Holly

July 22, 2021

Zoom has gotten sophisticated since the advent of Covid-19. When Holly started using it—in February of 2020, which seems much longer than seventeen months ago—it was apt to drop the connection if you so much as looked at it crosseyed. Sometimes you could see your fellow Zoomers; sometimes you couldn’t; sometimes they flickered back and forth in a headache-inducing frenzy.

Quite the movie fan is Holly Gibney (although she hasn’t been in an actual theater since the previous spring), and she enjoys Hollywood tentpole movies every bit as much as art films. One of her faves from the eighties is Conan the Barbarian, and her favorite line from that film is spoken by a minor character. “Two or three years ago,” the peddler says of Set and his followers, “they were just another snake cult. Now they’re everywhere.”

Zoom is sort of like that. In 2019 it was just another app, struggling for breathing room with competitors like FaceTime and GoTo Meeting. Now, thanks to Covid, Zoom is as ubiquitous as the Snake Cult of Set. It’s not just the tech that’s improved, either. Production values have, as well. The Zoom funeral Holly is attending could almost be a scene in a TV drama. The focus is on each speaker eulogizing the dear departed, of course, but there are also occasional cuts to various grieving mourners in their homes.

Not to Holly, though. She’s blocked her video. She’s a better, stronger person than she once was, but she’s still a deeply private person. She knows it’s okay for people to be sad at funerals, to cry and choke up, but she doesn’t want anyone to see her that way, especially not her business partner or her friends. She doesn’t want them to see her red eyes, her tangled hair, or her shaking hands as she reads her own eulogy, which is both short and as honest as she could make it. Most of all she doesn’t want them to see her smoking a cigarette—after seventeen months of Covid, she’s fallen off the wagon.

Now, at the end of the service, her screen begins showing a kinescope featuring the dear departed in various poses at various locations while Frank Sinatra sings “Thanks for the Memory.” Holly can’t stand it and clicks LEAVE. She takes one more drag on her cigarette, and as she’s butting it out, her phone rings.

She doesn’t want to talk to anyone, but it’s Barbara Robinson, and that’s a call she has to take.

“You left,” Barbara says. “Not even a black square with your name on it.”

“I’ve never cared for that particular song. And it was over, anyway.”

“But you’re okay, right?”

“Yes.” Not exactly true; Holly doesn’t know if she’s okay or not. “But right now, I need to…” What’s the word that Barbara will accept? That will enable Holly to end this call before she breaks down? “I need to process.”

“Understood,” Barbara says. “I’ll come over in a heartbeat if you want, lockdown or no lockdown.”

It’s a de facto lockdown instead of a real one, and they both know it; their governor is determined to protect individual freedoms no matter how many thousands have to sicken or die to support the idea. Most people are taking precautions anyway, thank God.

“No need for that.”

“Okay. I know this is bad, Hols—a bad time—but hang in there. We’ve been through worse.” Maybe—almost certainly—thinking about Chet Ondowsky, who took a short and lethal trip down an elevator shaft late last year. “And booster vaccines are coming. First for people with bad immune systems and people over sixty-five, but I’m hearing at school that by fall it’ll be everyone.”

“That sounds right,” Holly says.

“And bonus! Trump’s gone.”

Leaving behind a country at war with itself, Holly thinks. And who’s to say he won’t reappear in 2024? She thinks of Arnie’s promise from The Terminator: “I’ll be back.”

“Hols? You there?”

“I am. Just thinking.” Thinking about another cigarette, as it happens. Now that she’s started again she can’t seem to get enough of them.

“Okay. I love you, and I understand you need your space, but if you don’t call back tonight or tomorrow I’ll call you again. Fair warning.”

“Roger that,” Holly says, and ends the call.

She reaches for her cigarettes, then pushes them away and puts her head down on her crossed arms and begins to cry. She’s cried so much lately. Tears of relief after Biden won the election. Tears of horror and belated reaction after Chet Ondowsky, a monster pretending to be human, went down the elevator shaft. She cried during and after the Capitol riot—those were tears of rage. Today, tears of grief and loss. Except they are also tears of relief. That’s awful, but she supposes it’s also human.

