Holly

July 29, 2021

At some point that night, Holly has a strange dream. She’s in a cage behind crisscrossed bars that make many squares. Sitting on a kitchen chair and looking in at her is an old man. She can’t see him very well because her vision keeps doubling on her, but he appears to be covered in fire engines. “Did you know,” he says, “that there are 2,600 calories in the human liver? Some are fat-cals, but most, almost all, are pure protein. This wonderful organ…”

The Fire Engine Man continues his lecture—now something about the thighs—but she doesn’t want to listen. It’s a terrible dream, worse than the ones about her mother, and she has the worst headache of her life.

Holly closes her eyes and drifts back into darkness.

Penny is so mad she can’t sleep. She only thrashes around in the bed until it’s a total mess. But by three o’clock that morning, her rage at Holly has morphed into nagging disquiet. Her daughter is gone, as if she stepped on one of the world’s many hidden trapdoors and vanished from sight. What if the same thing has happened to Holly?

While her anger was burning hot she called Holly useless, but she hadn’t seemed useless. On the contrary, she’d seemed very competent, and her track record—Penny had done her due diligence—bore that out. Sometimes, though, even competent people made mistakes. Stepped on one of those hidden trapdoors and boom, down they went.

Penny gets up, retrieves her phone, and tries Holly again. Voicemail again. She’s reminded of how her unease grew when she kept trying Bonnie and getting her voicemail. She can tell herself that this isn’t the same, there’s a reasonable explanation, it’s only been six hours since the missed appointment, but at three in the morning the mind fills up with unpleasant shadows and some of them have teeth. She wishes she had a personal number for Holly’s partner as well as the one listed on the website, but she doesn’t. Only Holly’s personal and the Finders Keepers office number. So she’s out of luck, isn’t she? Besides, who leaves their phone on active duty at such an ungodly hour?

Lots of people, she thinks. The parents of teenagers… people on the night shift… maybe even private investigators.

She has an idea and goes to the Finders Keepers website. The partner’s name and office phone number are there, also a list of services and the hours when the office is open: 9 AM to 4 PM, just like Penny’s bank. At the bottom of the web page is After hours call 225 521 6283 and below that, in red: If you feel you are in immediate danger, call 911 RIGHT NOW.

Penny has no intention of calling 911; they’d laugh at her. If anyone answered at all, that is. But the after-hours number is almost certainly an answering service. She calls it. The woman who picks up sounds sleepy and has an intermittent cough. Penny pictures someone who’s working a job that can be done from home, even when sick.

“This is Braden Answering Service, which client do you wish to reach?”

“Finders Keepers. My name is Penelope Dahl. I need to speak to one of the partners. His name is Peter Huntley. It could be urgent.” She decides that isn’t strong enough. “I mean it is. It is urgent.”

“Ma’am, I’m not allowed to give out private num—”

“But you must have them, don’t you? For emergencies?”

The answering service woman doesn’t reply. Unless a coughing fit is a reply.

“I’ve been calling Holly Gibney, she’s the other partner. Calling and calling. She doesn’t answer. Her private number is 440 771 8218. You can check that. But I don’t have his. I need a little help here. Please.”

The answering service woman coughs. There’s a ruffle of pages. Checking her protocols, Penny thinks. Then the woman says, “Leave me your number and I’ll give it to him. Or more likely leave it on his voicemail. It’s three-thirty in the morning, you know.”

“I do know. Tell him to call Penelope Dahl. Penny. My number is—”

“I have that on my screen.” The woman is coughing again.

“Thank you. So much. And ma’am? Take care of yourself.”

When twenty minutes pass with no callback from Huntley (she didn’t really expect one), Penny returns to bed with her phone beside her. She drifts off to sleep. She dreams her daughter comes home. Penny hugs her and says she will never interfere in her daughter’s life again. The phone stays quiet.

Holly doesn’t regain consciousness, she rises back to it and into a world of pain. She’s only had one hangover in her life—the result of a badly spent New Year’s Eve she doesn’t like to think about—but it was mild compared to this. Her brain feels like a blood-soaked sponge in a bone cage. Her bottom is throbbing. It’s as if a bunch of wasps, the new kind they call murder wasps, sank their poison-filled stingers into her back and the nape of her neck. Her ribs on the right side hurt so badly that it’s hard to draw each breath. Eyes still closed, she presses there gently. It makes the pain worse, but they seem intact.

She opens her eyes to see where she is and a bolt of pain goes through her head even though the lights in the Harris basement are low. She lifts her shirt on the right side. That makes the wasp stings hurt worse than ever and another bolt of pain goes through her head, but she gets a good look—better than she wants to—at a huge bruise, mostly purple but black just below her bra.

She kicked me. After I was out, that bitch kicked me.

On the heels of that: Which bitch?

Emily Harris. That bitch.

She’s in a cage. Crisscrossed bars form squares. Beyond them is a cement-floored basement with a large steel box at the far end. It’s standing in what looks like a workshop area. Above the cage, the lens of a camera peers down. There’s a kitchen chair in front of the cage, so the Fire Engine Man wasn’t a dream after all. He was sitting right there.

She’s lying on a futon. There’s a blue plastic potty squatting in one corner. She’s able to get to her feet (slowly, slowly) by grasping the bars and pulling herself up by her left hand. She tries to add her right, but the ache in her ribs is too much. The effort of standing makes her headache worse, but standing takes some of the pressure off her bruised ribs. Now she’s aware that she’s fiercely, fiercely thirsty. She feels like she could drink a gallon of water without stopping.

She takes shuffling baby steps toward the potty, lifts the lid, and sees nothing inside, not even water laced with that blue disinfectant that looks like antifreeze or windshield washer fluid. The potty is as dry as her mouth and throat.

Her memory of what happened is blurry at best, but she has to get it back. Has to get her wits back. Holly has a good idea that she’s going to die in this cage where others have died before her, probably at the hands of the Red Bank Predator, but if she doesn’t get her wits back, she’ll die for sure. Her bag is gone. Her phone is gone. Bill’s gun is gone. No one knows she’s here. Her wits are all she has.

Roddy Harris is sitting on the front porch, wearing slippers and a robe over blue pajamas covered with red firetrucks. Emily gave them to him for his birthday years ago as a joke, but he likes them. They remind him of his childhood, when he loved to watch the firetrucks go by.

He has been sitting on the porch since sunrise, drinking coffee from his tall Starbucks travel mug and waiting for the police. Now it’s nine-thirty on this Thursday morning and there’s been nothing but the usual traffic. This isn’t a guarantee that no one knows where the woman has gone, but it’s a step in the right direction. Roddy believes that if noon comes and goes with no police, they can begin to assume that Miss Nosy Girl hasn’t been missed. At least not yet.

Her address, an apartment building on the east side, was on her driver’s license. Because poor Emmy’s back wasn’t up to walking down the hill to where Nosy Girl’s car was parked, Roddy did it. By then it was dark. He drove it up to their house, where Em took over. Roddy followed her in their Subaru to Nosy Girl’s building. A button on the visor lifted the gate to the underground parking garage. Em parked (in this hot midsummer there were plenty of vacancies) and limped back up the ramp to the Subaru. She insisted on driving home, although she could only use one hand effectively. Probably because she was afraid Roddy wouldn’t remember the way, which was ridiculous. He’d had a few Elf Bites after they got Nosy Girl downstairs and into the cell—so had Em—and he was clear, very clear. Not quite so clear this morning, but clear enough. Like Holly, he understood this would be a very bad time to lose his wits.

Emily joins him. She’s wearing an Ace bandage wound tight around her wrist. It’s swollen and throbs like hell. The Gibney woman tried her best to break it but didn’t quite succeed. “She’s awake. We need to talk to her.”

“Both of us?”

“That would be best.”

“All right, dear.”

They go into the house. On the kitchen counter in a white dish are the two green pills: cyanide, the poison with which Joseph and Magda Goebbels killed their six children in the Führerbunker. Roddy scoops them up and puts them in his pocket. He has no intention of leaving their final means of escape in the kitchen while they are in the basement.

Emily takes a bottle of Artesia water from the refrigerator. There is no raw calves’ liver in there. There is no need for any. They want nothing to do with Nosy Girl’s smoke-polluted carcass, didn’t even have to discuss it.

Emily gives Roddy her thin smile. “Let’s see what she has to say for herself, shall we?”

“Be careful on the stairs, dear,” Roddy says. “Mind your back.”

Em replies that she’ll be fine, but hands the bottle of water to Roddy so she can grip the railing with her good hand, and she goes down very slowly, a step at a time. Like an old woman, Roddy mourns. If we get out of this somehow, I suppose we’ll have to take another one, and soon.

Risk or no risk, he can’t bear to see her suffer.

Holly watches them descend. They move with glassy care, and she’s once again amazed that they have taken her prisoner. That old ad comes to mind. She should have gone to the running car after all instead of hiding behind the chainsaws.

“I wouldn’t believe you’d have much to smile about in your current situation, Ms. Gibney, but apparently you do.” Emily has both hands at the small of her back. “Would you like to share?”

Never answer a suspect’s questions, Bill used to say. They answer yours.

“Hello again, Professor Harris,” she says, looking past Emily… who, by her expression, does not enjoy being looked past. “You came up behind me, didn’t you? With your own Taser.”

“I did,” Roddy says, and rather proudly.

“Were you here last night? I seem to remember your pajamas.”

“I was.”

Emily’s eyes widen and Holly thinks, You didn’t know that, did you?

Em turns to her husband and takes the water. “I think that’s enough, dear. Let me ask the questions.”

Holly has an idea there will only be one question before they slam the big door and turn out all the lights, and she would like to postpone it. She has remembered something else from last night, and it fits with the undergraduate nickname for this man. Fits perfectly. Were she free and talking with friends about the case in bright daylight she would have considered the idea absurd, but in this basement—thirsty, in severe pain, a prisoner—it makes perfect sense.

“Is he eating them? Is that why you take them?”

They exchange a puzzled look that can be nothing but authentic. Then Emily bursts into surprisingly girlish laughter. After a moment, Roddy joins her. As they laugh they share the particular telepathic look that is the sole property of a couple that’s been together for many decades. Roddy gives a slight nod—tell her, why not—and Emily turns to Holly.

“There is no he, dear, only we. We eat them.”

While Holly is discovering that she’s been locked in a cage by a pair of elderly cannibals, Penny Dahl is in the shower with her hair full of shampoo. Her phone rings. She steps out onto the bathmat and plucks it off the clothes hamper while soapy water runs down her neck and back. She checks the number. Holly? No.

“Hello?”

It isn’t a man who replies but a woman, and she doesn’t bother with hello. “Why did you call in the middle of the night? What’s the big emergency?”

“Who is this? I asked for a callback from Peter Hun—”

“It’s his daughter. Dad’s in the hospital. He has Covid. I’m on his phone. What do you want?”

“I was in the shower. Can I rinse off and call you back?”

The woman gives a longsuffering sigh. “Sure, fine.”

“My screen says unknown number. Can you—”

The woman gives her the number and Penny writes it in the steam on the bathroom mirror, repeating it over and over to herself for good measure as she turns the shower back on and sticks her head under it. It’s a half-assed rinse job, but she can finish later. She wraps herself in a towel and calls back.

“This is Shauna. What’s your deal, Ms. Dahl?”

Penny tells her that Holly was investigating the disappearance of her daughter and was supposed to call to report her progress at nine last night. There was no call, and since then, including this morning, Penny gets only voicemail.

“I don’t know what I can do for y—”

A male voice interrupts her. “Give it to me.”

“Dad, no. The doctor said—”

“Give me the damn phone.”

Shauna says, “If you set back his recovery—”

Then she’s gone. A man coughs into Penny’s ear, reminding her of the woman from the answering service. “This is Pete,” he says. “I apologize for my daughter. She’s in full protect-the-old-guy mode.”

