If It Bleeds

In January of 2021, a small padded envelope addressed to Detective Ralph Anderson is delivered to the Conrads, the Andersons’ next-door neighbors. The Anderson family is on an extended vacation in the Bahamas, thanks to an endless teachers’ strike in the Andersons’ home county. (Ralph insisted that his son Derek bring his books, which Derek termed “a grotesque bummer.”) The Conrads have agreed to forward their mail until the Andersons return to Flint City, but printed on this envelope, in large letters, is DO NOT FORWARD HOLD FOR ARRIVAL. When Ralph opens the package, he finds a flash drive titled If It Bleeds, presumably referring to the old news trope which proclaims “If it bleeds, it leads.” The drive holds two items. One is a folder containing photographs and audio spectrograms. The other is a kind of report, or spoken-word diary, from Holly Gibney, with whom the detective shared a case that began in Oklahoma and ended in a Texas cave. It was a case that changed Ralph Anderson’s perception of reality forever. The final words of Holly’s audio report are from an entry dated December 19th, 2020. She sounds out of breath.

I have done the best I can, Ralph, but it may not be enough. In spite of all my planning there’s a chance I won’t come out of this alive. If that’s the case, I need you to know how much your friendship has meant to me. If I do die, and you choose to continue what I’ve started, please be careful. You have a wife and son.

[This is where the report ends.]

December 8–9, 2020

Pineborough Township is a community not far from Pittsburgh. Although much of western Pennsylvania is farm country, Pineborough boasts a thriving downtown and just shy of 40,000 residents. As you enter the municipal city limits, you pass a gigantic bronze creation of dubious cultural merit (although the residents seem to like it). This is, according to the sign, THE WORLD’S LARGEST PINE CONE! There is a turnout for people who want to picnic and take pictures. Many do, some posing their younger children on the cone’s scales. (A small sign reads “No children over 50 lbs on the Pine Cone, please.”) On this day it’s too cold for picnics, the Porta John has been taken away for the season, and the bronze creation of dubious cultural merit is decked out in blinking Christmas lights.

Not far beyond the giant cone, close to where the first traffic light marks the beginning of downtown Pineborough, is Albert Macready Middle School, where almost five hundred students attend grades seven, eight, and nine—no teachers’ strike here.

At quarter to ten on the 8th, a Pennsy Speed Delivery truck pulls into the school’s circular drive. The delivery guy gets out and stands in front of his truck for a minute or two, consulting his clipboard. Then he pushes his glasses up on the bridge of his narrow nose, gives his little mustache a stroke, and goes around to the back. He rummages and retrieves a square package about three feet on all sides. He carries it easily enough, so it can’t be too heavy.

At the door is an admonishment reading ALL SCHOOL VISITORS MUST BE ANNOUNCED AND APPROVED. The driver pushes the button on the intercom below the sign and Mrs. Keller, the school secretary, asks him how she can help.

“Got a package here for something called…” He bends to look at the label. “Boy-howdy. Looks like Latin. It’s for the Nemo… Nemo Impune… or maybe you say Impuny…”

Mrs. Keller helps him out. “The Nemo Me Impune Lacessit Society, right?”

On her video monitor, the delivery guy looks relieved. “If you say so. The last word is Society, for sure. What does it mean?”

“Tell you inside.”

Mrs. Keller is smiling as the delivery guy walks through the metal detector, enters the main office, and puts the package on the counter. It’s plastered with stickers, a few of Christmas trees and holly and Santas, many more of Scottish guys in kilts and Black Watch caps honking on bagpipes.

“So,” he says, taking his reader off his belt and aiming it at the address label. “What’s Nemo Me Impuny when it’s home with its shoes off?”

“The Scottish national motto,” she says. “It means No one provokes me with impunity. Mr. Griswold’s Current Affairs class has a partner school in Scotland, near Edinburgh. They email and Facebook and send pictures to each other and things like that. The Scottish kids root for the Pittsburgh Pirates, our kids for the Buckie Thistle Football Club. The Current Affairs kids watch the games on YouTube. Calling themselves the Nemo Me Impune Lacessit Society was probably Griswold’s idea.” She peers at the return address on the label. “Yup, Renhill Secondary School, that’s the one. Customs stamp and everything.”

“Christmas presents, I bet,” the delivery guy says. “Gotta be. Because look here.” He tips the box up, showing her DO NOT OPEN UNTIL 18 DECEMBER, carefully printed and bookended by two more bagpipe-blowing Scots.

Mrs. Keller nods. “That’s the last day of school before the Christmas break. God, I hope Griswold’s kids sent them something.”

“What kind of presents do Scottish kids send American kids, do you think?”

She laughs. “I just hope it’s not haggis.”

“What’s that? More Latin?”

“Sheep’s heart,” Mrs. Keller says. “Also liver and lungs. I know because my husband took me to Scotland for our tenth wedding anniversary.”

The delivery guy pulls a face that makes her laugh some more, then asks her to sign the window in his reader gadget. Which she does. He wishes her a good day and a merry Christmas. She wishes him the same. When he’s gone, Mrs. Keller grabs a loitering kid (no hall pass, but Mrs. Keller lets it go this once) to take the box to the storage closet between the school library and the first-floor teachers’ room. She tells Mr. Griswold about the package during the lunch break. He says he’ll take it down to his classroom at three-thirty, after the last bell. Had he taken it at lunch, the carnage might have been even worse.

The American Club at Renhill Secondary did not send the kids at Albert Macready a Christmas box. There is no such company as Pennsy Speed Delivery. The truck, later discovered abandoned, was stolen from a mall parking lot shortly after Thanksgiving. Mrs. Keller will excoriate herself for not noticing that the delivery guy wasn’t wearing a name tag, and when he aimed his reader at the package’s address label, it didn’t beep the way the ones used by the UPS and FedEx drivers did, because it was a fake. So was the customs stamp.

The police will tell her anyone might have missed these things, and she has no reason to feel responsible. She does, nevertheless. The school’s security protocols—the cameras, the main door that’s locked when school is in session, the metal detector—are good, but they’re only machinery. She is (or was) the human part of the equation, the guardian at the gate, and she let the school down. She let the kids down.

Mrs. Keller feels that the arm she lost will only be the beginning of her atonement.

It’s 2:45, and Holly Gibney is getting ready for an hour that always makes her happy. That may suggest certain low tastes, but she still enjoys her sixty minutes of weekday television viewing, and tries to insure that Finders Keepers (nice new digs for the detective agency, fifth floor of the Frederick Building downtown) is empty from three to four. Since she’s the boss—a thing she still finds hard to believe—that isn’t difficult.

Today Pete Huntley, her partner in the business since Bill Hodges died, is out trying to track down a runaway at the city’s various homeless shelters. Jerome Robinson, taking a year off from Harvard while he tries to turn a forty-page sociology paper into what he hopes will be a book, is also working for Finders Keepers, although only part-time. This afternoon he’s south of the city, looking for a dognapped golden retriever named Lucky who may have been dumped at a Youngstown, Akron, or Canton dog impound when Lucky’s owners refused to pay the demanded ransom of ten thousand dollars. Of course the dog may just have been turned loose in the Ohio countryside—or killed—but maybe not. The dog’s name is a good omen, she told Jerome. She said she was hopeful.

“You have Holly hope,” Jerome said, grinning.

“That’s right,” she replied. “Now go on, Jerome. Fetch.”

She’s got a good chance of being alone until it’s time to close the place up, but it’s only the hour between three and four that she really cares about. With one eye on the clock, she writes a starchy email to Andrew Edwards, a client who was worried that his partner was trying to hide business assets. Turns out the partner wasn’t, but Finders did the work and needs to be paid. This is our third billing, Holly writes. Please clear your account so we don’t have to turn this matter over to a collection agency.

Holly finds she can be much more forceful when she can write “our” and “we” rather than “my” and “I.” She’s working on that, but as her grandfather was wont to say, “Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was Philadelphia.”

She sends off the email—whoosh—and shuts down her computer. She glances at the clock. Seven to three. She goes to the little fridge and takes out a can of Diet Pepsi. She puts it on one of the coasters the firm gives out (YOU LOSE, WE FIND, YOU WIN), then opens the top left drawer of her desk. In here, concealed by a pile of junk paperwork, is a bag of Snickers Bites. She takes out six, one for each commercial break during her show, unwraps them, and lines them up.

Five to three. She turns on the television but mutes it. Maury Povich is currently strutting around and inciting his studio audience. She may have low tastes, but not that low. She considers eating one of her Snickers and tells herself to wait. Just as she is congratulating herself on her forbearance, she hears the elevator and rolls her eyes. It must be Pete. Jerome is way down south.

It’s Pete, all right, and smiling. “Oh, happy day,” he says. “Somebody finally got Al to send a repairman—”

“Al did nothing,” Holly said. “Jerome and I took care of it. It was just a glitch.”

“How—”

“There was a small hack involved.” She’s still got one eye on the clock: three minutes to three. “Jerome did that, but I could have.” Once more, honesty compels her. “At least I think so. Did you find the girl?”

Pete gives her two thumbs up. “At Sunrise House. My first stop. Good news, she wants to go home. She called her mom, who’s coming to get her.”

“Are you sure? Or is that what she told you?”

“I was there when she made the call. I saw the tears. This is a good resolution, Holly. I just hope Mom’s not a deadbeat like that guy Edwards.”

“Edwards will pay,” she says. “My heart is set on it.” On the TV, Maury has been replaced by a dancing bottle of diarrhea medicine. Which in Holly’s opinion is actually an improvement. “Now be quiet, Pete, my show is coming on in one minute.”

“Oh my God, are you still watching that guy?”

Holly gives him a forbidding look. “You are welcome to watch, Pete, but if you intend to make sarcastic remarks and spoil my enjoyment, I wish you would leave.”

Be assertive, Allie Winters likes to tell her. Allie is her therapist. Holly saw another therapist briefly, a man who has written three books and many scholarly articles. This was for reasons apart from the demons that have chased her out of her teens. She needed to talk about more recent demons with Dr. Carl Morton.

“No sarcastic remarks, roger that,” Pete says. “Man, I can’t believe you and Jerome bypassed Al. Took the bull by the horns, so to speak. You rock, Holly.”

“I am trying to be more assertive.”

“And you’re succeeding. Is there a Coke in the fridge?”

“Only diet.”

“Uck. That stuff tastes like—”

“Hush.”

It’s three o’clock. She unmutes the TV just as her show’s theme song starts up. It’s the Bobby Fuller Four singing “I Fought the Law.” A courtroom comes on the screen. The spectators—actually a studio audience, like Maury’s but less feral—are clapping along with the music, and the announcer intones, “Steer clear if you’re a louse, because John Law is in the house!”

“All rise!” George the bailiff cries.

The spectators get up, still clapping and swaying, as Judge John Law comes out of his chambers. He’s six-six (Holly knows this from People magazine, which she hides even better than her Snickers Bites) and bald as an eight-ball… although he’s more dark chocolate than black. He’s wearing voluminous robes that sway back and forth as he boogies his way to the bench. He grabs the gavel and tick-tocks it back and forth like a metronome, flashing a full deck of white teeth.

“Oh my dear Jesus in a motorized wheelchair,” Pete says.

Holly gives him her most forbidding look. Pete claps one hand over his mouth and waves the other one in surrender.

“Siddown, siddown,” says Judge Law—actual name Gerald Lawson, Holly also knows this from People, but it’s close enough—and the spectators all sit down. Holly likes John Law because he’s straight from the shoulder, not all snarky and poopy like that Judge Judy. He gets to the point, just as Bill Hodges used to… although Judge John Law is no substitute, and not just because he’s a fictional character on a TV show. It’s been years since Bill passed away, but Holly still misses him. Everything she is, everything she has, she owes to Bill. There’s no one like him, although Ralph Anderson, her police detective friend from Oklahoma, comes close.

“What have we got today, Georgie, my brother from another mother?” The spectators chortle at this. “Civil or criminal?”

Holly knows it’s unlikely the same judge would handle both kinds of cases—and a new one every afternoon—but she doesn’t mind; the cases are always interesting.

“Civil, Judge,” Georgie the bailiff says. “The plaintiff is Mrs. Rhoda Daniels. The defendant is her ex-husband, Richard Daniels. At issue is custody of the family dog, Bad Boy.”

“A dog case,” Pete says. “Right up our alley.”

Judge Law leans on his gavel, which is extra-long. “And is Bad Boy in the house, Georgie my man?”

“He’s in a holding room, Judge.”

“Very good, very good, and does Bad Boy bite, as his name might indicate?”

“According to security, he seems to have a very sweet nature, Judge Law.”

“Excellent. Let’s hear what the plaintiff has to say about Bad Boy.”

At this point, the actor playing Rhoda Daniels enters the courtroom. In real life, Holly knows, the plaintiff and defendant would already be seated, but this is more dramatic. As Ms. Daniels sways down the center aisle in a dress that’s too tight and heels that are too high, the announcer says, “We’ll return to Judge Law’s courtroom in just a minute.”

An ad for death insurance comes on, and Holly pops her first Snickers Bite into her mouth.

“Don’t suppose I could have one of those, could I?” Pete asks.

“Aren’t you supposed to be on a diet?”

“I get low sugar at this time of day.”

Holly opens her desk drawer—reluctantly—but before she can get to the candy bag, the old lady worrying about how she can pay her husband’s funeral expenses is replaced by a graphic that says BREAKING NEWS. This is followed by Lester Holt, and Holly knows right away it’s going to be serious. Lester Holt is the network’s big gun. Not another 9/11, she thinks every time something like this happens. Please God, not another 9/11 and not nuclear.

Lester says, “We’re interrupting your regularly scheduled programming to bring you news of a large explosion at a middle school in Pineborough, Pennsylvania, a town about forty miles southeast of Pittsburgh. There are reports of numerous casualties, many of them children.”

“Oh my God,” Holly says. She puts the hand that was in the drawer over her mouth.

“These reports are so far unconfirmed, I want to emphasize that. I think…” Lester puts a hand to his ear, listens. “Yes, okay. Chet Ondowsky, from our Pittsburgh affiliate, is on the scene. Chet, can you hear me?”

“Yes,” a voice says. “Yes, I can, Lester.”

“What can you tell us, Chet?”

The picture switches away from Lester Holt to a middle-aged guy with what Holly thinks of as a local news face: not handsome enough to be a major market anchor, but presentable. Except the knot of his tie is crooked, there’s no makeup to cover the mole beside his mouth, and his hair is mussy, as if he didn’t have time to comb it.

“What’s that he’s standing beside?” Pete asks.

“I don’t know,” Holly says. “Hush.”

“Looks sort of like a giant pine co—”

“Hush!” Holly could care less about the giant pine cone, or Chet Ondowsky’s mole and mussed-up hair; her attention is fixed on the two ambulances that go screaming past behind him, nose to tail with their lights flashing. Casualties, she thinks. Numerous casualties, many of them children.

“Lester, what I can tell you is that there are almost certainly at least seventeen dead here at Albert Macready Middle School, and many more injured. This comes from a county sheriff’s deputy who asked not to be identified by name. The explosive device may have been in the main office, or a nearby storage room. If you look over there…”

He points, and the camera obediently follows his finger. At first the picture is blurry, but when the cameraman steadies and zooms, Holly can see a large hole has been blown in the side of the building. Bricks scatter across the lawn in a corona. And as she’s taking this in—with millions of others, probably—a man in a yellow vest emerges from the hole with something in his arms. A small something wearing sneakers. No, one sneaker. The other has apparently been torn off in the blast.

The camera returns to the correspondent and catches him straightening his tie. “The Sheriff’s Department will undoubtedly be holding a press conference at some point, but right now informing the public is the least of their concerns. Parents have already started to gather… ma’am? Ma’am, can I speak to you for just a moment? Chet Ondowsky, WPEN, Channel 11.”

The woman who comes into the shot is vastly overweight. She has arrived at the school without a coat, and her flower print housedress billows around her like a caftan. Her face is dead pale except for bright spots of red on her cheeks, her hair is disarrayed enough to make Ondowsky’s mussy ’do look neat, her plump cheeks glisten with tears.

They shouldn’t be showing this, Holly thinks, and I shouldn’t be watching it. But they are, and I am.

“Ma’am, do you have a child who attends Albert Macready?”

“My son and daughter both do,” she says, and grabs Ondowsky’s arm. “Are they okay? Do you know that, sir? Irene and David Vernon. David’s in the seventh grade. Irene’s in the ninth. We call Irene Deenie. Do you know if they are okay?”

“I don’t, Mrs. Vernon,” Ondowsky says. “I think you should talk to one of the deputies, over where they’re setting up those sawhorses.”

“Thank you, sir, thank you. Pray for my kids!”

“I will,” Ondowsky says as she rushes off, a woman who will be very lucky to survive the day without having some sort of cardiac episode… although Holly guesses that right now her heart is the least of her concerns. Right now her heart is with David and Irene, also known as Deenie.

Ondowsky turns back to the camera. “Everyone in America will be praying for the Vernon children, and all the children who were attending Albert Macready Middle School today. According to the information I have now—it’s sketchy, and this could change—the explosion occurred at about two-fifteen, an hour ago, and was strong enough to shatter windows a mile away. The glass… Fred, can you get a shot of this pine cone?”

“There, I knew it was a pine cone,” Pete says. He’s leaning forward, eyes glued to the television.

Fred the camera guy moves in, and on the pine cone’s petals, or leaves, or whatever you called them, Holly can see shards of broken glass. One actually appears to have blood on it, although she can hope it’s just a passing reflection cast by the lights on one of the ambulances.

Lester Holt: “Chet, that’s horrible. Just awful.”

The camera pulls back and returns to Ondowsky. “Yes, it is. This is a horrible scene. Lester, I want to see if…”

A helicopter with a red cross and MERCY HOSPITAL stenciled on the side is landing in the street. Chet Ondowsky’s hair swirls in the wash of the rotors, and he raises his voice to be heard.

“I want to see if I can do anything to help! This is terrible, just a terrible tragedy! Back to you in New York!”

Lester Holt returns, looking upset. “Be safe, Chet. Folks, we’re going to return you to your regularly scheduled programming, but we’ll continue to update you on this developing situation at NBC Breaking News on your—”

Holly uses the remote and kills the TV. She has lost her taste for make-believe justice, at least for today. She keeps thinking of that limp form in the arms of the man wearing the yellow vest. One shoe off, one shoe on, she thinks. Deedle-deedle-dumpling, my son John. Will she watch the news tonight? She supposes she will. Won’t want to, but won’t be able to help herself. She’ll have to know how many casualties. And how many are children.

Pete surprises her by taking her hand. Usually she still doesn’t like to be touched, but right now his hand feels good holding hers.

“I want you to remember something,” he says.

She turns to him. Pete is grave.

“You and Bill stopped something much worse than this from happening,” he says. “That crackpot fuck Brady Hartsfield could have killed hundreds at the rock concert he tried to blow up. Maybe thousands.”

“And Jerome,” she says in a low voice. “Jerome was there, too.”

“Yep. You, Bill, and Jerome. The Three Musketeers. That you could stop. And did. But stopping this one—” Pete nods to the TV. “That was someone else’s responsibility.”

At seven o’clock Holly is still in the office, going over invoices that don’t really need her attention. She managed to resist turning on the office TV and watching Lester Holt at six-thirty, but she doesn’t want to go home just yet. That morning she had been looking forward to a nice veggie dinner from Mr. Chow, which she would eat while watching Pretty Poison, a vastly overlooked thriller from 1968 starring Anthony Perkins and Tuesday Weld, but tonight she doesn’t want poison, pretty or otherwise. She has been poisoned by the news from Pennsylvania, and still might not be able to resist turning on CNN. That would gift her with hours of tossing and turning until two or even three in the morning.

Like most people in the media-soaked twenty-first century, Holly has become inured to the violence men (it’s still mostly men) do to each other in the name of religion or politics—those ghosts—but what happened at that suburban middle school is too much like what almost happened at the Midwest Culture and Arts Complex, where Brady Hartsfield tried to blow up a few thousand kids, and what did happen at City Center, where he plowed a Mercedes sedan into a crowd of job-seekers, killing… she doesn’t remember how many. She doesn’t want to remember.

She is putting away the files—she has to go home sometime, after all—when she hears the elevator again. She waits to see if it will go past the fifth floor, but it stops. Probably Jerome, but she still opens the second drawer of her desk and loosely grips the can there. It has two buttons. One blares an earsplitting horn. The other dispenses pepper spray.

It’s him. She lets go of the IntruderGuard and closes the drawer. She marvels (and not for the first time since he came back from Harvard) at how tall and handsome he’s become. She dislikes that fur around his mouth, what he calls “the goat,” but would never tell him so. Tonight his usual energetic walk is slow and a little slumped. He gives her a perfunctory “Yo, Hollyberry,” and drops into the chair that in business hours is reserved for clients.

Usually she would admonish him about how much she dislikes that childish nickname—it’s their form of call-and-response—but not tonight. They are friends, and because she’s a person who has never had many, Holly tries her best to deserve the ones she has. “You look very tired.”

“Long drive. Heard the news about the school? It’s all over the sat radio.”

“I was watching John Law when they broke in. Since then I’ve been avoiding it. How bad?”

“They’re saying twenty-seven dead so far, twenty-three of them kids between twelve and fourteen. But it’ll go higher. There are still a few kids and two teachers they haven’t been able to account for, and a dozen or so in critical condition. It’s worse than Parkland. Make you think of Brady Hartsfield?”

“Of course.”

“Yeah, me too. The ones he got at City Center and the ones he could have gotten if we’d been just a few minutes slower that night at the ’Round Here concert. I try not to think about that, tell myself we won that one, because when my mind goes to it I get the willies.”

Holly knows all about the willies. She has them often.

Jerome rubs a hand slowly down one cheek and in the quiet she can hear the scritch-scritch of his fingers on the day’s new bristles. “Sophomore year at Harvard I took a philosophy course. Did I ever mention that to you?”

Holly shakes her head.

“It was called—” Jerome makes finger-quotes. “—‘The Problem of Evil.’ In it, we talked a lot about concepts called inside evil and outside evil. We… Holly, you okay?”

“Yes,” she says, and she is… but at the mention of outside evil, her mind immediately turns to the monster she and Ralph tracked to his final lair. The monster had gone under many names and worn many faces, but she had always thought of him simply as the outsider, and the outsider had been as evil as they come. She’s never told Jerome about what happened in the cave known as the Marysville Hole, although she supposes he knows something pretty dire went on there—a lot more than made it into the newspapers.

He’s looking at her uncertainly. “Go on,” she tells him. “This is very interesting to me.” It’s the truth.

“Well… the class consensus was there’s outside evil if you believe in outside good—”

“God,” Holly says.

“Yes. Then you can believe there really are demons, and exorcism is a valid response to them, there really are malevolent spirits—”

“Ghosts,” Holly says.

“Right. Not to mention curses that really work, and witches, and dybbuks, and who knows what else. But in college, all that stuff pretty much gets laughed out of court. God Himself mostly gets laughed out of court.”

“Or Herself,” Holly says primly.

“Yeah, whatever, if God doesn’t exist, I guess the pronouns don’t matter. So that leaves inside evil. Moron stuff. Guys who beat their children to death, serial killers like Brady fucking Hartsfield, ethnic cleansing, genocide, 9/11, mass shootings, terrorist attacks like the one today.”

“Is that what they’re saying?” Holly asks. “A terrorist attack, maybe ISIS?”

“That’s what they’re assuming, but no one’s claimed responsibility yet.”

Now his other hand on his other cheek, scritch-scritch, and are those tears in Jerome’s eyes? She thinks they are, and if he cries, she will, too, she won’t be able to help it. Sadness is catching, and how poopy is that?