In March of 2020, Covid swept through almost all of the nursing homes in the state where Holly grew up and can’t seem to leave. That wasn’t a problem for Holly’s Uncle Henry, because at that time he was still living with Holly’s mother in Meadowbrook Estates. Even then Uncle Henry had been losing his marbles, a fact of which Holly had been blissfully unaware. He’d seemed pretty much okay on her occasional visits, and Charlotte Gibney kept her own concerns about her brother strictly to herself, following one of the great unspoken rules of that lady’s life: if you don’t talk about something, if you don’t acknowledge it, it isn’t there. Holly supposes that’s why her mother never sat her down and had The Conversation with her when she was thirteen and started to develop breasts.

By December of last year Charlotte was no longer able to ignore the elephant in the room, which was no elephant but her gaga older brother. Around the time Holly was beginning to suspect Chet Ondowsky might be something more than a local TV reporter, Charlotte enlisted her daughter and her daughter’s friend Jerome to help her transport Uncle Henry to the Rolling Hills Elder Care facility. This was around the time the first cases of the so-called Delta variant began to appear in the United States.

A Rolling Hills orderly tested positive for this new and more communicable version of Covid. The orderly had refused the vaccinations, claiming they contained bits of fetal tissue from aborted babies—he had read this on the Internet. He was sent home, but the damage was done. Delta was loose in Rolling Hills, and soon over forty of the oldies were suffering various degrees of the illness. A dozen died. Holly’s Uncle Henry wasn’t one of them. He didn’t even get sick. He had been double-vaxxed—Charlotte protested but Holly insisted—and although he tested positive, he never got so much as the sniffles.

It was Charlotte who died.

An avid Trump supporter—a fact she trumpeted to her daughter at every opportunity—she refused to get the vaccinations or even to wear a mask. (Except, that was, at Kroger and her local bank branch, where they were required. The one Charlotte kept for those occasions was a bright red, with MAGA stamped on it.)

On July 4th, Charlotte attended an anti-mask rally in the state capital, waving a sign reading MY BODY MY CHOICE (a sentiment that did not keep her from being adamantly anti-abortion). On July 7th, she lost her sense of smell and gained a cough. On the 10th, she was admitted to Mercy Hospital, nine short blocks from Rolling Hills Elder Care, where her brother was doing fine… physically, at least. On the 15th, she was placed on a ventilator.

During Charlotte’s final, brutally short illness, Holly visited via Zoom. To the very end Charlotte continued to claim that the Coronavirus was a hoax, and she just had a bad case of the flu. She died on the 20th, and only strings pulled by Holly’s partner, Pete Huntley, prevented her body being stored in the refrigerated truck that was serving as an adjunct to the morgue. She was taken to the Crossman Funeral Home instead, where the funeral director had quickly arranged the Zoom funeral. A year and a half into the pandemic, he had plenty of experience in such televised final rites.

Holly finally cries herself out. She thinks about watching a movie, but the idea has no appeal, which is a rarity. She thinks about lying down, but she’s slept a lot since Charlotte died. She supposes that’s how her mind is dealing with grief. She doesn’t want to read a book, either. She doubts if she could keep track of the words.

There’s a hole where her mother used to be, it’s as simple as that. The two of them had a difficult relationship which only got worse when Holly started to pull away. Her success in doing that was largely down to Bill Hodges. Holly’s grief was bad when Bill passed—pancreatic cancer—but the grief she feels now is somehow deeper, more complicated, because Charlotte Gibney was, tell the truth and shame the devil, a woman who specialized in smotherlove. At least when it came to her daughter. Their estrangement only got worse with Charlotte’s wholehearted embrace of the ex-president. There had been few face-to-face visits in the last two years, the final one on the previous Christmas, when Charlotte cooked all of what she imagined were Holly’s favorite foods, every one of which reminded Holly of her unhappy, lonely childhood.

She has two phones on her desk, her personal and her business. Finders Keepers has been busy during the time of the pandemic, although investigations have become rather tricky. The firm is shut down now, with messages on her office phone and Pete Huntley’s saying the agency will be closed until August 1st. She considered adding “because of a death in the family” and decided that was no one’s business. When she checks the office phone now, it’s only because she’s on autopilot for the time being.