Faintly: “Oh my fuck, really?”

“Start over, please.”

Penny goes through it again. This time she finishes by saying, “Maybe it’s nothing, but since my daughter disappeared, anyone not showing up makes me crazy.”

“Maybe nothing, maybe something,” Pete says. “Holly’s always on time. It’s a thing with her. I want—” He coughs dryly. “I want to give you Jerome Robinson’s number. He works with us sometimes. He… well, shit. I forgot. Jerome is in New York. You can try him if you want, but his sister Barbara might be a better bet. I’m pretty sure she and Jerome both have keys to Holly’s apartment. I have one, too, but I’m—” More coughing. “I’m in Kiner. Another day, they tell me, then more quarantining at home. Shauna, too. I guess I could send a nurse down with the key.”

Penny is in the kitchen now, and dripping on the floor. She grabs a pen from beside the day planner. “I hope it won’t come to that. Give me those numbers.”

He does. Penny jots them down. Shauna recaptures the phone, says an unceremonious “G’bye,” and then Penny is on her own again.

She tries both numbers, the one for Barbara first since she’s in town. She gets voicemail from both. She leaves messages, then goes back into the bathroom to finish her shower. It’s the second time this month that she’s had the feeling that something is wrong, and the first time she was right.

Holly’s always on time. It’s a thing with her.

“You eat them,” Holly echoes.

There is no Red Bank Predator. It should be impossible to believe, but it’s not. Only two old college professors living in a neat Victorian home near a prestigious college.

Roddy steps forward eagerly, almost within grabbing distance. Emily pulls him back by his robe, wincing as she does it. Roddy doesn’t seem to notice.

“All mammals are cannibals,” he says, “but only homo sapiens has a silly taboo about it, one that flies in the face of all known medical facts.”

“Roddy—”

He ignores her. He’s dying to expound. To explain. They have never done that with any of their other captures, but this isn’t livestock; he doesn’t have to worry about her adrenals flooding her flesh before they are ready to slaughter.

“That taboo is less than three hundred years old, and even now many tribes—long-lived tribes, I might add—enjoy the benefits of human flesh.”

“Roddy, this isn’t the time—”

“Do you know how many calories are contained in the body of an adult human being of average weight? One hundred and twenty-six thousand!” His voice has begun to rise to the screamy pitch many of his nutrition and biology classes would have recognized in days of yore. “Healthy human flesh and blood cures epilepsy, it cures amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, it cures sciatica! Healthy human fat cures otosclerosis, the main cause of deafness, and drops of warm liquid fat in the eyes spontaneously heal macular—”

“Roddy, enough!”

He gives her a stubborn look. “Human flesh ensures longevity. Look at us, if you have any doubts. Late eighties, yet hale and healthy!”

Holly wonders if he’s having a kind of Alzheimer’s-induced dream, or if he’s just batpoop out of his mind. Maybe it’s both. She just saw the way they came downstairs, step by careful, hesitating step. Like human Ming vases.

“Let’s get to the point,” Emily says. “Who have you told? Who knows you’re here?”

Holly doesn’t reply.

Emily gives her scimitar smile. “Sorry, I misspoke. Nobody knows you’re here, at least at the present time, or they would have come looking for you.”

“The police,” Roddy amplifies. “Five-O. The po-po.” He actually makes a rurr-rurr-rurr sound and twirls one bunched and crooked finger in the air.

“Excuse my husband,” Emily says. “He’s upset and it makes him garrulous. I’m also upset, but it makes me curious. Who will know you’re here?”

Holly doesn’t reply.

Emily holds up the bottle of water. “You must be thirsty.”

Holly doesn’t reply.

“Tell me who you’ve told… assuming you’ve told anyone. Maybe you haven’t. The fact that no one has come looking for you suggests that, and quite strongly.”

Holly doesn’t reply.

“Let’s go,” she tells Roddy. “What we have here is a stubborn bitch.”

“You don’t understand,” Roddy says to Holly. “No one would understand.”

“Shall we give her a few hours to think it over, my love?”

“Yes,” Roddy says. There’s been a vacancy about him, but now it clears, at least a little. “Unless someone comes. Then we won’t need her input, will we?”

“No,” Emily says, “in that case we would not.”

“I’m going to die no matter what I do or don’t tell you,” Holly says. “Aren’t I?”

“Not necessarily,” Emily says. “I think you have no proof. I think you came here to get proof. You took pictures of our van with your phone, but your phone is gone. Without proof, we could perhaps let you go.”

As if this cage doesn’t exist, Holly thinks.

“On the other hand…” She raises her arm, showing the Ace bandage. “You hurt me.”

Holly thinks of lifting her shirt and showing the bruise. Of saying, I think we’re even on that score. She doesn’t. What she says is, “Maybe you have something for that.”

“Already applied,” Roddy says briskly. “A poultice of fat.”

From Bonnie Dahl, Holly thinks, and that is when the absolute truth of it hits her and she sags back a little.

Emily holds up the water. “Tell me what I want to know and I’ll give this to you.”

Holly says nothing.

“All right,” Emily says, with sadness that’s utterly unconvincing, “the truth is you’re almost certainly going to die. But do you want to die thirsty?”

Holly, who can’t believe she isn’t dead already, makes no reply.

“Come on, Roddy,” Emily says, leading him back toward the stairs. Roddy goes with her docilely. “She needs some time to think about it.”

“Yes. But not too much.”

“No, not too much. She must be terribly thirsty.”

They go up the stairs as carefully as they went down them. Fall, Holly urges. Fall! Stumble and fall and break your fracking necks!

But neither of them falls. The door between the world upstairs and this basement dungeon closes. Holly is left alone with her throbbing head, her other aches, and her thirst.

It’s busy, that nine o’clock hour, both on Ridge Road and several other places. It’s the nine o’clock hour when Emily calls Roddy in from the porch to talk to Holly in the basement. It’s the hour when Penny Dahl speaks to Shauna and Pete Huntley, then leaves voicemails on the phones of Jerome and Barbara Robinson.

It’s also the nine o’clock hour when Barbara comes downstairs from the guest room in Olivia’s house, where she’s spent the night. She’s wearing shorts and a top loaned to her by Marie Duchamp. They’re not quite the same size, but close enough. Barbara can’t remember the last time she slept so late. She’s not hungover, possibly because Marie told her to take two Tylenol before going to bed—a sure cure, she said, unless you really took a bath in the stuff—but possibly because she switched to sparkling water when a bunch of them, led by department head Rosalyn Burkhart, went to the Green Door Pub. Which, Rosalyn said, had been Olivia’s watering hole of choice before giving up booze in her seventies, after her first bout of a-fib.

Like most teenagers, the first thing Barbara does is make a beeline for her phone. She sees it’s down to 26 per cent power, and she left her charger at home. She also sees she has a missed call and a voicemail that must have come in just as she was dressing. She thinks it will be one of those nuisance VMs telling her she can update her car’s warranty (as if she had one), but it’s not. It’s from Penny Dahl, Holly’s client.

Barbara listens to it with growing concern. Her first thought is an accident. Her friend lives alone, and accidents sometimes happen to such people. They can slip in the shower or on the stairs. They can fall asleep with a lit cigarette (Barbara has known for some time that Holly’s smoking again). Or they can be assaulted in a parking garage, like the one under Holly’s building. Only robbed if lucky, beaten or raped if not.

As Marie comes downstairs—more slowly, because Marie did not switch to sparkling water last night—Barbara calls Holly. She gets a recorded message telling her Holly’s mailbox is full.

Barbara doesn’t like that.

“I have to go and check on someone,” she tells Marie. “A friend.”

Marie, still wearing last night’s clothes and suffering a bad case of bed head, asks if she’d like a cup of coffee first.

“Maybe later,” Barbara says. She likes this less and less. It isn’t just accidents she’s thinking about now, it’s Holly’s current case. She grabs her bag, drops her phone into it, and leaves in her mother’s car.

Roddy on the porch again. Emily joins him. He’s staring vacantly into the street. He comes and goes, Emily thinks. One day he’ll go and not come back.

She has no doubt that Gibney would eventually tell them what they want—need—to know, but Em doesn’t think they can afford to wait. That means she has to think for both of them. She doesn’t want to swallow cyanide, although she will if she has to; better suicide than seeing their names spattered across every newspaper and cable news outlet, not just in America but around the world. Her reputation, built up so carefully over the years, will fall to ruins. Roddy’s, too. The College Cannibals, she thinks. That’s what they’ll call us.

Better cyanide than that. Absolutely. But if there’s a chance, she wants to take it. And if they have to stop what they’ve been doing, would that really be so terrible? More and more she wonders if they’ve just been fooling themselves all along. She knows a two-word phrase from her own reading on the subject of nutrition and miracle cures. It’s a phrase that’s already occurred to the battered and thirsty woman in their basement.

Meanwhile, time is ticking, and maybe—just maybe—they won’t have to wait for Gibney to talk.

“Roddy.”

“Mmm?” Looking out at the street.

“Roddy, look at me.” She snaps her fingers in front of his eyes. “Pay attention.”

He turns to her. “How is your back, dear one?”

“Better. A little bit.” It’s true. Probably a six on the universal pain scale today. “I have to do something. You need to stay here, but don’t go downstairs. If the police come and they don’t have a search warrant, send them away and call me. Are you following this?”

“Yes.” He looks like he is, but she doesn’t trust that.

“Repeat it back to me.”

He does. Perfectly.

“If they do have a warrant, let them in. Then call me and take one of those pills. Do you remember where you put them?”

“Of course.” He gives her an impatient look. “They are in my pocket.”

“Good. Give me one.” And because of his alarmed look (he’s such a dear): “Just in case.”

He smiles at that and singsongs, “Where are you going, my little one, little one?”

“It doesn’t matter. Don’t concern yourself. I’ll be back by noon at the latest.”

“All right. Here is your pill. Be careful with it.”

She kisses the corner of his mouth, then gives him an impulsive hug to boot. She loves him, and she realizes that this mess is really her mess. If not for her, Roddy would have just gone on fulminating, spending his retirement writing responses in his various journals (journals he sometimes throws across the room in disgust). Certainly he never would have published anything about the benefits of eating human flesh; he was smart enough (then) to know what such ideas would do to his reputation. “They’d call me Modest Proposal Harris,” he grumbled once. (He’d read the Jonathan Swift essay at her urging.) It was she who had moved him—them—from the theoretical to the practical, and she had the perfect test case: the spic who had dared cross her about the Poetry Workshop. Eating that queerboy’s supposedly talented brains had been a pleasure.

And it did help, she tells herself. It really did. It helped both of us.

Holly’s purse is on the living room coffee table, along with the hat she’d been wearing. Emily jams the hat on her own head and roots through the purse, past all the jumble of Holly’s on-the-move life (including masks and cigarettes—the ironic juxtaposition doesn’t escape Emily), and comes up with what looks like an entry card of some sort. She pockets it. The woman’s gun, the one she hurt Em’s wrist with, is on the mantel.

Gibney’s phone is long gone, but Emily made sure to comb through it before removing the SIM card and then putting it in the microwave for good measure. Access was easy enough; all Em had to do was apply the unconscious woman’s fingerprint to the screen, and once again, when opening location services in the privacy settings. She saw the last two places Gibney visited before coming here were her office and her home. Emily doesn’t dare go back to the apartment building in broad daylight, but she thinks the office is a better bet, because the troublesome woman actually spent quite a bit of time there.

Gibney has (soon it will be had) a partner named Pete Huntley, but when Emily finds Huntley on Facebook, she discovers a wonderfully fortuitous thing. He doesn’t post much himself, but the comments and messages tell Emily all she needs to know: he’s got Covid. He was at home, and now he’s in the hospital. The last comment, posted only an hour ago, is from someone named Isabelle Jaynes and reads, Tomorrow you’ll be back home and on your feet in a week or two! Get Well, you Grumpy Old… and then an emoji of a bear.

