Holly

July 23, 2021

Holly arrives at the Fourth Street municipal parking lot half a block from the Frederick Building and swipes her card. The barrier goes up and she drives in. It’s 8:35 AM, almost half an hour before the appointed time for her meeting with Penny Dahl, but the Dahl woman is also early. There’s no mistaking her Volvo. It has large photos of her daughter taped to both sides and the back. Printed across the rear window (probably a moving violation, Holly thinks) is HAVE YOU SEEN MY DAUGHTER and BONNIE RAE DAHL and CALL 216-555-0019.

Holly parks her Prius next to it, which isn’t a problem. There’s no shortage of spaces in the lot; it used to be packed by nine, with the SORRY FULL sign out front, but that was before the pandemic. Now large numbers of people are working from home, assuming they still have jobs to work at. Also assuming they are not too sick to work. The hospitals emptied out for awhile, but then Delta arrived with its new bag of tricks. They aren’t at capacity yet, but they’re getting there. By August, patients may be bedding down in the halls and snack stations again.

Because Ms. Dahl is nowhere in sight and Holly is early, she lights a cigarette and walks around the Volvo, studying the pictures. Bonnie Dahl is both pretty and older than Holly expected. Mid-twenties, give or take. She guesses it was partly the thing about Dahl riding her bike to and from the Reynolds Library that made Holly expect a younger woman. The rest was how much Penny Dahl’s voice reminded Holly of her late mother. She supposes she thought Bonnie would look sort of like Holly had at nineteen or twenty: pinched Emily Dickinson face, hair pulled back in a bun or ponytail, fake smile (Holly had hated having her picture taken, still does), clothes designed not just to minimize her figure but to make it disappear.

This girl’s face is open to the world, her smile wide and sunny. Her blond hair is short, cut off in front in a shaggy, sun-streaked fringe. The pictures on the sides of the car are full-face portraits, but the one on the back shows Bonnie astride her bike, wearing white shorts with V-cuts on the sides and a strappy top. No body consciousness there.

Holly finishes her cigarette, bends, scrapes it out on the pavement. She touches the blackened tip to make sure it’s cold, then places it in the litter basket outside the swing gate. She pops a Life Saver into her mouth, puts on her mask, and walks down to her building.

Penny Dahl is waiting in the lobby, and even with the mask Holly sees the resemblance to her daughter. Holly puts her age at sixty or thereabouts. Her hair might be pretty with a touch-up, but now it’s rat-fur gray. Neatly kept, though, Holly adds to this first assessment. She always tries to be kind. Ms. Dahl’s clothes are clean but slapdash. Holly is no fashionista, far from it, but she would never put that blouse with those slacks. Here is a woman for whom personal appearance has taken a back seat. Across the requested N95, in bright red letters, is her daughter’s first name.

“Hello, Ms. Dahl,” she says. “Holly Gibney.”

Holly has never liked shaking hands, but she offers an elbow willingly. Penny Dahl bumps it with her own. “Thank you so much for seeing me. Thank you so very, very much.”

“Let’s go upstairs.” The lobby is empty and they don’t have to wait for the elevator. Holly pushes for the fifth floor. To Penny she says, “We had some trouble with this darn thing last year, but it’s fixed now.”

Without Pete or Barbara Robinson helping out (or just hanging out), the reception area feels like a held breath. Holly starts the coffee maker.

“I brought pictures of Bonnie, a dozen, all taken within a year or two of when she disappeared. I’ve got tons more, but from when she was younger, and that’s not the girl you’ll be looking for, is it? I can send them to your phone if you give me your email address.” Her delivery is staccato and she keeps touching her mask to be sure it’s in place. “I can take this off, you know. I’m double-vaxxed and Covid negative. I took the home test just last night.”

“Why don’t we wear them out here? We’ll take them off in my office and have some coffee. I have cookies, if Barbara—the young lady who sometimes helps out—hasn’t eaten them all.”

“No thank you.”