“But see, here’s the deal about inside and outside evil, Holly—I don’t think there’s any difference. Do you?”

She considers everything she knows, and everything she’s been through with this young man, and Bill, and Ralph Anderson. “No,” she says. “I don’t.”

“I think it’s a bird,” Jerome says. “A big bird, all frowsy and frosty gray. It flies here, there, and everywhere. It flew into Brady Hartsfield’s head. It flew into the head of the guy who shot all those people in Las Vegas. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, they got the bird. Hitler. Pol Pot. It flies into their heads, and when the wetwork’s done, it flies away again. I’d like to catch that bird.” He clenches his hands and looks at her and yes, those are tears. “Catch it and wring its fucking neck.”

Holly comes around the desk, kneels beside him, and puts her arms around him. It’s a clumsy hug with him sitting in the chair, but it does the job. The dam breaks. When he speaks against her cheek, she feels the scratch of his stubble.

“The dog’s dead.”

“What?” She can barely make out what he’s saying through his sobs.

“Lucky. The golden. When whoever stole him didn’t get the ransom, the bastard cut him open and threw him in a ditch. Somebody spotted him—still alive, barely—and took him to the Ebert Animal Hospital in Youngstown. Where he lived for maybe half an hour. Nothing they could do. Not so lucky after all, huh?”

“All right,” Holly says, patting his back. Her own tears are flowing, and there’s snot, too. She can feel it running out of her nose. Oough. “All right, Jerome. It’s okay.”

“It’s not. You know it’s not.” He pulls back and looks at her, cheeks wet and shining, goatee damp. “Cut that nice dog’s belly open, and threw him in the ditch with his intestines hanging out, and you know what happened then?”

Holly knows but shakes her head.

“The bird flew away.” He wipes his sleeve across his eyes. “Now it’s in someone else’s head, it’s better than ever, and on we fucking go.”

Just before ten o’clock, Holly gives up the book she’s trying to read and turns on the TV. She takes a look at the talking heads on CNN, but can’t bear their chatter. Hard news is what she wants. She switches to NBC, where a graphic, complete with grim music, reads SPECIAL REPORT: TRAGEDY IN PENNSYLVANIA. Andrea Mitchell is now anchoring in New York. She begins by telling America that the president has tweeted his “thoughts and prayers,” as he does after each of these horror shows: Pulse, Las Vegas, Parkland. This meaningless twaddle is followed by the updated score: thirty-one dead, seventy-three (oh God, so many) wounded, nine in critical condition. If Jerome was right, that means at least three of the criticals have died.

“Two terrorist organizations, Houthi Jihad and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, have claimed responsibility for the bombing,” Mitchell says, “but sources in the State Department say neither claim is credible. They are leaning toward the idea that the bombing may have been a lone-wolf attack, similar to that perpetrated by Timothy McVeigh, who set off a huge blast at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. That explosion took a hundred and sixty-eight lives.”

Many of those also children, Holly thinks. Killing children for God, or ideology, or both—no hell could be hot enough for those who’d do such things. She thinks of Jerome’s frosty gray bird.

“The man who delivered the bomb was photographed by a security camera when he buzzed for entry,” Mitchell continues. “We are going to put his picture up for the next thirty seconds. Look closely, and if you recognize him, call the number on your screen. There is a reward of two hundred thousand dollars for his arrest and subsequent conviction.”

The picture comes up. It’s color, and clear as a bell. It’s not perfect because the camera is positioned above the door and the man is looking straight ahead, but it’s pretty good. Holly leans forward, all her formidable job skills—some that were always innate, some honed during her work with Bill Hodges—kicking in. The guy is either Caucasian with a tan (not likely at this time of year but not impossible), a light-skinned Latino, a Middle Easterner, or possibly wearing makeup. Holly opts for Caucasian and makeup. She puts his age as mid-forties. He’s wearing specs with gold frames. His black mustache is small and neatly trimmed. His hair, also black, is short. She can see this because he’s not wearing a cap, which would have obscured more of his face. Bold son of a gun, Holly thinks. He knew there would be cameras, he knew there would be pictures, and he didn’t care.

“Not a son of a gun,” she says, still staring. Recording every feature. Not because this is her case, but because it’s her nature. “He’s a son of a bitch, is what he is.”

Back to Andrea Mitchell. “If you know him, call the number on the screen, and do it right away. Now we’re going to take you to the Macready Middle School and our man on the scene. Chet, are you still there?”

He is, standing in a pool of bright light thrown by the camera. More bright lights are shining on the middle school’s wounded side; each tumbled brick casts its own sharp shadow. Generators are roaring. People in uniform rush here and there, shouting and talking into mikes. Holly sees FBI on some of the jackets, ATF on others. There’s a crew in white Tyvek body suits. Yellow crime scene tape flutters. There is a sense of controlled chaos. At least Holly hopes it’s controlled. Someone must be in charge, maybe in the Winnebago she can see at the far left of the shot.

Lester Holt is presumably at home, watching this in his pj’s and slippers, but Chet Ondowsky is still going. A regular Energizer Bunny is Mr. Ondowsky, and Holly can understand that. This is probably the biggest story he’ll ever cover, he was in on it almost from the start, and he’s chasing it for all he’s worth. He’s still wearing his suit jacket, which was probably okay when he got to the site, but now the temperature has dropped. She can see his breath, and she’s pretty sure he’s shivering.

Someone give him something warmer, for heaven’s sake, Holly thinks. A parka, or even a sweatshirt.

The suit jacket will have to be thrown out. It’s smeared with brick dust and torn in a couple of places, sleeve and pocket. The hand holding the mike is also smeared with brick dust, and something else. Blood? Holly thinks it is. And the streak on his cheek, that’s blood, too.

“Chet?” Andrea Mitchell’s disembodied voice. “Are you there?”

The hand not holding the mike goes to his earpiece, and Holly sees there are Band-Aids on two of the fingers. “Yes, I’m here.” He faces the camera. “This is Chet Ondowsky, reporting from the bombing site at Albert Macready Middle School in Pineborough, Pennsylvania. This ordinarily peaceful school was rocked by an explosion of enormous strength sometime not long after two o’clock this afternoon—”

Andrea Mitchell appears on a split screen. “Chet, we understand from a source at Homeland Security that the explosion happened at two-nineteen P.M. I don’t know how the authorities can pinpoint the time that exactly, but apparently they can.”

“Yes,” Chet says, sounding a little distracted, and Holly thinks how tired he must be. And will he be able to sleep tonight? She guesses not. “Yes, that sounds just about right. As you can see, Andrea, the search for victims is winding down, but the forensic work is just beginning. There will be more personnel on the scene by daybreak, and—”

“Excuse me, Chet, but you took part in the search yourself, is that right?”

“Yes, Andrea, we all pitched in. Townspeople, some of them parents. Also Alison Greer and Tim Witchick from KDKA, Donna Forbes from WPCW, and Bill Larson from—”

“Yes, but I’m hearing you pulled two children from the ruins yourself, Chet.”

He doesn’t bother looking falsely modest and aw-shucks; Holly awards him points for that. He keeps it on a reporting level. “That’s correct, Andrea. I heard one of them moaning and saw the other. A girl and a boy. I know the boy’s name, Norman Fredericks. The girl…” He wets his lips. The mike in his hand trembles, and Holly thinks not just from the cold. “The girl was in bad shape. She was… calling for her mother.”

Andrea Mitchell looks stricken. “Chet, that’s awful.”

It is. Too awful for Holly. She picks up the remote to kill the feed—she has the salient facts, more than she has any use for—and then hesitates. It’s the torn pocket she’s looking at. Maybe torn while Ondowsky was searching for victims, but if he’s Jewish, it might have been done on purpose. It might have been keriah, the rending of garments after a death and the symbolic exposure of a wounded heart. She guesses that is the truth of that torn pocket. It is what she wants to believe.

The sleeplessness she expected doesn’t happen; Holly drops off within a matter of minutes. Perhaps crying with Jerome let out some of the poison the news from Pennsylvania had injected in her. Giving comfort and receiving it. As she slips away, she thinks she should talk about that with Allie Winters at their next session.

She wakes sometime deep in the early hours of December 9th, thinking about the correspondent, Ondowsky. Something about him—what? How tired he looked? The scratches and brick dust on his hands? The torn pocket?

That, she thinks. It must have been. Maybe I was dreaming about it.

She mutters briefly into the dark, a kind of prayer. “I miss you, Bill. I’m taking my Lexapro and I’m not smoking.”

Then she’s out and doesn’t wake up until the alarm goes at 6 A.M.

December 9–13, 2020

Finders Keepers has been able to move to the new, pricier digs on the fifth floor of the Frederick Building downtown because business has been good, and the rest of that week is busy for Holly and Pete. There’s no time for Holly to watch John Law and little to think about the school explosion in Pennsylvania, though the news reports continue and it never completely leaves her mind.

The agency has working relationships with two of the city’s big law firms, the white-shoe kind with lots of names on the door. “Macintosh, Winesap, and Spy,” Pete likes to joke. As retired police, he has no great love for lawyers, but he would be the second to admit (Holly would be the first) that subpoenas and process-serving pay very well. “Merry fucking Christmas to these guys,” Pete says as he goes out on Thursday morning with a briefcase full of woe and annoyance.

In addition to serving papers, Finders Keepers is on speed-dial at several insurance companies—locals, not affiliated with the big boys—and Holly spends most of Friday investigating an arson claim. It’s a pretty big one, the policy holder really needs the money, and she has been tasked with making sure that he was actually in Miami, as he claimed, when his warehouse went up in flames. Turns out he was, which is good for him but not so good for Lake Fidelity.

In addition to those things, which reliably pay the big bills, there’s an absconding debtor to track (Holly does this on her computer and locates him quickly by checking his credit charges), bail-jumpers to put on the radar—what’s known in the trade as skip-tracing—and lost kids and dogs. Pete usually goes after the kids, and when Jerome’s working, he’s great with the dogs.

She’s not surprised that Lucky’s death hit him so hard, not just because it was so extraordinarily cruel but because the Robinson family lost their beloved Odell to congestive heart failure the year before. There are no dogs on the docket, either lost or abducted, on that Thursday and Friday, which is good, because Holly is too busy and Jerome is at home, doing his own thing. The project that started as a school paper has now become a priority with him, if not an outright obsession. His folks are doubtful about their son’s decision to take what he calls “a gap year.” Holly isn’t. She doesn’t necessarily think Jerome is going to shock the world, but she has an idea he will make it sit up and take notice. She has faith in him. And Holly hope. That, too.

She can only follow developments on the middle school explosion out of the corner of her eye, and that’s okay, because there haven’t been many. Another victim has died—a teacher, not a student—and a number of kids with minor injuries have been released from various area hospitals. Mrs. Althea Keller, the only person who actually spoke to the delivery guy/bomber, has regained consciousness, but she had little to add, other than the fact that the package purported to be from a school in Scotland, and that cross-Atlantic relationship was in Pineborough’s weekly newspaper, along with a group photo of the Nemo Me Impune Lacessit Society (perhaps ironic but probably not, all eleven of the Impunies, as they called themselves, survived the explosion uninjured). The van was found in a nearby barn, wiped clean of prints and bleach-cleaned of DNA. The police have been inundated with calls from people eager to identify the perp, but none of the calls has produced results. Hopes of an early capture are being replaced by fears that the guy may not be done but only getting started. Holly hopes this isn’t so, but her experience with Brady Hartsfield makes her fear the worst. Best case scenario, she thinks (with a coldness that once would have been alien to her), he’s killed himself.

On Friday afternoon, as she’s finishing her report to Lake Fidelity, the phone rings. It’s her mother, and with news Holly has been dreading. She listens, she says the appropriate things, and she allows her mother to treat her as the child she thinks Holly still is (even though the purpose of this call will involve Holly acting like a grownup), asking if Holly is remembering to brush after every meal, if she is remembering to take her medication with food, if she is limiting her movies to four a week, etc., etc. Holly tries to ignore the headache her mother’s calls—and this call in particular—almost always bring on. She assures her mother that yes, she will be there on Sunday to help, and yes, she will be there by noon, so they can eat one more meal as a family.

My family, Holly thinks. My fracked-up family.

Because Jerome keeps his phone off when he’s working, she calls Tanya Robinson, Jerome and Barbara’s mom. Holly tells Tanya she won’t be able to eat Sunday dinner with them because she needs to go upstate. Kind of a family emergency. She explains, and Tanya says, “Oh, Holly. I’m so sorry to hear that, sweetie. Are you going to be all right?”

“Yes,” Holly says. It’s what she always says when someone asks her that horrible loaded question. She’s pretty sure she sounds okay, but as soon as she hangs up, she puts her hands over her face and begins to cry. It’s that sweetie that does it. To have someone call her, who was known in high school as Jibba-Jibba, sweetie.

To have that, at least, to come back to.

On Saturday night Holly plans her drive using the Waze app on her computer, factoring in a stop to pee and gas up her Prius. To get there by noon, she will have to leave at seven-thirty, which will give her time for a cup of tea (decaf), toast, and a boiled egg. With this groundwork laid to a nicety, she lies awake for two hours as she didn’t on the night after the Macready School blew up, and when she does sleep, she dreams of Chet Ondowsky. He is telling about the carnage he saw when he joined the first responders, and saying things he would never say on television. There was blood on the bricks, he says. There was a shoe with a foot still in it, he says. The little girl who cried for her mommy, he says, screamed in pain even though he tried to be gentle when he took her in his arms. He tells these things in his best just-the-facts voice, but as he talks he rends his clothes. Not just his suit coat pocket and sleeve, but first one lapel and then the other. He yanks off his tie and rips it in two. Then the shirt right down the front, popping off the buttons.

The dream either fades before he can go to work on the trousers of his suit, or her conscious mind refuses to remember it the next morning when her phone alarm goes off. In any case, she wakes feeling unrested, and she eats her egg and toast with no pleasure, just fueling up for what will be a trying day. She usually enjoys a road trip, but the prospect of this one sits on her shoulders like a physical weight.

Her little blue bag—what she thinks of as her notions bag—is by the door, packed with a clean change of clothes and her toiletries, in case she has to spend the night. She slides the strap onto her shoulder, takes the elevator down from her cozy little apartment, opens the door, and there is Jerome Robinson sitting on the front step. He’s drinking a Coke and his backpack with its JERRY GARCIA LIVES sticker is resting beside him.

“Jerome? What are you doing here?” And because she can’t help it: “And drinking Coke at seven-thirty in the morning, oough!”

“I’m going with you,” he says, and the look he gives her says that arguing will do no good. That’s okay, because she doesn’t want to.

“Thanks, Jerome,” Holly says. It’s hard, but she manages not to cry. “That’s very good of you.”

Jerome drives the first half of the journey, and at the gas-and-pee stop on the turnpike, they switch. Holly feels her sense of dread at what’s awaiting her (us, she corrects herself) starting to close in as they get closer to the Cleveland suburb of Covington. To keep it at bay, she asks Jerome how his project is going. His book.

“Of course, if you don’t want to talk about it, I know some authors don’t—”

But Jerome is willing enough. It began as a required assignment for a class called Sociology in Black and White. Jerome decided to write about his great-great-grandfather, born of former slaves in 1878. Alton Robinson spent his childhood and early adulthood in Memphis, where a thriving black middle class existed in the latter years of the nineteenth century. When yellow fever and white vigilante gangs struck at that nicely balanced sub-economy, much of the black community simply pulled up stakes, leaving the white folks they’d worked for to cook their own food, dispose of their own garbage, and wipe their own babies’ beshitted bottoms.

Alton settled in Chicago, where he worked in a meat-packing plant, saved his money, and opened a juke joint two years before Prohibition. Rather than close down when “the biddies started busting the barrels” (this from a letter Alton wrote to his sister—Jerome has found a trove of letters and documents in storage), he changed locations and opened a South Side speakeasy that became known as the Black Owl.

The more Jerome discovered about Alton Robinson—his dealings with Alphonse Capone, his three escapes from assassination (the fourth did not go so well), his probable sideline in blackmail, his political kingmaking—the more his paper grew, and the more his work for other classes seemed insignificant in comparison. He turned the long essay in and received a laudatory grade.

“Which was sort of a joke,” he tells Holly as they roll into the last fifty miles of their journey. “That paper was just, you know, the tip of the iceberg. Or like the first verse in one of those endless English ballads. But by then I was halfway through spring semester, and I had to pick up the slack in my other courses. Make the mater and pater proud, you know.”

“That was very adult of you,” says the woman who feels she never succeeded in making her mother and late father proud. “But it must have been hard.”

“It was hard,” Jerome says. “I was on fire, kiddo. Wanted to drop everything else and chase great-great-Grandpa Alton. That man had a fabulous life. Diamonds and pearl stickpins and a mink coat. But letting it age a little was the right thing to do. When I went back to it—this was last June—I saw how it had a theme, or could have, if I did the job right. Have you ever read The Godfather?”

“Read the book, saw the movie,” Holly says promptly. “All three movies.” She feels compelled to add, “The last one isn’t very good.”

“Do you remember the epigraph of the novel?”

She shakes her head.

“It’s from Balzac. ‘Behind every great fortune there is a crime.’ That was the theme I saw, even though the fortune ran through his fingers long before he was shot down in Cicero.”

“It really is like The Godfather,” Holly marvels, but Jerome shakes his head.

“It’s not, because black people can never be American in the same way Italian and Irish people can. Black skin withstands the melting pot. I want to say…” He pauses. “I want to say that discrimination is the father of crime. I want to say that Alton Robinson’s tragedy was that he thought that through crime he could achieve some sort of equality, and that turned out to be a chimera. In the end he wasn’t killed because he got crossways with Paulie Ricca, who was Capone’s successor, but because he was black. Because he was a nigger.”

Jerome, who used to irritate Bill Hodges (and scandalize Holly) by sometimes doing a minstrel show colored accent—all yassuh boss and I sho do, suh!—spits this last word.

“Do you have a title?” Holly asks quietly. They are nearing the Covington exit.

“I think so, yeah. But I didn’t think it up.” Jerome looks embarrassed. “Listen, Hollyberry, if I tell you something, do you promise to keep it secret? From Pete, and from Barb and my parents? Especially them.”

“Of course. I can keep a secret.”

Jerome knows this is true, but still hesitates for a moment before plunging. “My prof in that Black and White sociology class sent my paper to an agent in New York. Elizabeth Austin is her name. She was interested, so after Thanksgiving I sent her the hundred or so pages I’ve written since summer. Ms. Austin thinks it’s publishable, and not just by an academic press, which was about as high as I was shooting. She thinks one of the majors might be interested. She suggested calling it by the name of great-great-Gramp’s speakeasy. Black Owl: The Rise and Fall of an American Gangster.”

“Jerome, that’s wonderful! I bet tons of people would be interested in a book with a title like that.”

“Black people, you mean.”

“No! All kinds! Do you think only white people liked The Godfather?” Then a thought strikes her. “Only how would your family feel about it?” She’s thinking of her own family, which would be horrified to have such a skeleton dragged out of the closet.

“Well,” Jerome says, “they both read the paper and loved it. Of course, that’s different from a book, isn’t it? One that might be read by a lot more people than a teacher. But it’s four generations back, after all…”

Jerome sounds troubled. She sees him look at her, but only out of the corner of her eye; Holly always faces directly forward when she’s driving. Those movie sequences where the driver looks at his passenger for seconds at a time while delivering dialogue drive her absolutely crazy. She always wants to shout, Look at the road, dummy! Do you want to hit a kid while you’re discussing your love life?

“What do you think, Hols?”

She considers this carefully. “I think you should show your parents as much as you showed the agent,” she says at last. “Listen to what they say. Get a read on their feelings and respect them. Then… push ahead. Write it all down—the good, the bad, and the ugly.” They’ve come to the Covington exit. Holly puts on her blinker. “I’ve never written a book, so I can’t say for sure, but I think it takes a certain amount of bravery. So that’s what you should do, I think. Be brave.”

And that’s what I need to be now, she thinks. Home is only two miles away, and home is where the heartache is.

The Gibney house is in a development called Meadowbrook Estates. As Holly weaves her way through the spiderweb of streets (to the home of the spider, she thinks, and is immediately ashamed of thinking about her mother that way), Jerome says, “If I lived here and came home drunk, I’d probably spend at least an hour finding the right house.”

He’s right. They’re New England saltboxes, only set apart from one another by different colors… which wouldn’t be much help at night, even with the streetlights. There are probably different flowerbeds in the warm months, but now the yards of Meadowbrook Estates are covered in crusty scarves of old snow. Holly could tell Jerome that her mother likes the sameness, it makes her feel safe (Charlotte Gibney has her own issues), but doesn’t. She’s gearing up for what promises to be a stressful lunch and an even more stressful afternoon. Moving day, she thinks. Oh God.

She pulls into the driveway of 42 Lily Court, kills the engine, and turns to Jerome. “You need to be prepared. Mother says he’s gotten a lot worse in the last few weeks. Sometimes she exaggerates, but I don’t think she is this time.”

“I understand the situation.” He gives one of her hands a brief squeeze. “I’ll be fine. You just take care of yourself, okay?”

Before she can reply, the door of Number 42 opens and Charlotte Gibney comes out, still in her good church clothes. Holly raises one hand in a tentative hello gesture, which Charlotte doesn’t return.

“Come inside,” she says. “You’re late.”

Holly knows she’s late. By five minutes.

As they approach the door, Charlotte gives Jerome a what’s-he-doing-here look.

“You know Jerome,” Holly says. It’s true; they’ve met half a dozen times, and Charlotte always favors him with that same look. “He came to keep me company, and lend moral support.”

Jerome gives Charlotte his most charming smile. “Hello, Mrs. Gibney. I invited myself along. Hope you don’t mind.”

To this Charlotte simply says, “Come in, I’m freezing out here.” As though it had been their idea for her to come out on the stoop rather than her own.

Number 42, where Charlotte has lived with her brother since her husband died, is overheated and smelling so strongly of potpourri that Holly hopes she won’t begin coughing. Or gagging, which would be even worse. There are four side tables in the little hall, narrowing the passage to the living room enough to make the trip perilous, especially since each table is crammed with the little china figurines that are Charlotte’s passion: elves, gnomes, trolls, angels, clowns, bunnies, ballerinas, doggies, kitties, snowmen, Jack and Jill (with a bucket each), and the pièce de la résistance, a Pillsbury Doughboy.

“Lunch is on the table,” Charlotte says. “Just fruit cup and cold chicken, I’m afraid—but there’s cake for dessert—and… and…”

Her eyes fill with tears, and when Holly sees them, she feels—in spite of all the work she’s done in therapy—a surge of resentment that’s close to hate. Maybe it is hate. She thinks of all the times she cried in her mother’s presence and was told to go to her room “until you get that out of your system.” She feels an urge to throw those very words in her mother’s face now, but gives Charlotte an awkward hug instead. As she does, she feels how close the bones lie under that thin and flabby flesh, and realizes her mother is old. How can she dislike an old woman who so obviously needs her help? The answer seems to be quite easily.

After a moment Charlotte pushes Holly away with a little grimace, as though she smelled something bad. “Go see your uncle and tell him lunch is ready. You know where he is.”

Indeed Holly does. From the living room comes the sound of professionally excited announcers doing a football pregame show. She and Jerome go single-file, so as not to risk upsetting any members of the china gallery.

“How many of these does she have?” Jerome murmurs.

Holly shakes her head. “I don’t know. She always liked them, but it’s gotten out of hand since my father died.” Then, lifting her voice and making it artificially bright: “Hi, Uncle Henry! All ready for lunch?”