If Gibney is working for the elf’s mother, she may have taken time to write a report. If so, and if that’s the only artifact—other than Gibney herself, and she’ll soon be nothing but wet clumps in a plastic disposal bag—and if Emily can get the hard copy… or delete it from Gibney’s computer…

It’s a long shot, but one well worth taking. Meanwhile, their prisoner will be getting thirstier and more willing to talk. Maybe even craving a cigarette, Emily thinks, and smiles. This is a desperate situation, but she’s never felt more alive. And at least it’s taken her mind off her back. She starts to leave, then re-thinks that. She takes an Elf Parfait from the refrigerator—gray, with red swirls—and gobbles it.

Tasty!

The thing about human flesh, she’s discovered, is that you start off curious. Then you get to liking it. Eventually you get to love it, and one day you can’t get enough.

Instead of going out the kitchen door to get to the garage, she takes the long way around so she can speak to Roddy again. “Repeat what I told you.”

He does. Letter-perfect.

“Don’t go down there, Roddy. That’s the most important thing. Not until I get back.”

“Buddy system,” he says.

“That’s right, buddy system.” And she walks down the driveway to get the Subaru.

Besides her thirst, her pounding headache, and more other pains than she cares to count, Holly is scared. She’s been close to death on other occasions, but never any closer than this. She understands they’re going to kill her no matter what, and it won’t be long. As they say in the old film noir movies Holly is so fond of, she knows too much.

She’s not entirely sure what the big metal box is on the far side of the basement but suspects it might be a woodchipper. The hose goes through the wall and into whatever is on the other side of the small door in the workshop area. That’s how they get rid of them, she thinks. Whatever’s left of them. God only knows how they’d got their disposal unit down here.

She looks at the pegboard on the far wall and sees two items there that aren’t tools. One is a bike helmet. Next to it is a backpack. Holly’s knees weaken at the sight of them, and she sits down on the futon, gasping a little at the pain in her ribs. The futon moves a little. She sees the edge of something beneath it. She lifts the futon to see what it is.

Barbara has a key to Holly’s apartment but no gate-opener, so she parks on the street, goes down the ramp, and ducks under the bar. Right away she sees something she doesn’t like. Holly’s car is there, but it’s parked close to the ramp, and both of Holly’s assigned spaces—one for her, one for a guest—are much further in. And another thing: the left front tire is over the yellow line and intruding on the next parking space. Holly would never park that way. She’d take one look, then get back in her car and make the adjustment.

Maybe she was in a hurry.

Maybe so, but her own spaces are closer to the elevator and the stairs. It’s the stairs Barbara takes, because you need a swipe card for the elevator and she doesn’t have one. She goes up at a trot, more anxious than ever. On Holly’s floor she uses her key, opens the door, and pokes her head in.

“Holly? Are you here?”

No answer. Barbara checks the place quickly, almost running from room to room. Everything is in its place and everything is neat as a pin—bed made, kitchen counters free of crumbs and spills, bathroom spotless. The only thing Barbara notices is the lingering smell of cigarette smoke, and even that’s faint. There are aromatherapy candles in every room, and the only ashtray is in the dish drainer, clean as a whistle. It looks good. Fine, in fact.

But the car.

The car bothers her. In the wrong space, and sloppily parked.

Her phone rings. It’s Jerome. “Did you track her down?”

“No. I’m in her apartment now. I don’t like it, J.” She tells him about the car, thinking he’ll dismiss it, but Jerome doesn’t like it, either.

“Huh. Look in the little basket by the front door. She always drops her keys there when she comes in. I’ve seen her do it a thousand times.”

Barbara looks. There’s a spare key to Holly’s Prius there, but not her keyring. Not her swipe card for the elevator, either. “They’re probably in that big shoulder bag of hers.”

“Maybe, but why is her car there and she’s not?”

“She took the bus?” Barbara says doubtfully.

“They’re not running a regular schedule because of Covid. I found that out when I tried to take one to the airport. I had to Uber.”

“Poor you,” she says, but it’s a bad attempt at their usual amiable raillery.

“I have a bad feeling about this, Ba. I think I’m going to come home.”

“Jerome, no!”

“Jerome yes. I’ll see what I can get for a flight. If she turns up before I get on a plane, call me or shoot me a text.”

“What about your glitzy weekend in Montauk? You might get a chance to meet Spielberg!”

“I didn’t like his last two movies, anyway. She seemed fine when I talked to her yesterday, but…” He trails off, but goes on before she can speak: “It might be the case. The Dahl woman left me a message, too. She sounded really worried. Hols could have run across the wrong person investigating Bonnie’s disappearance. And the others. Now there’s this guy Castro from nine or ten years ago, add him to the list.”

“Maybe. I don’t know.” All Barbara knows for sure is that Holly would never have parked that way. It’s sloppy, and sloppy is one thing Holly isn’t.

“Have you tried calling the office?”

“Yes. On the way over. Voicemail.”

“Maybe you should go there. Make sure she isn’t… I don’t know.”

But Barbara knows. Make sure she isn’t dead.

“We’re probably jumping at shadows, J. There might be a perfectly reasonable explanation for this, and you’ll be flying home for nothing.”

“Check the office. Just, if you find her before I get on a plane, let me know.”

She leaves and hurries back down the stairs.

As Barbara is talking to her brother in Holly’s empty apartment, Rodney Harris is on his porch, planning the letter he will write to Gut, an important journal dedicated to gastroenterology and hepatology. In the latest issue, Roddy has read a perfectly absurd paper by George Hawkins, about the relationship he claims to have discovered between the pylorus and Crohn’s disease. Hawkins—a PhD, no less!—has totally misrepresented papers written by Myron DeLong and… and that other fellow, whose name Roddy can’t recall at the moment. Hawkins’s conclusions are thus completely wrong.

Roddy munches from his supply of deep-fried Elf Balls, relishing the crunch as he bites down. My response will destroy him, he thinks contentedly.

He recalls that they have a prisoner in the basement. He can’t remember her name, but he does remember the look of horror on her face when Em told her how they had managed to keep the worst depredations of old age at bay. The idea of knocking down her foolish prejudices one by one pleases him almost as much as writing the letter to Gut that will knock down Professor George Hawkins’s flimsy house of cards. He has forgotten Emily’s command to stay out of the basement. Even if he had recalled it, he would have dismissed it as foolish. The woman is in a cage, for God’s sake!

He gets up and goes into the house, tossing another Elf Ball into his mouth as he does. They have a wonderfully clarifying effect.

Holly creaks to her feet as Harris descends to the basement. She’s wondering if this is it, how it ends. He comes to the foot of the stairs and just stands there for a moment. Off in his own universe. He’s still wearing his robe and pajamas. He takes something brown and round from the pocket of his robe and tosses it into his mouth. Holly doesn’t want to believe it’s a piece of Penny Dahl’s daughter, but suspects it is. Her left hand is a fist, squeezing and releasing in time with the pulsing ache in her head, short nails digging into her palm.

“Is that what I think it is?”

He gives her a conspiratorial smile but says nothing.

“Are they good for pain? Because I hurt all over.”

“Yes, they have an analgesic effect,” he says, and pops another. “Quite amazing. Several popes knew of the beneficial effects. The Vatican keeps it quiet, but there are records!”

“Could I… could you give me one?” The idea of eating a piece of Penny Dahl’s daughter makes her feel almost nauseated enough to throw up, but she tries to look both pleading and hopeful.

He smiles, pulls one of the little brown balls from the pocket of his robe, and starts toward her. Then he stops and shakes a finger at her like an indulgent parent who has caught his three-year-old drawing crayon pictures on the wallpaper. “Aah-aah-aah,” he says. “Perhaps not, Miss… what was your name?”

“Holly. Holly Gibney.”

Roddy glances at the broom they use to push food and water through the flap, then shakes his head. He starts to put the brown ball back into his pocket, then changes his mind and tosses it into his mouth.

“If you don’t want to help me, what did you come down for, Mr. Harris?”

“Professor Harris.”

“I’m sorry. Professor. Did you want to talk?”

He just stands there, looking off into space. Holly would like to wring his scrawny neck, but he’s still at the foot of the stairs, twenty or twenty-five feet away. She wishes her arms were that long.

He turns to go back up, then remembers why he came down and turns to her again. “Let’s talk liver. The human liver that has been awakened. Shall we?”

“All right.” She doesn’t know how she can entice him to come closer, but as long as he doesn’t go upstairs—or if his wife, whose brains appear to be in better working order, doesn’t come down—something may occur to her. “How do you wake up a liver, Professor?”

“By eating another liver, of course.” He gives her a look that asks how she can be so stupid. “Calves’ liver is best, but I suspect pigs’ liver would be almost as good. We’ve never tried it. Because of the prions. Also, if it’s not broke—”

“Don’t fix it,” Holly finishes. Her head is pounding so fiercely it makes her feel like her eyeballs are pulsing, and her thirst is enormous, but she gives him her best I’m eager to learn smile. Her hand squeezes and releases, squeezes and releases.

“Correct! Absolutely correct! What’s not broken need not be fixed. It’s axiomatic! I suspect human liver would be best of all, but to feed a person fresh human liver from another person, the problem would be… obviously… would be…” He frowns into space.

“That you’d need two prisoners,” Holly says.

“Yes! Yes! Obvious! Axiomatic! But the liver… what was I saying?”

“Awakened,” Holly says. “Possibly… made ready?”

“Exactly. The liver is the grail. The true holy grail. A sacrament. Did you know the human liver contains all nine essential amino acids? That it’s especially high in lysine?”

“Which prevents cold sores,” says Holly, who is prone to them.

“That’s the least of its attributes!” Harris’s voice is rising in pitch. Soon it will reach the ranting near scream that disturbed some students so much that they dropped his classes. “Lysine cures anxiety! Lysine heals wounds! The liver is a lysine treasure chest! It also revitalizes the thymus gland, which creates T-cells! And Covid? Covid?” He laughs, and even that is a near scream. “Those who are fortunate enough to eat of the human liver, most particularly the awakened human liver, those fortunate ones laugh at Covid, as I and my wife do! Oh, and iron! Human liver is richer in iron than the livers of calves… sheep… pigs… deer… woodchucks… you name it. There is more iron in a human liver than in the liver of a blue whale, and a blue whale weighs one hundred and sixty-five tons! Iron wards off fatigue and improves circulation, especially in the BRAAIIIN!” Roddy taps his temple, where a node of small veins is pulsing.

Holly thinks, I am speaking to an authentic mad scientist. Only of course she’s not speaking; she’s listening. Nor is Rodney Harris lecturing. Not anymore. He’s hollering at an invisible audience of unbelievers.

“Ounces, MERE OUNCES, of human liver contain seven hundred per cent of EVERY VITAMIN needed for the creation of red cell formation and cell METABOLISM! Look at my skin, my good elf, just look at it!”

Roddy grasps one hollow wrinkled cheek and palpates it like a dentist preparing to inject Novocain into a patient’s gum. “Smooth! Smooth as the fabled BABY’S BOTTOM! And that’s just the LIVER!” He pauses to catch his breath. “As for the consumption of brain tissue—”

“All bullshit,” Holly says. It just pops out. She has no plan, no strategy. She’s just had enough. Thoughts of humoring him have gone straight out the window.

He stares at her, wide-eyed. He has been speaking to that invisible audience, swaying them, and some callow undergraduate with nothing but high school biology as a foundation has had the temerity to challenge him. “What? What do you say?”

