Holly

July 26, 2021

Holly is up with the sun. She has a bowl of oatmeal and fruit, then goes to her computer and opens Twitter. She has gotten one reply to her Craslow query. Elmer Craslow (Eagles fan, MAGA fan, Nyack Strong!) says he’s never heard of Ellen Craslow, of Bibb County, Georgia. Holly isn’t terribly disappointed. She has eleven more chances. In baseball it’s three strikes and you’re out.

As she’s putting on her sneakers in preparation for her morning walk—it’s when she does her best thinking—her phone trills. It’s Jerome, and he sounds excited. In a voice slightly muffled by the mask he’s wearing, he tells her he’s in an Uber, headed for the airport. He’s going to New York.

Holly is alarmed. “In a plane?”

“That’s the usual way one travels a thousand miles,” he says, and laughs. “Relax, Hollyberry, I’ve got my vax card and I’ll be wearing my mask the whole time I’m in the air. In fact I’m wearing one now, as you can probably tell.”

“Why New York?” But of course she knows. “Your book!”

“The editor called me last night. He said he could send the contract, or I could come and sign it today and he’d hand me a check for a hundred thousand dollars! He says that’s not the way it’s usually done, but he got the green light to make an exception. Is that crazy, or what?”

“It’s crazy and wonderful, as long as you don’t get sick.”

“According to the statistics, New York’s actually safer than our town, Hols. I can’t get there for lunch—too bad, publisher’s lunch is sort of a tradition—but he says we can get together this afternoon for burgers and a beer. My agent will be there—I’ve never even met her except for Zoom, also crazy. He said in the old days he would have taken us to Four Seasons, but the best he can manage now is the Blarney Stone. Which is good enough for me.”

He’s babbling, but Holly doesn’t mind. What she minds is the idea of him traveling on a plane where the air is recirculated and anyone might have Covid, but she can’t help being delighted by his over-the-moon happiness. Spur-of-the-moment trip to New York City in the summer of Covid, she thinks. It’s good to be young and today it’s good to be Jerome.

“Enjoy yourself, and whatever you do, don’t lose that check.”

“My agent will handle that,” he says. “Whoo, this is so far out! We’re almost at the terminal, Hollyberry.”

“Fly well and when you go to the restaurant, make sure to sit outsi—”

“Yes, Mom. One more thing while I’ve got you. I printed out a MapQuest of Deerfield Park and the surrounding area. Marked it in red where Bonnie and Pete Steinman were last seen. We don’t know about Ellen Craslow, but we know she worked on campus, so I marked the Union. Barbara can give it to you if you want. I left it on my desk.”

“I know the locations,” Holly says with some asperity. She thinks of Uncle Henry saying I didn’t fall off a skidder yesterday.

“Yeah, but seeing them like that is creepy. You should find out if there are more. We’re here. I gotta go.”

“When do you come back?”

“I might stay a couple of days or I might come back tomorrow.”

“If you’re thinking about Broadway, the shows are clo—”

“Gotta bounce, Hollyberry.” And boom, he’s gone.

“I hate it when you call me that.” But she’s smiling. Because she really doesn’t, and Jerome knows it.

She’s on her walk when her phone rings again. “Who’s your daddy?” Pete Huntley inquires.

“Not you, Pete. But you sound happy. Plus, not sick.”

“I have risen from the ashes of Covid a new man,” he says, then spoils it with a coughing fit. “Almost. I found your chick, Holly.”

She stops. “You found Ellen Craslow?”

“Well, not her, but I got her LKA.” Last known address. “Also her picture, which I will send to you ASAP. Called the personnel office at Bell as soon as they opened, so ain’t you proud of me?”

“Very proud. What’s the address?”

“11114 MLK Boulevard. That’s about as far out of Lowtown as you can get and still be in it.”

“Peter, thank you.”

“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?

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.”

“We have people who’ve been here for a long time, Ms. Gibley. Why, Mr. and Mrs. Cullen have been here for I’m going to say twenty years. We like the older folks, Phil and me. Ellen was only in her twenties, but she said she was the quiet type, so we took a chance. And she was as good as her word.” She shakes her head. “We lost a month on that unit. Just standing empty. I think Phil was smit with her, not that he would have gotten anywhere even if he’d been thirty instead of sixty. I believe she batted for the other side, if you know what I mean.”