Holly doesn’t have to look to know they’re all gone, anyway. Barbara can’t keep her hands off the vanilla wafers. “I saw the pictures of Bonnie on your car, by the way. She’s very attractive.”

Penny’s eyes crinkle as she smiles behind her mask. “I think so. Of course I’m her mother, so what else would I say? No Miss America, but she was a prom queen back in high school. And nobody dumped a bucket of blood on her, either.” She laughs, the sound as sharp as her delivery. Holly hopes she isn’t going to get all hysterical. After three weeks the woman should be beyond that, but maybe not. Holly has never lost a daughter, so she doesn’t know. But she does know how she felt when she thought she might have lost Jerome and Barbara—like she was going out of her mind.

Holly writes her email address on a Post-it. “Are you married, Ms. Dahl?”

Dahl pastes the note inside the cover of her phone. “If you don’t start calling me Penny, I may scream.”

“Penny it is,” Holly says, partly because she thinks her new client actually might.

“Divorced. Herbert and I dissolved our partnership three years ago. Political differences were part of it—he was all in on Trump—but there were plenty of other reasons, as well.”

“How did Bonnie feel about that?”

“Handled it in very adult fashion. And why not? She was an adult. Twenty-one. Besides, the first time Herbie came home wearing a MAGA hat, she actually laughed at him. He was… mmm… displeased.”

Here is another relationship chilled by the fast-talking man in the red tie. It’s not fate and not coincidence.

Meanwhile, the coffee is ready. “How do you like it, Penny? Or I have tea, and there might be a Poland Water unless Pete or Barbara—”

“Coffee’s fine. No cream, just a little sugar.”

“I’ll let you add that yourself.” Holly pours into two of the Finders Keepers mugs, which Pete insisted on ordering. Without looking up, she says: “Let’s cross one t right away, Penny. Is there any chance your ex-husband might have something to do with Bonnie’s disappearance?”

The jagged laugh comes again—nerves rather than amusement. “He’s in Alaska. Left for a white-collar job in a shipping plant about six months after the divorce. And he has Covid. His idol refused to wear a mask, so Herb refused to wear one. You know, Trumper see, Trumper do. If you’re asking if he abducted his twenty-four-year-old daughter, or tempted her into moving to Juneau to live with him, the answer is no. He says he’s getting better…”

This makes Holly think of Pete.

“…but when I FaceTime him it’s all cough-cough-cough, wheeze-wheeze-wheeze.” Penny says this with unmistakable satisfaction.

In Holly’s office, they take off their masks. The client’s chair probably isn’t a full six feet away, but it’s close. Besides, Holly tells herself, perfect is the enemy of good. She opens her iPad to the note function and types Bonnie Rae Dahl and 24 yo and Disappeared on the night of July 1. It’s a start.

“Tell me about when she was last seen, let’s start with that. You said it was at a Jet Mart convenience store?”

“Yes, on Red Bank Ave. Bonnie has an apartment in one of those new Lake View condos, you know where the old docks used to be?”

Holly nods. There are several condominium clusters down there now, and more under construction. Soon you won’t be able to see the lake at all unless you own one.

“The Jet Mart is at the halfway point of her ride home. A mile and a half from the library, a mile and a half from her place. The clerk knows her there. She came in on July first at four minutes past eight.”

Jet Mart regular stop, Holly types. She hits the keys without looking, keeping her eyes on Penny.

“I have the security camera video. I’ll send that to you, too, but do you want to see it now?”

“Really? How did you get that?”

“Detective Jaynes shared it with me.”

“At your lawyer’s request?”

Penny looks perplexed. “I don’t have a lawyer. I used one when I bought my house in Upriver, but not since. She gave it to me when I asked.”

Good for Izzy, Holly thinks.

“Should I have a lawyer?”

“That’s up to you, but I don’t think you need one right now. Let’s look at the video.”

Penny gets up and starts to come around the desk.

“No, just hand it to me.”

Double-vaxxed or not, home-tested last night or not, Holly doesn’t want the woman looking over her shoulder and breathing on the side of her face. It’s not just Covid. Even before the virus she didn’t like strangers in her personal space, and that’s what this woman still is.