“I call bullshit,” Holly replies. She’s holding the crossbars loosely in her right hand, the left fisted above her right breast, her face pressed into one of the squares, staring at him. Her care not to use vulgarities, learned at her mother’s knee, has also gone out the window. “This is medicine-show crap, right up there with copper bracelets and magic crystals. Smooth skin? Have you looked in a mirror lately, Professor? You’re as wrinkled as an unmade bed.”

“Shut up!” His cheeks are glowing dull red. That snarl of veins in his temple is pulsing faster, faster. “Shut up, you… you twerp!”

They’re going to kill me, but I’m going to tell this man a few basic truths before they do.

“As for improved brain function… you’re suffering Alzheimer’s, Professor, and not just early-onset. You can’t remember my name, and in a few months, maybe only a few weeks, you won’t be able to remember your own, either.”

“Shut up! Shut up! You’re an ignorant know-nothing!”

He takes a step toward her. This is exactly what Holly was hoping for when she asked him to share one of his horrid brown balls of flesh, but now she barely notices. In her rage—at him, at his wife, at her current hopeless situation—she has even forgotten her thirst.

“You think you’re better. Your wife thinks she’s better. Maybe for awhile you even were better. It happens. You’re not the only one who reads the science magazines. It’s called—”

“Stop! It’s a lie! It’s a FILTHY FUCKING LIE!”

He doesn’t want her to say what he knows might be true, but she intends to. She’ll have to be quiet when she’s dead, but she’s not dead yet.

As Holly is informing Rodney Harris that he’s not the only one who reads the science magazines, Emily is entering the Frederick Building. She finds the idea of masks ridiculous but she’s happy to be wearing one now, and Holly’s gimme cap is pulled down so the visor shades her eyes. She goes to the building directory and checks it. Finders Keepers is on the fifth floor, along with the offices of Furniture Imports, Inc., and David & Daughter, Forensic Accountants.

Emily steps into the elevator and pushes 5. When she gets out, she makes sure the hall is empty and limps down to the door with FINDERS KEEPERS INVESTIGATIVE AGENCY on it. Since she has Holly’s keys, she’s happy to find the door locked. It means no receptionist on duty. If there had been, she would have put on a vague old woman act and said she must have gotten off on the wrong floor, so sorry. She begins going through Holly’s keys, trying ones that look like they might fit, hoping no one comes out of Furniture Imports or David & Daughter to use the loo.

The third key fits. She lets herself into a waiting area. Air conditioning whooshes softly. She checks the computer on the small desk, hoping it’s only asleep, but no joy. She opens the door to the right and peeps into what must be the male partner’s office, judging by the framed sports pages on the wall. The one headlined CLEVELAND WINS WORLD’S SERIES (bad grammar there, she thinks) is probably real, but not BROWNS WIN SUPERBOWL!

The other office is Gibney’s. She hurries to Holly’s computer and pushes a random key, hoping to wake it up if it’s asleep. This one is, but it wants a password to unlock any possible treasures within. She tries several, including HollyGibney, hollygibney, FindersKeepers, finderskeepers, LaurenBacallFan, and password. None of them work. She looks on the desk, which is neat, orderly, and bare except for a notepad. On the top sheet are doodles of flowers and a few jottings. There is the name Imani, which means nothing to Emily, but Elm Grove Trailer Park does; Emily went there to clear out enough things from the Craslow bitch’s trailer to make it appear she was gone. Em doesn’t like that, but what’s printed below it she likes even less: BellRinger and J. Castro and 2012.

How can the bitch have found out so much?

Em tears this sheet off, and the one beneath it for good measure. She balls them up and puts them in her pocket. She checks the desk drawers one by one, hoping for a written report. She doesn’t find one, and admits that even finding one wouldn’t have eased her mind unless it was written in longhand. Nor does she find a slip of paper with Holly’s password written on it, and a wave of angry despair rolls through her.

We should have had an exit plan beyond cyanide pills, she thinks. Why didn’t we?

The answer seems obvious: because they’re old, and old people can’t run very far or very fast.

Maybe there’s no report. Maybe the stupid woman was too unsure of her conclusions to write one or tell anyone.

Emily decides it’s the best she can hope for. She’ll go home. Roddy will shoot the Gibney bitch as he did the Craslow bitch. They’ll run her through the Morbark, pulverizing her bones and liquifying the rest of her, including her nicotine-poisoned liver. Then out into the lake in the Marie Cather, where they’ll stop above the deepest part and drop the remains of Holly Gibney over the side in a plastic disposal bag. After that they will continue hoping for the best. What else is there? Suicide, of course, but Emily still hopes it won’t come to that.

She finds the wall safe, predictably hidden behind a picture of a mountain meadow. She tries the handle, expecting nothing, and nothing is what she gets. She gives the combo a disgusted spin, rehangs the picture, and turns off the computer. She decides the notepad is a little out of place, so she squares it up. Then she retreats the way she came, wiping everything she touched, starting with the computer keyboard. She finishes with the knob of the office door, after putting on her mask and peering through the spyhole to make sure the coast is clear. She is halfway down the hall before she remembers she forgot to re-lock the door. She goes back and does it, once more taking care to wipe away her fingerprints.

In the elevator she pulls the brim of the gimme cap down. She encounters only one person in the lobby and with her head lowered sees only jeans and sneakers as Barbara Robinson passes her on her way to the elevator. It’s time to go home and tie up at least one troublesome loose end.

As she pushes open the door to the street, a particularly vicious bolt of pain strikes the small of her back. Emily stands on the sidewalk, grimacing, waiting for it to let up. It does, at least a little, and she thanks God (who of course doesn’t exist) for the Elf Parfait she ate before leaving the house. She crosses Frederick Street to her car, limping more severely than ever.

The phrase that Holly is screaming at her husband at that very moment comes into her mind and she rejects it.

“IT’S CALLED THE PLACEBO EFFECT, you half brain-dead idi—”

He rushes at her, screaming at her to shut up, the placebo effect doesn’t exist, it’s nothing but the manipulation of statistics by a cadre of lazy, pseudoscientific—

She grabs him the second he comes within reach. Again, there’s no thought, not even a shred of advance planning; she simply shoots her right arm through the bars and curls it around his neck. It hurts her bruised ribs, but in her adrenaline-fired state she barely notices.

He tries to jerk free and almost makes it. Holly redoubles her grip and yanks him against the bars. His bathrobe is sliding off, revealing his ridiculous firetruck pajamas.

“Let me go!” Choking, almost gurgling the words. “Let me go!”

Holly remembers what she has in her left hand. What she’s been squeezing so tightly it’s cut into her palm. It’s a triangular earring, the mate of the one she found in the weeds next to the abandoned auto body shop. She shoves that hand through the bars and, holding the earring tightly between her thumb and forefinger, runs one of its three golden points across Harris’s scrawny throat in a semicircle from one jaw to the other. She expects nothing, just does it. For most of that ten-inch semicircle, the point barely cuts the skin; a paper cut might go deeper and draw more blood. Then it catches on a bulging tendon and digs deeper. Roddy helps by jerking his head to the side, trying to get clear of whatever she’s cutting him with. The earring slices through his jugular vein and Holly takes first one faceful of warm blood and then another as his heart pumps it at her. It’s in her eyes and it burns.

Roddy gives a convulsive jerk and breaks her grip. He staggers toward the stairs with the back of his bathrobe hanging almost to his waist and the rest of it dragging on the floor. He puts his hand to his neck. Blood jets through his fingers. He blunders into the broom that’s propped there and stumbles over it. His head hits the stair-rail and he goes to his knees. The spurts of blood continue, but they’re starting to weaken. He uses the rail to gain his feet and turns to her. His eyes are wide. He reaches out and makes a guttural sound that could be anything, but Holly thinks it might be his wife’s name. The bathrobe slips all the way off. It makes her think of a snake shedding its skin. He takes two steps toward her, waving his arms, then goes down on his face. The front of his skull thuds on the concrete. His fingers twitch. He tries to raise his head and can’t. Blood trickles across the concrete.

Holly is frozen with shock and amazement. Her arms are still sticking out through two of the squares made by the crisscrossing bars. The earring is still in her left hand, which is now wearing a wet red glove. At first the only thought in her mind is Lady Macbeth’s question: who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him?

Then another one surfaces: Where is his wife?

She takes one step backward, then two, then trips over her own foot and sits down hard on the futon. She cries out in the pain of her bruised and outraged ribs. The earring drops from her hand.

She waits for Emily.

Barbara barely glances at the woman who passes her in the lobby of the Frederick Building. She’s thinking of Deduction, Please, a series of children’s detective books that Jerome read as a kid and then passed on to her. She doesn’t know if her and J’s fascination with Holly’s chosen field (his especially) originated in those books, but it might have.

There were thirty or forty mysteries in each Deduction, Please, each only two or three pages long. They featured a sleuth with the unlikely name of Dutch Spyglass. Dutch would come to the scene of the crime, observe, talk to a few people, and then solve the mystery (usually robbery, sometimes arson or a clonk on the head, never murder). Dutch always concluded the same way: “All the clues are there! The solution is in your grasp! Deduction, please?” Jerome was able to solve the cases some of the time, Barbara almost never… although when she turned to the back of the book and read the case summary, it always seemed obvious.

As she goes up in the elevator, she thinks the disappearances Holly has been investigating are like those mini-mysteries she puzzled over when she was nine or ten. Nastier, more sinister, but essentially the same. All the clues are there, the solution is in your grasp. Barbara almost thinks that’s true. She wishes she could turn to the back of the book and read the solution, but there is no book. Only her missing friend.

She goes down the hall and opens the door to Finders Keepers with her key. “Holly?”

No answer, but Barbara has the queerest sensation that either someone is here or has been not long ago. It’s not a smell, just a feeling that the air has been disturbed recently.

“Anyone?”

Nothing. She takes a quick look into Pete’s office. She even checks the coat closet. Then she goes to the door of Holly’s office. She pauses there for a moment, her hand on the knob, afraid she’s going to find Holly dead in her chair, eyes open and glazed. She forces herself to open the door, telling herself she won’t see Holly but if she does she mustn’t scream.

Holly’s not there, but Barbara’s sense of a recent presence doesn’t go away. She looks at Holly’s desk and sees nothing but a blank pad, the one she uses when she’s doodling, taking notes, or both. It’s neatly centered, and that’s Holly all the way. Barbara pushes a key on the computer’s keypad and frowns when nothing happens. Holly almost never turns her computer off, just lets it go to sleep. She says she hates even a short wait while it boots up.

Barbara turns it on and when the starter screen appears, she uses the notebook app on her phone to find the password that opens all the office computers: Qxtt4#%ck. She types it in. Nothing happens except for the quick annoying shake that means the Mac has rejected the password. She tries again in case she’s entered it wrong. Same result. She frowns, then barks a small exasperated laugh as she gets it. The password changes automatically every six months, a security feature that means Qxtt4#%ck became obsolete on July first. Holly has neglected to give her the new one, and Barbara—busy with her own affairs—has forgotten to ask. Jerome may have it, but she’s guessing he doesn’t. He’s also been busy with his own affairs.

Deduction, please?

Barbara has none. She gets up, starts to leave, then, almost on a whim, takes down the Turner landscape print on the wall. The company safe is behind it. And although it’s shut and locked, Barbara sees something that adds to her disquiet. When Holly uses the safe, she always resets the combination dial to zero. It’s one of her little compulsions. Pete wouldn’t bother if he used the safe, but Pete’s been out almost all month.

She tries the handle. Locked. She doesn’t know the combination, so she can’t check to see if anything has been taken. What she can do is reset the dial to zero, put back the painting, and call her brother.

Emily parks in the driveway and gets out of the Subaru a little too fast. Another bolt of pain goes through her back. It’s becoming harder and harder to believe they’re holding back the tide of senescence, a thing they’ve taken as an article of faith since dining on Jorge Castro.