“I do.” That also agrees with Keisha’s impression.

“She’s really missing? Not just from here, I mean?”

Holly nods. “Since around Thanksgiving in 2018.”

“And someone’s just getting around to looking for her now? Why am I surprised? That’s how it goes with Black folks.”

“The thing is, nobody reported her missing,” Holly says. “Maybe she’s not. She was from Georgia and might have gone home. I’m trying to track down her relatives, but really, I just got started.”

“Well then, you go on with your bad self. And by the way, you don’t need that mask. Corona, that’s all just a big old hoax.”

“What happened to Ellen’s things, do you know?”

“You know what, I don’t. Of course the trailers are furnished, but she must have had her own stuff, right?”

“You’d think,” Holly agrees.

“Phil’s in Akron this week. At the trailer show. But if she left a bunch of stuff, he would have told me. He always does. We have a good clientele here, Ms. Gibby, but every now and then someone does kind of…” She raises her hand and makes the first two fingers trot. “Sometimes then we find leftover things, which go to the First Baptist or the Goodwill. If they’re worth saving, that is.”

“How long was she here?”

Lacey puts on her glasses and calls up a different spreadsheet. “She came in March of 2016. Two and a half years? Yeah, she must have had stuff. Want me to call Phil? Although I’m sure he would have told me.”

“That would be great,” Holly says. “Are there any neighbors around 11114 who would remember her?”

Lacey considers. “What about Mrs. McGuire, in 11110? That’s not right next door, but only across the kiddie pool. I think Ellen and Imani McGuire used to be friends. Did their laundry together, you know? Women talk plenty then. And she’ll be home. Her husband still works part-time at the city impound, but Imani’s retired from some other city job. These days she just knits and watches TV. That old girl knits up a storm. Sells it, too, at craft fairs and such. She might know where Ellen went.”

Not if Ellen got snatched in the vicinity of Deerfield Park, Holly thinks. That’s miles from here. But she’ll talk to Imani McGuire. Holly is a fan of Michael Connelly’s detective hero, Harry Bosch, and especially of Bosch’s number one maxim: get off your ass and go knock on doors.

“I’ll talk to Phil and see if he knows what happened to her stuff. I’m pretty sure her trailer was empty—you know, except for the mod cons—when we rented it in February of ’19. You could talk to the Joneses, they live there now, but they’re both working folks. And why would they know anything? Ellen was long gone when they moved in.” She shakes her head. “Missing over two years! What a shame! You come back, Ms. Gibsy, I’ll call Phil right now.”

“Thank you.”

“And ditch the mask, that’s my advice. Corona’s just make-believe to sell magic pillows on the TV news.”

Imani McGuire is tall and thin, with an afro so white it makes the top of her head look like a dandelion puff. Her trailer is a doublewide, painted canary yellow. There’s a beautiful rag rug on the floor of the living area, concentric circles of green and cinnamon. The walls—some composition stuff that’s supposed to look like wood and really doesn’t—are dressed in photographs showing the McGuires at various stages of their lives. The one holding pride of place is a wedding photo. The groom is in Navy dress whites. The bride, with an afro that’s black instead of white, bears a striking resemblance to Angela Davis. Imani is perfectly willing to talk, but she has a question.

“Are you vaxxed?”

“I am.”

“Double?”

“Yes. Moderna.”

“Take off your mask, then. I got my second shot in April.”

Holly takes it off and puts it in her pocket. There are his-and-hers La-Z-Boy recliners on the rag rug, facing a TV whose screen isn’t much bigger than the screen of Holly’s iPad Pro. Draped over the padded arm of one is a half-finished sweater the same bright yellow as the trailer’s exterior. Below it is a basket filled with skeins of the same yellow.

Imani picks her needlework up and drapes it over her lap. On the TV, Drew Carey is extolling prizes on The Price Is Right. Imani raises the remote and snaps the TV off.