Penny opens the video and hands her phone to Holly. “Just hit play.”

The security camera is looking down from a high angle, and it’s far from crystal clear; no one has cleaned the lens in a long time, if ever. It shows the so-called Beer Cave, the clerk, the front door, the miserly parking area, and a slice of Red Bank Avenue. The time-stamp in the lower lefthand corner reads 8:04 PM. The date-stamp in the righthand corner reads 7/1/21. It’s not dark yet, but—as Bob Dylan says—it’s getting there. Plenty of light still left in the sky, enough for Holly to see Bonnie pull up on her bike, take off her helmet, and shake out her hair, which was probably sweaty. The last week of June and the first week of July were very hot. Poopy hot, in fact.

She puts her helmet on the seat of her bike but enters the store still wearing her backpack. She’s in tan slacks and a polo shirt with Bell College above the left breast, and the bell tower logo above the words. The clip is soundless, of course. Holly looks at the little movie with the fascination she supposes anyone feels when looking at someone who went from a clean, well-lighted place into the unknown.

Bonnie Rae goes to the back cooler and gets a bottle of soda, looks like a Coke or Pepsi. On her way to the cash register she stops to inspect the snack rack. She picks up a package. Might be Ho Hos, might be Yodels, doesn’t matter because she puts it back, and in Holly’s mind she hears Charlotte Gibney say, I must maintain my girlish figger.

At the register she has a brief conversation with the clerk (middle-aged, balding, Hispanic). It must be something funny because they both laugh. Bonnie rests her pack on the counter, unbuckles the flap, and puts her bottle of soda inside. It’s big enough for the shoes she wears at work, maybe, plus her phone and a book or two. She slides the straps back over her shoulders and says something else to the clerk. He gives her some change and a thumbs-up. She leaves. Puts on her helmet. Mounts her bike. Pedals away to… wherever.

When Holly looks up and hands back the phone, Penny Dahl is crying.

Tears are hard for Holly to handle. There’s a box of tissues beside her mousepad. She pushes it toward Penny without making eye contact, nibbling at her lower lip and wishing for a cigarette. “I’m sorry. I know how hard this is for you.”

Penny looks at her over a bouquet of Kleenex. “Do you?” It’s almost a challenge.

Holly sighs. “No, probably not.”

There’s a moment of silence between them. Holly thinks of telling Penny she recently lost her mother, but it’s not the same. She knows where her mother is, after all: under dirt and sod at Cedar Rest. Penny Dahl only knows there’s a hole in her life where her daughter is supposed to be.

“I’m curious about your daughter’s helmet. Was it with her bike when it was found?”

Penny’s mouth falls open. “No, just the bike. You know what, Detective Jaynes never asked about that and I never thought of it.”

Penny gets a pass, but Izzy Jaynes sinks a bit in Holly’s estimation. “What about her pack?”

“Gone, but you’d expect that, wouldn’t you? You might wear a pack after you got off your bike, she wore it into the store, but you’d hardly keep wearing your helmet, would you?”

Holly doesn’t answer, because this isn’t a conversation, it’s an interrogation. It will be as gentle as she can make it, but an interrogation is what it is.

“Catch me up, Penny. Tell me everything you know. Start with what Bonnie does at the Reynolds Library and when she left that evening.”

There are four assistant librarians at the Reynolds Library on the Bell College of Arts and Sciences campus. During the summer, the library closes at seven. The head librarian, Matt Conroy, sometimes stays until closing, but that night he didn’t. Margaret Brenner, Edith Brookings, Lakeisha Stone, and Bonnie Dahl saw out the last few visitors by five past. Before locking they split up and took a quick sweep through the stacks for anyone who either didn’t hear the closing bell or chose to ignore it while reading one more page or taking one more note. Bonnie had told her mother that sometimes they found people fast asleep in the reading room or the stacks, and on a few occasions they came across couples who had been overcome with passion. In flagrant delicious, she called it. They also checked the restrooms on the main level and on the third floor. That night all the customers were gone.