She sees she’s gotten four calls during the forty minutes while she was attending her mother’s funeral. All from the same number. The caller has also left four voicemails. Holly thinks briefly of simply erasing them, she has no more desire to take on a case than she has to watch a movie or read a book, but she can’t do that any more than she can leave a picture hanging crooked or her bed unmade.

Listening doesn’t render an obligation to call back, she tells herself, and pushes play for the first VM. It came in at 1:02 PM, just about the time the last Charlotte Gibney Show got going.

“Hello, this is Penelope Dahl. I know you’re closed, but this is very important. An emergency, in fact. I hope you’ll call me back as soon as possible. Your agency was suggested to me by Detective Isabelle Jaynes—”

That’s where the message ends. Of course Holly knows who Izzy Jaynes is, she used to be Pete’s partner when Pete was still on the cops, but that isn’t what strikes her about the message. What hits, and hard, is how much Penelope Dahl sounds like Holly’s late mother. It’s not so much the voice as the palpable anxiety in the voice. Charlotte was almost always anxious about something, and she passed on that constant gnawing to her daughter like a virus. Like Covid, in fact.

Holly decides not to listen to the rest of Anxious Penelope’s messages. The lady will have to wait. Pete sure isn’t going to be doing any legwork for awhile; he tested positive for Covid a week before Charlotte died. He was double-vaxxed and isn’t too sick—says it’s more like a heavy cold than the flu—but he’s quarantining and will be for some time to come.

Holly stands at the living room window of her tidy little apartment, looking down at the street and remembering that last meal with her mother. An authentic Christmas dinner, just like in the old days! Charlotte had said, cheery and excited on top but with that constant anxiety pulsing away underneath. The authentic Christmas dinner had consisted of dry turkey, lumpy mashed potatoes, and flabby spears of asparagus. Oh, and thimble glasses of Mogen David wine to toast with. How terrible that meal had been, and how terrible that it had been their last. Did Holly say I love you, Mom before she drove away the next morning? She thinks so but can’t remember for sure. All she can remember for sure is the relief she felt when she turned the first corner and her mother’s house was no longer in the rearview mirror.

Holly has left her cigarettes by her desktop computer. She goes back to get them, shakes one out, lights it, looks at the office phone in its charging cradle, sighs, and listens to Penelope Dahl’s second message. It starts on a note of disapproval.

“This is a very short space for messages, Ms. Gibney. I’d like to talk to you, or Mr. Huntley, or both of you, about my daughter Bonnie. She disappeared three weeks ago, on the first of July. The police investigation was very superficial. I told Detective Jaynes that, right to her—”

End of message. “Told Izzy right to her face,” Holly says, and jets smoke from her nostrils. Men are often captivated by Izzy’s red hair (salon-enhanced these days, no doubt) and her misty gray eyes, women less frequently. But she’s a good detective. Holly has decided that if Pete retires, as he keeps threatening to do, she’ll try to lure Isabelle away from the cops and over to the dark side.

There’s no hesitation about going to the third message. Holly has to see how the story ends. Although she can guess. Chances are good that Bonnie Dahl is a runaway, and her mother can’t accept that. Penelope Dahl’s voice returns.

“Bonnie is an assistant librarian on the Bell campus. At the Reynolds? It opened again in June for the summer students, although of course you have to wear a mask to enter, and I suppose soon you’ll have to show a vaccination card as well, although so far they haven’t—”

Message ends. Would you get to the point, lady? Holly thinks, and punches up the last one. Penelope talks faster, almost speed-rapping.

“She rides her bike to and from her job. I’ve told her how unsafe that is, but she says she wears her helmet, as if that would save her from a bad crash or getting hit by a car. She stopped at the Jet Mart for a soda and that’s the last…” Penelope begins to cry. It’s hard to listen to. Holly takes a monster drag on her cigarette, then mashes it out. “The last time she was seen. Please help—”

Message ends.