“I’m sorry to interrupt your day.”

“Oh no, I love some company,” Imani says, “and besides, they already spun the wheel. That’s the best part. After that comes the Showcase Round, and you tell me why some fat old man on Social Security wants a couple of motorcycles and camping gear. I bet they sell those prizes if they win. I know I would.” Her needles are already flying, the sweater growing appreciably before Holly’s eyes.

“That’s going to be beautiful.”

“Hell of a thing to be knitting on a day when the temperature’s s’posed to be in the nineties, but cold weather always comes… or did, they got the climate so screwed up it’s hard to tell what’s gonna happen from one year to the next. But if the snow flies and the lake freezes, someone’ll buy this at the church sale. I have more put away, plus scarves and mittens. I get good money for these things, more than Yardley makes, but working at the impound keeps him out of my hair… and me out of his, I suppose. Works both ways. Fifty-two years is a hell of a long walk from the altar, let me tell you. And some of it’s stony. Now how can I help you?”

Holly tells how Keisha got to know Ellen Craslow, and how Ellen just dropped out of sight: there one day, gone the next. “I put her name out to the other Craslows who are on Twitter, but so far I’ve only heard from one, and he was no help.”

“Nor will any of the others, based on what I know about her. She’s gone anyplace but Traverse, Georgia. She is a sweetie, Miz Gibney—”

“Holly. Please.”

Imani nods. “A sweetie, smart as a whip, and strong. She’ll find her way.”

“You say she won’t go back to her hometown, where I assume she has people. Why is that?”

“There’s family, all right, but she is dead to them and they to her. You won’t get anything on Facebook.”

“What happened?”

For what seems like a long time there’s only the click of Imani’s needles. She’s frowning down at the yellow sweater. Then she looks up. “Is your kind of investigator bound by confidentiality? Like a lawyer or a priest or a doctor?”

Holly thinks this isn’t a real question but a test. She has an idea Imani knows. And in any case, it doesn’t matter. Honesty really is the best policy. “I have some degree of privilege, but not as much as lawyers or priests. Under certain circumstances I’d have to talk to the police or the district attorney’s office about a case, but they aren’t involved in this.” Holly leans forward. “What you say to me stays with me, Ms. McGuire.”

“Call me Immi.”

“All right.” Holly smiles. She’s got a good one. Jerome tells her she doesn’t use it enough.

“I’m gonna take you at your word, Holly. Because I cared for that girl. Certainly felt sorry for her troubles. I just want you to know that I’m no tattletale and no backfence gossip.”

“Noted,” Holly says. “May I turn on my phone and record this?”

“No you may not.” Click-click go the needles. “I don’t think I’d tell you at all if you were a man. I’ve never told Yard. But women, we know more than they do. Don’t we?”

“Yes. Yes we do.”

“All right, then. Ellen—she was always an Ellen, never an Ellie—she was in her family’s bad books ever since twelve or thirteen, when she gave up eating meat, or any meat products. Total vegetarian. No, that’s not right. Total vegan. Her family was part of one of those hardshell bunches, the First Unreformed Church of I Know Better, and when she quit eating flesh they quoted the Bible at her left and right. The pastor counseled her.”

Imani puts a satiric emphasis on counseled.

“I’m a fallen-away hardshell myself, and I know you can always find scripture to support what you believe, and they found plenty. In Romans it says the weak person eats only vegetables. Deuteronomy, the Lord has promised you shall eat meat. Corinthians, eat whatever is sold in the meat market. Huh! They must have loved that one in Wuhan, where this damn plague came from. Then when she was fourteen, they caught her with another girl.”

“Oh-oh,” Holly says.

“Oh-oh is right. She tried to run away, but they brought her back. Her family. Don’t suppose you know why?”

“Because she was their cross to bear,” Holly says, thinking of times when her own mother said something similar, always prefacing it with a sigh and an Oh, Holly.

“So. You know.”

“Yes I do,” Holly says, and something in her voice opens the door to the rest of the story, which Imani might not have told her otherwise.