The four gabbed for a bit in the break room, discussing weekend plans, then turned out the lights. Lakeisha got into her Smart car and drove away. Bonnie got on her bike and headed for her efficiency apartment, where she never arrived. Penny hadn’t been very concerned when she called Bonnie the next morning and got voicemail on the first ring.

“I wanted to ask if she’d like to come over on Friday or Saturday night and watch something on Netflix or Hulu,” Penny says, then adds, “I was going to make popcorn.”

“Is that all?” Holly’s nose for a lie isn’t as strong as Bill Hodges’s was, but she’s good at knowing when someone’s shading the truth.

Penny colors. “Well… we’d had an argument a couple of nights before. It got a little heated. Mothers and daughters, you know. Movies are how we make up. We both love the movies, and now there’s so much to watch, isn’t there?”

“Yes,” Holly says.

“I assumed she was on the phone with someone else and she’d call back.”

But there was no callback. Penny tried again at ten, then at eleven, with the same result: one ring and then voicemail. She called Lakeisha Stone, Bonnie’s best bud on the library staff, to ask if Bonnie was still mad at her. Lakeisha said she didn’t know. Bonnie hadn’t come in that morning. That was when Penny began to get worried. She had a key to her daughter’s condo apartment and drove there.

“What time was this?”

“I was worried and not checking the time. I think around noon. I wasn’t afraid she’d gotten sick with Covid or something else—she always takes precautions, and she’s always been healthy—but I kept thinking about an accident. Like a slip in the shower, or something.”

Holly nods but is remembering the security video. Bonnie Rae wasn’t wearing a mask when she went into the store and neither was the guy at the register. So much for always taking precautions.

“She wasn’t at her apartment and everything looked normal so I drove to the library, really getting worried now, but she still wasn’t there and hadn’t called in. I called the police and tried to file a missing persons report, but the man I talked to—after being on hold for twenty minutes—told me that it had to be at least forty-eight hours for a ‘teen minor’ or seventy-two hours for a legal adult. I told him how she wasn’t answering her phone, like it was turned off, but he didn’t seem interested. I asked to speak with a detective and he said they were all busy.”

At six that evening, back home, Penny got a call from Bonnie’s friend, Lakeisha. A man had arrived at the Reynolds with a blue and white Beaumont City ten-speed in the back of his pickup. That kind of bike has a package carrier, to which Bonnie had pasted a bumper sticker reading I REYNOLDS LIBRARY. The man, Marvin Brown, wanted to know if it belonged to someone who worked at the library, or maybe someone who used the library a lot. Otherwise, he said, he guessed he probably should take it to the police station. Because of the note on the seat.

“The note saying I’ve had enough,” Holly says.

“Yes.” Penny’s eyes have filled with tears again.

“But you wouldn’t call your daughter suicidal?”

“God, no!” Penny jerks back as if Holly has slapped her. A tear spills down her cheek. “God, no! I told Detective Jaynes the same thing!”

“Go on.”

The staff all recognized the bike. Matt Conroy, the head librarian, called the police; Lakeisha called Penny.

“I kind of broke down,” Penny says. “Every psycho stalker movie I ever saw flashed in front of my eyes.”

“Where did Mr. Brown find the bike?”

“Less than three blocks down Red Bank from the Jet Mart. There’s an auto repair shop for sale across from the park. Mr. Brown has a repair shop on the other side of town and I guess he’s interested in expanding. A real estate agent met him there. They examined the bike together.” Penny swallows. “Neither of them liked that note on the seat.”

“Did you talk to Mr. Brown?”

“No, Detective Jaynes did. She called him.”

No personal interview, Holly types, still keeping her eyes on Penny, who is wiping away more tears. She thinks Marvin Brown may be her first contact.

“Mr. Brown and the real estate man discussed what to do with the bike and Mr. Brown said well, why don’t I run it up to the library in my pickup, and after they looked the place over—the repair shop, I mean—that’s what he did.”

“Who was there first? Brown or the real estate agent?”

“I don’t know. It didn’t seem important.”