Not faith, she insists. Science. The science is there. These are just nerve spasms brought on by tension. They’ll pass, and once they do I’ll continue my recovery.

She goes up the front steps, palms pressed into the lumbar area at the base of her spine. Roddy is no longer on the porch; nothing there but a half-empty coffee cup and his notebook. She looks down at it and is distressed to see his formerly neat handwriting has begun to sprawl and shake. Nor has he kept to the notebook’s blue lines. His sentences go up and down as if he’d written them on the Marie Cather in a heavy swell.

She expects to find him in the living room or in the downstairs office, but he’s in neither, and when she goes into the kitchen she sees the basement door is standing open. Emily feels a sinking in the pit of her stomach. She goes to the door. “Roddy?”

It’s the woman who answers. The wretched snooping woman. “He’s down here, Professor, and I think he’s given his last lecture.”

Jerome tells Barbara he won’t be flying home after all. There was a flight scheduled at 12:40 PM, but when he called to book a seat, he was told it has been canceled because of Covid. The pilot and three members of the cabin crew had tested positive.

“I’m going to try and rent a car. It’s just shy of five hundred miles. I can be home by midnight. Earlier, if the traffic isn’t too bad.”

“Are you sure you’re old enough to rent one?” She hopes he is. She wants him with her, wants him bad.

“As of my birthday two months ago, I am. I can even get a discount with my Authors Guild card. Crazy, huh?”

“You want to know what’s crazy? I think someone’s been in the office. I’m here now.” She tells him about how she had to turn the computer on instead of just waking it up with a keystroke, and how the combination dial was set in the 70s instead of at zero. “Do you have her password? The one that kicked in at the start of the month?”

“Gee, no. Haven’t been there at all. My book, you know.”

Barbara knows. “She might have turned her computer off, I’ve told her they suck power even when they’re asleep, but forgetting to set the combo dial to zero? You know Holly.”

“But why would anyone go there?” Jerome asks, then answers his own question. “Maybe someone’s worried about what she’s been finding out. Wants to know if she’s written a report, or talked to her client. Barb, you have to phone the Dahl woman. Tell her to be careful.”

“I don’t know her num…” Barbara thinks of the message Penny Dahl left. Her number will be in Barbara’s contacts. “Never mind, yes I do. I’m more worried about Holly than I am about Bonnie Dahl’s mother.”

“Right there with you, sis. What about the police? Isabelle Jaynes?”

“What am I supposed to say? That she parked her car in the wrong space with a tire on the yellow line and forgot to turn the wall safe dial back to zero so call out the National Guard?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I see your point. But Izzy’s sort of a friend. Do you want me to call her?”

“No, I’ll do it. But before I do, tell me everything you know about the case.”

“I already—”

“You did, but I was wrapped up in my own shit, so tell me again. Because I feel like I almost know. I just can’t… I’m so upset… just go through it again. Please.”

So he does.

Emily comes halfway down the stairs and stops when she sees her husband lying facedown in a spreading pool of blood. “What happened?” she screams. “What happened?”

“I cut his throat,” Holly says. She’s standing against the cement wall at the far side of the cell, next to the potty. She feels remarkably calm. “Would you like to hear a joke I made up?”

Emily bolts down the final six or eight risers. A mistake. She trips on the last one and loses her balance. She puts out her hands to break her fall, and Holly hears the snap as a bone in her left arm—old and brittle—fractures. This time it’s a shriek instead of a scream, not of horror but of pain. She crawls to Roddy and turns his head. The blood from his cut throat has begun to coagulate, and there’s a sticky ripping sound as his cheek pulls free of it.

“A new millionaire walks into a bar and orders a mai-tai…”

“What did you do? WHAT DID YOU DO TO RODDY?”

“Weren’t you listening? Cut his fracking throat.” Holly bends and picks up the golden earring. “With this. It was Bonnie’s. If there was ever a case of revenge from beyond the grave, I’d say this is it.”

Emily gets up… too fast. Not a scream or a shriek this time, but a howl of agony as her back goes nuclear. And her left arm is hanging crookedly.

Broke at the elbow, Holly thinks. Good.

“Oh my God! Oh my dear God! HOW IT HURTS!”

“I only wish you’d split your crazy evil skull,” Holly tells her. She raises the earring. It glitters under the fluorescents. “Come over here, Professor. Let me put you out of your misery, which looks to be considerable. Maybe it’s not too late to catch up with your husband on his way to hell.”

Emily is bent over, haglike. Her hair, which she put up in a neat bun that morning, is coming loose and hanging around her face. Holly thinks it adds to her overall witchy-woman vibe. She wonders if the calm she feels means she’s lost her mind. She thinks not, because she’s perfectly clear on one thing: if Emily Harris can get back up to the first floor—and then back down—Holly is going to die.

At least I got one of them, she thinks, and then flashes on Bogie saying We’ll always have Paris.

Emily takes shuffling baby steps to the stairs. She grasps the rail. She looks back once, not at Holly but at her husband, lying dead on the floor. Then—very slowly, pulling herself along—she begins to climb. She’s breathing in harsh gasps.

Holly calls after her. “A new millionaire walks into a bar and orders a mai-tai. Fall and break your neck, you bitch, fall!”

But Emily doesn’t.

Barbara thinks there may be a solution to the mystery of Holly’s disappearance in the back of the book after all. If, that is, you think of Penny Dahl as the back of the book. There’s a MISSING WOMAN flier on a streetlight pole next to the Frederick Building’s parking lot. It’s been faded by three weeks of weather and part of it is flapping in the hot late-morning breeze, but Barbara can still see the girl’s smiling face.

Dead, she thinks. That girl is dead. Please God, Holly’s not dead, too.

She calls Penny Dahl’s number. As the phone rings, she looks at the picture of the smiling blond woman on the poster. Not much older than Barbara herself.

Be there, Mrs. Dahl. Answer your damn phone.

Penny does, sounding breathless. “Hello?”

“This is Barbara Robinson, Mrs. Dahl.”

“Did you get my message? Have you found her? Is she all right?”

Barbara doesn’t know if she’s talking about Bonnie or Holly. In either case, the answer is the same. “Still missing. I know you and Holly were supposed to talk last night. Did she send you a report instead? Have you checked your email?”

“I did, and there was nothing.”

“Would you check again?”

Penny Dahl tells her to hold on. Barbara stands looking at the picture of this woman’s missing daughter as she does. Blond all-American cheerleader type, every white boy’s dream. She waits, with sweat rolling down her cheeks. She keeps remembering the combination dial. Sorry, wrong number, she thinks.

Penny comes back. “No. Nothing.”

So if there’s a report, it’s probably locked inside the Finders Keepers computer system. Barbara thanks Penny and calls Pete Huntley. He answers himself, having hectored his daughter into giving up custody of his phone.

“Pete, it’s Barbara, and before you ask, she’s still gone.” She tells him about the un-Hollylike parking job at the apartment building and the combination dial oddity. Then she asks the big question: does he have the company computers’ password, which was automatically reset on July first?

She has to wait through a coughing fit before he can answer. “Hell, no. Holly takes care of all that stuff.”

“Are you sure she didn’t give it to you?”

“Yes. I would have written it down if she did. And before you ask, I don’t have the combo to the safe, either. She gave it to me a few months back, and that I did write down, but I lost the paper I wrote it on. I never use it, anyway. Sorry, kiddo.”

Barbara is disappointed but not surprised. She thanks him, ends the call, and stands staring at the smiling blond on the MISSING poster. The heat has mastered her antiperspirant and sweat is now trickling down from her armpits. She doubts if there’s a hard copy in the safe, anyway. Holly is particular about keeping it all in “the box”—which is what she calls her computer—until she’s sure the case is over. She hates having to reprint after making changes or additions; it’s another of her tics. If she did write a report and filed it to the cloud, it’s going to stay there until an IT guy—one with high-powered skills—can open the Finders Keepers computers, and by then it may be too late. Will probably be too late.

Jerome said she should call Isabelle Jaynes and Barbara said she would, but to what purpose? Holly has been missing for less than twenty-four hours. There’s no blood or sign of a struggle in her apartment or her office. She can’t even ask Izzy to put out a BOLO alert on Holly’s car, because it’s in Holly’s apartment building garage. Just parked in the wrong space, and people do that all the time.

Not Holly. She wouldn’t.

Barbara decides to go home. Her parents won’t be there, and she doesn’t want to upset them with this at work. What she wants is Jerome, and when she gets to the house, she calls him. The message she gets says he can’t answer because he’s driving. Barbara tells herself that’s good, but it doesn’t feel good. Nothing does.

Maybe she’ll collapse upstairs, Holly thinks. Broken arm, bad back… it could happen. But she doesn’t believe it will.

She waits, and just as she’s beginning to hope, a shoe appears. Then another. Then the hem of the crazy lady’s skirt. She comes down slowly, one step at a time, panting and holding tightly to the stair-rail with her right hand. Her left dangles. Her face is so pale it could be the face of a corpse. Tucked into the waistband of her skirt is a gun. Although Holly can only see the butt, she’d know that gun anywhere. Emily intends to kill her with Bill Hodges’s .38.

“You bitch,” Emily rasps. She has reached the foot of the stairs. “Your snooping has ruined everything.”

“It was ruined long before I came on the scene.” Holly backs up slowly until she can back no more. She even raises her hands, much good that will do. “It was the placebo effect all along, Emily. Expectation aids body chemistry. I’m a little bit of a hypochondriac, so I know. And I’ve seen the numbers. Scientists have known about the placebo effect for years. I’m sure that in his heart, your husband did, as well.”

If Holly hoped to provoke the sort of rage that caused this woman’s husband to act so rashly, she’s disappointed. If she hoped Emily might shoot herself in the stomach while taking the .38 out of her waistband, she’s similarly disappointed. In truth, Holly isn’t aware of feeling anything at all, but her senses are sharply—almost supernaturally—attuned. She sees everything, hears everything, right down to the slight rattle in Emily Harris’s throat as she draws each quick breath. Holly wonders if everyone, at least those who see death coming for them, experiences this divinely sharp focus, the brain’s last attempt to take in everything before everything is taken away.

Emily is looking down at her husband. “Alas, poor Roddy,” she says. “I knew him well.”

“Listen to you,” Holly says, her back to the wall, her hands splayed against the concrete. “A cannibal quoting Shakespeare. That deserves a place in the Guinness Book of—”

“Shut up. Shut up!”

Holly has no intention of shutting up. She has been a meek mouse too much of her life. Her mother: Speak when spoken to. Uncle Henry: Children should be seen and not heard. Well, frack them. No, fuck them. In a matter of seconds this woman is going to shut her up forever, but as with Roddy, she means to have her say first.

“I’ve been trying to tell you a joke I made up. A new millionaire walks into a bar, and—”

“Shut up!”

Emily raises the gun and fires. Although it’s a revolver of relatively small caliber, the report is deafening in the basement. A spark jumps from one of the home-welded bars (Roddy found a video on YouTube and followed it with excellent results). Holly sees a chip fly upward from the cement wall above the blue plastic potty. She thinks, I didn’t even have time to duck.

“—and asks for a mai—”

“Shut up!”

Holly slides along the wall to the left just as Emily fires again. There’s no spark this time; the slug goes through one of the squares and makes a penny-sized hole in the concrete where Holly was standing a second before. The gun wavers in Emily’s hand and Holly thinks, She’s a lefty, and that’s the arm she broke. She’s shooting with her dumb hand.

“And asks for a mai-tai. Are you with me so far? This is pretty good, at least I think so. The bartender goes to make it and the woman hears a voice say ‘Congratulations, Holly! You deserve—’ ”

Emily starts forward, wanting to get close, but catches a foot in Roddy’s bathrobe and falls again. One knee comes down on the late professor’s butt. The other knee lands on the concrete. Her body twists at the waist, she cries out in pain, and the gun goes off. This bullet goes into the back of Roddy’s head. Not that he feels it.