Uncle Henry clearly didn’t make the run to church. He’s slumped in his La-Z-Boy, wearing a Purdue sweatshirt with some of his breakfast egg on it, and a pair of jeans, the kind with the elasticized waist. They are riding low, showing a pair of boxer shorts with tiny blue pennants on them. He looks from the TV to his visitors. For a moment he’s totally blank, then he smiles. “Janey! What are you doing here?”

That goes through Holly like a glass dagger, and her mind flashes momentarily to Chet Ondowsky, with his scratched hands and torn suit coat pocket. And why would it not? Janey was her cousin, bright and vivacious, all the things Holly could never be, and she was Bill Hodges’s girlfriend for awhile, before she died in another explosion, victim of a bomb planted by Brady Hartsfield and meant for Bill himself.

“It’s not Janey, Uncle Henry.” Still with that artificial brightness, the kind usually saved for cocktail parties. “It’s Holly.”

There’s another of those blank pauses as rusty relays go about business they used to do lickety-split. Then he nods. “Sure. It’s my eyes, I guess. From looking at the TV too long.”

His eyes, Holly thinks, are hardly the point. Janey is years in her grave. That’s the point.

“Come here, girl, and give me a hug.”

She does so, as briefly as possible. When she pulls back, he’s staring at Jerome. “Who’s this…” For a terrible moment she thinks he’s going to finish by saying this black boy or maybe even this jigaboo, but he doesn’t. “This guy? I thought you were seeing that cop.”

This time she doesn’t bother to correct him about who she is. “It’s Jerome. Jerome Robinson. You’ve met him before.”

“Have I? Mind must be going.” He says it not even as a joke, just as a kind of conversational placeholder, without realizing that’s exactly the case.

Jerome shakes his hand. “How you doing, sir?”

“Not bad for an old fella,” Uncle Henry says, and before he can say more, Charlotte calls—practically shrieks—from the kitchen that lunch is on.

“His master’s voice,” Henry says good-humoredly, and when he stands up, his pants fall down. He doesn’t seem to realize.

Jerome gives Holly a tiny jerk of the head toward the kitchen. She gives him a doubtful look in return, but goes.

“Let me just help you with those,” Jerome says. Uncle Henry doesn’t reply but only stares at the TV with his hands dangling at his sides while Jerome pulls up his pants. “There you go. Ready to eat?”

Uncle Henry looks at Jerome, startled, as if just registering his presence. Which is probably true. “I don’t know about you, son,” he says.

“Don’t know what about me, sir?” Jerome asks, taking Uncle Henry by the shoulder and getting him turned toward the kitchen.

“The cop was too old for Janey, but you look too young.” He shakes his head. “I just don’t know.”

They get through lunch, with Charlotte scolding Uncle Henry along and sometimes helping him with his food. Twice she leaves the table and comes back wiping her eyes. Through analysis and therapy, Holly has come to realize that her mother is almost as terrified of life as Holly herself used to be, and that her most unpleasant characteristics—her need to criticize, her need to control situations—arise from that fear. Here is a situation she can’t control.

And she loves him, Holly thinks. That, too. He’s her brother, she loves him, and now he’s leaving. In more ways than one.

When lunch is finished, Charlotte banishes the men to the living room (“Watch your game, boys,” she tells them) while she and Holly do up the few dishes. As soon as they are alone, Charlotte tells Holly to have her friend move her car so they can get Henry’s out of the garage. “His things are in the trunk, all packed and ready to go.” She’s speaking out of the corner of her mouth like an actress in a bad spy movie.

“He thinks I’m Janey,” Holly says.

“Of course he does, Janey was always his favorite,” Charlotte says, and Holly feels another of those glass daggers go in.

Charlotte Gibney might not have been pleased to see Holly’s friend turn up with her daughter, but she’s more than willing to allow Jerome to pilot Uncle Henry’s big old boat of a Buick (125,000 miles on the clock) to the Rolling Hills Elder Care Center, where a room has been waiting since the first of December. Charlotte was hoping her brother could remain at home through Christmas, but now he’s begun to wet the bed, which is bad, and to wander the neighborhood, sometimes in his bedroom slippers, which is worse.

When they arrive, Holly doesn’t see a single rolling hill in the vicinity, just a Wawa store and a decrepit bowling alley across the street. A man and a woman in blue Care Center jackets are leading a line of six or eight golden oldies back from the bowling alley, the man holding up his hands to stop traffic until the group is safely across. The inmates (not the right word, but it’s the one that occurs to her) are holding hands, making them look like prematurely aged children on a field trip.

“Is this the movies?” Uncle Henry asks as Jerome wheels the Buick into the turnaround in front of the Care Center entrance. “I thought we were going to the movies.”

He’s riding shotgun. At the house, he actually tried to get in behind the wheel until Charlotte and Holly got him turned around. No more driving for Uncle Henry. Charlotte filched her brother’s driver’s license from his wallet in June, during one of Henry’s increasingly long naps. Then sat at the kitchen table and cried over it.

“I’m sure they’ll have movies here,” Charlotte says. She’s smiling, and biting her lip as she does it.

They are met in the lobby by a Mrs. Braddock, who treats Uncle Henry like an old friend, grasping both of his hands and telling him how glad she is “to have you with us.”

“With us for what?” Henry asks, looking around. “I have to go to work soon. The paperwork is all messed up. That Hellman is worse than useless.”

“Do you have his things?” Mrs. Braddock asks Charlotte.

“Yes,” Charlotte says, still smiling and biting her lip. Soon she may be crying. Holly knows the signs.

“I’ll get his suitcases,” Jerome says quietly, but there’s nothing wrong with Uncle Henry’s ears.

“What suitcases? What suitcases?”

“We have a very nice room for you, Mr. Tibbs,” Mrs. Braddock says. “Plenty of sunsh—”

“They call me Mister Tibbs!” Uncle Henry bellows in a very credible Sidney Poitier imitation that makes the young woman at the desk and a passing orderly look around, startled. Uncle Henry laughs and turns to his niece. “How many times did we watch that movie, Holly? Half a dozen?”

This time he got her name right, which makes her feel even worse. “More,” Holly says, and knows she may soon cry herself. She and her uncle watched a lot of movies together. Janey may have been his favorite, but Holly was his movie-buddy, the two of them sitting on the couch with a bowl of popcorn between them.

“Yes,” Uncle Henry says. “Yes indeed.” But he’s losing it again. “Where are we? Where are we really?”

The place where you’re probably going to die, Holly thinks. Unless they take you to the hospital to do it. Outside, she sees Jerome unloading a couple of tartan suitcases. Also a suit bag. Will her uncle ever wear a suit again? Yes, probably… but only once.

“Let’s look at your room,” Mrs. Braddock says. “You’re going to like it, Henry!”

She takes his arm, but Henry resists. He looks at his sister. “What’s going on here, Charlie?”

Don’t cry now, Holly thinks, hold it in, don’t you dare. But oh poop, here come the waterworks, and in full flow.

“Why are you crying, Charlie?” Then: “I don’t want to be here!” It’s not his stentorian “Mister Tibbs” bellow, more of a whine. Like a kid realizing he’s about to get a shot. He turns from Charlotte’s tears to see Jerome coming in with his luggage. “Here! Here! What are you doing with those traps? They’re mine!”

“Well,” Jerome says, but doesn’t seem to know how to go on.

The oldies are filing in from their trip to the bowling alley, where Holly is sure a great many gutter balls were rolled. The employee who raised his hands to stop traffic joins a nurse who seems to have appeared from nowhere. She is broad of beam and thick of bicep.

These two close in on Henry and take him gently by the arms. “Let’s go this way,” says the bowling alley guy. “Have a look at the new crib, brother. See what you think.”

“Think of what?” Henry asks, but he begins to walk.

“You know something?” the nurse says. “The game’s on in the common room, and we’ve got the biggest TV you’ve ever seen. You’ll feel like you’re on the fifty-yard line. We’ll take a quick gander at your room, then you can watch it.”

“Plenty of cookies, too,” Mrs. Braddock says. “Fresh baked.”

“Is it the Browns?” Henry asks. They are approaching double doors. He will soon disappear behind them. Where, Holly thinks, he’ll begin living the dimmed-out remainder of his life.

The nurse laughs. “No, no, not the Browns, they’re out of it. The Ravens. Peck ’em and deck ’em!”

“Good,” Henry says, then adds something he never on God’s earth would have said before his neural relays began to rust out. “Those Browns are all a bunch of cunts.”

Then he is gone.

Mrs. Braddock reaches into the pocket of her dress and hands Charlotte a tissue. “It’s perfectly natural for them to be upset on moving-in day. He’ll settle down. I have some more paperwork for you if you feel up to it, Mrs. Gibney.”

Charlotte nods. Over the sodden bouquet of the tissue, her eyes are red and streaming. This is the woman who scolded me for crying in public, Holly marvels. The one who told me to stop trying to be the center of attention. This is payback, and I could have done without it.

Another orderly (the woods are full of them, Holly thinks) has materialized and is loading Uncle Henry’s faded tartan bags and his Brooks Brothers suiter onto a trolley, as if this place were just another Holiday Inn or Motel 6. Holly is staring at this and holding back her own tears when Jerome takes her gently by the arm and leads her outside.

They sit on a bench in the cold. “I want a cigarette,” Holly says. “First time in a long while.”

“Pretend,” he says, and exhales a plume of frosty air.

She inhales and blows out her own cloud of vapor. She pretends.

They don’t stay overnight, although Charlotte assures them there’s plenty of room. Holly doesn’t like to think of her mother spending this first night alone, but she can’t bear to stay. It isn’t the house where Holly grew up, but the woman who lives here is the woman she grew up with. Holly is very different from the pale, chain-smoking, poetry-writing (bad poetry) girl who grew up in Charlotte Gibney’s shadow, but that’s hard to remember in her presence, because her mother still sees her as the damaged child who went everywhere with her shoulders hunched and her eyes cast down.

It’s Holly driving the first leg this time, and Jerome does the rest. It’s long after dark when they see the lights of the city. Holly has been dozing in and out, thinking in a disconnected way about how Uncle Henry mistook her for Janey, the woman who was blown up in Bill Hodges’s car. That leads her wandering mind back to the explosion at Macready Middle School, and the correspondent with the torn pocket and the brick dust on his hands. She remembers thinking that there was something different about him that night.

Well sure, she thinks as she drifts toward another doze. In between the first bulletin that afternoon and the special report that night, Ondowsky helped search the rubble, thus transitioning from reporting the story to becoming a part of it. That would change anyb—

Suddenly her eyes snap open and she sits bolt upright, startling Jerome. “What? Are you all ri—”

“The mole!”

He doesn’t know what she’s talking about and Holly doesn’t care. It probably doesn’t mean anything, anyway, but she knows Bill Hodges would have congratulated her on her observation. And on her memory, the thing Uncle Henry is now losing.

“Chet Ondowsky,” she said. “The news correspondent who was first on the scene after the school blew up. In the afternoon he had a mole beside his mouth, but when the special report came on that night at ten, it was gone.”

“Thank God for Max Factor, huh?” Jerome says as he leaves the expressway.

He’s right, of course, it even occurred to her when the news bulletin came on: crooked tie, no time to cover the mole with makeup. Later on, when Ondowsky’s support crew arrived, they took care of that. Still, it’s a little strange. Holly is sure a makeup person would have left the scratches—they were good TV, made the correspondent look heroic—but wouldn’t the makeup guy or gal have cleaned some of the brick dust from around Ondowsky’s mouth in the process of covering the mole?

“Holly?” Jerome asks. “Are you overcranking again?”

“Yes,” she says. “Too much stress, not enough rest.”

“Let it go.”

“Yes,” she says. It’s good advice. She intends to follow it.

December 14, 2020

Holly expected another night of tossing and turning, but she sleeps right through until her phone alarm (“Orinoco Flow”) gently wakes her. She feels rested, fully herself again. She slips to her knees, does her few morning meditations, then settles into her tiny breakfast nook for a bowl of oatmeal, a cup of yogurt, and a big mug of Constant Comment.

As she enjoys her little repast, she reads the local paper on her iPad. News of the Macready School bombing has slipped from the front page (dominated, as usual, by the president’s idiotic shenanigans) to the National News section. This is because there have been no fresh developments. More victims have been released from the hospital; two kids, one of them a talented basketball player, remain in critical condition; the police claim to be following a number of leads. Holly doubts it. There is nothing about Chet Ondowsky, and he’s the first person she thought of when Enya’s high notes urged her back to wakefulness. Not her mother, not her uncle. Was she dreaming about Ondowsky? If she was, she can’t remember.

She exits the newspaper, opens Safari, and types in Ondowsky’s name. The first thing she learns is that his real first name is Charles, not Chester, and he’s been with Pittsburgh’s NBC affiliate for the last two years. His stated beat is charmingly alliterative: crime, community, and consumer fraud.

There are any number of videos. Holly clicks on the most recent, titled “WPEN Welcomes Chet and Fred Home.” Ondowsky enters the newsroom (wearing a new suit), followed by a young man wearing a plaid shirt and khaki pants with big pockets on the sides. They are greeted by a wave of applause from the station’s staff, both the on-air people and the studio crew. Looks like forty or fifty in all. The young man—Fred—grins. Ondowsky reacts with surprise, then pleasure of an appropriately modest sort. He even applauds them in return. A woman dressed to the nines, probably a news anchor, comes forward. “Chet, you’re our hero,” she says, and kisses him on the cheek. “You too, Freddy.” No kiss for the young man though, just a quick pat on the shoulder.

“I’ll rescue you anytime, Peggy,” Ondowsky says, drawing laughter and more applause. That’s where the clip ends.

Holly watches some more clips, choosing at random. In one, Chet stands outside a burning apartment building. In another, he’s at the site of a multiple vehicle pileup on a bridge. In the third, he’s reporting on the groundbreaking of a new YMCA, complete with ceremonial silver spade and a soundtrack featuring the Village People. A fourth, from just before Thanksgiving, shows him knocking repeatedly on the door of a so-called “pain clinic” in Sewickley, and getting nothing for his pains but a muffled “No questions, go away!”

Busy guy, busy guy, Holly thinks. And in none of these clips does Charles “Chet” Ondowsky have a mole. Because it’s always covered with makeup, she tells herself as she rinses her few dishes in the sink. It was just that once, when he had to get on the air in a hurry, that it showed. And why are you worrying about this, anyway? It’s like when some annoying pop song turns into an earworm.

Because she’s up early, she has time for an episode of The Good Place before leaving for work. She goes into her television room, picks up the remote, then just holds it, staring at the blank screen. After a bit, she puts the remote down and goes back into the kitchen. She powers up her iPad and finds the clip of Chet Ondowsky doing his investigative song and dance about the Sewickley pain clinic.

After the guy inside tells Chet to get lost, the story goes to Ondowsky in a medium close-up, holding the mike (WPEN logo prominently displayed) to his mouth and smiling grimly. “You heard it, self-identified ‘pain doctor’ Stefan Muller refusing to answer questions and telling us to go away. We did, but we’ll keep coming back and asking questions until we get some answers. This is Chet Ondowsky, in Sewickley. Back to you, David.”

Holly watches it again. On this run-through she freezes the picture just as Ondowsky is saying we’ll keep coming back. The mike dips a bit at that point, giving her a good view of his mouth. She spreads her fingers to zoom the image until his mouth fills the screen. There is no mole there, she’s sure of it. She’d see its ghost even if it was covered with foundation and powder.

Thoughts of The Good Place have left her mind.

Ondowsky’s initial report from the scene of the explosion isn’t on the WPEN site, but it is on the NBC News site. She goes to it and once more spreads her fingers, enlarging the image until the screen is filled with Chet Ondowsky’s mouth. And guess what, that isn’t a mole at all. Is it dirt? She doesn’t think so. She thinks it’s hair. A spot he missed shaving, maybe.

Or maybe something else.

Maybe the remains of a fake mustache.

Now thoughts of getting in to the office early so she can check the answering machine and do some peaceful paperwork before Pete comes in have also left her mind. She gets up and walks twice around the kitchen, her heart beating hard in her chest. What she’s thinking can’t be true, it’s totally stupid, but what if it is true?

She googles Macready Middle School Explosion and finds the still of the delivery guy/bomber. She uses her fingers to enlarge the picture, focusing on the guy’s mustache. She’s thinking about those cases you read about from time to time where some serial arsonist turns out to be a fireman, either from the responding department or from a volunteer crew. There was even a true crime book about that, Fire Lover, by Joseph Wambaugh. She read it when she was in high school. It’s like some fracked-up Munchausen by proxy.

Too monstrous. Can’t be.

But Holly finds herself wondering for the first time how Chet Ondowsky got to the scene of the explosion so fast, beating all the other reporters by… well, she doesn’t know just how long, but he was there first. She knows that.

But wait, does she? She didn’t see any other reporters doing stand-ups during that first bulletin, but can she be sure?

She rummages in her bag and finds her phone. Since the case she and Ralph Anderson shared—the one that ended in gunfire at the Marysville Hole—she and Ralph often talk, and it’s usually early in the morning. Sometimes he calls her; sometimes she’s the one who reaches out. Her finger hovers over his number but doesn’t descend. Ralph is on an unexpected (and well deserved) vacation with his wife and son, and even if he’s not still sleeping at seven in the morning, it’s his family time. Bonus family time. Does she want to bother him with this on so little?

Maybe she can use her computer and figure it out for herself. Set her mind at rest. She learned from the best, after all.

Holly goes to her desktop, calls up the picture of the delivery guy/bomber, and prints it out. Then she selects several headshots of Chet Ondowsky—he’s a news guy, so there are plenty—and prints them, as well. She takes all of them out to the kitchen, where the morning light is strongest. She arranges them in a square, the bomber’s picture in the middle, the Ondowsky shots all around it. She studies them carefully for a full minute. Then she closes her eyes, counts to thirty, and studies them again. She lets out a sigh that’s a little disappointed and exasperated, but mostly relieved.

She remembers a conversation she had with Bill once, a month or two before the pancreatic cancer finished her ex-cop partner off. She asked if he read detective novels, and Bill said only Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch stories and the 87th Precinct novels by Ed McBain. He said those books were based on actual police work. Most of the others were “Agatha Christie bullshit.”

He told her one thing about the 87th Precinct books that had stuck with her. “McBain said there are only two types of human faces, pig faces and fox faces. I’d add that sometimes you see a man or woman with a horse face, but they’re rare. Mostly yeah, it’s pigs and foxes.”

Holly finds this a useful yardstick as she studies the headshots on her kitchen table. Both men are okay looking (wouldn’t crack a mirror, her mother might have said), but in different ways. The delivery guy/bomber—Holly decides to call him George, just for the sake of convenience—has a fox face: rather narrow, the lips thin, the chin small and tight. The narrowness of the face is accentuated by the way George’s black hair starts high on the temples, and how it’s short and combed tight to the skull. Ondowsky, on the other hand, has a pig face. Not in any gross way, but it’s round rather than narrow. His hair is light brown. His nose is broader, his lips fuller. Chet Ondowsky’s eyes are round, and if he’s wearing corrective lenses, they are contacts. George’s eyes (what she can see of them behind his glasses) look like they might be tilted at the corners. The skin tones are different, too. Ondowsky is your textbook white guy, with ancestors probably hailing from Poland or Hungary or someplace like that. George the Bomber has a slight olive blush to his skin. To top it off, Ondowsky has a cleft chin, like Kirk Douglas. George does not.

They probably aren’t even the same height, Holly thinks, although of course it’s impossible to tell for sure.

Nevertheless, she grabs a Magic Marker from the mug on the kitchen counter and doodles a mustache on one of the Ondowsky headshots. She puts this one next to the security camera still of George. It doesn’t change anything. These two can’t possibly be the same guy.

Still… as long as she’s here…

She returns again to her office computer (still in her pajamas) and begins searching for other early coverage that would have been fed from the affiliates to the networks—ABC, FOX, CBS. In two of them she can see the WPEN newsvan in the background. In the third, she sees Ondowsky’s cameraman winding up electrical cable, getting ready to move to a new location. His head is bent but Holly recognizes him anyway, by the baggy khakis with the side pockets. It’s Fred from the welcome home video. Ondowsky isn’t in that one, so he’s probably already helping in the rescue efforts.

She goes back to Google and finds another station, an independent, that was probably on the scene. She plugs WPIT Breaking News Macready School into her search engine and finds a video of a young woman who looks barely old enough to be out of high school. She’s doing her stand-up beside the giant metal pine cone with its blinking Christmas lights. Her station’s newsvan is there, parked in the turnout behind a Subaru sedan.

The young reporter is clearly horrified, stumbling over her words, doing a clumsy job of reporting that will never get her hired (or even noticed) by one of the bigger stations. Holly doesn’t care. When the young woman’s cameraman zooms in on the school’s broken-out side, focusing on EMTs, police, and plain old civilians digging in the wreckage and carrying stretchers, she gleeps (Bill’s word) Chet Ondowsky. He’s digging like a dog, bent over and tossing bricks and broken boards between his spread legs. He came by those cuts on his hands honestly.

“He was there first,” Holly says. “Maybe not before the first first responders, but before any of the other TV—”

Her phone rings. It’s still in the bedroom, so she answers on her desktop, a little fillip Jerome added on one of his visits.

“Are you on your way?” Pete asks.

“To where?” Holly is honestly bewildered. She feels like she’s been yanked out of a dream.

“Toomey Ford,” he says. “Did you really forget? That’s not like you, Holly.”

It’s not, but she has. Tom Toomey, who owns the dealership, is pretty sure one of his salesmen—Dick Ellis, a star performer—has been under-reporting his accounts, possibly to provide for a little dolly he’s seeing on the side, possibly to support a drug habit. (“He sniffs a lot,” Toomey said. “Claims it’s the air conditioning. In December? Give me a break.”) This is Ellis’s day off, which means it’s a perfect opportunity for Holly to run some numbers, do some comparisons, and see if something’s wrong.

She could make an excuse to Pete, but the excuse would be a lie, and she doesn’t do that. Unless she absolutely has to, anyway. “I did forget. I’m sorry.”

“Want me to go out there?”

“No.” If the numbers support Toomey’s suspicions, Pete will have to go out later and confront Ellis. Being ex-police himself, he’s good at that. Holly, not so much. “Tell Mr. Toomey I’ll meet him for lunch, wherever he wants, and Finders will pick up the tab.”

“Okay, but he’ll pick someplace expensive.” A pause. “Holly, are you chasing something?”

Is she? And why did she think of Ralph Anderson so quickly? Is there something she’s not telling herself?

“Holly? Still there?”

“Yes,” she says, “I’m here. I just overslept.”

So. Lying after all.

Holly takes a quick shower, then dresses in one of her fade-into-the-woodwork business suits. Chet Ondowsky stays on her mind all the while. It occurs to her that she might know a way to answer the major question that’s nagging at her, so she goes back to her computer and opens Facebook. No sign that Chet Ondowsky does that one, or Instagram, either. Unusual for a TV personality. They usually love social media.

Holly tries Twitter, and bingo, there he is: Chet Ondowsky @condowsky1.

The school explosion happened at 2:19. Ondowsky’s first tweet from the scene came over an hour later, and this doesn’t surprise Holly: busy-busy-busy was condowsky1. The tweet reads, Macready School. Horrible tragedy. 15 dead so far, maybe many more. Pray, Pittsburgh, pray. It’s heartrending, but Holly’s heart isn’t rent. She’s gotten very tired of all the “thoughts and prayers” bullpoop, maybe because it seems too pat, somehow, probably because she’s not interested in Ondowsky’s aftermath tweets. They are not what she’s looking for.