It may not be, but Holly intends to find out. Because sometimes killers “find” the bodies of their victims, and sometimes arsonists call the fire department. It gives them a thrill.

“Any further developments since then?”

“Nothing,” Penny says. She wipes her eyes. “Her voicemail is full but sometimes I call anyway. To hear her voice, you know.”

Holly winces. Pete says she’ll get used to clients’ tales of woe eventually, that her heart will grow calluses, but it hasn’t happened yet, and Holly hopes it never does. Pete may have those calluses, and Izzy Jaynes, but Bill never did. He always cared. He said he couldn’t help it.

“What about the hospitals? I assume they were checked?”

Penny laughs. There’s no humor in it. “I asked the policeman who answered the phone—the one who told me all the detectives were busy—if he would do that, or if I should. He said I should. You know, your runaway daughter, your job. It was pretty clear that’s what he thought she was, a runaway. I called Mercy, I called St. Joe’s, I called Kiner Memorial. Do you know what they told me?”

Holly is sure she does, but lets Penny say it.

“They said they didn’t know. How’s that for incompetency?”

This woman is distraught, so Holly won’t point out what would have been obvious to her if her focus hadn’t narrowed to exclude everything but her missing daughter: the hospitals here and all over the Midwest are overwhelmed. The staff has been inundated with Covid patients—not just the doctors and nurses, everyone. On the front page of yesterday’s paper there was a picture of a masked janitor wheeling a patient into the Mercy Hospital ICU. If not for the computerized record-keeping systems, the city’s hospitals might have no idea of even how many patients they have in care. As it is, the information must be lagging well behind the flood of sick people.

When this is over, Holly thinks, no one will believe it really happened. Or if they do, they won’t understand how it happened.

“And since then, has Detective Jaynes been in touch?”

“Twice in three weeks,” Penny says. She sounds bitter, and Holly thinks she has a right to be. “Once she came to my house—for ten minutes—the other time she called. She has Bonnie’s picture and said she’d put it on NamUs, which is a nationwide missing persons database, also on NCMEC, that’s—”

“The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children,” Holly says, thinking that was a good call on Izzy’s part even though Bonnie Rae Dahl isn’t a child. Cops often post there if the missing person is young and female. Young females are by far the most common abductees. Of course, they are also the most common runaways.

But, she thinks, if a twenty-four-year-old woman decides to up stakes and start over somewhere else, you can’t call her a runaway.

Penny pulls in a shuddering breath. “No help from the police. Zero. Jaynes says sure, she might have been abducted, but the note suggests she just left. Only why would she? Why? She has a good job! She’s in line for a promotion! She’s good pals with Lakeisha! And she finally dumped that loser of a boyfriend!”

“What’s the name of the loser boyfriend?”

“Tom Higgins.” She wrinkles her nose. “He worked at the shoe store out at the Airport Mall. Then the mall closed down during the first Covid wave. He tried to move in with Bonnie to save on the rent, but she wouldn’t let him. They had a big fight about it. Bon told him they were done. He laughed and said she couldn’t fire him, he quit. Like it was original, you know. Probably he thought it was.”

“Do you think he had anything to do with Bonnie’s disappearance?”

“No.” She folds her arms across her chest, as if to say that ends the subject. Holly waits—a technique Bill Hodges taught her—and Penny finally fills the silence. “That man could barely blow his own nose without an instruction video. Also very immature. I never knew what Bonnie saw in him, and she could never explain it.”

Holly, a fan of the hunks on Bachelor in Paradise, has a good idea what Bonnie might have seen in him. She doesn’t want to say it and doesn’t have to. Penny says it for her.

“He must have been terrific in the sack, a real sixty-minute man.”

“Do you have his address?”

Penny consults her phone. “2395 Eastland Avenue. Although I don’t know if he’s still there.”

Holly records it. “Do you have a picture of the note?”

Penny does, says Lakeisha Stone photographed it when Marvin Brown brought the bike. Holly studies it and doesn’t like what she sees. Block letters, all caps, carefully made: I’VE HAD ENOUGH.

