“Do you have any idea where she might have gone, Mr. Higgins?”

“Nope. I dumped her last winter. She was asking—without asking, you know how some women are—for a long-term commitment, and I was already planning this trip.”

I heard the dumping was the other way around, Holly doesn’t say.

“Does it seem likely to you that she’d leave without telling anyone?”

“According to you, she told everyone,” Tom says. “She left a note, didn’t she?”

“Yes, but on the spur of the moment? Leaving her bike for anyone to steal? Was she that impulsive?”

“Sometimes…” This careful answer suggests to Holly that he’s saying what he thinks she wants to hear.

“Without taking any clothes? And without using a credit card or her phone for the last three weeks?”

“So what? She probably got sick of her mother. Bonnie hated her like poison.”

Not according to Keisha. According to Keisha, there was love lost between them but plenty of love left. Penny is driving around with her daughter’s picture plastered on her car, after all.

“She probably hasn’t called anybody because then her mother would send out the Royal Canadian Mounties. Or someone like you. Can’t wait to get her back there and start running her life again.”

Holly decides to change the subject. “Are you enjoying Las Vegas, Mr. Higgins?”

“Yeah, it’s great.” Animation replaces caution. “It’s a happening town.”

“It sounds like you’re in a casino.”

“Yeah, Binion’s. I’m just waiting tables right now, but I’m working my way up. And the tips are fantastic. Speaking of work, my break’s almost over. Good talking to you, Miz Gibley. I’d say I hope you find Bonnie, but since you’re working for the Queen Bitch, I can’t really do that. My bad, I guess.”

“One more thing before you go, please?”

“Make it quick. My asshole boss is waving.”

“I spoke with Randy Holsten. You owe five hundred dollars of back rent.”

Tom laughs. “He can whistle for it.”

“I’m the one who’s whistling,” Holly says. “I know where you work. I can have my lawyer call the management and ask that your wages be attached in that amount.” She doesn’t know if she can actually do that, but it certainly sounds good. She’s always been more inventive on the phone. More assertive, too.

Neither caution nor animation this time. Injury. “Why would you do that? You’re not working for Randy!”

“Because,” Holly says in the same prim voice she used with Jerome, “you don’t strike me as a good person. For all sorts of reasons.”

A moment’s silence, except for the boops and beeps. Then: “Right back atcha, bitch.”

“Goodbye, Mr. Higgins. Have a nice day.”

Holly drives across town to the Red Bank Avenue Jet Mart, feeling strangely happy, strangely light. She thinks, A bitch walks into a bar and orders a mai-tai.

Not even discovering that the clerk she wants isn’t on duty can put a dent in her good mood. She should have expected it, anyway; if the guy has enough seniority to know Bonnie as a regular, it’s not surprising that he’d have Sundays off. She describes the man she’s looking for to the current clerk, a young man with an unfortunate wall eye.

“That’s Emilio,” the young man says. “Emilio Herrera. He’ll be on tomorrow, three to eleven. Eleven’s when this dump closes up.”

“Thank you.”

Holly considers driving up to the college and asking some questions about Ellen Craslow at the Belfry and the Life Sciences building, but what would be the point? It’s not just a Sunday in midsummer but a Sunday in Covid midsummer. Bell College of Arts and Sciences will be as dead as Abe Lincoln. Better to go home, put her feet up, and think. About why she felt hesitant about getting in touch with the Craslows she found on Twitter. About whether the van on the security footage means anything. Sometimes a cigar is just a smoke and a van is just a van. About whether or not she actually has stumbled across the track of a serial killer.

Her phone rings. It’s Pete Huntley. Once she’s back in her apartment building garage, she lights a cigarette and calls him back.

“I don’t know what kind of van that is,” he says, “but there’s something funny about it.”

“Only you don’t know exactly what.”

“Yeah. How did you know that?”

“Because Jerome said the same thing. Why don’t you talk to him? Maybe between the two of you, you can figure it out.”

Holly can’t sleep that night. She lies on her back, hands folded between her breasts, looking up into the dark. She thinks about Bonnie’s bike, just begging to be stolen. She thinks about Peter Steinman, known as Stinky to his friends. Skateboard abandoned but returned to his mother. Does Bonnie’s mother have Bonnie’s bike? Of course she does. She thinks about Keisha, saying love was lost but plenty was left. And she thinks about Ellen Craslow. That’s what’s keeping her awake.

She gets up, goes to her desktop, and opens Twitter. Using her favorite alias—LaurenBacallFan—she messages each of the dozen Craslows, asking if any of them have information about Ellen Craslow from Bibb County, Georgia. She attaches each query to each Craslow’s last tweet. This doesn’t allow for privacy, but so what? None of them have more than a dozen followers. With that done she goes back to bed. For awhile she still can’t sleep, nagged by the idea that it was somehow a wrong move, but how can it be? Not doing it would have been the wrong one. Right?

Right.

At last she drops off. And dreams of her mother.