She becomes a time traveler, scrolling back along Ondowsky’s feed to before the explosion happened, and at 1:46 P.M. she finds a photograph of a retro diner with a parking lot in the foreground. The neon sign in the window says WE’VE GOT HOME COOKIN’, GOOD LOOKIN’! Ondowsky’s tweet is below the picture. Just time for coffee and pie at Clauson’s before off to Eden. See my report on the World’s Largest Garage Sale on PEN tonight at 6!

Holly googles Clauson’s Diner and finds it in Pierre Village, Pennsylvania. A further check on Google (what did we ever do without it, she wonders) shows her that Pierre Village is less than fifteen miles from Pineborough and the Macready School. Which explains how he and his cameraman got there first. He was on his way to cover the World’s Largest Garage Sale in a town called Eden. A further check shows her that Eden Township is ten miles north of Pierre Village, and about the same distance from Pineborough. He just happened to be in the right place—near it, anyway—at the right time.

Besides, she’s pretty sure the local police (or maybe the investigators from ATF) have already asked both Ondowsky and Fred the cameraman about their fortuitous arrival, not because either is an actual suspect but because the authorities will be crossing every t and dotting every i in a bombing situation where there have been multiple fatalities and casualties.

Her phone is now in her handbag. She takes it out, calls Tom Toomey, and asks if it’s too late for her to come by the dealership and look at some figures. Maybe have a peek at the suspected salesman’s computer?

“Absolutely,” Toomey tells her. “But I had my face fixed for lunch at DeMasio’s. Their fettuccini alfredo’s amazing. Is that still part of the deal?”

“Absolutely,” Holly says, inwardly wincing as she thinks of the expense slip she will be filling out later—DeMasio’s isn’t cheap. As she goes out, she tells herself to think of it as penance for lying to Pete. Lies are a slippery slope, each one usually leading to two more.

Tom Toomey devours his fettuccini alfredo with a napkin tucked into the collar of his shirt, eating and slurping with abandon, and follows it up with a mixed-nut panna cotta. Holly has an antipasto and refuses dessert, settling for a cup of decaf (she eschews caffeine after 8 A.M.).

“You really should have dessert,” Toomey says. “It’s a celebration. Looks like you saved me a bundle.”

“We did,” Holly says. “The firm. Pete will get Ellis to own up and there’ll be at least some restitution. That should draw a line under it.”

“There you go! So come on,” he coaxes. Selling seems to be his default position. “Have something sweet. Treat yourself.” As if she’s the one who just got the scoop on a cheating employee.

Holly shakes her head and tells him she’s full. The fact is she wasn’t hungry when she sat down, although her oatmeal was hours ago. Her mind keeps returning to Chet Ondowsky. Her earworm.

“Watching your figure, I guess, huh?”

“Yes,” Holly says, which isn’t quite a lie; she watches her calorie intake, and her figure takes care of itself. Not that she has anyone to watch it for. Mr. Toomey should be watching his own figure, he’s digging his grave with his fork and spoon, but it isn’t her place to tell him that.

“You should bring in your lawyer and a forensic accountant if you plan to prosecute Mr. Ellis,” she says. “My figures won’t be enough in court.”

“You betcha.” Toomey concentrates on his panna cotta, demolishing what’s left, then looks up. “I don’t get it, Holly. I thought you’d be more pleased. You nailed a bad guy.”

How bad the salesman is or isn’t would depend on why he’s been chipping away money on the side, but that isn’t Holly’s business. She only gives Toomey what Bill used to call her Mona Lisa smile.

“Something else on your mind?” Toomey asks. “Another case?”

“Not at all,” Holly replies, which is also not a lie, not really; the Macready School explosion is also none of her business. She has no skin in the game, Jerome would say. But that mole that wasn’t a mole stays on her mind. Everything about Chet Ondowsky seems legit except for the thing that got her wondering about him in the first place.

There is a reasonable explanation, she thinks as she motions for the waiter to bring the check. You’re just not seeing it. Let it go.

Just let it go.

The office is empty when she gets back. Pete has left a note on her computer that says Rattner spotted in a bar down by the lake. On my way. Call me if you need me. Herbert Rattner is a bail-jumper with a long history of not appearing when his cases (there have been many) are called in court. Holly mentally wishes Pete luck and goes to the files, which she—and Jerome, when he gets a chance—have been digitizing. It will keep her mind off Ondowsky, she thinks, but it doesn’t. After just fifteen minutes she gives up and goes to Twitter.

Curiosity killed the cat, she thinks, but satisfaction brought him back. I’ll just check this one thing, then return to the scut work.

She finds Ondowsky’s diner tweet. Before, she was concentrating on the words. Now it’s the photograph that she studies. Silver retro diner. Cute neon sign in the window. Parking in front. The lot is only half full, and nowhere does she see the WPEN newsvan.

“They might have parked around back,” she says. Maybe true—she has no way of knowing if there are more spaces behind the diner—but why do that when there were so many available spaces in front, just a few steps from the door?

She starts to exit the tweet, then stops and bends forward until her nose is almost touching the screen. Her eyes are wide. She feels the sense of satisfaction she gets when she finally thinks of the word that’s been giving her fits in a crossword, or when she finally sees where a troublesome piece goes into a jigsaw puzzle.

She highlights Ondowsky’s diner photo and slides it to one side. Then she finds the video of the inept young reporter doing her stand-up beside the giant pine cone. The indie station’s van—older and humbler than those of the network affiliates—is parked in the turnout behind a forest green Subaru sedan. Which means the Subaru was almost certainly there first, or the positions would be reversed. Holly freezes the video and pulls the diner photo as close as she can, and yes, there’s a forest green Subaru sedan in the diner parking lot. It’s not conclusive, there are plenty of Subarus on the road, but Holly knows what she knows. It’s the same one. It’s Ondowsky’s. He parked in the turnout and then hustled to the scene.

She’s so deep in the center of her head that when her phone rings, she gives a little scream. It’s Jerome. He wants to know if she has any lost dogs for him. Or lost kids—he says he feels ready to move up to the next rung on the ladder.

“No,” she says, “but you could…”

She stops short of asking him if he can track down any information about a WPEN cameraman named Fred, perhaps by posing as a blogger or a magazine writer. She should be able to track down Fred herself, using her trusty computer. And there’s something else. She doesn’t want Jerome involved in this. She won’t let herself think exactly why, but the feeling is strong.

“Could what?” he asks.

“I was going to say that if you wanted to go bar-hopping down by the lake, you could look for—”

“Love bar-hopping,” Jerome says. “Love it.”

“I’m sure you do, but you’d be looking for Pete, not drinking beer. See if he needs any help with a bail-jumper named Herbert Rattner. Rattner’s white, about fifty…”

“Neck tattoo of a hawk or something,” Jerome says. “Saw the photo on the bulletin board, Hollyberry.”

“He’s a non-violent offender, but be careful, just the same. If you see him, don’t approach him without Pete.”

“Got it, got it.” Jerome sounds excited. His first real crook.

“Be careful, Jerome.” She can’t help reiterating this. If anything happened to Jerome, it would wreck her. “And please don’t call me Hollyberry. It’s worn very thin.”

He promises, but she doubts if he means it.

Holly returns her attention to her computer, eyes ticking back and forth between the two forest green Subarus. It means nothing, she tells herself. You’re only thinking what you’re thinking because of what happened in Texas. Bill would call it Blue Ford Syndrome. If you bought a blue Ford, he said, you suddenly saw blue Fords everywhere. But this wasn’t a blue Ford, it was a green Subaru. And she can’t help what she is thinking.

There is no John Law for Holly that afternoon. By the time she leaves the office, she has more information, and she’s troubled.

At home, Holly makes herself a little meal and fifteen minutes later has forgotten what it was. She calls her mother to ask if she’s been to see Uncle Henry. Yes, Charlotte says. Holly asks how he’s doing. He’s confused, Charlotte says, but he seems to be adjusting. Holly has no idea if this is true, because her mother has a way of jiggering her view of the world until she’s seeing it the way she wants to see it.

“He’d like to see you,” Charlotte says, and Holly promises she’ll go as soon as she can—maybe this weekend. Knowing he’ll call her Janey, because Janey is the one he wants. The one he loves best and always will, even though Janey has been dead for six years. This isn’t self-pity, just the truth. You have to accept the truth.

“Have to accept the truth,” she says. “Have to, like it or not.”

With this in mind she picks up her phone, almost calls Ralph, and again keeps herself from doing it. Why spoil his time off just because the two of them bought a blue Ford down in Texas and now she’s seeing them everywhere?

Then she realizes she doesn’t have to talk to him, at least not in person. She gets her phone and a bottle of ginger ale and goes into the TV room. Here the walls are lined with books on one side and DVDs on the other, everything arranged in alphabetical order. She sits in her comfortable viewing chair, but instead of powering up the big-screen Samsung, she opens her phone’s recording app. She just looks at it for a few moments, then pushes the big red button.

“Hello, Ralph, it’s me. I’m recording this on December fourteenth. I don’t know if you’ll ever hear it, because if what I’m thinking turns out to be nothing, and it probably will, I’ll just delete it, but saying it out loud might, um, clarify my thoughts.”

She pauses the recording, thinking about how she should start.

“I know you remember what happened in that cave when we finally met the outsider face to face. He wasn’t used to being found out, was he? He asked what made me able to believe. It was Brady that made me able to do that, Brady Hartsfield, but the outsider didn’t know about Brady. He asked if it was because I’d seen another like him somewhere. Do you remember how he looked and sounded when he asked that? I do. Not just eager, greedy. He thought he was the only one. I thought so, too, I think we both did. But Ralph, I’m starting to wonder if there might be another one, after all. Not quite the same, but similar—the way dogs and wolves are similar, say. It might only be what my old friend Bill Hodges used to call Blue Ford Syndrome, but if I’m right, I need to do something about it. Don’t I?”

The question sounds plaintive, lost. She pauses the recording again, thinks about deleting that last, and decides not to. Plaintive and lost is exactly how she feels right now, and besides—Ralph will probably never hear this.

She goes again.

“Our outsider needed time to transform. There was a period of hibernation, weeks or months, while he changed from looking like one person to looking like another. He wore a chain of faces going back years, maybe even centuries. This guy, though… if what I’m thinking is true, he can change much faster, and I’m having trouble believing that. Which is kind of ironic. Do you remember what I said to you the night before we went after our perp? That you had to set your lifelong concept of reality aside? It was okay for the others not to believe, but you had to. I said if you didn’t believe we were probably going to die, and that would allow the outsider to keep moving along, wearing the faces of other men and leaving them to take the blame when more children died.”

She shakes her head, even laughs a little.

“I was like one of those revival preachers exhorting unbelievers to come to Jesus, wasn’t I? Only now I’m the one trying not to believe. Trying to tell myself it’s just paranoid Holly Gibney, jumping at shadows the way I used to before Bill came along and taught me to be brave.”

Holly takes a deep breath.

“The man I’m worried about is named Charles Ondowsky, although he goes by Chet. He’s a TV reporter, and his beat is what he calls the three Cs: crime, community, and consumer fraud. He does cover community affairs, stuff like groundbreaking ceremonies and the World’s Largest Garage Sale, and he covers consumer fraud—there’s even a segment on his station’s nightly news called Chet on Guard—but what he covers mostly is crime and disaster. Tragedy. Death. Pain. And if all that doesn’t remind you of the outsider who killed the boy in Flint City and the two little girls in Ohio, I’d be very surprised. Shocked, in fact.”

She pauses the recording long enough to take a big drink of her ginger ale—her throat is as dry as the desert—and lets out a resounding belch that makes her giggle. Feeling a little better, Holly pushes the record button and makes her report, just as she would when investigating any case—repo, lost dog, car salesman chipping six hundred dollars here, eight hundred there. Doing that is good. It’s like disinfecting a wound that has begun to show some minor but still troubling redness.

December 15, 2020

When she wakes up the next morning, Holly feels brand new, ready to work and also ready to put Chet Ondowsky and her paranoid suspicions about him behind her. Was it Freud or Dorothy Parker who once said that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar? Whichever one it was, sometimes a dark spot beside a reporter’s mouth is just hair or dirt that looks like hair. Ralph would tell her that if he ever heard her audio recording, which he almost certainly won’t. But it did the job; talking it out cleared her head. In that way it was like her therapy sessions with Allie. Because if Ondowsky could somehow morph into George the Bomber, then morph back into himself again, why would he leave a little piece of George’s mustache behind? The idea is ridiculous.

Or take the green Subaru. Yes, it belongs to Chet Ondowsky, she’s sure of that. She took it for granted that he and his cameraman (Fred Finkel is his name, finding that was a snap, no Jerome necessary) were traveling together in the station’s newsvan, but that was an assumption rather than a deduction, and Holly believes the path to hell is paved with faulty assumptions.

Now that her mind is rested, she can see that Ondowsky’s decision to travel alone is perfectly reasonable and perfectly innocent. He’s a star reporter at a big metro TV station. He’s Chet on Guard, for heaven’s sake, and as such he can get up a little later than the hoi polloi, maybe drop by the station, and later enjoy coffee and pie at his favorite diner while Fred the faithful cameraman goes to Eden to do B-roll (as a film buff, Holly knows that’s what they call it) and maybe even—if Fred has aspirations of rising in the news department hierarchy—pre-interview the people Ondowsky should talk to when he does his World’s Largest Garage Sale stand-up for the six o’clock news.

Only Ondowsky gets the news flash, maybe on a police scanner, about the school explosion and beats feet to the location. Fred Finkel does the same, driving the newsvan. Ondowsky parks beside that ridiculous pine cone and that’s where he and Finkel go to work. All perfectly explicable, no supernatural elements need apply. This is just a case of a private investigator hundreds of miles away who happens to be suffering from Blue Ford Syndrome.

Voilà.

Holly has a good day at the office. Rattner, that master criminal, has been spotted by Jerome in a bar with the amazing (to Holly, at least) name of the Edmund Fitzgerald Taproom, and escorted to county lockup by Pete Huntley. Pete is currently at the Toomey dealership where he will confront Richard Ellis.

Barbara Robinson, Jerome’s sister, drops by, telling Holly (rather smugly) that she has been excused from afternoon classes because she’s doing a report called Private Investigation: Fact vs. Fiction. She asks Holly a few questions (recording the answers on her own phone), then helps Holly with the files. At three o’clock, they settle down to watch John Law.

“I love this guy, he’s so jive,” Barbara says as Judge Law boogies his way to the bench.

“Pete doesn’t agree,” Holly says.

“Yes, but Pete is white,” Barbara says.

Holly looks at Barbara, wide-eyed. “I’m white.”

Barbara giggles. “Well, there’s white and there’s really white. Which is what Mr. Huntley is.”

They laugh together, then watch as Judge Law deals with a burglar who claims he didn’t do anything, he’s just a victim of racial profiling. Holly and Barbara give each other one of those telepathic looks—as if. Then they burst out laughing again.

A very good day, and Chet Ondowsky hardly crosses Holly’s mind until her phone rings at six o’clock that evening, just as she’s settling in to watch Animal House. That call, from Dr. Carl Morton, changes everything. When it finishes, Holly makes one of her own. An hour later, she receives another call. She takes notes on all three.

The next morning she’s on her way to Portland, Maine.

December 16, 2020

Holly gets up at three o’clock in the morning. She’s packed, she’s printed out her Delta ticket, she doesn’t have to be at the airport until seven and it’s a short ride, but she can’t sleep anymore. She would not, in fact, think she had slept at all except for her Fitbit, which registers two hours and thirty minutes. Shallow sleep and precious little of it, but she’s made do on less.

She has coffee and a cup of yogurt. Her bag (overhead bin–sized, of course) is waiting by the door. She calls the office and leaves a message for Pete, telling him she won’t be in the office today and maybe not for the rest of the week. It’s a personal matter. She’s about to end the call when something else occurs to her.

“Please have Jerome tell Barbara that she should watch The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, and Harper for the ‘fiction’ part of her private investigation report. All three movies are in my collection. Jerome knows where I keep the spare key to my apartment.”

With that done, she opens the recording app on her phone and begins to add to the report she is making for Ralph Anderson. She’s starting to believe she may have to send it to him, after all.

Although Allie Winters is Holly’s regular therapist, and has been for years, Holly did some research and sought out Carl Morton after she returned from her dark adventures in Oklahoma and Texas. Dr. Morton has written two books of case histories, similar to those of Oliver Sacks but too clinical for bestsellerdom. Still, she thought he was the right man, he was relatively close, and so she sought him out.

She had two fifty-minute sessions with Morton, enough to recount the complete and unvarnished story of her dealings with the outsider. She didn’t care if Dr. Morton believed all, some, or none. The important thing, as far as Holly was concerned, was getting it out before it could grow inside her like a malignant tumor. She didn’t go to Allie because she thought it would poison the work the two of them were doing on Holly’s other issues, and that was the last thing Holly wanted.

There was another reason for going to a secular confessor like Carl Morton. Have you seen another one like me somewhere? the outsider had asked. Holly hadn’t; Ralph hadn’t; but the legends of such creatures, known to Latinos on both sides of the Atlantic as El Cuco, had been around for centuries. So… maybe there were others.

Maybe there were.

Toward the end of their second and last session, Holly said, “May I tell you what I think you think? I know that’s very impertinent, but may I?”

Morton gave her a smile probably meant to be encouraging but which Holly read as indulgent—he wasn’t as hard to read as he perhaps liked to believe. “Go right ahead, Holly. This is your time.”

“Thank you.” She had folded her hands. “You must know that at least some of my story is true, because the events were well publicized, from the rape-murder of the Peterson boy in Oklahoma to the events—some of them, at least—that occurred at the Marysville Hole in Texas. The death of Detective Jack Hoskins, from Flint City, Oklahoma, for instance. Am I right?”

Morton had nodded.

“As for the rest of my story—the shape-changing outsider and what happened to him in that cave—you believe those are stress-induced delusions. Am I right about that?”

“Holly, I wouldn’t characterize—”

Oh, spare me the jargon, Holly thought, and then had interrupted him—a thing of which she would have been incapable not so long ago.

“It doesn’t matter how you characterize it. You’re welcome to whatever you believe. But I want something from you, Dr. Morton. You attend lots of conferences and symposiums. I know this, because I researched you online.”

“Holly, aren’t we wandering a bit from the subject of your story? And your perceptions of that story?”

No, she thought, because that story is told. What matters is what comes next. I’m hoping it will be nothing, and it probably will be, but it never hurts to be sure. Being sure helps a person sleep better at night.

“When you go to those conferences and symposiums, I want you to talk about my case. I want you to describe it. Write it up if you like, that would be fine, too. I want you to be specific about my belief, which you’re welcome to characterize as delusional, that I encountered a creature that renews itself by eating the pain of the dying. Will you do that? And if you ever—ever—meet or get an email from a fellow therapist who says he has or had a patient suffering from that exact same delusion, will you give that therapist my name and telephone number?” And then, to be gender neutral (which she always strives to be): “Or her.”

Morton had frowned. “That would hardly be ethical.”

“You’re wrong,” Holly said. “I’ve checked the law. Talking to another therapist’s patient would be unethical, but you can give the therapist my name and number if I give you permission to do so. And I do.”

Holly waited for his response.

She pauses her recording long enough to check the time and get a second cup of coffee. It will give her the jitters and acid indigestion, but she needs it.

“I saw him thinking it over,” Holly says into her phone. “I think what tipped the scales was knowing what a good story my story would make in his next book or article or compensated appearance. It did, too. I read one of the articles and looked at one of the conference videos. He changes the locations, and he calls me Carolyn H., but otherwise it’s the whole megillah. He’s especially good when talking about what happened to our perp when I hit him with the Happy Slapper—that brought gasps from the audience in the video. And I’ll give him this, he always ends my part of his lectures by saying he would like to hear from anyone with patients suffering similar delusional fantasies.”

She pauses to think, then restarts the recording.

“Dr. Morton called last night. It’s been awhile, but I knew who it was right away, and I knew it was going to lead back to Ondowsky. I remember something else you said once, Ralph: there’s evil in the world, but there’s also a force for good. You were thinking about the piece of menu you found, the one from a restaurant in Dayton. That fragment linked the murder in Flint City to two similar murders in Ohio. That’s how I came to be involved, just a little scrap of paper that could have easily blown away. Maybe something wanted it to be found. I like to think so, anyway. And maybe that same thing, that force, has something more for me to do. Because I can believe the unbelievable. I don’t want to, but I can.”

She stops there and puts her phone in her purse. It’s still way early to go to the airport, but she will, anyway. It’s just how she rolls.

I’ll be early to my own funeral, she thinks, and opens her iPad to find the nearest Uber.

At five in the morning, the cavernous airport terminal is almost completely deserted. When it’s filled with travelers (sometimes absolutely bursting at the seams with their chattering bustle) the music floating down from the overhead speakers is barely noticeable, but at this hour, with nothing but the hum of a janitor’s floor-buffer to compete with, Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain” sounds not just eerie but like a harbinger of doom.

Nothing is open on the concourse except for Au Bon Pain, but that’s good enough for Holly. She resists the temptation to put another coffee on her tray, settles instead for a plastic cup of orange juice and a bagel, and takes the tray to a table at the back. After looking around to make sure no one is close (she is, in fact, the only current customer), she takes out her phone and resumes her report, speaking low and stopping every so often to marshal her thoughts. She still hopes Ralph will never get this. She still hopes that what she thinks may be a monster will only turn out to be a shadow. But if he does get it, she wants to make sure he gets all of it.

Especially if she’s dead.

From Holly Gibney’s report to Detective Ralph Anderson:

Still December 16th. I’m at the airport, got here early, so I have some time. Actually quite a bit.

[Pause]

I think I left off by telling you that I knew Dr. Morton right away. Had him from hello, as the saying is. He said he’d checked with his lawyer after our last session—out of curiosity, he claimed—to find out if I was correct when I said that putting me in touch with another patient’s therapist wouldn’t be an ethical breach.

“It turned out to be a gray area,” he said, “so I didn’t do it, especially since you elected to stop therapy, at least with me. But the call I got yesterday from a Boston psychiatrist named Joel Lieberman made me reconsider.”

Ralph, Carl Morton has actually had news of another possible outsider for over a year, but he didn’t call me. He was timid. As a timid person myself I can understand that, but it still makes me mad. Probably it shouldn’t, because Mr. Bell didn’t know about Ondowsky then, but it still

[Pause]

I’m getting ahead of myself. Sorry. Let’s see if I can keep this in order.

In 2018 and 2019, Dr. Joel Lieberman was seeing a patient living in Portland, Maine. This patient took the Downeaster—I assume that’s a train—to keep his once-monthly appointments in Boston. The man, Dan Bell as it turns out, is an elderly gentleman who seemed perfectly rational to Dr. Lieberman except for his firm belief that he had discovered the existence of a supernatural creature, which he called a “psychic vampire.” Mr. Bell believed that this creature had been around for a long time, at least sixty years and perhaps much longer.

Lieberman attended a lecture Dr. Morton gave in Boston. Last summer, this was—2019. During his lecture, Dr. Morton discussed the case of “Carolyn H.” Me, in other words. He asked any attendees who had patients with similar delusions to get in touch with him, as I had asked. Lieberman did.

Have you got the picture? Morton talked about my case, as I asked him to. He inquired if there were doctors or therapists who’d had patients with similar neurotic convictions, also as I asked him to. But for sixteen months he didn’t put me in touch with Lieberman, as I practically implored him to do. His ethical concerns held him back, but there was something more. I’ll get to that.