“When she was eighteen, she got raped. They wore masks, those stocking things people wear when they go skiing, but she recognized one of them by his stutter. He was from her church. Sang in the choir. Ellen said he had a good voice, and didn’t stutter when he sang. Excuse me.”

She raises the back of one hand and wipes at her left eye. Then the needles resume their synchronized flight. Watching the sun flash on them is hypnotic.

“You know what they kept talking about? Meat! How they were giving her the meat, and didn’t she like it, wasn’t it good? Wasn’t it something she couldn’t get from some girl? She said one of them tried to put his doodad in her mouth, told her to go on and eat the meat, and she told him he’d lose it if he did. So that boy fetched her a wallop upside her head and for the rest of the business she was only about a quarter conscious. And guess what came of that?”

Holly knows this, too. “She got pregnant.”

“Indeed she did. Went on down to Planned Parenthood and got it taken care of. When her folks found out—I don’t know how, she didn’t tell them—they told her she wasn’t part of the family anymore. She was ex-com-mu-nicated. Her daddy said she was a murderer no different from Cain in Genesis, and told her to go where Cain went, to the east of Eden. But Traverse, Georgia, was no Eden to Ellen, furthest thing from it, and she didn’t go east. She went north. Worked ten years’ worth of blue-collar jobs and wound up here, up to the college.”

Holly sits silent, looking at the needles. It occurs to her that next to Ellen Craslow, she hasn’t had it so bad. Mike Sturdevant hung Jibba-Jibba on her but he never raped her.

“She didn’t tell me that all at once. It came out in pieces. Except the last part, about the rape and the abortion. That came out all at once. She was looking down at the floor the whole time. Her voice cracked once or twice, but she never cried. We were in that laundry room by the office, all by ourselves. When she was done I put two fingers under her chin and said, ‘Look at me, girl,’ and she did. I said, ‘God sometimes asks us to pay up front in this life, and you paid a high cost. From now on you are going to have a good life. A blessed life.’ That was when she cried. Here, have a Kleenex.”

Until she takes it and wipes her eyes, Holly hasn’t realized she’s crying herself.

“I hope I was right about that,” Imani says. “I hope that wherever she is, she’s fine. But I don’t know. For her to leave so sudden like she did…” She shakes her head. “I just don’t know. The woman who came for her things—clothes, her laptop computer, her little TV, her knickknack ceramic birds and suchlike—she said Ellen was going back to Georgia, and that didn’t sound right to me. Not that going back south means going back home, there’s a lot more Georgia than one little shit-splat of a town, pardon my French. That woman might have said something about Atlanta.”

“What woman?” Holly asks. All of her interior lights have flashed on.

“I can’t remember her name—Dickens, Dixon, something like that—but she seemed all right.” Something in Holly’s expression troubles her. “Why wouldn’t she be? I walked across to check up on her when I saw her going in and out, and she was friendly enough. Said she knew Ellen from the college, and she had her keys. I recognized the lucky rabbit’s foot Ellen kept on her keyring.”

“Was this woman driving a van? One with a blue stripe down low on the side?”

Holly is sure the answer will be yes, but she’s disappointed. “No, a little station wagon. I don’t know what kind, but Yard would, working in the impound and all. And he was here. He stood on the stoop when I went over, just to make sure everything was all right. Did I do wrong?”

“No,” Holly says, and means it. There was no way Imani could have known. Especially when Holly herself isn’t entirely sure that something unlucky happened to the already unlucky Ellen Craslow. “When did this woman come?”

“Well, gee. It’s been awhile, but I think it was after Thanksgiving but before Christmas. We’d just had the first real snowfall, I know that, but that probably isn’t any help to you.”

“What did she look like?”

“Old,” Imani says. “Older than me by maybe ten years, and I just passed seventy. And white.”

“Would you recognize her if you saw her again?”

“I might,” Imani says. She sounds dubious.

Holly gives her one of her Finders Keepers cards and asks her to have her husband call if he can remember what kind of car it was.

“I actually helped her carry out the laptop computer and some of the clothes,” Imani says. “Poor old lady looked like she was in pain. She said she wasn’t, but I know sciatica when I see it.”