Holly has been standing, holding the office phone in her hand, listening on speaker. Now she sits and slots the phone back in its cradle. For the first time since Charlotte got sick—no, since the time when Holly realized she wasn’t going to get better—Holly’s grief takes a back seat to these bite-sized messages. She’d like to hear the whole story, or as much of it as Anxious Penelope knows. Pete probably doesn’t know, either, but she decides to give him a call. What else does she have to do, except think about her last few video visits with her mother, and how frightened Charlotte’s eyes were as the ventilator helped her breathe?

Pete answers on the first ring, his voice raspy. “Hey, Holly. So sorry about your mom.”

“Thank you.”

“You gave a great eulogy. Short but sweet. I only wish I could have…” He breaks off as a coughing fit strikes. “…only wish I could have seen you. What was it, some kind of computer glitch?”

Holly could say it was, but she makes it a habit to tell the truth except on those rare occasions when she feels she absolutely can’t. “No glitch, I just turned off the video. I’m kind of a mess. How are you feeling, Pete?”

She can hear the rattle of phlegm as he sighs. “Not terrible, but I was better yesterday. Jesus, I hope I’m not going to be one of those long haulers.”

“Have you called your doctor?”

He gives a hoarse laugh. “I might as well try to call Pope Francis. You know how many new cases there were in the city yesterday? Thirty-four hundred. It’s going up exponentially.” There’s another coughing fit.

“Maybe the ER?”

“I’ll stick with juice and Tylenol. The worst part of it is how fucking tired I am all the time. Every trip to the kitchen is a trek. When I go to the bathroom, I have to sit down and pee like a girl. If that’s too much information, I apologize.”

It is, but Holly doesn’t say so. She didn’t think she had to worry about Pete, breakthrough cases usually aren’t serious, but maybe she does have to worry.

“Did you call just to bat the breeze, or did you want something?”

“I don’t want to bother you if—”

“Go ahead, bother me. Give me something to think about besides myself. Please. Are you okay? Not sick?”

“I’m fine. Did you get a call from a woman named—”

“Penny Dahl. Right? She’s left four messages on my company voicemail so far.”

“Four on mine, too. You didn’t get back to her?”

Holly knows he didn’t. What she knows is this: Anxious Penelope looked on the Finders Keepers website, or maybe Facebook, and found two office numbers for two partners, one male and one female. Anxious Penelope called the male, because when you’ve got a problem—an emergency, she termed it—you don’t ask for help from the mare, at least not at first. You call the stallion. Calling the mare is your fallback position. Holly is used to being the mare in the Finders Keepers stable.

Pete sighs again, producing that disturbing rattle. “In case you forgot, we’re closed, Hols. And feeling like shit, as I currently do, I didn’t think talking to a weepy-ass divorced mom would make me feel any better. Having just lost your own mom, I don’t think it would make you feel any better, either. Wait until August, that’s my advice. My strong advice. By then the girl may have called Momzie from Fort Wayne or Phoenix or San Fran.” He coughs some more, then adds: “Or the cops will have found her body.”

“You sound like you know something, even if you didn’t talk to the mother. Was it in the paper?”

“Oh yeah, it was a big story. Stop the presses, extra, extra, read all about it. Two lines in the Police Beat between a naked man passed out on Cumberland Avenue and a rabid fox wandering around in the City Center parking lot. There’s nothing else in the paper these days except Covid and people arguing about masks. Which is like people standing out in the rain and arguing about whether or not they’re getting wet.” He pauses, then adds rather reluctantly, “The lady’s voicemail said Izzy caught the squeal, so I gave her a call.”

Smiles have been in short supply for Holly this summer, but she feels one on her face now. It’s nice to know that she’s not the only one addicted to the job.

It’s as if Pete can see her, even though they’re not Zooming. “Don’t make a big deal of it, okay? I needed to catch up with Iz anyway, see how she’s doing.”

“And?”

“Covid-wise she’s fine. Shitcanned her latest boyfriend is all, and I got a fair amount of wah-wah-wah about that. I asked her about this Bonnie Dahl. Izzy says they’re treating it as a missing persons case. There are some good reasons for that. Neighbors say Dahl and her mother argued a lot, some real blow-outs, and there was a buh-bye note taped to the seat of Dahl’s ten-speed. But the note struck the mom as ominous, and Izzy as ambiguous.”

“What did it say?”