Then, yesterday, Dr. Lieberman called Dr. Morton again. His patient from Portland had stopped coming in for sessions some time ago, and Lieberman assumed he had seen the last of him. But on the day after the Macready School explosion, the patient called out of the blue and asked if he could come in for an emergency session. He was extremely distraught, so Lieberman made room for him. The patient—Dan Bell, as I now know—claimed that the Macready School bombing was the work of this psychic vampire. He stated this unequivocally. He was so upset that Dr. Lieberman thought about an intervention and perhaps even a short involuntary committal. But then the man calmed down, and said he needed to discuss his ideas with someone he only knew of as Carolyn H.

I need to consult my notes here.

[Pause]

All right, I have them. Here I want to quote Carl Morton as exactly as I can, because it’s the other reason he hesitated to call me.

He said, “It wasn’t just ethical concerns that held me back, Holly. There is great danger in putting people with similar delusional ideations together. They have a tendency to reinforce each other, which can deepen neuroses into full-blown psychoses. This is well documented.”

“Then why did you?” I asked.

“Because so much of your story was based on known facts,” he said. “Because to some degree it challenged my established belief system. And because Lieberman’s patient already knew about you, not from his therapist but from an article I wrote about your case in Psychiatric Quarterly. He said Carolyn H. would understand.”

Do you see what I mean about a possible force for good, Ralph? Dan Bell was reaching out for me, just as I was reaching out for him, and before I could be sure that he even existed.

“I’ll give you Dr. Lieberman’s numbers, office and cell,” Dr. Morton said. “He’ll decide whether or not to put you in touch with his patient.” Then he asked if I might also have concerns about the middle school explosion in Pennsylvania, concerns relating to our discussions in therapy. He was flattering himself on that, there were no discussions—I just talked and Morton listened. I thanked him for getting in touch with me, but I didn’t answer his question. I suppose I was still mad that he waited so long to call.

[Here there is an audible sigh.]

Actually, there’s no suppose about it. I still need to work on my anger issues.

I’ll have to stop soon, but it shouldn’t take long to finish bringing you up to date. I called Lieberman on his cell, because it was evening. I introduced myself as Carolyn H. and asked for his patient’s name and contact number. He gave me both, but reluctantly.

He said, “Mr. Bell is anxious to talk to you, and after careful thought, I’ve decided to agree. He’s very elderly now, and this is in the nature of a last wish. Although I should add that other than his fixation on this so-called psychic vampire, he’s not suffering any of the cognitive decline we often see in the elderly.”

That made me think of my Uncle Henry, Ralph, who has Alzheimer’s. We had to put him in care last weekend. Thinking about that makes me very sad.

Lieberman said that Mr. Bell is ninety-one, and coming to his most recent appointment must have been very difficult for him, even though he had his grandson to assist him. He said that Mr. Bell is suffering from a number of physical ailments, the worst being congestive heart failure. He said that under other circumstances, he might worry that talking to me would reinforce his neurotic fixation and mar the rest of what might otherwise be a fruitful and productive life, but given Mr. Bell’s current age and condition, he didn’t feel that was much of an issue.

Ralph, it may be projection on my part, but I found Dr. Lieberman rather pompous. Still, he said one thing at the end of our conversation that moved me, and has stayed with me. He said, “This is an old man who is very frightened. Try not to frighten him more than he already is.”

I don’t know if I can do that, Ralph. I’m frightened myself.

[Pause]

This place is filling up, and I should go to my gate, so I’ll make this quick. I called Mr. Bell, introducing myself as Carolyn H. He asked for my real name. That was my Rubicon, Ralph, and I crossed it. I said I was Holly Gibney and asked if I might come and see him. He said, “If it’s about the school explosion, and the thing calling itself Ondowsky, as soon as possible.”

With a change of planes in Boston, Holly arrives at the Portland Jetport just before noon. She checks into Embassy Suites and calls Dan Bell’s number. The phone rings half a dozen times, long enough for Holly to wonder if the old man has died in the night, leaving her questions about Charles “Chet” Ondowsky unanswered. Assuming the old fellow actually has some answers.

As she’s about to end the call, a man picks up. Not Dan Bell, a younger man. “Hello?”

“This is Holly,” she says. “Holly Gibney. I was wondering when—”

“Oh, Ms. Gibney. Now would be fine. Grampa’s having a good day. Actually slept through the night after talking to you, and I can’t remember the last time he did that. Do you have the address?”

“19 Lafayette Street.”

“That’s right. I’m Brad Bell. How soon can you come?”

“As soon as I can get an Uber.” And a sandwich, she thinks. A sandwich would also be good.

As she slips into the back seat of the Uber, her phone rings. It’s Jerome, wanting to know where she is and what she’s doing and if he can help. Holly says she’s sorry, but it really is personal. She says she’ll tell him later, if she can.

“Is it about Uncle Henry?” he asks. “Are you chasing down some kind of treatment option? That’s what Pete thinks.”

“No, not Uncle Henry.” Another old man, she thinks. One who might or might not turn out to be compos mentis. “Jerome, I really can’t talk about this.”

“Okay. As long as you’re all right.”

It’s really a question, and she supposes he’s got a right to ask it, because he remembers when she wasn’t.

“I’m fine.” And, just to prove she hasn’t lost the plot: “Don’t forget to tell Barbara about those private detective movies.”

“Already taken care of,” he says.

“Tell her she may not be able to use them in her paper, but they will provide valuable background.” Holly pauses and smiles. “Also, they’re extremely entertaining.”

“I’ll tell her. And you’re sure you’re—”

“Fine,” she says, but as she ends the call, she thinks about the man—the thing—she and Ralph confronted in the cave, and she shivers. She can barely stand to think of that creature, and if there’s another, how can she possibly face it alone?

Certainly Holly won’t be facing it with Dan Bell, who’s all of eighty pounds and sitting in a wheelchair with an oxygen tank clipped to the side. He’s a shadow-man, with a mostly bald skull and dark purple patches under his bright but exhausted eyes. He and his grandson live in a fine old brownstone full of fine old furniture. The living room is airy; the drapes are pulled back to allow in floods of cold December sunlight. Yet the smells under the air freshener (Glade Clean Linen, if she’s not mistaken) remind her inevitably of the smells, stubborn and not to be denied, that she detected wafting into the lobby of the Rolling Hills Elder Care Center: Musterole, Bengay, talcum powder, pee, the approaching end of life.

She’s shown into Bell’s presence by the grandson, a man of about forty whose dress and mannerisms seem curiously old-fashioned, almost courtly. The hall is lined with half a dozen framed pencil drawings, full-face portraits of four men and two women, all good and all surely done by the same hand. They strike her as an odd introduction to the house; most of the subjects look rather skeevy. There’s a much larger picture over the fireplace in the living room, where a small and cozy fire has been kindled. This one, an oil painting, shows a beautiful young woman with black, merry eyes.

“My wife,” Bell says in his cracked voice. “Dead these many years, and how I miss her. Welcome to our home, Ms. Gibney.”

He rolls his chair toward her, wheezing with the effort it takes, but when the grandson moves forward to help, Bell waves him off. He holds out a hand which arthritis has turned into a driftwood sculpture. She shakes it with care.

“Have you had lunch?” Brad Bell asks.

“Yes,” Holly says. A hastily gobbled chicken salad sandwich on the short ride from her hotel to this fashionable neighborhood.

“Would you like tea or coffee? Oh, and we have pastries from Two Fat Cats. They are excellent.”

“Tea would be wonderful,” Holly says. “Decaf, if you have it. And I’d love a pastry.”

“I want tea and a turnover,” the old man says. “Apple or blueberry, doesn’t matter which. And I want real tea.”

“Coming right up,” Brad says, and leaves them.

Dan Bell immediately leans forward, eyes fixed on Holly’s, and says in a low conspiratorial voice, “Brad’s terribly gay, you know.”

“Oh,” Holly says. She can think of nothing else to say except I was pretty sure he was, and that seems rude.

“Terribly gay. But he’s a genius. He’s helped me with my researches. I can be sure—I have been sure—but Brad’s the one who provided the proof.” He wags a finger at her, marking off each syllable. “In… contro… vertible!”

Holly nods and sits in a wing chair, knees together and purse on her lap. She’s starting to think that Bell actually is in the grip of a neurotic fantasy and she’s running up a blind alley. This doesn’t irritate or exasperate her; on the contrary, it fills her with relief. Because if he is, she probably is, too.

“Tell me about your creature,” Dan says, leaning even further forward. “In his article, Dr. Morton says you call it an outsider.” Those bright, exhausted eyes are still fixed on hers. Holly thinks of a cartoon vulture sitting on a tree branch.

Although it once would have been difficult for Holly not to do what people asked her to do—almost impossible—she shakes her head.

He sits back in his wheelchair, disappointed. “No?”

“You already have most of my story from the article Dr. Morton published in Psychiatric Quarterly, and from videos you may have seen on the Internet. I came to hear your story. You called Ondowsky a thing, an it. I want to know how you can be so sure he’s an outsider.”

“Outsider is a good name for him. Very good.” Bell straightens his cannula, which has come askew. “A very good name. I’ll tell you over our tea and pastries. We’ll have them upstairs, in Brad’s workroom. I’ll tell you everything. You’ll be convinced. Oh yes.”

“Brad—”

“Brad knows everything,” Dan says, waving that driftwood hand dismissively. “A good boy, gay or not.” Holly has time to muse that when you’re in your nineties, even men twenty years older than Brad Bell must seem like boys. “A smart boy, too. And you don’t have to tell me your story if you don’t want to—although I would love for you to fill in certain details I’m curious about—but before I tell you what I know, I must insist that you tell me what caused you to suspect Ondowsky in the first place.”

This is a reasonable request, and she runs down her reasoning… such as it is. “Mostly it was that little spot of hair beside his mouth that kept bugging me,” she finishes. “It was as if he put on a false mustache and was in such a hurry when he peeled it off that he didn’t get all of it. Only if he could change his whole physical appearance, why would he even need a false mustache?”

Bell waves his hand dismissively. “Did your outsider have facial hair?”

Holly thinks, frowning. The first person the outsider impersonated (that she knew of), an orderly named Heath Holmes, didn’t. The second one didn’t have face hair, either. His third target had a goatee, but when Holly and Ralph confronted the outsider in the Texas cave, his transformation hadn’t been complete.

“I don’t think so. What are you saying?”

“I don’t think they can grow facial hair,” Dan Bell says. “I think if you saw your outsider naked—I assume you never did?”

“No,” Holly says, and because she can’t help it: “Oough.”

That makes Dan smile. “If you had, I think you would have seen no pubic hair. And clean armpits.”

“The thing we met in that cave had hair on his head. So does Ondowsky. So did George.”

“George?”

“What I call the man who delivered the package with the bomb in it to the Macready School.”

“George. Ah, I see.” Dan appears to meditate on this for a moment. A little smile touches the corners of his mouth. Then it fades. “Head hair is different, though, isn’t it? Children have hair on their heads before puberty. Some are born with hair on their heads.”

Holly sees his point, and hopes it really is a point and not just another facet of this old man’s delusion.

“There are other things the bomber—George, if you like—can’t change the way he changes his physical appearance,” Dan says. “He needed to put on a fake uniform and wear fake glasses. He needed a fake truck and a fake package reader. And he needed a fake mustache.”

“Ondowsky may also have fake eyebrows,” Brad says, coming in with a tray. On it are two mugs of tea and a pile of turnovers. “But probably not. I’ve studied pictures of him until my eyes are practically rolling down my cheeks. I think he may have had implants to normalize what would otherwise have just been fuzz. The way baby eyebrows are just fuzz.” He bends to put the tray on the coffee table.

“No, no, your workroom,” Dan says. “Time to get this show on the road. Ms. Gibney—Holly—will you push me? I’m rather tired.”

“Of course.”

They pass a formal dining room and a cavernous kitchen. At the end of the hall is a stair-chair, which runs up to the second floor on a steel rail. Holly hopes it’s more reliable than the elevator in the Frederick Building.

“Brad had this put in when I lost the use of my legs,” Dan says. Brad hands Holly the tray and transfers the old man to the stair-chair with the ease of long practice. Dan pushes a button and begins to rise. Brad takes the tray back and he and Holly walk along beside the chair, which is slow but sure.

“This is a very nice house,” Holly says. Must have been expensive is the unspoken corollary.

Dan, nevertheless, reads her mind. “Grandfather. Pulp and paper mills.”

The penny drops for Holly. The supply closet at Finders Keepers is stacked with Bell copier paper. Dan sees her face and smiles.

“Yes, that’s right, Bell Paper Products, now part of an overseas conglomerate that kept the name. Until the nineteen-twenties, my grandfather owned mills all over western Maine—Lewiston, Lisbon Falls, Jay, Mechanic Falls. All shuttered now, or turned into shopping malls. He lost most of his fortune in the Crash of ’29 and the Depression. That was the year I was born. No life of Riley for my father or me, we had to work for our beer and skittles. But we managed to keep the house.”

On the second floor, Brad transfers Dan to another wheelchair and hooks him up to another bottle of oxygen. This floor seems to consist of one large room where the December sunlight has been forbidden to enter. The windows have been covered with blackout curtains. There are four computers on two work desks, several gaming consoles that look state-of-the-art to Holly, a ton of audio equipment, and a gigantic flatscreen TV. Several speakers have been mounted on the walls. Two more flank the TV on either side.

“Put the tray down, Brad, before you spill everything.”

The table Dan indicates with one of his arthritic hands is covered with computing magazines (several of them copies of SoundPhile, which Holly has never heard of), flash drives, external hard drives, and cables. Holly starts trying to clear a place.

“Oh, just put all that rickrack on the floor,” Dan says.

She looks at Brad, who nods apologetically. “I’m a little messy,” he says.

When the tray is safely in place, Brad puts pastries on three plates. They look delicious, but Holly no longer knows if she’s hungry or not. She’s starting to feel like Alice at the Mad Hatter’s teaparty. Dan Bell takes a sip from his cup, smacks his lips, then grimaces and places a hand on the left side of his shirt. Brad is at his side immediately.

“Do you have your pills, Grampa?”

“Yes, yes,” Dan says, and pats the side pocket of his wheelchair. “I’m all right, you can stop hovering. It’s just the excitement of having someone in the house. Someone who knows. It’s probably good for me.”

“Not so sure about that, Grampa,” Brad says. “Maybe you better take a pill.”

“I’m fine, I said.”

“Mr. Bell—” Holly begins.

“Dan,” the old man says, once more wagging his finger, which is grotesquely bent with arthritis but still admonitory. “I’m Dan, he’s Brad, you’re Holly. We’re all friends here.” He laughs again. This time it sounds out of breath.

“You have to slow down,” Brad says. “Unless you want another trip to the hospital, that is.”

“Yes, Mother,” Dan says. He cups a hand over his beak of a nose and takes several deep breaths of oxygen. “Now give me one of those turnovers. And we need napkins.”

But there are no napkins. “I’ll get some paper towels from the bathroom,” Brad says, and off he goes.

Dan turns to Holly. “Terribly forgetful. Terribly. Where was I? Does it even matter?”

Does any of this? Holly wonders.

“I was telling you that my father and I had to work for a living. Did you see the pictures downstairs?”

“Yes,” Holly says. “Yours, I assume.”

“Yes, yes, all mine.” He holds up his twisted hands. “Before this happened to me.”

“They’re very good,” Holly says.

“Not so bad,” he says, “although the ones in the hall aren’t the best. Those were for work. Brad put them up. Insisted. I also did some paperback covers back in the fifties and sixties, for publishers like Gold Medal and Monarch. They were much better. Crime, mostly—half-dressed babes with smoking automatics. They brought in a little extra. Ironic, when you think about my full-time job. I was with the Portland PD. Retired at sixty-eight. Did my forty and four more.”

Not just an artist but another cop, Holly thinks. First Bill, then Pete, then Ralph, and now him. She once more thinks of how some force, invisible but strong, seems to be pulling her into this, quietly insisting on parallels and continuations.

“My grandfather was a mill-owning capitalist, but since then we’ve all been blue. Dad was police, and I followed in his footsteps. As my son followed in mine. Brad’s father, I’m speaking of. He died in a crash while chasing a man, probably drunk, driving a stolen car. That man lived. May be living today, for all I know.”

“I’m very sorry,” Holly says.

Dan ignores her effort at condolence. “Even Brad’s mother was in the family trade. Well, in a way. She was a court stenographer. When she died, I took the boy in. I don’t care if he’s gay or not, nor does the police department. Although he doesn’t work for them full-time. With him it’s more of a hobby. Mostly he does… this.” He waves his deformed hand at the computer equipment.

“I design audio for games,” Brad says quietly. “The music, the effects, the mix.” He has returned with a whole roll of paper towels. Holly takes two and spreads them on her lap.

Dan goes on, seemingly lost in the past. “After my radio car days were over—I never rose to detective, never wanted to—I worked mostly in dispatch. Some cops don’t like riding a desk, but I never minded, because I had another job as well, one that kept me busy long after retirement. You could say that’s one side of the coin. What Brad does, when they call him in, is the other side. Between the two of us, Holly, we nailed this, pardon my French, this shitbag. He’s been in our sights for years.”

Holly has finally taken a bite of her turnover, but now opens her mouth, allowing an unsightly shower of crumbs to fall to the plate and paper towels in her lap. “Years?”

“Yes,” Dan says. “Brad’s known since he was in his twenties. He’s worked on this with me since 2005 or so. Isn’t that right, Brad?”

“A little later,” Brad says, after swallowing a bite of his own turnover.

Dan shrugs. It looks painful. “It all starts to melt together when you’re my age,” he says, then turns what’s almost a glare on Holly. His bushy eyebrows (no faking there) draw together. “But not with Ondowsky, as he’s now calling himself. On him I’m crystal clear. Right back to the beginning… or at least to where I came in. We’ve arranged quite a show for you, Holly. Brad, is that first video cued up?”

“All ready, Grampa.” Brad grabs his iPad and uses a remote to turn on the big TV. It’s currently showing nothing but a bluescreen and the word READY.

Holly hopes she is.

“I was thirty-one when I first saw him,” Dan says. “I know that because my wife and boy had a little birthday party for me just a week before. It seems like a long time ago and it seems like no time at all. I was still on radio cars then. Marcel Duchamp and I were parked just off Marginal Way, behind a snowbank and waiting for speeders, not very likely on a weekday morning. Eating crullers, drinking coffee. I remember Marcel was ribbing me about some paperback cover I’d done, asking how my wife liked me painting pictures of hot women in their undies. I think I was just telling him that his wife had posed for that one when the guy ran up to the car and knocked on the driver’s side window.” He pauses. Shakes his head. “You always remember where you were when you get bad news, don’t you?”

Holly thinks of the day she found out that Bill Hodges was gone. Jerome made that call, and she was pretty sure he’d been choking back tears.

“Marcel rolled his window down and asked the guy if he needed help. He said no. He had a transistor radio—that was what we had instead of iPods and cell phones back in those days—and asked if we’d heard about what just happened in New York.”

Dan pauses to straighten his cannula and adjust the flow of oxygen from the tank on the side of his chair.

“We hadn’t heard anything except for what was on the police radio, so Marcel turned that off and turned on the regular one. Found the news. This is what the jogger was talking about. Go ahead and run the first one, Brad.”

Dan’s grandson has his electronic tablet on his lap. He pokes at it and says to Holly, “I’m going to mirror this to the big screen. One second… okay, here we go.”

On the screen, to somber music, comes the title card of an old-time newsreel. WORST AIR CRASH IN HISTORY, it reads. What follows is crisp black-and-white footage of a city street that looks like a bomb hit it.

“The terrible aftermath of the worst air disaster in history!” the announcer intones. “In a Brooklyn street lies the shattered remnant of a jet transport that collided with another airliner in murky New York skies.” On the tail of the plane—or what remains of it—Holly can read UNIT. “The United Airlines aircraft plummeted into a brownstone residential section, killing six on the ground as well as eighty-four passengers and the crew.”

Now Holly sees firemen in old-fashioned helmets rushing through the wreckage. Some are carrying stretchers to which are strapped blanket-covered bodies.

“Normally,” the announcer continues, “this United flight and the Trans World Airlines flight it collided with would have been separated by miles, but the TWA plane—Flight 266, carrying forty-four passengers and crew—was far off course. It crashed on Staten Island.”

More covered bodies on more stretchers. A huge airplane wheel, the rubber shredded and still smoking. The camera pans the wreckage of 266, and Holly sees Christmas presents wrapped in gay paper scattered everywhere. The camera zooms in on one, to show a little Santa Claus attached to the bow. Santa is smoldering and blackened with soot.

“You can stop it there,” Dan says. Brad pokes his tablet and the big TV returns to bluescreen.

Dan turns to Holly.

“A hundred and thirty-four dead in all. And when did it happen? December sixteenth, 1960. Sixty years ago to this very day.”

Only a coincidence, Holly thinks, but a chill shivers through her just the same, and once again she thinks of how there may be forces in this world moving people as they will, like men (and women) on a chessboard. The confluence of dates could be a coincidence, but can she say that about all that’s brought her here to this house in Portland, Maine? No. There’s a chain going all the way back to another monster named Brady Hartsfield. Brady, who allowed her to believe in the first place.

“There was one survivor,” Dan Bell says, startling her out of her reverie.

Holly points at the bluescreen, as if the newsreel were still playing there. “Someone survived that?”

“Only for a day,” Brad says. “The newspapers called him the Boy Who Fell from the Sky.”

“But it was someone else who coined the phrase,” Dan says. “Back then in the New York metro area, there were three or four independent TV stations as well as the networks. One of them was WLPT. Long gone now, of course, but if something was filmed or taped, chances are good that you can find it on the Internet. Prepare yourself for a shock, young lady.” He nods at Brad, who begins poking at his tablet again.

Holly learned at her mother’s knee (and with her father’s tacit approval) that overt displays of emotion weren’t just embarrassing and unpleasant but shameful. Even after years of work with Allie Winters, she usually keeps her feelings bottled up and tightly capped, even among friends. These are strangers, but when the next clip starts on the big screen, she screams. She can’t help it.

“That’s him! That’s Ondowsky!”

“I know,” Dan Bell says.

Only most people would say it wasn’t, and Holly knows this.

They’d say Oh yes, there’s a resemblance, just as there’s a resemblance between Mr. Bell and his grandson, or between John Lennon and his son Julian, or between me and Aunt Elizabeth. They’d say I bet it’s Chet Ondowsky’s grandfather. Gosh, the apple sure doesn’t fall far from the tree, does it?

But Holly, like the old man in the wheelchair, knows.

The man holding the old-fashioned WLPT microphone is fuller in the face than Ondowsky, and the lines on that face suggest he’s ten, maybe even twenty years older. His crewcut is salt-and-pepper, and it comes to a slight widow’s peak that Ondowsky doesn’t have. He has the beginning of jowls, and Ondowsky doesn’t have those, either.

Behind him, some firefighters scurry about in the sooty snow, picking up packages and luggage, while others turn hoses on the remains of the United plane and two burning brownstones behind it. Just pulling away is a big old Cadillac of an ambulance with its lights flashing.

“This is Paul Freeman, reporting from the Brooklyn site of the worst air crash in American history,” the reporter says, puffing out white vapor with every word. “All were killed onboard this United Airlines jet except for one boy.” He points to the departing ambulance. “The boy, as yet unidentified, is in that ambulance. He is—” The reporter calling himself Paul Freeman pauses dramatically. “—The Boy Who Fell from the Sky! He was thrown from the rear section of the plane, still on fire, and landed in a snowbank. Horrified bystanders rolled him in the snow and put out the flames, but I saw him loaded into the ambulance, and I can tell you that his injuries looked severe. His clothes were almost entirely burned off, or melted into his skin.”

