Holly

July 27, 2021

Holly returns to her former parking spot in the two-hour zone and smokes a cigarette with the door open and her feet on the pavement. It comes to her that there’s something exceptionally perverse about taking all the proper precautions against Covid and then filling her lungs with this carcinogenic crap.

I have to stop, she thinks. I really do. Just not today.

The Golden Oldies bowling team is probably a bust. It’s hard for her to remember now why she ever thought it would lead to something. Was it just because Cary Dressler also visited the Jet Mart Bonnie used on a regular basis? Well, Dressler’s also gone, leaving his moped behind, but those are pretty thin connections. It certainly doesn’t seem to her that Roddy Harris is a likely candidate for the Red Bank Predator (if there even is such a person). She doesn’t know if Harris’s wife suffers from sciatica as well as migraines—finding out might be possible, although Holly doesn’t think it’s a priority—but it’s pretty obvious Harris has got his own problems. Onguarding for regarding, Clover for Covid, temperature lobe for temporal lobe, forgetting her name. There’s also the way he simply stopped a couple of times, frowning and looking into space. It doesn’t necessarily mean he’s suffering the onset of Alzheimer’s disease, but the age is right. Also…

“That’s the way it started with Uncle Henry,” she says.

But since she’s started running the Oldies down, she might as well finish the job. She snuffs her cigarette in her portable ashtray and heads for the turnpike. Ernie Coggins lives in Upriver, which is only four exits away. A quick run. But now that Uncle Henry has come into her mind, she can’t stop thinking about him. When was the last time she visited? In the spring, wasn’t it? Yes. Her mother nagged her into it—guilt-tripped her into it—last April, before Charlotte got sick.

Holly gets to the Upriver exit, slows, then changes her mind and continues north toward Covington, location of both her mother’s house and the Rolling Hills Elder Care Center, where Uncle Henry is now living (if you want to call it that). It’s also where another member of the Golden Oldies bowling team is living, so she can get two for the price of one. Of course Victor Anderson may not be any more compos mentis than her uncle; according to Hugh Clippard, Anderson suffered a stroke, and if he’s in long-term care, he’s probably not in recovery mode. Holly can check him off her list, though, and talk to Ernie Coggins tomorrow, when she’s fresh. Plus, turnpike driving soothes her, and when Holly’s in a tranquil state of mind, things sometimes occur to her.

But the whole thing is starting to feel like a wild goose-chase.

Her phone lights up three times on the four-hour drive to the same Days Inn where she stayed three nights before. She doesn’t answer even though her car is Bluetooth-equipped. One call is from Jerome. One is from Pete Huntley. The third is from Penny Dahl, who undoubtedly wants an update. And deserves one.

By the time she gets to Covington, Holly’s stomach is growling. She enters the Burger King drive-thru and orders without hesitation when her turn comes. She has favorites at all the fast food franchises. At Burger King it’s always a Big Fish, a Hershey’s Pie, and a Coke. As she approaches the payment window, she reaches into her left pocket for one of her emoji gloves and only finds the bottle of Germ-X. She grabs a Kleenex out of the center console and uses that to offer her money and take her change. The girl in the window gives her a pitying look. Holly finds a glove in her right pocket and puts it on just in time to drive up to the second window and take her food. She has no idea what happened to the missing glove and doesn’t care. There’s a whole box of them in the trunk, courtesy of Barbara Robinson.

She checks in at the motel and has to laugh at herself when she realizes that she has once again arrived without luggage. She could make another trip to Dollar General but decides against it, telling herself the stock market won’t crash if she wears the same undies two days in a row. There’s no point in going to the Elder Care Center tonight, either; visiting hours end at seven PM.

She eats slowly, enjoying her fish sandwich, enjoying the Hershey’s Pie even more. There’s nothing like empty calories, she sometimes thinks, when you’re feeling confused and unsure of what to do next.

Oh, you know perfectly well what to do next, she thinks, and calls Penny Dahl. Who asks if she’s made any progress.

“I don’t know,” Holly says. This is, as Uncle Henry used to say, the God’s honest.

“Either you have or you haven’t!”

Holly doesn’t want to tell Penny that her daughter might have become the latest victim of a serial killer. It may come to that—in her heart Holly is convinced it will come to that—but while she’s still unsure it would be too cruel.

“I’m going to give you a full report, but I want another twenty-four hours. Are you all right with that?”

“No, I’m not all right with that! If you’ve found something, I have a right to know. I’m paying you, for Christ’s sake!”

Holly says, “Let me put it another way, Penny. Can you live with that?”

“I should fire you,” Penny grumbles.

“That’s your prerogative,” Holly says, “but an end-of-case report would still take me twenty-four hours to prepare. I’m chasing a couple of things.”