Stay down, Holly thinks. Stay down. STAY DOWN!

But Emily rises, although the pain makes her scream and she can’t manage to get fully upright. Holly doesn’t think she looks like a witch anymore; now she looks like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Her eyes are bulging. There are white curds at the corners of her mouth and Holly doesn’t want to consider what the woman may have eaten, telling herself she needed the strength, before coming back down to end Holly with her mentor’s gun. Which she now raises.

“Come on,” Holly says. “Show me what you can do.”

She slides to the left along the wall, ducking at the same time, feeling as fragile as one of her mother’s china figurines. This time she’s a little late and Emily is a little lucky. Holly feels a burning streak across her right arm above the elbow. Holly also knows her Shakespeare and thinks of Hamlet: a hit, a very palpable hit. But only a graze. It doesn’t hurt much, at least not yet.

“So this voice says ‘Congratulations, Holly! You deserve every fracking cent of that money.’ But when she looks around, no one is there. Then she hears a voice on the other side say—”

“Shut up, shut up, SHUT UP!”

Just before Emily fires again, Holly drops to her knees. She hears the hzzzz of the bullet passing just over her head, close enough to part her hair. For all she knows it did part her hair.

“Sorry, Professor,” Holly says, getting up. “Pistols are only good at close range.” She can feel blood soaking the sleeve of her shirt. It’s warm, and warmth is good. Warmth is life. “And you’re shooting with the wrong hand, too. Let’s end this. I’ll make it easy for you. Just let me finish my joke.”

She walks to the front of the cell and pushes her face into one of the squares. Bars press against her cheeks and the bars are cold. “So this other voice says, ‘You’re looking especially pretty tonight, Holly.’ But when she looks, still no one there! The bartender comes back with the drink, and—”

Emily lurches forward. She presses the short barrel of Bill’s pistol against Holly’s forehead and pulls the trigger. There’s a dry click as the hammer falls on the chamber Holly has left empty, as Bill taught her… because revolvers, unlike the Glock that was his service weapon, have no safeties.

There is just long enough for Emily to register surprise before Holly shoots her hands through the bars, seizes Emily’s head, and twists it to the left with all her strength. Holly heard a snap when the old woman’s arm broke. What she hears this time is a muffled crack. Emily’s knees buckle. Her head slides out of Holly’s grip as she goes down, leaving Holly with nothing but a few gray hairs in her left hand. They feel nasty, like cobwebs, and she wipes them away on her shirt. She hears herself breathing in great gasps, and the world tries to swim away from her. She can’t let that happen, so she slaps herself across the face. Blood flies from her wounded arm. Droplets spatter on the bars of the cage.

Emily has ended up in a kind of squat, legs beneath her but twisted in opposite directions from the knees down, her face resting against the cage. One of the bars has pulled her nose up into a pig’s snout. Like her legs, her open eyes appear to be staring in different directions. Holly drops to her knees, raises the feeding-flap, and gets the gun. It’s empty but can still be useful. If Emily is still alive (Holly doubts it), if she moves at all, Holly intends to beat her fracking head in.

There is no movement. Holly counts aloud to sixty. Still on her knees, she reaches through one of the lower squares and presses her fingers into the side of Emily’s neck. The boneless way the woman’s head rolls over onto her shoulder tells Holly all she needs to know (what she knew already), but she keeps her fingers there for another sixty count. She feels nothing. Not even a few final erratic beats of a dying heart.

Holly gets up, still breathing in those great gasps, but she can’t keep her feet. She sits down heavily on the futon. She’s alive. She can’t believe it. She does believe it. The pain in her ribs convinces her. The burn in her arm convinces her. And her thirst convinces her. She feels that she could drink all five of the Great Lakes dry.

They are both dead. She cut the throat of one, broke the neck of the other. And here she sits in a cage no one knows about. Someone will come eventually, but how long before that happens? And how long can a human being go without water? She doesn’t know. She can’t even remember the last time she had a drink.

She slides up the sleeve of her shirt, hissing with pain as the cloth passes over the wound. She sees it was a little more than a graze, after all. The skin is split two inches above her right elbow, and she can look into the meat of her arm. The bone isn’t visible, and she supposes that’s good, but the wound is bleeding freely. She knows blood-loss will also contribute to her thirst, which is raging now and will soon be… what? What’s beyond raging? She can’t think of the word any more than she can think of how many days a person can go without water.

I killed them both from inside this cage. That should go in the Guinness Book of World Records.

Holly works her way out of her shirt. It’s a slow operation, and painful, but she finally manages. She ties it around the gunshot wound—another slow operation—and knots it with her teeth. Then she leans back against the concrete wall and begins to wait.

“A new millionaire walks into a bar,” she croaks, “and orders a mai-tai. While the bartender is making it, she hears someone say, ‘You deserve that money, Holly. Every fracking cent.’ She looks and there’s nobody there. Then she hears a voice on her other side say, ‘You killed them both from inside the cage, you’re in the Guinness Book of World Records, way to go, you’re a star.’ ”

Has Emily moved? Surely not. Surely her imagination. Holly knows she should shut up, talking will only make her thirstier, but she needs to finish the fracking joke, even if her only audience is a couple of dead old people.

“The bartender comes back and she says, ‘I keep hearing voices saying these nice things, what’s up with that?’ And the bartender says… he says…”

She passes out.

While Holly is losing consciousness (and just before the punchline, too), Barbara is at home, in the office that’s now Jerome’s. She’s looking at the MapQuest printout with the red dots on it marking the various disappearances. Which now includes the one she herself made to mark Jorge Castro, who went missing in the fall of 2012. Barbara put that dot on Ridge Road across from Olivia’s house. Did I tell you I saw him shortly before he disappeared? Olivia said that. Running. He always ran at night, to the park and back again. Even in the rain, and it was raining that night. And something else: I certainly never saw him again.

Barbara traces a route from the Bell campus down Ridge Road to the park. To the playground in the park. What if it was there? There’s a parking lot, and if there was a van, like the one in the security footage of Bonnie in the store…

Something nibbles at her. Something about the van? About Ridge Road? Both? She doesn’t know, although she’s sure Dutch Spyglass would.

Her phone rings. It’s Jerome. He asks her for an update. She tells him about the calls she made and the one she hasn’t made, to Izzy Jaynes. He tells her she was probably right to skip that one. He says he’s making good time, already in New Jersey, but he doesn’t want to exceed the speed limit by more than five miles an hour. Barbara doesn’t have to ask him why; he’s driving while Black. He doesn’t even want to risk talking on his cell while on the road. He pulled into a rest area to call her, and he wants to get going again.

Before he can end the call, Barbara blurts out her worst fear. “What if she’s dead, J?”

There’s a pause. She can hear turnpike traffic. Then he says, “She’s not. I’d feel it if she was. Gotta go, Ba. I’ll be home by eleven.”

“I’m going to lie down,” Barbara says. “Maybe something will come to me. I feel like I know more than I think I know. Did you ever have that feeling?”

“Quite often.”

Barbara goes into her room and stretches out on her bed. She doesn’t expect to sleep, but maybe she can clear her mind. She closes her eyes. She thinks about Olivia and Olivia’s many stories. She remembers asking the old poet about the famous picture of her and Bogart in front of the Trevi Fountain. In particular about her wide-eyed, almost startled smile. Olivia saying, If I looked startled it’s because he had his hand on my ass.

Barbara falls asleep.

Holly is in the sunroom of Rolling Hills Elder Care. It’s empty except for her mother and her uncle. They are sitting at one of the tables, watching a bowling match on the big-screen television and drinking tall glasses of iced tea.

“Can I have some?” Holly croaks. “I’m thirsty.”

They look around. They salute her with those tall glasses and drink. There are lemon wedges stuck in the rims of the glasses, which are beaded with condensation. Holly thinks of how much she would like to stick out her tongue to lick those little drops of condensate from the sides of their glasses. She’d lick them all the way to the top, suck the lemon wedges, then drain them both.

“You couldn’t handle that much money,” Uncle Henry says, and sips. “We did it for your own good.”

“You’re fragile,” Charlotte says, and takes her own sip. So delicate! How can she not just guzzle? Holly would guzzle both glasses, if only they would give them to her.

Charlotte holds hers out to Holly. “You can have it.”

Uncle Henry holds his out. “You can have this one, too.”

And together, chanting like children: “As soon as you agree to stop all this dangerous foolishness and come home.”

Holly claws her way out of this dream. Reality is the cage in the Harris basement. Her ribs still hurt and the wound in her arm feels like somebody drenched it with lighter fluid and set it on fire, but those pains are subservient to her thirst, which is unrelenting. At least the gash from the bullet seems to have stopped bleeding; what’s on her makeshift bandage is brown instead of red. She thinks pulling the shirt off the wound is going to hurt a great deal, but that’s nothing she has to worry about now.

She gets to her feet and goes to the bars. The body of Rodney Harris lies near the stairs. Emily has fallen out of her final slumped-over crouch and lies on her side. She must have left the door to the kitchen open because flies have gathered, sampling Roddy’s spilled blood. There’s plenty to sample.

Holly thinks, I would sell my soul for a glass of beer… and I don’t even like beer.

She thinks of how her dream ended, that childlike chant: As soon as you agree to stop all this dangerous foolishness and come home.

She assures herself that someone will come. Someone has to come. The question is what kind of shape she’ll be in when that happens. Or if she’ll be alive at all. Yet even now, hurting all over, with two bodies outside the cage in which she is locked, raging with thirst…

“I regret nothing,” she croaks. “Nothing.”

Well, one thing. Hiding behind the chainsaws was a big mistake.

Holly thinks, I need to learn to trust myself more. Will have to work on that.

Barbara is also dreaming. She bursts into the living room of Olivia Kingsbury’s house on Ridge Road to find Olivia in her accustomed chair, reading a book—it’s Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck—and eating a small sandwich. There’s a cup of steaming tea on the table beside her.

“I thought you were dead!” Barbara cries. “They told me you were dead!”

“Nonsense,” Olivia says, putting her book down. “I fully intend to celebrate my hundredth. Did I tell you about the time Jorge Castro spoke up at the meeting to decide the fate of the Poetry Workshop? Emily never lost that smile of hers, but her eyes—”

Barbara’s cell phone trills and the dream falls apart. It was wonderful while it lasted because in it Olivia was alive, but a dream was all it was. She grabs her phone and sees her mother’s smiling photo on the screen. She also sees the time: 4:03 PM. Jerome must be in Pennsylvania by now.

“Hey…” She has to clear her throat. “Hey, Mom.”

“Were you napping?”

“I just meant to lie down, but I guess I fell asleep. I dreamed Olivia was still alive.”

“Oh, honey. I’m so sorry. I had dreams like that after your Gramma Annie died. I was always sorry to wake up.”

“Yeah. Like that.” Barbara scruffs a hand through her hair and thinks about what dream-Olivia was saying when the phone woke her. Like her passing thought about the van in the security footage, it seems it might be important. Dutch would know, she thinks. Dutch would have this shit all figured out.

“—Holly?”

“What?”

“I asked if you’ve located Holly yet. Or if she’s been back in touch.”

“No, huh-uh, not yet.” She still has no intention of telling Tanya about her fears. Maybe after J gets back, but not until.

“She’s probably upstate, taking care of her mother’s affairs.” Tanya lowers her voice. “I’d never say it to Holly, but Charlotte Gibney didn’t die of Covid, she died of stupidity.”

Barbara has to smile at that. “I think Holly knows, Mom.”

“I called to tell you I’m meeting your dad for dinner. At a fancy-schmancy restaurant.”

“Nice!” Barbara says. “Which one?”

Tanya tells her, but Barbara hardly hears. She feels like a stroke of lightning has gone off in her head.