“Stop it there,” the old man commands. His grandson does so. Dan turns to Holly. His blue eyes are faded but still fierce. “Do you see it, Holly? Do you hear it? I’m sure to the viewing audience he just looked and sounded horrified, doing his job under difficult conditions, but—”

“He’s not horrified,” Holly said. She’s thinking of Ondowsky’s first report from the Macready School bombing. Now she sees that with clearer eyes. “He’s excited.”

“Yes,” Dan says, and nods. “Yes indeed. You understand. Good.”

“Thank God someone else does,” Brad says.

“The boy’s name was Stephen Baltz,” Dan says, “and this Paul Freeman saw the burned boy, perhaps heard his screams of pain—because witnesses said the boy was conscious, at least to begin with. And do you know what I think? What I have come to believe? That he was feeding.”

“Of course he was,” Holly says. Her lips feel numb. “On the boy’s pain and on the horror of the bystanders. On the death.”

“Yes. Get ready for the next one, Brad.” Dan sits back in his chair, looking tired. Holly doesn’t care. She needs to know the rest. She needs to know everything. The old fever is on her.

“When did you go looking for this? How did you find out?”

“I first saw the clip you just watched the evening of the crash, on The Huntley-Brinkley Report.” He sees her puzzlement and smiles a little. “You’re too young to remember Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. It’s now called NBC Nightly News.”

Brad says, “If an indie station arrived at some big news event first, and got good footage, they’d sell the report to one of the networks. That’s what must have happened with this, and how Grampa got to see it.”

“Freeman got there first,” Holly muses. “Are you saying… do you think Freeman caused those planes to crash?”

Dan Bell shakes his head so emphatically that the cobwebby remains of his hair fly. “No, just struck lucky. Or played the odds. Because there are always tragedies in big cities, aren’t there? Chances for a thing like him to feed. And who knows, a creature like him may be attuned to the approach of major disasters. Maybe he’s like a mosquito—they can smell blood from miles away, you know. How can we know, when we don’t even know what he is? Run the next one, Brad.”

Brad starts the clip, and the man who comes on the big screen is once more Ondowsky… but he’s different. Thinner. Younger than “Paul Freeman,” and younger than the version of Ondowsky doing his report near the blown-out side of the Macready School. But it’s him. The face is different, the face is the same. The microphone he’s holding has the letters KTVT attached to it. Three women are standing with him. One of them is wearing a Kennedy political button. Another has a placard, crumpled and somehow forlorn, that reads ALL THE WAY WITH JFK IN ’64!

“This is Dave Van Pelt, reporting from Dealey Plaza, across from the Texas School Book Depository, where—”

“Freeze it,” Dan says, and Brad does. Dan turns to Holly. “It’s him again, right?”

“Yes,” Holly says. “I’m not sure anyone else would see it, I’m not sure how you saw it so long after the plane crash report, but it is. My father once told me something about cars. He said the companies—Ford, Chevrolet, Chrysler—offer lots of different models, and they change them from year to year, but they’re all from the same template. He… Ondowsky…” But words fail her and she can only point to the black-and-white image on the screen. Her hand is trembling.

“Yes,” Dan says softly. “Very well put. He’s different models, but from the same template. Except there are at least two templates, maybe more.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll get to that.” His voice is rustier than ever, and he drinks some more tea to lubricate it. “I only saw this report by chance, because I was a Huntley-Brinkley man when it came to the evening news. But after Kennedy was shot, everyone turned over to Walter Cronkite, including me. Because CBS had the best coverage. Kennedy was shot on a Friday. This report was on the CBS Evening News the following day, the Saturday. What news people call a backgrounder. Go ahead, Brad. But take it from the top.”

The young reporter in the horrible plaid sport coat begins again. “This is Dave Van Pelt, reporting from Dealey Plaza, across from the Texas School Book Depository, where John F. Kennedy, the thirty-fifth President of the United States, was fatally shot yesterday. I’m here with Greta Dyson, Monica Kellogg, and Juanita Alvarez, Kennedy supporters who were right here where I’m standing when the shots were fired. Ladies, can you tell me what you saw? Miss Dyson?”

“Shots… blood… there was blood from the back of his poor head…” Greta Dyson is weeping so hard she can barely be understood, which Holly supposes is sort of the point. Viewers at home are probably weeping right along with her, thinking that her grief stands for theirs. And for the grief of a nation. Only the reporter…

“He’s eating it up,” she says. “Just pretending to be concerned, and not doing a very good job of it, at that.”

“Absolutely,” Dan says. “Once you look at it the right way, it’s impossible to miss. And look at the other two ladies. They’re crying, too. Hell, a lot of people were crying that Saturday. And in the weeks that followed. You’re right. He’s eating it up.”

“And you think he knew it was going to happen? Like a mosquito smelling blood?”

“I don’t know,” Dan says. “I just don’t know.”

“We do know he only started working at KTVT that summer,” Brad says. “I wasn’t able to find out much about him, but that much I did get. From a history of the station on the Internet. And he was gone by the spring of 1964.”

“The next time he turns up—that I know about, anyway—is in Detroit,” Dan says. “1967. During what was known at the time as the Detroit Rebellion, or the 12th Street Riot. It started when the police raided an after-hours bar, a so-called blind pig, and spread city-wide. Forty-three killed, twelve hundred injured. It was the top news story for five days, which was how long the violence went on. This is from another independent station, but it got picked up by NBC and ran on the nightly news. Go ahead, Brad.”

A reporter is standing in front of a burning storefront, interviewing a black man with blood running down his face. The man is almost incoherent with grief. He says that’s his dry-cleaning business burning down across the way, and he doesn’t know where his wife and daughter are. They have disappeared into the city-wide melee. “I have lost everything,” he says. “Everything.”

And the reporter, this time calling himself Jim Avery? He’s a small-city TV guy for sure. Stouter than “Paul Freeman,” verging on fat, and short (his interviewee towers over him), and balding. Different model, same template. It’s Chet Ondowsky buried in that fat face. It’s also Paul Freeman. And Dave Van Pelt.

“How did you tip to this, Mr. Bell? How in heaven’s name—”

“Dan, remember? It’s Dan.”

“How could you see the resemblance wasn’t just a resemblance?”

Dan and his grandson look at each other and exchange a smile. Holly, watching this momentary byplay, thinks again, Different models, same template.

“You noticed the pictures in the hall, right?” Brad asks. “That was Grampa’s other job when he was on the cops. He was a natural for it.”

Once again, the penny drops. Holly turns to Dan. “You were a sketch artist. That was your other police job!”

“Yes, although I did a lot more than sketch. I was no cartoonist. I did portraits.” He thinks, then adds, “You’ve heard people say they never forget a face? Mostly they’re exaggerating or outright lying. I’m not.” The old man speaks matter-of-factly. If it’s a gift, Holly thinks, it’s as old as he is. Maybe once it blew his mind. Now he takes it for granted.

“I’ve seen him work,” Brad says. “If not for the arthritis in his hands, he could turn around, face the wall, and do you in twenty minutes, Holly, and every detail would be right. Those pictures in the hall? All people who were caught based on Grampa’s portraits.”

“Still—” she begins doubtfully.

“To remember faces is only part of it,” Dan says. “It doesn’t help when it comes to getting a likeness of a perpetrator, because I’m not the one who saw him. You understand?”

“Yes,” Holly says. She’s interested in this for reasons other than his ID of Ondowsky in his many different guises. She’s interested in it because in her own work as an investigator, she is still learning.

“The witness comes in. In some cases—like a carjacking or a robbery—several witnesses come in. They describe the doer. Only it’s like the blind men with the elephant. You know that story?”

Holly does. The blind man who grabs the tail says it’s a vine. The one who grabs the trunk thinks it’s a python. The one who grabs the leg is sure it’s the bole of a big old palm tree. Eventually the blind men get into a brawl about who is right.

“Every witness sees the guy in a slightly different way,” Dan says. “And if it’s one witness, he or she sees him in different ways on different days. No, no, they say, I was wrong, the face is too fat. It’s too thin. He had a goatee. No, it was a mustache. His eyes were blue. No, I slept on it and I guess they were actually gray.”

He takes another long pull of O₂. Looking more tired than ever. Except for the eyes in their purple pouches. They are bright. Focused. Holly thinks that if the Ondowsky-thing saw those eyes, he might be afraid. Might want to shut them before they saw too much.

“My job is to look past all the variations and see the similarities. That’s the real gift and what I put in my pictures. It’s what I put in my first pictures of this guy. Look.”

From the side pocket of his chair he takes a small folder and hands it to her. Inside are half a dozen pieces of thin drawing paper going brittle with age. There’s a different version of Charles “Chet” Ondowsky on each one. They are not as detailed as his rogue’s gallery in the front hall, but they are still extraordinary. In the first three she’s looking at Paul Freeman, Dave Van Pelt, and Jim Avery.

“Did you draw these from memory?” she asks.

“Yes,” Dan says. Again not boasting, just stating a fact. “Those first three were drawn soon after I saw Avery. Summer of ’67. I’ve made copies, but those are the originals.”

Brad says, “Remember the time-frame, Holly. Grampa saw these men on TV before VCRs, DVRs, or the Internet. For ordinary viewers, you saw what you saw and then it was gone. He had to rely on memory.”

“And these others?” She’s spread out the other three like a fan of cards. Faces with different hairlines, different eyes and mouths, different lines, different ages. All different models from the same template. All Ondowsky. She can see it because she’s seen the elephant. That Dan Bell saw it back in the day is amazing. Genius, really.

He points to the drawings she’s holding, one after another. “That one’s Reginald Holder. He reported from Westfield, New Jersey, after John List killed his whole family. Interviewed sobbing friends and neighbors. The next one is Harry Vail, reporting from Cal State Fullerton after a janitor named Edward Allaway shot and killed six people. Vail was on the scene before the blood was dry, interviewing survivors. The last one, his name escapes me—”

“Fred Liebermanenbach,” Brad says. “Correspondent for WKS, Chicago. He covered the Tylenol poisonings in 1982. Seven people died. Talked to grieving relatives. I have all these video clips, if you want to see them.”

“He’s got plenty of clips, we’ve uncovered seventeen different versions of your Chet Ondowsky,” Dan says.

“Seventeen?” Holly is flabbergasted.

“Those are just the ones we know of. No need to look at all of them. Slide those first three drawings together and hold them up to the TV, Holly. It’s not a lightbox, but it should do.”

She holds them in front of the bluescreen, knowing what she’ll see. It’s one face.

Ondowsky’s face.

An outsider.

When they go downstairs, Dan Bell isn’t exactly sitting in the stair-chair; it’s more like lolling. No longer just tired, exhausted. Holly really doesn’t want to trouble him further, but will have to.

Dan Bell also knows they’re not done. He asks Brad to bring him a knock of whiskey.

“Grampa, the doctor said—”

“Fuck the doctor and the horse he rode in on,” Dan says. “It’ll brighten me up. We’ll finish, you show Holly that last… thing… and then I’ll lie down. I slept through last night, and I bet I will again tonight. This is such a weight off my shoulders.”

But now it’s on mine, Holly thinks. I wish Ralph was here. I wish for Bill even more.

Brad brings his gramps a Flintstone jelly glass with barely enough whiskey in it to cover the bottom. Dan gives it a sour look but accepts it without comment. From the side pocket of his wheelchair he takes a bottle of pills with a geriatric-friendly screw-off cap. He shakes out a pill and half a dozen others spill onto the floor.

“Balls,” says the old man. “Pick those up, Brad.”

“I’ll get them,” Holly says, and does. Dan, meanwhile, puts the pill in his mouth and swallows it with the whiskey.

“Now I know that’s not a good idea, Grampa,” Brad says, sounding prissy.

“At my funeral, no one will say I died young and handsome,” Dan replies. Some color has come into his cheeks, and he’s sitting up straight in his chair again. “Holly, I have perhaps twenty minutes before that almost useless dram of whiskey wears off. Half an hour at most. I know you have more questions, and we have one more thing for you to look at, but let’s try to be brief.”

“Joel Lieberman,” she says. “The psychiatrist you saw in Boston starting in 2018.”

“What about him?”

“You didn’t go to him because you thought you were crazy, did you?”

“Of course not. I went for the same reasons I imagine you went to see Carl Morton, with his books and lectures about people with weird neuroses. I went to tell everything I knew to someone who was paid to listen. And to find someone else who had reasons to believe the unbelievable. I was looking for you, Holly. Just as you were looking for me.”

Yes. It’s true. Still, she thinks, it’s a miracle we got together. Or fate. Or God.

“Although Morton changed all the names and locations for his article, it was easy for Brad to track you down. The thing calling itself Ondowsky wasn’t there reporting from the Texas cave, by the way. Brad and I looked at all the news footage.”

Holly says, “My outsider didn’t show up on tape or film. There was footage where he should have been part of a crowd, but he wasn’t there.” She taps the drawings of Ondowsky in his various guises. “This perp is on TV all the time.”

“Then he’s different,” the old man says, and shrugs. “The way housecats and bobcats are different but similar—same template, different models. As for you, Holly, you were barely mentioned in the news reports, and never by name. Only as a private citizen who helped with the investigation.”

“I asked to be kept out of it,” Holly mutters.

“By then I’d read about Carolyn H. in Dr. Morton’s articles. I tried to reach out to you with Dr. Lieberman—made a trip to Boston to see him, which wasn’t easy. I knew that even if you hadn’t recognized Ondowsky for what he was, you would have good reason to believe my story if you heard it. Lieberman called your guy Morton and here you are.”

One thing troubles Holly, and very much. She says, “Why now? You’ve known about this thing for years, you’ve been hunting it—”

“Not hunting,” Dan says. “Keeping track would be a more accurate way to put it. Since 2005 or so, Brad has been monitoring the Internet. In every tragedy, in every mass shooting, we look for him. Don’t we, Brad?”

“Yes,” Brad says. “He’s not always there, he wasn’t at Sandy Hook or in Las Vegas when Stephen Paddock killed all those concert-goers, but he was working at WFTV in Orlando in 2016. He interviewed survivors from the Pulse nightclub shooting the next day. He always picks the ones who are most upset, the ones who were inside or lost friends who were.”

Of course he does, Holly thinks. Of course. Their grief is tasty.

“But we didn’t know he was at the nightclub until after the school bombing last week,” Brad says. “Did we, Grampa?”

“No,” Dan agrees. “Even though we checked all the Pulse news footage as a matter of course during the aftermath.”

“How did you miss him?” Holly asks. “Pulse was over four years ago! You said you never forget a face, and by then you knew Ondowsky’s, even with the changes it’s always the same, a pig face.”

They look at her with identical frowns, so Holly explains what Bill told her about most people having either pig faces or fox faces. In every version she’s seen here, Ondowsky’s face is rounded. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, but it’s always a pig face.

Brad still looks puzzled, but his grandfather smiles. “That’s good. I like it. Although there are exceptions, some people have—”

“Horse faces,” Holly finishes for him.

“Just what I was going to say. And some people have weasel faces… although I suppose you could say weasels have a certain foxy aspect, don’t they? Certainly Philip Hannigan…” He trails off. “Yes. And in that aspect, I bet he always has a fox face.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“But you will,” Dan says. “Show her the Pulse clip, Brad.”

Brad starts the clip and turns the iPad to face Holly. Again, it’s a reporter doing a stand-up, this time in front of a huge pile of flowers and heart balloons and signs saying things like MORE LOVE AND LESS HATE. The reporter is beginning to interview a sobbing young man with the remains of either dirt or mascara smudging his cheeks. Holly doesn’t listen, and this time she doesn’t scream because she doesn’t have the breath to do it. The reporter—Philip Hannigan—is young, blond, skinny. He looks like he stepped into the job right out of high school, and yes, he has what Bill Hodges would have called a fox face. He is looking at his interview subject with what could be concern… empathy… sympathy… or barely masked greed.

“Freeze it,” Dan says to Brad. And to Holly: “Are you all right?”

“That’s not Ondowsky,” she whispers. “That’s George. That’s the man who delivered the bomb to the Macready School.”

“Oh, but it is Ondowsky,” Dan says. He speaks gently. Almost kindly. “I already told you. This creature doesn’t have just one template. He has two. At least two.”

Holly turned off her phone before knocking on the Bells’ door and doesn’t think to turn it on again until she’s back in her room at the Embassy Suites. Her thoughts are swirling like leaves in a strong wind. When she does power up, to continue her report to Ralph, she sees that she has four texts, five missed calls, and five voicemail messages. The missed calls and voicemails are all from her mother. Charlotte knows how to text—Holly showed her—but she never bothers, at least when it comes to her daughter. Holly thinks her mother has found texting insufficient when it comes to crafting a really effective guilt trip.

She opens the texts first.

Pete: All okay, H? I’m minding the store, so do your thing. If you need something, ask.

Holly smiles at that.

Barbara: I got the movies. They look good. Thanx, will return.

Jerome: Maybe have a line on that chocolate Lab. In Parma Heights. Going to check. If you need something, I’m on my cell. Don’t hesitate.

The last one, also from Jerome: Hollyberry.

In spite of all she’s learned at the house on Lafayette Street, she has to laugh. And she has to tear up a little, too. They all care for her, and she cares for them. It’s amazing. She’ll try to hold onto that while she deals with her mother. She already knows how each of Charlotte’s voicemails will end.

“Holly, where are you? Call me.” That’s the first.

“Holly, I need to speak to you about going to see your uncle this weekend. Call me.” The second.

“Where are you? Why is your phone off? It’s very inconsiderate. What if there was an emergency? Call me!” The third.

“That woman from Rolling Hills, Mrs. Braddock, I didn’t like her, she seemed very full of herself, she called and said Uncle Henry is very upset! Why aren’t you returning my calls? Call me!” Big number four.

The fifth is simplicity itself: “Call me!”

Holly goes into the bathroom, opens her notions bag, and takes an aspirin. Then she gets down on her knees and folds her hands on the edge of the tub. “God, this is Holly. I need to call my mother now. Help me to remember I can stand up for myself without being all nasty and poopy and getting into an argument. Help me to finish another day without smoking, I still miss cigarettes, especially at times like this. I still miss Bill, too, but I’m glad Jerome and Barbara are in my life. Pete, too, even though he can be a little slow on the uptake sometimes.” She starts to stand, then resumes the position. “I also miss Ralph, and hope he’s having a nice vacation with his wife and son.”

Thus armored (or so she hopes), Holly calls her mother. Charlotte does most of the talking. That Holly won’t tell her where she is, what she’s doing, or when she’ll be back makes Charlotte very angry. Beneath the anger Holly senses fear, because Holly has escaped. Holly has a life of her own. That was not supposed to happen.

“Whatever you’re doing, you have to be back this weekend,” Charlotte says. “We need to go see Henry together. We’re his family. All he’s got.”

“I may not be able to do that, Mom.”

“Why? I want to know why!”

“Because…” Because I’m chasing the case. That’s what Bill would have said. “Because I’m working.”

Charlotte begins to cry. For the last five years or so it has always been her last resort when it comes to bringing Holly to heel. It no longer works, but it’s still her default position and it still hurts.

“I love you, Mom,” Holly says, and ends the call.

Is that true? Yes. It’s liking that got lost, and love without liking is like a chain with a manacle at each end. Could she break the chain? Strike off the manacle? Perhaps. She’s discussed that possibility with Allie Winters many times, especially after her mother told her—proudly—that she voted for Donald Trump (oough). Will she do it? Not now, maybe never. When Holly was growing up, Charlotte Gibney taught her—patiently, perhaps even with good intentions—that she was thoughtless, helpless, hapless, careless. That she was less. Holly believed that until she met Bill Hodges, who thought she was more. Now she has a life, and it is more often than not a happy one. If she broke with her mother, it would lessen her.

I don’t want to be less, Holly thinks as she sits on the bed in her Embassy Suites room. Been there, done that. “And got the tee-shirt,” she adds.

She takes a Coke from the bar refrigerator (damn the caffeine). Then she opens her phone’s recording app and continues her report to Ralph. Like praying to a God she can’t quite believe in, it clears her head, and by the time she finishes, she knows how she’ll go forward.

From Holly Gibney’s report to Detective Ralph Anderson:

From here on, Ralph, I’ll try to give you my conversation with Dan and Brad Bell verbatim, while it’s still fresh in my mind. It won’t be completely accurate, but it will be close. I should have recorded our talk, but never thought of it. I still have a lot to learn about this job. I only hope I get the chance.

I could see that Mr. Bell—the old Mr. Bell—wanted to go on, but once that little bit of whiskey wore off, he couldn’t. He said he needed to lie down and rest. The last thing he said to Brad was something about the sound recordings. I didn’t understand that. Now I do.

His grandson wheeled him away to his bedroom, but first he gave me his iPad and opened a photo stream for me. I looked at the pictures while he was gone, then I looked at them again, and I was still looking at them when Brad came back. Seventeen photos, all taken from videos on the Internet, all of Chet Ondowsky in his various

[Pause]

His various incarnations, I guess you’d say. And an eighteenth. The one of Philip Hannigan outside the Pulse nightclub four years ago. No mustache, blond hair instead of dark, younger than in the security camera photo of George in his fake delivery uniform, but it was him, all right. Same face underneath. Same fox face. But not the same as Ondowsky. No way was he.

Brad came back with a bottle and two more jelly glasses. “Grampa’s whiskey,” he said. “Maker’s Mark. Do you want a little?” When I said no, he poured quite a bit into one of the glasses. “Well, I need some,” he said. “Did Grampa tell you I was gay? Terribly gay?”

I said he had, and Brad smiled.

“That’s how he starts every conversation about me,” he said. “He wants to get it right out front, on the record, to show he doesn’t mind. But of course he does. He loves me, but he does.”

When I said I felt sort of the same way about my mother, he smiled and said that we had something in common. I guess we do.

He said his grandfather had always been interested in what he called “the second world.” Stories about telepathy, ghosts, strange disappearances, lights in the sky. He said, “Some people collect stamps. My grampa collects stories about the second world. I had my doubts about all that stuff until this.”

He pointed at the iPad, where the picture of George was still on the screen. George with his package full of explosives, waiting to be buzzed into the Macready School office.

Brad said, “Now I think I could believe in anything from flying saucers to killer clowns. Because there really is a second world. It exists because people refuse to believe it’s there.”

I know that’s true, Ralph. And so do you. It’s how the thing we killed in Texas survived as long as it did.

I asked Brad to explain why his grandfather waited so long, although by then I had a pretty good idea.

He said his grandfather thought it was basically harmless. A kind of exotic chameleon, and if not the last of its species, then one of the last. It lives off grief and pain, maybe not a nice thing, but not so different from maggots living off decaying flesh or buzzards and vultures living off roadkill.

“Coyotes and hyenas live that way, too,” Brad said. “They’re the janitors of the animal kingdom. And are we really any better? Don’t people slow down for a good long look at an accident on the turnpike? That’s roadkill, too.”

I said that I always looked away. And said a prayer that the people involved in the accident would be all right.

He said if that was true, I was an exception. He said that most people like pain, as long as it’s not theirs. Then he said, “I suppose you don’t watch horror movies, either?”

Well, I do, Ralph, but those movies are make-believe. When the director calls cut, the girl who had her throat slashed by Jason or Freddy gets up and grabs a cup of coffee. But still, after this I may not…

[Pause]

Never mind, I don’t have time to ramble off the subject. Brad said, “For every clip of killings or disasters that Grampa and I have collected, there are hundreds more. Maybe thousands. News people have a saying: If it bleeds, it leads. That’s because the stories people are most interested in are bad news stories. Murders. Explosions. Car crashes. Earthquakes. Tidal waves. People like that stuff, and they like it even more now that there’s cell phone video. The security footage recorded inside Pulse, when Omar Mateen was still rampaging? That has millions of hits. Millions.”