“Just three words. I’ve had enough. Which could mean she left town, or—”

“Or that she committed suicide. What do her friends say about her state of mind? Or the people she works with at the library?”

“No idea,” Pete says, and starts coughing again. “That’s where I left it and it’s where you should leave it, at least for now. Either the case will still be there on August first, or it will have solved itself.”

“One way or the other,” Holly says.

“Right. One way or the other.”

“Where was the bike found? Ms. Dahl said her daughter got a soda at Jet Mart the night she disappeared. Was it there?” Holly can think of at least three Jet Mart convenience stores in the city, and there are probably more.

“Again, I have no idea. I’m going to lie down for awhile. And again, I’m sorry your mother passed.”

“Thanks. If you don’t start to improve, I want you to seek medical attention. Promise me.”

“You’re nagging, Holly.”

“Yes.” Another smile. “I’m good at it, aren’t I? Learned at my mother’s knee. Now promise.”

“Okay.” He’s probably lying. “One other thing.”

“What?” She thinks it will be something about the case (that’s already how she’s thinking of it), but it’s not.

“You’ll never convince me that this Covid shit happened naturally, jumping to people from bats or baby crocodiles or whatever in some Chinese wet market. I don’t know if it escaped from a research facility where they were brewing it up or if it got released on purpose, but as my grandfather would have said, t’aint natcherl.”

“Sounding kind of paranoid there, Pete.”

“You think? Listen, viruses mutate. It’s their big survival skill. But they’re just as apt to mutate into a less dangerous strain as one that’s more dangerous. That’s what happened with the Bird Flu. But this one just keeps getting worse. Delta infects people who’ve been double-vaxxed—I’m a case in point. And people who don’t get really sick from Delta carry four times the viral load as the original version, which means they can pass it on even more easily. Does that sound random to you?”

“Hard to tell,” Holly says. What’s easy to tell is when someone is riding a hobbyhorse. Pete is currently aboard his. “Maybe the Delta variant will mutate into something weaker.”

“We’ll find out, won’t we? When the next one comes along. Which it will. In the meantime, shelve Penny Dahl and find something to watch on Netflix. It’s what I’m going to do.”

“Probably good advice. Take care, Pete.” With that she ends the call.

She doesn’t want to watch anything on Netflix (Holly thinks most of their movies, even those with big budgets, are weirdly mediocre) but her stomach is making tiny, tentative growls and she decides to pay attention. Something comforting. Maybe tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich. Pete’s ideas about viruses are probably Internet bullpoop, but his advice about leaving Penelope “Penny” Dahl alone is undoubtedly good.

She heats the soup, she makes the grilled cheese with plenty of mustard and just a dab of relish, the way she likes it, and she doesn’t call Penelope Dahl.

At least not until seven that night. What keeps gnawing at her is the note taped to the seat of Bonnie Dahl’s bicycle: I’ve had enough. There were lots of times when Holly thought of leaving a similar note and getting out of Dodge, but she never did. And there were times when she thought of ending it all—pulling the pin, Bill would have said—but she never thought of it seriously.

Well… maybe once or twice.

She calls Ms. Dahl from her study, and the woman answers on the first ring. Eager and a little out of breath. “Hello? Is this Finders Keepers?”

“Yes. Holly Gibney. How can I help, Ms. Dahl?”

“Thank God you called. I thought you and Mr. Huntley must be on vacation or something.”

As if, Holly thinks. “Can you come to my office tomorrow, Ms. Dahl? It’s in—”

“The Frederick Building, I know. Of course. The police have been no help at all. Not at all. What time?”

“Would nine o’clock suit you?”

“Perfect. Thank you so much. My daughter was last seen at four minutes past eight on July first. There’s video of her in a store where she—”

“We’ll discuss all that tomorrow,” Holly says. “But no guarantees, Ms. Dahl. It’s just me, I’m afraid. My partner is ill.”

“Oh my God, not Covid?”

“Yes, but a mild case.” Holly hopes it’s mild. “I only have a few questions for you now. You said on your message that Bonnie was last seen at a Jet Mart. There are quite a few of them around the city. Which of them was it?”

“The one near the park. On Red Bank Avenue. Do you know that area?”