Which one?

“—the actual date.”

“Okay, right.”

Tanya laughs. “Did you even hear me? I said it’s an early anniversary dinner because he has to be away on the actual date. There’s money for takeout if you want it, just check the kitchen draw—”

“Have a good time, Mom. I have to go. Love you.”

“Love you, t—”

But Barbara ends the call and scrolls back through her texts to and from Holly. Here it is: Which one?

Barbara asked that because she knew two of the men in the picture Holly sent her. One was Cary Dressler, the dishy young guy all the girls in her PE class were crushing on. The other was Professor Harris. She saw him washing his car when she went to Emily Harris, hoping for an introduction to Olivia Kingsbury. On that warm winter day both of the Harris garage bays were open, and in the other one there had been a van. Had he seen her looking at it, and made haste to close the garage door? To hide it?

Bullshit. You’re making that up.

Maybe, but now she knows what Olivia was about to say when her mother’s call woke her up. She knows because Olivia actually said it: Emily never lost that smile of hers, but her eyes… her eyes looked like she wanted to kill him.

Jorge Castro, the first of the disappearances.

“You’re crazy,” Barbara whispers to herself. “Just because he knew Cary Dressler… and she knew Castro… and didn’t like him…”

Did I tell you I saw him shortly before he disappeared?

“You’re crazy,” Barbara repeats. “They’re old.”

But… Bonnie Dahl. The last of the disappearances. Could it be…?

She hurries into Jerome’s office, powers up his computer, and googles what she wants. Then she calls Marie Duchamp.

“Do you remember the time Olivia told us about the Harrises’ Christmas party? How they sent Santas around to hand out snacks and beer?”

“Oh yes,” Marie says, and laughs. “Only they were supposed to be Santa’s elves. Olivia thought it was a perfect example of Emily Harris—she meant to keep her Christmas party streak alive, come hell, high water, or Covid. We ate the snacks, drank the beer—Livvie had two cans, against my strong advice—but skipped the Zoom.”

“She said a blond girl delivered to your place. A pretty blond Santa.”

“Right…” Marie sounds disappointingly vague.

“Would you recognize her if I sent you a picture?”

“They were Santa outfits, Barb, complete with snowy white fake beards.”

“Oh.” Barbara deflates. “Fuck. Well, thanks anyw—”

“No, wait a second. Our elf was cold from riding her bike, so Olivia gave her a teensy knock of booze. I remember because Olivia said, ‘You can have the whiskey if you take off your whiskers.’ And she did. Pretty girl. Looked like she was having fun. I guess I might recognize her, at that.”

“Let me send you the picture. Stay on the line.”

Bonnie’s Facebook and Instagram pages are very much alive, thanks to her mother, and Barbara sends Marie the picture of Bonnie on her bike, wearing a strappy top and white shorts.

“Did you get it?” It can’t be her. It just can’t be.

“Yes, and that’s her. That was our Christmas elf. Why?”

“Thanks, Marie.”

Barbara hangs up, feeling numb. Professor Harris knowing Cary might mean nothing, and Emily Harris knowing and not liking Jorge Castro also might mean nothing. But Bonnie makes three. And if you add in the van…

She almost calls Jerome, then stops. He’ll want to speed up, then he might get pulled over. Like every Black person in the city, Barbara is very aware of what happened to Maleek Dutton when he got pulled over.

What to do?

The answer seems obvious—go to 93 Ridge Road and see if Holly’s there. If not, find out if they know where she is. Maybe the Harrises don’t have anything to do with the disappearances, Barbara can’t think of any reason why they would, old people aren’t serial killers, but she’s sure of one thing: Holly knew what Barbara knows, and she would have gone there.

Barbara isn’t afraid of Roddy and Emily, but there may be someone else involved. Which means taking precautions. She goes to her closet, stands on tiptoe, and moves aside Oingo and Boingo, stuffed bears that used to reside on her bed. She no longer needs them beside her at night to keep her safe from the boogeymonster, but she can’t get rid of them. They are treasured relics.

Behind them is a Nike shoebox. She takes it down and opens it. She couldn’t ask Holly for a gun after the affair of Chet Ondowsky, she would have refused and suggested counseling, so she asked Pete instead, after swearing him to secrecy. He gave her a purse-sized .22 automatic with no argument, and when she offered to pay him for it, he shook his head. “Just don’t shoot yourself with it, Cookie, and don’t shoot anyone else.” He thought that over and added, “Unless they deserve it.”

Barbara doesn’t expect to shoot anyone this afternoon, but threatening isn’t out of the question. She needs to know where Holly is. If the Harrises deny knowledge, and she thinks they’re lying… yes, threatening might be in order. Even if it means jail time.

Barbara thinks, I wouldn’t be the first poet to go to jail.

On the way out she snags an Indians cap from the basket by the front door, puts it on, and stops dead in her tracks. She thinks of Holly’s computer being off instead of asleep. She thinks of the combination lock not set to zero. And then she remembers a woman she passed in the lobby of the Frederick Building, going out as Barbara was going in. The woman was limping, she remembers that. And wearing a billed cap similar to the one Barbara has just put on. The woman’s head was lowered, allowing Barbara to read what was on the front of it: Columbus Clippers.

She doesn’t know if that woman was Emily Harris, but Barbara knows Holly also had a Clippers hat. There are plenty of people in the city wearing Indians lids, and plenty of people wearing Cardinals lids, and quite a few wearing Royals lids. But Clippers hats? Not many. Was that woman, who might or might not have been Emily Harris, on the fifth floor? Did she perhaps have Holly’s keys as well as her hat? Did she turn off the computer after powering it up? Spin the safe’s combination dial? Unlikely, but…

But.

It gnaws at Barbara enough for her to decide she doesn’t want either of the Harrises to see her coming until she’s at their door and ready to hit them with her question: Where is she? Where’s Holly?

She rides her ten-speed to Ridge Road and chains it to the bike rack in the parking lot adjacent to the park playground. She checks her watch and sees it’s ten past five. Barbara walks up the hill past Olivia’s house. She has always liked Holly’s no-nonsense, unsexy cargo pants, so ordered a pair for herself. She’s wearing them now. The .22 is in one of the flap pockets, her phone in the other.

She decides a reconnaissance pass wouldn’t be a bad idea. She tugs down the brim of her cap, lowers her head, and strolls slowly past 93, as if on her way to the college at the top of the hill. She shoots a quick glance to her left and sees something odd: the Harrises’ front door is standing ajar. No one is on the porch, but there’s a table with a large travel mug on it. Even a quick glance is enough for Barbara to recognize the Starbucks logo.

She goes as far as 109, then turns and walks back. This time when she lowers her head she spots something in the gutter that she knows well. It’s a nitrile glove covered with various emojis. She should know it; she gave a box of those gloves to Holly herself, as a joke present.

Barbara calls Pete Huntley, praying that he will answer. He does.

“Hey, Cookie, did you locate her ye—”

“Listen to me, Pete, okay? This is probably nothing and I’m probably going to call you back in five minutes, but if I don’t, call Isabelle Jaynes and tell her to send police to 93 Ridge Road. Tell her to come, too. Have you got that?”

“Why? What happened? Is this about Holly?”

“Tell me the address. Repeat it.”

“93 Ridge Road. But don’t do anything stu—”

“Five minutes. If I don’t call back, call Ms. Jaynes and send five-O.”

She slips her phone back into her left front pocket and takes the gun out of her right pocket. Is it loaded? She never checked, but she remembers Pete telling her that an unloaded gun isn’t very useful if you wake up and find a prowler in your house. It feels heavy enough to be loaded.

She goes up the porch steps, puts the gun behind her back, and rings the bell. With the door ajar she hears its double tone quite clearly, but no one comes. She rings again. “Hello? Anyone home? Professor Harris? Emily?”

She hears something, very faint. It could be a voice; it could be someone’s radio playing loud through an open window on the next block. Barbara knocks, and her fist pushes the door wider. She’s looking down the wood-paneled front hall. Gloomy. Did she think that on her previous visit? She can’t remember. What she does remember is that it smelled stuffy, somehow. And the tea was awful.

“Hello, is anyone home?”

Yes, she hears a voice, all right. Very faint. No way to tell what it’s saying, or possibly shouting. Barbara hesitates on the porch, thinking Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly.

She peeks behind the door. Sees no one hiding there. Biting her lip, sweat trickling down the back of her neck, the little automatic now held stiffly at her side but with her finger outside the trigger guard as Pete instructed her, Barbara ventures down the hall to the living room.

“Hello? Hello?”

Now she hears the voice better. It’s still muffled, and hoarse, but she thinks it’s Holly. She could be wrong about that, but there’s no doubt about what it’s saying: “Help! Help me!”

Barbara runs into the kitchen and sees a door on the far side of the refrigerator standing open. There’s a padlock hanging from the hasp. She sees steps leading down to a basement and something at the bottom. She tells herself it can’t be what it looks like, already knowing it is.

“Holly? Holly!”

“Down here!” Her voice is a broken croak. “Down here!”

Barbara goes halfway down the stairs and stops. It’s a body, all right. The male Professor Harris is sprawled on the floor in a puddle of drying blood. His wife is slumped at the foot of some sort of cage. In it, standing at the crisscrossed bars with a bloody shirt wrapped around her arm, is Holly Gibney. Her hair is plastered to her cheeks. There are smears of blood on her face. Because she’s taken off her shirt to use as a bandage, Barbara can see a bruise, grotesquely large, spreading up her side like ink.

When Holly recognizes who it is, she begins to cry. “Barbara,” she manages in her cracked voice. “Barbara, oh thank God. I can’t believe it’s you.”

Barbara looks around. “Where is he, Holly? Where’s the guy who killed them? Is he still in the house?”

“There’s no guy,” Holly croaks. “No Red Bank Predator. I killed them. Barbara, get me some water. Please. I’m—” She puts her hands to her throat and makes a horrible grating sound. “Please.”

“All right. Yes.” Her phone is trilling and trilling. That will be Pete. Or maybe Isabelle Jaynes. “As long as you’re sure no one is going to jump me.”

“No,” Holly says. “It was all them.” And shocks Barbara by dry-spitting on Emily Harris’s slumped corpse.

Barbara turns to go back upstairs and get water. That’s the priority; she doesn’t need to take any calls just now because Pete will send the police and the police need to come, oh God they need to come as fast as possible.

“Barbara!” It’s a shriek with splinters in it. Holly sounds like she’s either lost her mind or is on the verge. “Get it from the sink! Don’t look in the refrigerator! DON’T LOOK IN THE REFRIGERATOR!”

Barbara runs up the stairs and into the kitchen. She has no idea what’s happened here. Her mind is frozen on just one thought: water. There are cabinets on either side of the sink. Barbara puts her gun on the counter and opens one. Plates. She opens another and sees glasses. She fills one, starts back to the basement door, then changes her mind and fills another. Carrying a glass in each hand, she goes back down the stairs. There’s a corona of blood around Professor Harris and she sidles past it.

She stops in front of Emily’s body and stretches to pass one of the glasses through the bars. Holly seizes it, spilling some, and chugs the rest down in big gulps. She tosses it behind her onto the futon and holds out her hand through one of the squares. “More.” Her voice is clearer now.

Barbara gives her the other glass. Holly drinks half of it. “Good,” she says. “So fracking good.”

“I told Pete to send police if I didn’t call him back. And the lady detective. How do I let you out, Holly?”

Holly points to the keypad but shakes her head. “I don’t know the numbers. Barbara…” She stops and swipes at her face. “How did you… never mind, that’s for later. Go upstairs. Meet them.”

“All right. I’ll call Pete again and tell him—”

“Did I see a gun? Do you have a gun?”

“Yes. Pete—”

“Don’t have it when the police come. Remember the Dutton boy.”