He said Mr. Bell thought this rare creature was only doing what all the people who watch the news do: feeding on tragedy. The monster—he didn’t call it an outsider—was just fortunate enough to live longer by doing it. Mr. Bell was content to watch and marvel until he saw the security camera still of the Macready School bomber. He has that memory for faces, and he knew he’d seen a version of that face at some act of violence, not that long ago. It took Brad less than an hour to isolate Philip Hannigan.

“I’ve found the Macready School bomber three more times so far,” Brad said, and showed me pictures of the fox-faced man—always different but always George underneath—doing three different stand-ups. Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Illinois tornadoes in 2004. And the World Trade Center in 2001. “I’m sure there are more, but I haven’t had time enough to hunt them out.”

“Maybe it’s a different man,” I said. “Or creature.” I was thinking that if there were two—Ondowsky, and the one we killed in Texas—there might be three. Or four. Or a dozen. I remembered a show I saw on PBS about endangered species. Only sixty black rhinos left in the world, only seventy Amur leopards, but that’s a lot more than three.

“No,” Brad said. “It’s the same guy.”

I asked him how he could be so sure.

“Grampa used to do sketches for the police,” he said. “I sometimes do court-ordered wiretaps for them, and a few times I’ve miked up UCs. You know what those are?”

I did, of course. Undercovers.

“No more mikes under shirts,” Brad said. “We use bogus cufflinks or shirt buttons these days. I once put a mike in the B logo of a Red Sox hat. B for bug, get it? But that’s only part of what I do. Watch this.”

He pulled his chair close to mine so we could both see his iPad. He opened an app called VocaKnow. There were several files inside it. One was labeled Paul Freeman. He was the version of Ondowsky who reported the plane crash in 1960, you remember.

Brad pushed PLAY, and I heard Freeman’s voice, only crisper and clearer. Brad said he had cleaned the audio and dropped out the background noise. He called that sweetening the track. The voice came from the iPad’s speaker. On the screen, I could see the voice, the way you can see soundwaves at the bottom of your phone or tablet when you tap the little microphone icon to send an audio text message. Brad called that a spectrogram voiceprint, and he claims to be a certified voiceprint examiner. Has given testimony in court.

Can you see that force we talked about at work here, Ralph? I can. Grandfather and grandson. One good with pictures, the other good with voices. Without both, this thing, their outsider, would still be wearing his different faces and hiding in plain sight. Some people would call it chance, or coincidence, like picking the winning numbers in a lottery, but I don’t believe it. I can’t, and I don’t want to.

Brad put Freeman’s plane-crash audio on repeat. Next he opened the sound file for Ondowsky, reporting from the Macready School, and also put that one on repeat. The two voices overlapped each other, turning everything into meaningless gabble. Brad muted the sound and used his finger to separate the two spectrograms, Freeman on the top half of his iPad and Ondowsky on the bottom half.

“You see, don’t you?” he asked, and of course I did. The same peaks and valleys were running across both, almost in sync. There were a few minor differences, but it was basically the same voice, although the recordings had been made sixty years apart. I asked Brad how the two wave-forms could look so similar when Freeman and Ondowsky were saying different things.

“His face changes, and his body changes,” Brad said, “but his voice never does. It’s called vocal uniqueness. He tries to change it—sometimes he raises the pitch, sometimes he lowers it, sometimes he even tries a little bit of an accent—but he doesn’t try very hard.”

I said, “Because he’s confident the physical changes are enough, along with the changes in location.”

“I think so,” Brad said. “Here’s something else. Everyone also has a unique delivery. A certain rhythm that’s determined by breath units. Look at the peaks. That’s Freeman punching certain words. Look at the valleys where he takes a breath. Now look at Ondowsky.”

They were the same, Ralph.

“There’s one other thing,” Brad said. “Both voices pause on certain words, always with s or th sounds in them. I think at some point, God knows how long ago, this thing talked with a lisp, but of course a TV news reporter can’t lisp. He’s taught himself to correct it by touching his tongue to the roof of his mouth, keeping it away from his teeth, because that’s where a lisp happens. It’s faint, but it’s there. Listen.”

He played me a sound byte of Ondowsky at the middle school, the part where he says “The explosive device may have been in the main office.”

Brad asked if I heard it. I asked him to play it again, to make sure it wasn’t just my imagination trying to hear what Brad said was there. It wasn’t imagination. Ondowsky says, “The explo… sive device may have been in the main of… fice.”

Next, he played a sound byte of Paul Freeman at the 1960 crash site. Freeman says, “He was thrown from the rear section of the plane, still on fire.” And I heard it again, Ralph. Those tiny pauses on section and still. The tongue touching the roof of the mouth to stop the lisp.

Brad put a third spectrogram on his tablet. It was Philip Hannigan interviewing the young man from Pulse, the kid with the smudged mascara on his cheeks. I couldn’t hear the young man, because Brad scrubbed his voice out along with all the background noises, like sirens and people talking. It was just Hannigan, just George, and he could have been right in the room with us. “What was it like in there, Rodney? And how did you escape?”

Brad played it for me three times. The peaks and valleys on the spectrogram matched the ones still running above it—Freeman and Ondowsky. That was the technical part, Ralph, and I could appreciate it, but what really got to me, what gave me the chills, were those tiny pauses. Short on what was it like, longer on escape, which must be especially hard for lispers to conquer.

Brad asked me if I was satisfied, and I said I was. Nobody who hasn’t been through what we’ve been through would have been, but I was. He isn’t the same as our outsider, who had to hibernate during his transformations and couldn’t be seen on video, but he’s certainly that being’s first or second cousin. There’s so much about these things we don’t know, and I suppose we never will.

I need to stop now, Ralph. I haven’t had anything to eat today but a bagel and a chicken sandwich and a little bit of a turnover. If I don’t get something soon, I’ll probably pass out.

More later.

Holly orders out to Domino’s—a small veggie pizza and a large Coke. When the young man shows up, she tips according to Bill Hodges’s rule of thumb: fifteen per cent of the bill if the service is fair, twenty per cent if the service is good. This young man is prompt, so she tips the full amount.

She sits at the little table by the window, munching away and watching as dusk begins to steal over the Embassy Suites parking lot. A Christmas tree is blinking its lights on and off down there, but Holly has never had less Christmas spirit in her life. Today the thing she’s investigating was only pictures on a TV screen and spectrograms on an iPad. Tomorrow, if all goes as she hopes it will (she has Holly hope), she’ll be face to face with it. That will be scary.

It has to be done; she has no choice. Dan Bell is too old and Brad Bell is too scared. He flat-out refused, even after Holly explained that what she planned to do in Pittsburgh couldn’t possibly put him at risk.

“You don’t know that,” Brad said. “For all you know, the thing’s telepathic.”

“I’ve been face to face with one,” Holly had replied. “If it was telepathic, Brad, I’d be dead and it would still be alive.”

“I’m not going,” Brad said. His lips were trembling. “My grampa needs me. He’s got a very bad heart. Don’t you have friends?”

She does, and one is a very good cop, but even if Ralph was in Oklahoma, would she risk him? He’s got a family. She doesn’t. As for Jerome… no. No way. The Pittsburgh part of her budding plan really shouldn’t be dangerous, but Jerome would want to be all in, and that would be dangerous. There’s Pete, but her partner has almost zero imagination. He’d do it, but treat the whole thing as a joke, and if there’s one thing Chet Ondowsky isn’t, it’s a joke.

Dan Bell might have taken the shape-shifter on when he was younger, but in those years he was content to just watch, fascinated, when it popped up from time to time, a Where’s Waldo of disaster. Feeling almost sorry for it, maybe. But now things have changed. Now it is no longer content to live on the aftermath of tragedy, gobbling grief and pain before the blood dries.

This time it brought the carnage, and if it gets away with it once, it will do it again. Next time the death toll may be much higher, and Holly will not allow that.

She opens her laptop on the room’s chintzy excuse for a desk and finds the email from Brad Bell she was expecting.

Attached is what you requested. Please use the materials wisely, and please keep us out of it. We have done what we can.

Well, Holly thinks, not quite. She downloads the attachment and then calls Dan Bell’s phone. She expects Brad to answer again, but it’s the old man, sounding relatively rejuvenated. There’s nothing like a nap to do that; Holly takes one whenever she can, but these days the opportunity doesn’t come around as often as she’d like.

“Dan, it’s Holly. Can I ask you one more question?”

“Shoot.”

“How does he move from job to job without being discovered? This is the age of social media. I don’t understand how that works.”

For a few seconds there’s only the sound of his heavy, oxygen-assisted breathing. Then he says, “We’ve talked about that, Brad and I. We have some ideas. He… it… wait, Brad wants the damn phone.”

There’s a smatter of talk she can’t pick up, but Holly gets the gist: the old guy doesn’t like being co-opted. Then Brad is on. “You want to know how he keeps getting jobs on TV?”

“Yes.”

“It’s a good question. Really good. We can’t be sure, but we think he jimmies his way in.”

“Jimmies?”

“It’s a broadcast term. Jimmying is how radio personalities and TV reporters move up in big markets. In those places there’s always at least one local TV station. Small. Unaffiliated. Pays peanuts. They mostly do community affairs. Everything from opening a new bridge to charity drives to city council meetings. This guy gets on the air there, does a few months, then applies at one of the big stations, using audition tapes from the little local station. Anybody seeing those tapes would get right away that he’s good at the job. A pro.” Brad gives a short laugh. “He’d have to be, wouldn’t he? He’s been doing it for at least sixty damn years. Practice makes perf—”

The old man interrupts with something. Brad says he’ll tell her, but that isn’t good enough for Holly. She’s suddenly impatient with both of them. It’s been a long day.

“Brad, put the phone on speaker.”

“Huh? Oh, okay, good idea.”

“I think he was doing it on radio, too!” Dan bawls. It’s as if he thinks they’re communicating with tin cans on a waxed string. Holly winces and holds the phone away from her ear.

“Grampa, you don’t have to talk so loud.”

Dan lowers his voice, but only slightly. “On the radio, Holly! Even before there was TV! And before there was radio, he might have been covering bloodshed for the newspapers! God knows how long he—it—has been alive.”

“Also,” Brad says, “he must have a rolling file of references. Probably the aspect you call George writes some for Ondowsky, and the one you call Ondowsky has written some for George. You understand?”

Holly does… sort of. It makes her think of a joke Bill told her once, about brokers marooned on a desert island getting rich trading each other’s clothes.

“Let me talk, goddammit,” Dan says. “I understand as well as you do, Bradley. I’m not stupid.”

Brad sighs. Living with Dan Bell can’t be easy, Holly thinks. On the other hand, living with Brad Bell is probably no bed of roses, either.

“Holly, it works because TV talent is a seller’s market at big local affiliates. People move up, some quit the business… and he’s good at the job.”

“It,” Brad says. “It’s good at the job.”

She hears coughing and Brad tells his grandfather to take one of his pills.

“Jesus, will you stop being such an old woman?”

Felix and Oscar, yelling at each other across the generation gap, Holly thinks. It might make a good sitcom, but when it comes to getting information it’s extremely poopy.

“Dan? Brad? Will you stop…” Bickering is the word that comes to mind, but Holly can’t quite bring herself to say it, even though she’s wound tight. “Stop your discussion for a minute?”

They are blessedly quiet.

“I understand what you’re saying, and it makes sense as far as it goes, but what about his work history? Where he went to broadcasting school? Don’t they wonder? Ask questions?”

Dan says gruffly, “He probably tells them he’s been out of the business for awhile and decided to get back in.”

“But we don’t really know,” Brad says. He sounds pissed, either because he can’t answer Holly’s question to her satisfaction (or to his own), or because he’s smarting over being called an old woman. “Listen, there was a kid in Colorado who posed as a doctor for almost four years. Prescribed drugs, even did operations. Maybe you read about it. He was seventeen passing for twenty-five, and didn’t have a college degree in anything, let alone medicine. If he could slip through the cracks, this outsider could.”

“Are you done?” Dan asks.

“Yes, Grampa.” And sighs.

“Good. Because I have a question. Are you going to meet him, Holly?”

“Yes.” Along with the pictures, Brad has included a spectrograph screen grab of Freeman, Ondowsky, and Philip Hannigan—aka George the Bomber. To Holly’s eye, all three look identical.

“When?”

“I hope tomorrow, and I’d like you both to keep completely quiet about this, please. Will you do that?”

“We will,” Brad says. “Of course we will. Won’t we, Grampa?”

“As long as you tell us what happens,” Dan says. “If you can, that is. I used to be a cop, Holly, and Brad works with the cops. We probably don’t have to tell you that meeting him could be dangerous. Will be dangerous.”

“I know,” Holly says in a small voice. “I work with an ex-cop myself.” And worked with an even better one before him, she thinks.

“Will you be careful?”

“I’ll try,” Holly says, but she knows there always comes a point when you have to stop being careful. Jerome talked about a bird that carried evil like a virus. All frowsy and frosty gray, he said. If you wanted to catch it and wring its fracking neck, there came a time when you had to stop being careful. She doesn’t think that will happen tomorrow, but it will soon.

Soon.

Jerome has turned the space over the Robinsons’ garage into a writing room and is using it to work on his book about great-great-Gramps Alton, also known as the Black Owl. He’s beavering away on it this evening when Barbara lets herself in and asks Jerome if she’s interrupting. Jerome tells her he can use a break. They get Cokes from the small refrigerator nestled beneath one sloping eave.

“Where is she?” Barbara asks.

Jerome sighs. “No how’s your book going, J? No did you find that chocolate Lab, J? Which I did, by the way. Safe and sound.”

“Good for you. And how’s your book going, J?”

“Up to page 93,” he says, and sweeps a hand through the air. “I’m sailing.”

“That’s good, too. Now where is she?”

Jerome takes his phone out of his pocket and touches an app called WebWatcher. “See for yourself.”

Barbara studies the screen. “The airport in Portland? Portland, Maine? What’s she doing there?”

“Why don’t you call her and ask?” Jerome says. “Just say ‘Jerome snuck a tracker on your phone, Hollyberry, because we’re worried about you, so what are you up to? Spill it, girl.’ Think she’d like that?”

“Don’t joke,” Barbara says. “She’d be super-pissed. That would be bad, but she’d also be hurt, and that would be worse. Besides, we know what it’s about. Don’t we?”

Jerome had suggested—just suggested—that Barbara could peek at the history on Holly’s home computer when she went to pick up those movies for her school report. If, that was, Holly’s password at home was the same as the one she used at work.

That turned out to be the case, and while Barbara had felt extremely creepy and stalkerish about looking at her friend’s search history, she had done it. Because Holly hadn’t been the same after her trip to Oklahoma and subsequent trip to Texas, where she had nearly been killed by an off-the-rails cop named Jack Hoskins. There was a great deal more to that story than her near miss that day, and both of them knew it, but Holly refused to talk about it. And at first that seemed okay, because little by little the haunted look had left her eyes. She had returned to normal… Holly-normal, at least. But now she was gone, doing something she’d refused to talk about.

So Jerome had decided to track Holly’s location with the WebWatcher app.

And Barbara had looked at Holly’s search history.

And Holly—trusting soul that she was, at least when it came to her friends—had not wiped it.

Barbara discovered Holly had looked at many trailers for upcoming movies, had visited Rotten Tomatoes and Huffington Post, and had several times visited a dating site called Hearts & Friends (who knew?), but many of her current searches had to do with the terrorist bombing at the Albert Macready Middle School. There were also searches for Chet Ondowsky, a TV reporter at WPEN in Pittsburgh, a place called Clauson’s Diner in Pierre, Pennsylvania, and someone named Fred Finkel, who turned out to be a cameraman at WPEN.

Barbara took all this to Jerome and asked if he thought Holly might be on the verge of some sort of weirdo breakdown, maybe kicked off by the Macready School bombing. “Maybe she’s like, flashing back to when her cousin Janey got blown up by Brady Hartsfield.”

Based on her searches, it certainly crossed Jerome’s mind that Holly had caught the scent of another really bad man, but there’s something else that seemed—to him, at least—equally plausible.

“Hearts & Friends,” he says to his sister now.

“What about it?”

“Has it not occurred to you that Holly might be, don’t gasp, hooking up? Or at least meeting a guy she’s exchanged emails with?”

Barbara stares at him with her mouth open. Almost laughs, then doesn’t. What she says is, “Hmmm.”

“Meaning what?” Jerome says. “Give me some insight here. You spend girl-time with her—”

“Sexist, J.”

He ignores that. “Does she have a friend of the male persuasion? Now or ever?”

Barbara considers this carefully. “You know what, I don’t think so. I think she might still be a virgin.”

What about you, Barb? is the thought that immediately jumps into Jerome’s mind, but some questions should not be asked of eighteen-year-old girls by their big brothers.

“She’s not gay, or anything,” Barbara hastens on. “She never misses a Josh Brolin flick, and when we saw that stupid shark movie a couple of years ago, she actually moaned when she saw Jason Statham with his shirt off. Do you really think she’d go all the way to Maine for a date?”

“The plot thickens,” he says, peering into his phone. “She’s not at the airport. If you zoom in, you’ll see it’s Embassy Suites. She’s probably drinking champagne with some guy who likes frozen daiquiris, strolling in the moonlight, and discussing classic films.”

Barbara makes as if to punch him in the face, only springing her hand open at the last second.

“Tell you what,” Jerome says. “I think we better leave this alone.”

“For real?”

“I think so, yeah. We need to remember that she survived Brady Hartsfield. Twice. Whatever happened in Texas, she got through that, too. She’s a little shaky on top, but down deep… solid steel.”

“Got that right,” Barbara says. “Looking at her browser… that made me feel skeevy.”

“This makes me feel skeevy,” he says, and taps the blinking dot on his phone that marks the Embassy Suites. “I’m going to sleep on it, but if I feel the same in the morning, I’m gonna dump it. She’s a good woman. Brave. Lonely, too.”

“And her mother’s a witch,” Barbara adds.

Jerome doesn’t disagree. “Maybe we should just let her alone. Work it out, whatever it is.”

“Maybe we should.” But Barbara looks unhappy about it.

Jerome leans forward. “One thing I know for sure, Barb. She’s never going to find out that we tracked her at all. Is she?”

“Never,” Barbara says. “Or that I peeked at her searches.”

“Good. We have that straight. Now can I go back to work? I want to get another two pages before I knock off.”

Holly isn’t even close to knocking off. In fact, she’s just about to get started on the evening’s real work. She thinks about kneeling for a little more prayer first and decides she would only be procrastinating. She reminds herself that God helps those who help themselves.

Chet Ondowsky’s Chet on Guard segment has its own webpage, where folks who feel they have been burned can call in on an 800 number. This line is manned (or womaned) twenty-four hours a day, and the page claims all calls will be kept absolutely confidential.

Holly takes a deep breath and makes the call. It rings just a single time. “Chet on Guard, this is Monica speaking, how may I help?”

“Monica, I need to speak to Mr. Ondowsky. It’s quite urgent.”

The woman responds smoothly and with no hesitation. Holly’s sure she’s got a script, complete with possible variations, on the screen in front of her, “I’m sorry, ma’am, but Chet has either left for the day or is on assignment. I’ll be happy to take your contact information and pass it on to him. Some information on the nature of your consumer complaint would also be helpful.”

“This isn’t exactly a consumer complaint,” she says, “but it is about consuming. Will you tell him that, please?”

“Ma’am?” Monica is clearly puzzled.

“I need to speak to him tonight, and before nine P.M. Tell him it concerns Paul Freeman and the plane crash. Have you got that?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Holly can hear the clitter-clitter-clitter of the woman typing.

“Tell him it also concerns Dave Van Pelt in Dallas and Jim Avery in Detroit. And tell him—this is very important—that it concerns Philip Hannigan and the Pulse nightclub.”

This startles Monica out of her previously smooth delivery. “Isn’t that where the man shot—”

“Yes,” Holly says. “Tell him to call by nine, or I will take my information elsewhere. And don’t forget to tell him it’s not about consumers, but it is about consuming. He’ll know what that means.”

“Ma’am, I can pass the message on, but I can’t guarantee—”

“If you pass it on, he’ll call,” Holly says, and hopes she’s right. Because she doesn’t have a Plan B.

“I need your contact information, ma’am.”

“You have my number on your screen,” Holly says. “I’ll wait for Mr. Ondowsky’s call to give my name. Please have a pleasant evening.”

Holly ends the call, wipes sweat from her brow, and checks her Fitbit. Heart rate is 89. Not bad. There was a time when a call like that would have rammed it up over 150. She looks at the clock. Quarter of seven. She takes her book out of her travel bag and immediately puts it back. She’s too tense to read. So she paces.

At quarter to eight she’s in the bathroom with her shirt off, washing her armpits (she doesn’t use deodorant; aluminum chlorohydrate is supposed to be safe but she has her doubts), when her phone rings. She takes two deep breaths, sends up the briefest of prayers—God help me not to frack up—and answers.

Her phone’s screen says UNKNOWN. Holly isn’t surprised. He’s calling on his personal phone or maybe a burner.

“This is Chet Ondowsky, to whom am I speaking?” The voice is smooth, friendly, and controlled. A veteran TV reporter’s voice.

“My name is Holly. That’s all you need to know for now.” She thinks she sounds okay so far. She punches her Fitbit. Pulse is 98.

“What’s this about, Holly?” Interested. Inviting confidences. This isn’t the man who reported on the bloody horror in Pineborough Township; this is Chet on Guard, wanting to know how the guy who paved your driveway shafted you on the price or how much the power company stiffed you for kilowatts you didn’t burn.

“I think you know,” she says, “but let’s make sure. I’m going to send you some pictures. Give me your email address.”

“If you check the Chet on Guard webpage, Holly, you’ll find—”

“Your personal email address. Because you don’t want anyone seeing this. You really don’t.”

There’s a pause, long enough for Holly to think she might have lost him, but then he gives her the address. She jots it on a sheet of Embassy Suites notepaper.

“I’m sending it right away,” she says. “Pay special attention to the spectrographic analysis and the picture of Philip Hannigan. Call me back in fifteen minutes.”

“Holly, this is very unusu—”

“You’re very unusual, Mr. Ondowsky. Aren’t you? Call me back in fifteen minutes, or I’ll take what I know public. Your time starts as soon as my email goes through.”

“Holly—”

She ends the call, drops the phone on the rug, and bends over, head between her knees and face in her hands. Don’t faint, she tells herself. Don’t you fracking do it.

When she feels okay again—as okay as she can be under the circumstances, which are very stressful—she opens her laptop and sends off the material Brad Bell gave her. She doesn’t bother adding a message. The pictures are the message.

Then she waits.

Eleven minutes later her phone lights up. She grabs it at once but lets it ring four times before taking the call.

He doesn’t bother with hello. “These prove nothing.” It’s still the perfectly modulated tone of the veteran TV personality, but all the warmth has gone out of it. “You know that, right?”

Holly says, “Wait until people compare the picture of you as Philip Hannigan with the one of you standing outside the school with that package in your hands. The false mustache will fool nobody. Wait until they compare the spectrogram of Philip Hannigan’s voice to the spectrogram of Chet Ondowsky’s voice.”

“Who is this they you’re referring to, Holly? The police? They’d laugh you right out of the station.”