“I do.” Holly has even gotten gas at that Jet Mart a time or two. “And was that where her bike was found?”

“No, further down Red Bank. There’s an empty building—well, there’s a lot of empty buildings on that side of the park—but this one used to be a car repair shop, or something. Her bike was on its kickstand, out in front.”

“No attempt to hide it?”

“No, no, nothing like that. The police detective I talked to, the Jaynes woman, said Bonnie might have wanted it found. She also said the bus and train depot is only a mile further along, right about where you get into downtown? But I said Bonnie wouldn’t leave her bike and then walk the rest of the way, why would she? I mean it stands to reason.”

She’s ramping up, getting into a hysterical rhythm Holly knows well. If she doesn’t stop the woman now, Holly will be on the phone for an hour or more.

“Let me stop you right there, Ms. Dahl—”

“Penny. Call me Penny.”

“Okay, Penny. We’ll get into it tomorrow. Our rates are four hundred dollars a day, three-day minimum, plus expenses. Which I will itemize. I can take Master or Visa or your personal check. No Amex, they’re—” Poopy is the word that comes naturally to Holly’s mind. “They’re difficult to deal with. Are you willing to proceed on that basis?”

“Yes, absolutely.” No hesitation at all. “The Jaynes woman asked if Bonnie was feeling depressed, I know what she was thinking about, suicide is what she was thinking about, but Bonnie is a cheerful soul, even after her breakup with that dope she was so crazy about she got back on the sunny side after the first two or three weeks, well, maybe it was more like a month, but—”

“We’ll talk tomorrow,” Holly repeats. “You can tell me all about it. Fifth floor. And Penny?”

“Yes?”

“Wear a mask. An N95, if you have one. I can’t help you if I get sick.”

“I will, I absolutely will. May I call you Holly?”

Holly tells Penny that would be fine and finally extracts herself from the call.

Mindful of Pete’s suggestion, Holly tries a Netflix movie called Blood Red Sky, but when the scary stuff starts she turns it off. She has followed all the bloody exploits of Jason and Michael and Freddy, she can tell you the names of every movie in which Christopher Lee played the sanguinary Count, but after Brady Hartsfield and Chet Ondowsky—especially Ondowsky—she thinks she may have lost her taste for horror films.

She goes to the window and stands there looking out at the latening day, ashtray in one hand, cigarette in the other. What a nasty habit it is! She’s already thinking about how much she’ll want one during her meeting with Penny Dahl, because meeting new clients is always stressful for her. She’s a good detective, has decided it’s what she was born to do, her calling, but she leaves the initial meet-and-greets to Pete whenever possible. No way she can do that tomorrow. She thinks about asking Jerome Robinson to be there, but he’s working on the editor’s draft of a book about his great-grandfather, who was quite a character. Jerome would come if she asked, but she won’t interrupt him. Time to suck it up.

No smoking in the building, either. I’ll have to go out to the alley on the side once the Dahl woman’s gone.

Holly knows this is how addicts think and behave: they rearrange the furniture of their lives to make room for their bad habits. Smoking is rotten and dangerous… but there’s nothing more comforting than one of these deadly little tubes of paper and tobacco.

If the girl took the train, there’ll be a record even if she paid cash. Same with Greyhound, Peter Pan, Magic Carpet, and Lux. But there are two fly-by-nighters on the next block that specialize in transient travel. Tri-State, and what’s the other one?

She can’t remember and she doesn’t want to do an Internet search tonight. Plus who’s to say that Bonnie Dahl left on a bus or Amtrak? She could have hitchhiked. Holly thinks of It Happened One Night, and how Claudette Colbert gets a ride for her and Clark Gable by hiking up her skirt and adjusting a stocking. Things don’t change that much… only Bonnie Dahl didn’t have a big strong man to protect her. Unless, of course, she’d reconnected with the old boyfriend her mom had mentioned.

No point picking at this now. There will probably be plenty to pick at tomorrow. She hopes so, anyway. Penny Dahl’s problem will give her something to think about besides her mother’s pointless, politics-driven death.

I have Holly hope, she thinks, and goes into the bedroom to put on her pajamas and say her prayers.