“Promising things?”

“I’m not sure.” She would like to say something more hopeful and can’t.

There’s silence. Then Penny says, “I expect to hear from you by nine tomorrow night, or I will fire you.”

“Fair enough. It’s just that right now I don’t have my—”

Ducks in a row is how she means to finish, but Penny ends the call before she can.

Next, Holly calls Jerome. Before she can even say hello, he asks if she’s talked to Barbara.

“No—should I?”

“Well, she’s got some pretty amazing news, but I want her to tell you. Spoiler alert, she’s also been writing, and just happens to be in the running for a literary prize with big bucks attached. Twenty-five K.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“I’m not. And don’t you tell Mom and Dad. She may not have told them yet. But that’s not why I called. I finally figured out what was bugging me about that van. The one in the security footage from the store?”

“What was it?”

“The body is too high. It’s not jacked like one of those monster trucks, but it’s noticeable—two or three feet more than normal. I looked online and the only vans like that are custom jobs for people with disabilities. The chassis gets raised to allow for a wheelchair ramp.”

Holly calls Pete from beside the ice machine, where she’s having a smoke. He has come to the same conclusion about the van as Jerome, only he calls that kind of vehicle “a crip wagon.” Holly winces, thanks him, and asks him how he’s doing. He says he’s like the guy in that Chicago song, feeling stronger every day. It crosses her mind that he’s trying to convince himself.

She puts out her cigarette and sits on the stairs to think. Now she has one almost-concrete thing to tell Penny tomorrow night: it seems more and more likely that Bonnie was taken by someone pretending to be disabled. Maybe all of them were. Or maybe not just pretending? Holly thinks of something Imani said: Poor old lady looked like she was in pain. She said she wasn’t, but I know sciatica when I see it.

She wishes now she had gotten eyes on Emily Harris. She should check at the college to see if anyone knows anything about her physical condition, and will be sure to get a good look at Ernie Coggins’s wife when she talks to him tomorrow.

Back in her room, she lies on the bed and calls Barbara. Her call goes straight to voicemail. Holly asks for a callback before ten-thirty, when she’ll shut off her phone, say her evening prayer, and go to sleep. Then she calls Jerome back. “I can’t get Barbara, and my curiosity is killing me. Tell me what’s going on.”

“It’s really Barbara’s news, Holly…”

“Pretty please? With sugar on it? Vanilla sugar?”

“Okay, but only if you promise to act surprised when Barb tells you.”

“I promise.”

So Jerome tells Holly how Barbara has been writing poetry in secret for a long time and met with Olivia Kingsbury—

“Olivia Kingsbury?” Holly exclaims, sitting up straight. “Holy frijoles!”

“You know her, I take it.”

“Not personally, but my God, Jerome, she’s one of America’s greatest poets! I’m amazed that Barbara got up the courage to approach her, but good for her!”

“Barb’s never been short on guts.”

“When I was a teenager trying to write my own poems, I read everything of Kingsbury’s I could get my hands on! I didn’t know she was still alive!”

“Almost a hundred, Barb says. Anyway, this Kingsbury checked out Barbara’s poetry and agreed to mentor her. I don’t know how long that went on, but the end result was Barb got put up for this prize, the Penworth or something—”

“The Penley Prize,” Holly says. She’s awestruck and delighted for her friend, who has done all of this and managed to keep it a dead secret.

“Yeah, that sounds right. But don’t bother asking what I’ve been up to, Hollyberry, my hundred thousand dollars and all. Not to mention my glitzy weekend in Montauk coming up. You wouldn’t want to hear about the party where Spielberg might show up, or any of that boring old stuff.”

Holly does, of course, and they talk for almost half an hour. He tells her about his lunch at the Blarney Stone, the advance check hand-over, discussions about his book’s launch and plans for promotion, plus a possible interview with The American Historical Review, a prospect that excites and terrifies him in equal measure.

When they have exhausted what he calls Jerome’s Excellent New York Adventure, he asks her to update him on the case. She does, finishing by confessing that her investigation of the bowling team is probably a one-way trip down a blind alley. Jerome disagrees.

“Valid line of investigation, Hol. Dressler worked there. He was targeted. I think they all were. No, I’m sure.”

“Maybe,” Holly says, “but I doubt if it was by an elderly bowler. The one I’m seeing tomorrow is actually a stroke victim. I guess I was hoping one of them is protecting a younger relative or friend. Protecting or enabling.”

The truth is, she’s still hoping that. She has less than a day before she needs to bring her client up to date, and she’d like to have something concrete to tell Penny. That isn’t the most important thing, though. She wants something concrete to tell herself.