“Is this your daughter’s printing?”

Penny gives a sigh that says she’s at her wit’s end. “It might be, but I can’t be sure. My daughter doesn’t do handwriting. None of them do these days except for their signatures, which you can barely read—just scribbles. She doesn’t usually print in all big letters, but if she wanted to be… I don’t know…”

“Emphatic?”

“Yes, that. Then she might.”

She could be right, Holly thinks, but if that were the case, might she not have printed in even bigger caps? Not I’VE HAD ENOUGH but I’VE HAD ENOUGH? Maybe even with an exclamation point or two? No, Holly doesn’t care for this note at all. She’s not ready to believe Bonnie didn’t write it, but she’s far from ready to believe that Bonnie did.

“Please forward this along with the photos of your daughter. What about you, Penny? Where do you live?”

“Renner Circle. 883 Renner, in Upriver.”

Holly adds it to her notes, where she has also written P and B argued, P says it got heated.

“And what do you do?”

“I’m the chief loan officer at the NorBank branch on the turnpike extension at the airport. At least I was, and I assume I will be again. NorBank has temporarily closed three of their stores—we call them stores—and one of them was mine.”

“Not working from home?”

“No. I’m still getting paid, though. One ray of sunshine in all this… this mess. Which reminds me, I need to give you a check.” She opens her bag and starts rooting through it. “You must have more questions, too.”

“I will have, but I’ve got enough to get started on.”

“When will I hear from you?” Penny is writing a check quickly and efficiently, not pausing at any of the fields. And not printing, either, but writing in a small, rolling, tightly controlled script.

“Give me twenty-four hours to get going.”

“If you find out something worth sharing before that, call. Anytime. Day or night.”

“One more thing.” Ordinarily she shies from anything personal, especially if it might seem confrontational, but this morning she doesn’t hesitate. She’s got hold of this now, like a snarled knot she wants to unpick. “Tell me about the argument. The one that got heated.”

Penny once more folds her arms over her chest, more tightly this time. Holly knows defensive body language from plenty of personal experience. “It was nothing. A tempest in a teapot.”

Holly waits.

“We argue from time to time, big deal. What mother and daughter don’t?”

Holly waits.

“Well,” Penny says at last, “this one was a little more serious, maybe. She slammed the door on the way out. She’s a goodnatured girl and that was out of character. We had some… some warm discussions about Tom, but she never slammed out of the house. And I swore at her. Called her a stubborn bitch. God, I wish I could take that back. Just say, ‘Okay, Bon, let’s forget about it.’ But you never know, do you?”

“What was it about?”

“There was an excellent position at NorBank. Records and inventory. Collating. Front office, working from home guaranteed, how great does that sound with everything that’s going on? I was trying to get her to apply for it, she’s excellent with numbers and a real people person, but she wouldn’t. I told her about the substantial pay jump she’d get, and the benefits, and the good hours. Nothing got through to her. She could be stubborn.”

Look who’s talking, Holly thinks, remembering fights she had with her own mother, especially once she started working with Bill Hodges. There had been some doozies after she and Bill had almost gotten killed while chasing after a doctor who had been possessed—there was really no other way to put it—by Brady Hartsfield.

“I told her if she worked at the bank she could buy some decent clothes for a change and stop dressing like a hippie. She laughed at me. That’s when I called her a bitch.”

“Any other arguments? Sore spots?”

“No. None.” Holly knows she’s lying, and not just to the private detective she’s just hired.

Holly types one more note, then gets up and puts on her mask.

“What will you do first?”

“Call Izzy Jaynes. I think she’ll talk to me. She and I go back quite a few years.”

And even before Brown, the pickup truck man, she wants to talk to Lakeisha Stone. Because if Lakeisha and Bonnie were besties—even closies—Lakeisha will have a better fix on how the mother and daughter got along. Door-slamming argument or not, Holly doesn’t want to start this by equating her own mother and Bonnie’s too closely.

You are not the case, Bill told her once. Never make the mistake of thinking you are. It never helps and usually makes things worse.