“But what—”

“Later, Barbara. And thank you. Thank you so much.”

Barbara goes back to the stairs, again being careful to skirt the gore that has spread around Rodney Harris. She looks back once and sees Holly drinking the rest of the second glass. She’s holding onto the bars with her other hand, as if to keep from collapsing.

What happened here? What the fuck happened?

In the kitchen she can hear sirens, still faint. She sees her .22 on the counter and thinks of Holly telling her don’t have it when the police come, remember the Dutton boy. She picks it up and puts it in the breadbox, on top of a package of English muffins.

Before leaving the kitchen, she can’t resist opening the fridge and peeking inside. She’s prepared for anything but sees nothing that warranted Holly’s warning. There’s skim milk, some eggs and butter, yogurt, veggies, a Tupperware box containing what looks like cranberry jelly, and a few packages of red meat in Saran wrap. Maybe steak. Also six or eight parfait dessert glasses filled with what’s probably vanilla pudding with swirls of strawberry. Looks tasty.

She closes the refrigerator and goes back outside.

A city police cruiser pulls up to the curb, siren unwinding to silence. There’s an unmarked sedan behind it, following so close it almost hits the cruiser’s bumper. Mindful of what Holly said and her own Black skin, Barbara stands on the top step of the porch with her hands held out from her sides, palms turned to show they’re empty.

Two uniform cops come up the walk. The one in the lead nevertheless has his hand on the butt of his Glock. “What’s going on here?” he asks. “What’s the big emergency?”

The other one, older, asks, “Are you high, sweetheart?”

Before Barbara has to dignify that with an answer—she will realize later the question wasn’t entirely stupid or racist; she was clearly in shock—the door of the unmarked car slams and Isabelle Jaynes is hurrying across the lawn. She’s wearing jeans and a plain white tee. Her police badge is slung around her neck and she’s got her own Glock on one hip.

“Stand back,” she tells the cops. “I know this young lady. Barbara, right? Jerome’s sister.”

“Yes,” Barbara says. “Holly’s in the basement. Locked in a cage. The old professors who live here are dead, and… and…” She begins to cry.

“Take it easy.” Izzy puts an arm around Barbara’s shaking shoulders. “They’re dead, I get that… and what?”

“And Holly says she killed them.”

Holly hears footsteps and voices overhead, then sees feet. She remembers Emily descending those stairs, coming to kill her with Bill’s gun, and shudders. She’ll see those old lady shoes in her dreams. But these aren’t shoes, they’re suede boots. Above them are bluejeans instead of a dress. They stop when the owner of the jeans sees the bodies. Isabelle comes the rest of the way down the stairs slowly, gun drawn. She sees Holly standing behind the crisscrossed bars, her face smeared with blood and a bloody shirt tied around her arm. There’s more drying on her chest above the cups of her bra.

“What the fuck happened here, Holly? How badly are you hurt?”

“Some of the blood is mine, but most of it’s his,” she says, and points a trembling finger at the dead man in the fire engine pajamas. “I can tell you everything once you get me out of here, but how am I going to tell her?” She puts her forehead against the bars.

Izzy comes forward and takes one of Holly’s hands. It’s cold. The two cops are on the stairs now, gawking at the bodies. Barbara, standing above them in the doorway, can hear more sirens approaching.

Izzy: “Tell who, Holly? Tell who what?”

“Penny Dahl,” Holly says, crying harder than ever. “How am I ever going to tell her what happened to her daughter? How am I going to tell any of them?”

By six o’clock, Ridge Road is lined with police cars, two crime scene vans, the county coroner’s station wagon, and an ambulance with its doors open and two EMTs waiting. There’s also a red panel truck with Upsala County Fire Department painted in gold on the side. Most of the residents of the street have come out to watch the show. Barbara Robinson has been sent out of the house but has been allowed to stay on the lawn. Ordered to, actually. She has called Jerome and Pete, telling them both that Holly has been hurt, but Barbara thinks—hopes—not too badly. The important thing is she’s safe. Barbara doesn’t tell them Holly is still locked up in the Harrises’ basement; that would lead to questions for which she has no answers. At least not yet. She thought of calling her parents, and didn’t. There will be time to talk to them later. For now, let them have their anniversary dinner.

There’s a horrified murmur from the crowd of residents across the street as two bodies, bagged and on stretchers, are carried out. Another county truck comes slowly down Ridge Road and parks in the middle of the street to receive them.

Barbara’s phone rings. It’s Jerome. She sits down on the grass to take the call. She can cry. With Jerome that’s okay.

Twenty minutes later Holly is crouched in the far corner of the cell across from the Porta-Potty. Her legs are drawn up and she has buried her face in her arms. A man in a welder’s mask is cutting through the bars, and the long room is filled with coruscating light. Izzy Jaynes is at the other end of the basement, where she first examines the woodchipper and then yells to one of the crime scene techs. She points to Bonnie’s bike helmet and backpack and tells him to bag both.

A steel bar clatters to the concrete floor. Then another. Izzy walks up to the FD guy running the cutting torch, keeping one arm up to shield her eyes. “How much longer?”

“I think we can get her out in another ten minutes. Maybe twenty. Someone did a hell of a good job putting this thing together.”

Izzy goes back to the workshop part of the basement and tries the door there. It’s locked. She motions to one of the bigger cops—there are half a dozen blues down here now, basically just milling around. “You better bust that,” she says. “I’m pretty sure I heard someone inside.”

He grins. “You got it, boss.”

He hits the door with his shoulder, and it gives way immediately. He stumbles inside. Izzy follows and finds a light switch beside the door. Overhead fluorescents come on, a lot of them. The two of them stand, stunned.

“What the fuck is that?” the widebody asks.

Izzy knows, even if it’s hard to believe what her eyes are reporting. “I’d say it’s an operating table.”

“And the bag?” He’s pointing to the big green sack hanging down from the end of the hose. It’s distended into a teardrop shape by what’s inside. Stuff Izzy doesn’t want to think about, let alone see.

“Leave it for the forensics guys and the ME,” she says, and thinks of Holly saying How am I ever going to tell her what happened to her daughter?

Forty minutes later Holly emerges onto the Harrises’ porch, supported by an EMT on one side and Izzy Jaynes on the other, but mostly walking under her own power. Barbara gets up, runs to her, hugs her, and turns to Izzy. “I want to go with her to the hospital.”

Instead of refusing, Izzy says they’ll both go.

Holly wants to walk to the waiting ambulance, but EMTs insist on a stretcher before she can descend the porch steps. Now there are news vans as well as all the official vehicles, but they are being kept at the top and bottom of the hill, behind police tape. There’s even a helicopter circling overhead.

Holly is hoisted into the ambulance. One of the EMTs shoots her up with something. She tries to protest, but he says it will help with the pain. Izzy sits on one side of the secured stretcher, Barbara on the other.

“Wipe my face, please,” Holly says. “The blood is drying to a crack-glaze.”

Izzy shakes her head. “No can do. Not until you’ve been photographed and we’ve got swabs.”

The ambulance pulls out, siren yelling. Barbara holds on as it takes the corner at the bottom of the hill.

“That’s a woodchipper in the basement,” Izzy says. “My father had one at his cabin upstate, but a lot smaller.”

“Yes. I saw it. Can I have a drink? Please?”

“There’s a cooler with Gatorade in it,” one of the EMTs calls back.

“Oh God, please,” Holly says.

Barbara finds the cooler, opens a bottle of orange Gatorade, and puts it in Holly’s outstretched hand. Holly’s eyes look up at them from above her bloody cheeks as she drinks.

She looks like she’s wearing warpaint, Barbara thinks. And I guess that’s okay, because she’s been in a war.

“The chipper’s outflow goes to a bag in that little…” Izzy pauses. She was about to say operating room, but that’s not right. “…that little torture chamber. Is the stuff inside what I think it is? Because it stinks.”

Holly nods. “They must not have had a chance to get rid of the… the leftovers this time. I don’t know how they did that with the others, but my guess is the lake. You’ll figure it out.”

“And the rest of her?”

“Check the refrigerator.”

Barbara thinks of the wrapped cuts of meat. She thinks of the parfait glasses. And feels like screaming.

“I have to tell you something,” Holly says to Izzy and Barbara. Whatever the EMT has given her is working. The pain in her arm and her ribs hasn’t gone away, but it’s receding. She thinks of the therapist she saw when she was younger. “I need to share something.”

Izzy takes her hand and gives it a squeeze. “Save it. I’ll need to hear everything, but right now you just need to take it easy.”

“It’s not about the case. I made up a joke and I’ve never had a chance to tell anyone. I tried to tell the woman… Emily… before she could shoot me, but then things got… complicated.”

“Go on,” Barbara says, and takes Holly’s hand. “Tell it now.”

“A new millionaire… me, actually, long story… walks into a bar and orders a mai-tai. When the bartender goes to make it, she hears a voice saying ‘You deserve that money, Holly. Every cent.’ She looks around and sees no one. She’s the only customer at the bar. Then she hears a voice on the other side. It says, ‘You look very pretty tonight, Holly.’ The bartender comes back and she says, ‘I keep hearing voices saying nice things about me, but when I look, no one’s there.’ And the bartender says—”

The EMT who gave her the shot looks back at her. He’s grinning. “He says ‘We charge for the drinks, but the nuts are complimentary.’ ”

Holly’s mouth drops open. “You know it?”

“God, yes,” the EMT says. “That’s an old one. You must’ve heard it somewhere and just forgot.”

Holly begins to laugh.

In a treatment room at Kiner, Holly is swabbed for DNA and photographed. Barbara gently wipes her face clean afterward. The resident on duty in the ER examines the bullet-wound and pronounces it “basically superficial.” He says if it had gone deeper and shattered the bone, that would be a different deal. Izzy gives her two thumbs up.

The doctor pulls off the shirt she’s used as a bandage, which starts the bleeding again. He cleans the wound, probes for shrapnel (there is none), then packs it. He says there’s no need for staples or sutures (a relief) and wraps it tightly. He says she’ll need a sling, but one of the nurses will take care of that. Also a course of antibiotics. Meanwhile, he’s got an ICU full of Covid patients to deal with, most of them unvaccinated.

“I got you a room here,” Izzy says, then smiles. “Actually that’s a lie. The Chief of Police got it.”

“Other people need it more.” The floaty feeling from the injection started to go away when the doc pulled the shirt out of the coagulating blood in the arm wound—rrrip—and by the time he’d finished disinfecting and probing, it was entirely gone.

“You’re staying,” Izzy says flatly. “Gunshot wound observation is mandatory in this town. Twenty-four hours. Be grateful they’re not stashing you in a hallway or the cafeteria. There are plenty of people in both places, coughing their lungs out. A nurse will give you some more pain med. Or a good-looking intern, if you’re lucky. Get a good night’s sleep. We’ll start debriefing you on this shitshow tomorrow. You’ll be doing a lot of talking.”

Holly turns to Barbara. “Give me your phone, Barb. I have to call Penny.”

Barbara starts to get it out of her pocket, but Izzy holds up a hand like a traffic cop. “Absolutely not. You don’t even know for sure that Bonnie Dahl is dead.”

“I know,” Holly said. “You do, too. You saw her bike helmet.”

“Yes, and her name is on the flap of the pack.”

“There was an earring, too,” Holly says. “It’s in the cell where they locked me up.”

“We’ll find it. They may have found it already. A six-man forensics crew is going over that basement as we speak, and a team from the FBI is on its way. After the basement, we’ll go through the whole house. Fine-tooth comb stuff.”

“It’s a gold triangle,” Holly says. “Sharp points. I found the other one outside the abandoned shop where they kidnapped her. The one in the cell was under the futon. Bonnie must have left it there. I used it to cut Professor Harris’s throat.”

And closes her eyes.