While Holly is talking to Jerome, Barbara Robinson is sitting with Marie Duchamp in a waiting room at Kiner Memorial. What they’re waiting to find out is whether or not the docs have been able to regulate Olivia’s heartbeat. They are also waiting—although neither of them say it—to find out if the old poet is still alive.

Barbara calls home and gets her father. She tells Jim that she’s in the hospital, waiting to get news about an old friend. A very old friend named Olivia Kingsbury. That’s bad, but there’s also good news. She tells him to call Jerome and he’ll explain everything, but now she and Olivia’s caregiver are expecting to hear from the doctor about Olivia’s condition at any time.

“Are you all right, honey?” Jim asks.

The answer is no, but she says yes. He asks when she’ll be home. Barbara says she doesn’t know, repeats that she’s fine, and ends the call. To pass the time, she checks her voicemails. She has one from Holly but doesn’t want to talk to her friend yet. She didn’t even want to talk to her dad. She’s trying to concentrate all her psychic force on keeping Olivia alive. Undoubtedly stupid, but who knows? There really are more things in heaven and earth than most people believe, Hamlet was right about that. Barbara has seen some of them for herself.

She also has a text from Holly, and to this she replies, sending off a brief two-word response just as Olivia’s doctor comes in and approaches them. One look at his face tells Barbara and Marie that the news is bad.

While Barbara is reading Holly’s text and sending off her brief reply, Emily Harris is standing at the bedroom window and looking down at Ridge Road. When Roddy comes in she turns to him, crosses the room (slowly but steadily, only limping a little), and gives him a hug.

“Someone’s feeling better,” Roddy says.

She smiles. “Little by slowly, my dear. Little by slowly. The detective woman didn’t seem exactly prepossessing, did she? With her mask and her prissy little questions?”

“She did not.”

“But we must keep an eye out for her. I tend to think you’re right, that she may be investigating Dressler and Dahl as separate cases for separate clients, but I still find it hard to believe. And if she was here partly because of the Dahl girl and didn’t say so, it’s because she suspects something.”

They walk to the window together and look out at the nighttime street. Rodney Harris is thinking that if what they have done—what they are doing—comes out, they would be branded as crazy. His academic reputation, built up over decades, would come crashing down.

Emily, the far more practical member of their partnership, is still thinking about Bonnie Dahl. Something else is nagging at her, but she ignores it.

“What could the Gibney woman find out? Not much. Maybe nothing. Dahl did some secretarial work for me after Christmas, but only for a short time, and I paid cash. I asked her to keep quiet about it for that reason. Reminded her that it was undeclared income.”

“Before Christmas, too,” Roddy says. “As a… you know…”

“As an elf, yes. For the party. But there were at least a dozen elves, all paid in cash, and they were forbidden to post about it on social media.”

Roddy snorts. “You might as well tell the wind not to blow.”

Em admits that this is true, young people post everything, including photographs of their private parts, but she knows Bonnie Dahl never posted about her job as a Christmas elf. Not on Facebook, Instagram, or her Twitter feed. Emily has checked, but that’s not all. “She knew the secretarial job was in the offing, and she didn’t want to lose it.”

“She may have told her mother.”

It’s Em’s turn to snort. “Not that one, she thought her mother was a meddling bitch, and the boyfriend is out of the picture. The Gibney woman doesn’t know about our relationship—our brief relationship—with the Dahl girl. At least she didn’t this afternoon. Did you see how afraid she was to touch you? What a mouse!” Emily laughs, then winces and clutches the small of her back.

“My poor honey,” Rodney says. “What about a little fresh cream for your ouchies?”

She gives him a grateful smile. “That would be good. And Roddy? Do you still have Thing One?”

“Yes.”

“Carry it. Just in case. Don’t forget!” He forgets so much these days.

“I’ll carry it and I won’t forget. Do you still have Thing Two?”

“Yes.” She kisses him. “Now help me off with my nightgown.”

Bill Hodges told Holly once that a case was like an egg.

This was near the end of his life, when he was in a lot of pain and on a lot of medication. He was ordinarily a practical man—a cop first, last, and always—but when he was high on the morph, he had a tendency to speak in metaphors. Sitting at his bedside, Holly listened carefully. She wanted everything he could teach her. Every last thing.

“Most cases are fragile, the way eggs are fragile. Why? Because most criminals are dopes. When it comes to doing dirt, even the ones who are smart are dopes. Otherwise they wouldn’t do dirt in the first place. So you treat a case like an egg. You crack it, you beat it, you put it in a pan with some butter. Then you make yourself a nice little omelet.”

Holly’s case starts to crack in her Days Inn room as she’s kneeling by her bed and saying her prayers.