“Oh no, not the police,” Holly said. “I can do better than that. If TMZ isn’t interested, Gossip Glutton will be. Or DeepDive. And the Drudge Report, they always like the strange stuff. On TV there’s Inside Edition and Celeb. But do you know where I’d go first?”

Silence from the other end. But she can hear him breathing.

It breathing.

“Inside View,” she says. “They ran with the Night Flier story for over a year, Slender Man for two. They wrung those stories dry. They’ve still got a circulation of over three million, and they’ll eat this up.”

“Nobody believes that shit.”

This isn’t true, and they both know it.

“They’ll believe this. I’ve got a lot of information, Mr. Ondowsky, what I believe you reporters call deep background, and when it comes out—if it comes out—people will start digging into your past. All your pasts. Your cover won’t just come apart, it will explode.” Like the bomb you planted to kill those children, she thinks.

Nothing.

Holly chews on her knuckles and waits him out. It’s very hard, but she does it.

At last he asks, “Where did you get those pictures? Who gave them to you?”

Holly knew this was coming, and knows she has to give him something. “A man who’s been onto you for a long time. You don’t know him and you’ll never find him, but you also don’t have to worry about him. He’s very old. What you have to worry about is me.”

There’s another long pause. Now one of Holly’s knuckles is bleeding. At last the question she’s been waiting for arrives: “What do you want?”

“I’ll tell you tomorrow. You’re going to meet me at noon.”

“I have an assignment—”

“Cancel it,” commands the woman who once scuttled through life with her head down and her shoulders hunched. “This is your assignment now, and I don’t think you want to blow it.”

“Where?”

Holly is ready for this. She’s done her research. “The food court of the Monroeville Mall. That’s less than fifteen miles from your TV station, so it should be convenient for you and safe for me. Go to Sbarro, look around, you’ll see me. I’ll be wearing a brown leather jacket open over a pink sweater with a turtleneck collar. I’ll have a slice of pizza and coffee in a Starbucks cup. If you’re not there by five past noon, I’ll leave and start shopping my merchandise.”

“You’re a kook and no one will believe you.” He doesn’t sound confident, but he doesn’t sound afraid, either. He sounds angry. That’s all right, Holly thinks, I can work with that.

“Who are you trying to convince, Mr. Ondowsky? Me, or yourself?”

“You’re a piece of work, lady. You know that?”

“I’ll have a friend watching,” she says. Not true, but Ondowsky won’t know that. “He doesn’t know what it’s about, don’t worry about that, but he’ll be keeping an eye on me.” She pauses. “And on you.”

“What do you want?” he asks again.

“Tomorrow,” Holly says, and ends the call.

Later, after she’s made arrangements to fly to Pittsburgh the following morning, she lies in bed, hoping for sleep but not expecting much. She wonders—as she did when she conceived this plan—if she really needs to meet him face to face. She thinks she does. She thinks she’s convinced him that she’s got the goods on him (as Bill would say). Now she has to look him in the eye and give him a way out. Has to convince him that she’s willing to make a deal. And what kind of deal? Her first wild idea was to tell him she wants to be like him, that she wants to live… maybe not forever, that seems too extreme, but for hundreds of years. Would he believe that, or would he think she was conning him? Too risky.

Money, then. Has to be.

That he will believe, because he has been watching the human parade for a long time. And looking down on it. Ondowsky believes that for lesser beings, for the herd he sometimes thins, it always comes down to money.

Sometime after midnight, Holly finally drops off. She dreams of a cave in Texas. She dreams of a thing that looked like a man until she hit it with a sock loaded with ball bearings and the head collapsed like the false front it was.

She cries in her sleep.

December 17, 2020

As an honor roll senior at Houghton High, Barbara Robinson is pretty much free to go as she lists during her free period, which runs from 9:00 to 9:50. When the bell rings releasing her from her Early English Writers class, she wanders down to the art room, which is deserted at this hour. She takes her phone from her hip pocket and calls Jerome. From the sound of his voice, she’s pretty sure she woke him up. Oh for the life of a writer, she thinks.

Barbara doesn’t waste time. “Where is she this morning, J?”

“Don’t know,” he says. “I dumped the tracker.”

“True?”

“True.”

“Well… okay.”

“Can I go back to sleep now?”

“No,” she says. Barbara has been up since 6:45, and misery loves company. “Time to get up and grab the world by the balls.”

“Mouth, sister,” he says, and boom, he’s gone.

Barbara stands by some kid’s really bad watercolor of the lake, staring at her phone and frowning. Jerome is probably right, Holly went off to meet some guy she met on that dating website. Not to fuck him, that’s not Holly, but to make a human connection? To reach out, as her therapist has no doubt been telling her she must do? That Barbara can believe. Portland has got to be at least five hundred miles from the site of that bombing she was so interested in, after all. Maybe more.

Put yourself in her shoes, Barbara tells herself. Wouldn’t you want your privacy? And wouldn’t you be mad if you ever found out that your friends—your so-called friends—were spying on you?

Holly wasn’t going to find out, but did that change the basic equation?

No.

Was she still worried (a little worried)?

Yes. But some worries had to be lived with.

She slips her phone back into her pocket and decides to go down to the music room and practice her guitar until 20th Century American History. She’s trying to learn the old Wilson Pickett soul shouter, “In the Midnight Hour.” The bar chords in the bridge are a bitch, but she’s getting there.

On her way out, she almost runs into Justin Freilander, a junior who’s a founding member of Houghton’s geek squad, and who has—according to rumor—a major crush on her. She smiles at him and Justin immediately turns that alarming shade of red of which only white boys are capable. Rumor confirmed. It suddenly occurs to Barbara that this might be fate.

She says, “Hey Justin. I wonder if you could help me with something?”

And takes her phone out of her pocket.

While Justin Freilander is examining Barbara’s phone (which is still, oh God, warm from being in her back pocket), Holly is landing at Pittsburgh International. Ten minutes later she’s in line at the Avis counter. Uber would be cheaper, but having her own ride is wiser. A year or so after Pete Huntley came onboard at Finders Keepers, the two of them took a driving course meant to teach surveillance and evasion—a refresher for him, new for her. She doesn’t expect to need the former today, but recourse to the latter isn’t out of the question. She is meeting a dangerous man.

She parks in the lot of an airport hotel to kill some time (early to my own funeral, she thinks again). She calls her mother. Charlotte doesn’t answer, which doesn’t mean she’s not there; direct-to-voicemail is one of her old punishing techniques for when she feels her daughter has stepped out of line. Holly next calls Pete, who asks again what she’s doing and when she’ll be back. Thinking of Dan Bell and his terribly gay grandson, she tells him she’s visiting friends in New England and will be in the office bright and early on Monday morning.

“You better be,” Pete says. “You have a depo on Tuesday. And the office Christmas party is on Wednesday. I plan to kiss you under the mistletoe.”

“Oough,” Holly says, but she’s smiling.

She arrives at the Monroeville Mall at quarter past eleven and makes herself sit in the car for another fifteen minutes, alternately punching her Fitbit (pulse running just over 100) and praying for strength and calm. Also to be convincing.

At eleven-thirty she enters the mall and takes a slow stroll past some of the shops—Jimmy Jazz, Clutch, Boobaloo strollers—looking in the windows not to scope out the merchandise but to catch a reflected glimpse of Chet Ondowsky, should he be watching her. And it will be Chet. His other self, the one she thinks of as George, is the most wanted man in America just now. Holly supposes he might have a third template, but she thinks it unlikely; he’s got a pig-self and a fox-self, why would he think he’d need more?

At ten minutes of twelve, she gets in line at Starbucks for a cup of coffee, then queues at Sbarro for a slice of pizza she doesn’t want. She unzips her jacket so the pink turtleneck shows, then finds an unoccupied table in the food court. Although it’s lunchtime, there are quite a few of those—more than she expected, and that makes her uneasy. The mall itself is low on foot traffic, especially for the Christmas shopping season. Seems to have fallen on hard times, everybody buys from Amazon these days.

Noon comes. A young man wearing cool sunglasses and a quilted jacket (a couple of ski-lift tags dangle jauntily from the zipper) slows, as if he means to chat her up, then moves on. Holly is relieved. She has little in the way of brush-off skills, never having had much reason to develop them.

At five past noon she starts to think Ondowsky isn’t coming. Then, at seven past, a man speaks from behind her, and in the warm, we’re-all-pals-here voice of a TV regular. “Hello, Holly.”

She jumps and almost spills her coffee. It’s the young man with the cool sunglasses. At first she thinks this is a third template after all, but when he takes them off she sees it’s Ondowsky, all right. His face is slightly more angular, the creases around his mouth are gone, and his eyes are closer together (not a good look for TV), but it’s him. And not young at all. She can’t see any lines and wrinkles on his face, but she senses them, and thinks there may be a lot. The masquerade is a good one, but up this close it’s like Botox or plastic surgery.

Because I know, she thinks. I know what he is.

“I thought it would be best if I looked just a bit different,” he says. “When I’m Chet, I tend to get recognized. TV journalists aren’t exactly Tom Cruise, but…” A modest shrug finishes the thought.

With his sunglasses off, she sees something else: his eyes have a shimmery quality, as if they’re underwater… or not there at all. And isn’t there something similar going on with his mouth? Holly thinks of how the picture looks when you’re at a 3-D movie and take off the glasses.

“You see it, don’t you?” The voice is still warm and friendly. It goes well with the small smile dimpling the corners of his mouth. “Most people don’t. It’s the transition. It will be gone in five minutes, ten at most. I had to come here directly from the station. You’ve caused me some problems, Holly.”

She realizes she can hear the small pause when he occasionally puts his tongue to the roof of his mouth to stop the lisp.

“That makes me think of an old country song by Travis Tritt.” She sounds calm enough but she can’t take her eyes from his, where the sclera shimmers into the iris and the iris shimmers into the pupil. For the time being, they’re countries with unstable borders. “It’s called ‘Here’s a Quarter, Call Someone Who Cares.’ ”

He smiles, the lips seeming to spread too far, and then, snap! The minute shivers in his eyes remain, but his mouth is solid again. He looks to her left, where an old gent in a parka and tweed cap is reading a magazine. “Is that your friend? Or is it the woman over there who’s been looking into the window of Forever 21 a suspiciously long time?”

“Maybe it’s both of them,” Holly says. Now that the confrontation is here, she feels okay. Or almost; those eyes are disturbing and disorienting. Looking into them too long will give her a headache, but he would take looking away as a sign of weakness. And it would be.

“You know me, but all I have is your given name. What’s the rest of it?”

“Gibney. Holly Gibney.”

“And what is it you want, Holly Gibney?”

“Three hundred thousand dollars.”

“Blackmail,” he says, and gives his head a small shake, as if he’s disappointed in her. “Do you know what blackmail is, Holly?”

She remembers one of the late Bill Hodges’s old maxims (there were many): You don’t answer a perp’s questions; the perp answers yours. So she simply sits and waits with her small hands folded beside her unwanted slice of pizza.

“Blackmail is rent,” he says. “Not even rent-to-buy, a scam Chet on Guard knows well. Let’s suppose I had three hundred thousand dollars, which I don’t—there’s a big difference between what a TV reporter makes and what a TV actor makes. But let’s suppose.”

“Let’s suppose you’ve been around for a long, long time,” Holly says, “and putting money away all the while. Let’s suppose that’s how you finance your…” Your what, exactly? “Your lifestyle. And your background. Bogus IDs and all.”

He smiles. It’s charming. “All right, Holly Gibney, let’s suppose that. The central problem for me remains: blackmail is rent. When the three hundred K is gone, you’ll come back with your Photoshopped pictures and your electronically altered voiceprints and threaten me with exposure all over again.”

Holly is ready for this. She didn’t need Bill to tell her that the best confabulation is the one containing the most truth. “No,” she says. “Three hundred thousand is all I want, because it’s all I need.” She pauses. “Although there is one other thing.”

“And what would that be?” The pleasant TV-trained tones have become condescending.

“Let’s stick with the money for now. Recently my Uncle Henry was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. He’s in an elder care facility that specializes in housing and treating people like him. It’s very expensive, but that’s really beside the point because he hates it there, he’s very upset, and my mother wants to bring him back home. Only she can’t care for him. She thinks she can, but she can’t. She’s getting old, she has medical problems of her own, and the house would have to be retrofitted for an invalid.” She thinks of Dan Bell. “Ramps, a stair-chair, and a bed-hoist to start with, but those things are minor. I’d want to hire round-the-clock care for him, including an RN in the daytime.”

“Such expensive plans, Holly Gibney. You must love the old dear very much.”

“I do,” Holly says.

It’s the truth even though Uncle Henry is a pain in the ass. Love is a gift; love is also a chain with a manacle at each end.

“His general health is bad. Congestive heart failure is the main physical problem.” Again she has Dan Bell to draw on. “He’s in a wheelchair and on oxygen. He might live another two years. It’s possible he could live three. I’ve run the numbers and three hundred thousand dollars would keep him for five.”

“And if he lives six, you’d come back.”

She finds herself thinking of young Frank Peterson, murdered by that other outsider in Flint City. Murdered in the most gruesome and painful way. She’s suddenly furious with Ondowsky. Him with his trained TV reporter’s voice and his condescending smile. He’s a piece of poop. Except poop is too mild. She leans forward, fixing her gaze on those eyes (which have finally, thankfully, begun to settle).

“Listen to me, you child-murdering piece of shit. I don’t want to ask you for more money. I didn’t even want to ask you for this money. I never want to see you again. I can’t believe I’m actually planning to let you go, and if you don’t wipe that fracking smile off your face, I just may change my mind.”

Ondowsky recoils as if slapped, and the smile does indeed disappear. Has he ever been spoken to like this? Maybe, but not for a long time. He’s a respected TV journalist! When he’s Chet on Guard, cheating contractors and pill-mill proprietors quail at his approach! His eyebrows (they are very thin, she notices, as if hair really doesn’t want to grow there) draw together. “You can’t—”

“Shut up and listen to me,” Holly says in a low, intense voice. She leans even further forward, not just invading his space but threatening it. This is a Holly her mother has never seen, although Charlotte’s seen enough in these last five or six years to consider her daughter a stranger, maybe even a changeling. “Are you listening? You better be, or I’ll call this off and walk away. I won’t get three hundred thousand from Inside View, but I’ll bet I can get fifty, and that’s a start.”

“I’m listening.” Listening has one of those pauses in the middle. This one is longer. Because he’s upset, Holly surmises. Good. Upset is just how she wants him.

“Three hundred thousand dollars. Cash. Fifties and hundreds. Put it in a box like the one you took to the Macready School, although you don’t have to bother with the Christmas stickers and the fake uniform. Bring it to my place of business on Saturday evening at six P.M. That gives you the rest of today and all of tomorrow to put the cash together. Be on time, not late like you were today. If you’re late, your goose is cooked. You want to remember how close I am to pulling the plug on this. You make me sick.” Also the truth, and she guesses that if she pushed the button on the side of her Fitbit now, her pulse would be up around 170.

“Just for the sake of discussion, what is your place of business? And what business do you do there?”

Answering those questions may be signing her death warrant if she fracks up, Holly knows this, but it’s too late to turn back now. “The Frederick Building.” She names the city. “On Saturday at six, and just before Christmas, we’ll have the whole place to ourselves. Fifth floor. Finders Keepers.”

“What is Finders Keepers, exactly? Some kind of collection agency?” He wrinkles his nose, as if at a bad smell.

“We do a few collections,” Holly admits. “Mostly other things. We’re an investigative agency.”

“Oh my God, are you an actual private eye?” He has regained enough of his sang-froid to sarcastically pat his chest in the vicinity of his heart (if he has one, Holly bets it’s black).

Holly has no intention of chasing that. “Six o’clock, fifth floor. Three hundred thousand. Fifties and hundreds in a box. Use the side door. Phone me when you arrive and I’ll give you the lock code by text.”

“Is there a camera?”

The question doesn’t surprise Holly in the least. He’s a TV reporter. Unlike the outsider who killed Frank Peterson, cameras are his life.

“There is, but it’s broken. From the ice storm early this month. It hasn’t been fixed yet.”

She can see he doesn’t believe that, but it happens to be the truth. Al Jordan, the building super, is a lazybones who should have been fired (in Holly’s humble opinion, and Pete’s) long since. It’s not just the side entrance camera; if not for Jerome, people with offices on the eighth floor would still be trudging up the stairs all the way to the top of the building.

“There’s a metal detector inside the door, and that does work. It’s built into the walls; there’s no way to dodge around it. If you come early, I’ll know. If you try to bring a gun, I’ll know that. Following me?”

“Yes.” No smile now. She doesn’t have to be telepathic to know he’s thinking she’s a meddlesome, troublesome cunt. That’s fine with Holly; it beats being a wimp scared of her own shadow.

“Take the elevator. I’ll hear it, it’s noisy. When it opens, I’ll be waiting for you in the hall. We’ll make the exchange there. Everything’s on a flash drive.”

“And how will the exchange work?”

“Never mind for now. Just believe it’s going to work so we both walk away.”

“And I’m supposed to trust you on that?”

Another question she has no intention of answering. “Let’s talk about the other thing I need from you.” This is where she either seals the deal… or doesn’t.

“What is it?” Now he sounds almost sullen.

“The old man I told you about, the one who spotted you—”

“How? How did he do that?”

“Never mind that, either. The thing is, he’s been keeping an eye on you for years. Decades.”

She watches his face closely and is satisfied with what she sees there: shock.

“He left you alone because he thought you were a hyena. Or a crow. Something that lives on roadkill. Not nice, but part of the… I don’t know, the ecosystem, I guess. But then you decided that wasn’t enough, didn’t you? You thought why wait around for some tragedy, some massacre, when I can make my own. DIY, right?”

Nothing from Ondowsky. He simply watches her, and even though his eyes are now still, they’re awful. It’s her death warrant, all right, and she’s not just signing it. She’s writing it herself.

“Have you done it before?”

A long pause. Just when Holly has decided he isn’t going to answer—which will be an answer—he does. “No. But I was hungry.” And he smiles. It makes her feel like screaming. “You look frightened, Holly Gibney.”

No use lying about that. “I am. But I’m also determined.” She leans forward into his space again. It’s one of the hardest things she’s ever done. “So here is the other thing. I’ll give you a pass this time, but never do it again. If you do, I’ll know.”

“And then what? You’ll come after me?”

It’s Holly’s turn not to speak.

“How many copies of this material do you actually have, Holly Gibney?”

“Only one,” Holly says. “Everything’s on the flash drive, and I’ll give it to you on Saturday evening. But.” She points a finger at him, and is pleased to see it doesn’t tremble. “I know your face. I know both your faces. I know your voice, things about it you may not know yourself.” She’s thinking of the pauses to defeat the lisp. “Go your way, eat your rotten food, but if I even suspect you’ve caused another tragedy—another Macready School—then yes, I’ll come after you. I’ll hunt you down. I’ll blow up your life.”

Ondowsky looks around at the nearly empty food court. Both the old man in the tweed cap and the woman who was staring at the mannequins in the window of Forever 21 are gone. There are people queuing at the fast food franchises, but their backs are turned. “I don’t think anyone’s watching us, Holly Gibney. I think you’re on your own. I think I could reach across this table and snap your scrawny neck and be gone before anyone realized what happened. I’m very fast.”

If he sees she’s terrified—and she is, because she knows he’s both desperate and furious to find himself in this position—he may do it. Probably will do it. So once more she forces herself to lean forward. “You might not be fast enough to keep me from screaming your name, which I believe everyone in the Pittsburgh metro area knows. I’m quite speedy myself. Would you like to take that chance?”

There’s a moment when he’s either deciding or pretending to. Then he says, “Saturday evening at six, Frederick Building, fifth floor. I bring the money, you give me the thumb drive. That’s the deal?”

“That’s the deal.”

“And you’ll keep your silence.”

“Unless there’s another Macready School, yes. If there is, I’ll start shouting what I know from the rooftops. And I’ll go on shouting until someone believes me.”

“All right.”

He sticks out his hand, but doesn’t seem surprised when Holly declines to shake it. Or even touch it. He gets to his feet and smiles again. It’s the one that makes her feel like screaming.

“The school was a mistake. I see that now.”

He puts on his sunglasses and is halfway across the food court almost before Holly has time to register his departure. He wasn’t lying about being fast. Maybe she could have avoided his hands if he’d reached across the small table, but she has her doubts. One quick twist and he’d’ve been gone, leaving a woman with her chin on her chest, as if she’s dozed off over her little lunch. But it’s only a temporary reprieve.

All right, he said. Just that. No hesitation, no asking for assurances. No questions about how she could be sure some future explosion resulting in multiple casualties—a bus, a train, a shopping center like this one—wasn’t his doing.

The school was a mistake, he said. I see that now.

But she was the mistake, one that needed to be corrected.

He doesn’t mean to pay me, he means to kill me, she thinks as she takes her untouched slice and her Starbucks cup to the nearest trash receptacle. Then she almost laughs.

Like I didn’t know that all along?

The mall parking lot is cold and windswept. At the height of the holiday buying season it should be full, but it’s only at half capacity, if that. Holly is exquisitely aware that she’s on her own. There are large empty spaces where the wind can really do its work, numbing her face and sometimes almost making her stagger, but there are also clusters of parked cars. Ondowsky could be hiding behind any one of them, ready to leap out (I’m very fast) and grab her.

She runs the last ten steps to the rental, and once she’s inside, she pushes the button that locks all the doors. She sits there for half a minute, getting herself under control. She doesn’t check her Fitbit because she wouldn’t like its news.

Holly drives away from the mall, checking her rearview mirror every few seconds. She doesn’t believe she’s being followed, but goes into evasive driving mode anyway. Better safe than sorry.

She knows Ondowsky might expect her to take a commuter flight back home, so she plans to spend the night in Pittsburgh and take an Amtrak tomorrow. She pulls into a Holiday Inn Express and turns on her phone to check for messages before going inside. There’s one from her mother.

“Holly, I don’t know where you are, but Uncle Henry’s had an accident at that damn Rolling Hills place. He may have a broken arm. Please call me. Please.” Holly hears both her mother’s distress and the old accusation: I needed you and you’ve disappointed me. Again.

The pad of her finger comes within a millimeter of returning her mother’s call. Old habits are hard to break and default positions are hard to change. The flush of shame is already heating her forehead, cheeks, and throat, and the words she’ll say when her mother answers are already in her mouth: I’m sorry. And why not? All her life she’s been apologizing to her mother, who always forgives her with that expression on her face that says Oh Holly, you never change. You are such a reliable disappointer. Because Charlotte Gibney also has her default positions.

This time Holly stays her finger, thinking.

Why, exactly, should she be sorry? What would she be apologizing for? That she wasn’t there to save poor addled Uncle Henry from breaking his arm? That she didn’t answer the phone the minute, the very second, that her mother called, as if Charlotte’s life is the important life, the real life, and Holly’s only her mother’s cast shadow?

Facing Ondowsky was hard. Refusing to immediately answer her mother’s cri de coeur is just as hard, maybe even harder, but she does. Although it makes her feel like a bad daughter, she calls the Rolling Hills Elder Care Center instead. She identifies herself and asks for Mrs. Braddock. She’s put on hold and suffers “The Little Drummer Boy” until Mrs. Braddock comes on. Holly thinks it’s music to commit suicide by.

“Ms. Gibney!” Mrs. Braddock says. “Is it too early to wish you happy holidays?”

“Not at all. Thank you. Mrs. Braddock, my mother called and said my uncle has had an accident.”

Mrs. Braddock laughs. “Saved one, more like it! I called your mother and told her. Your uncle’s mental state may have deteriorated somewhat, but there’s certainly nothing wrong with his reflexes.”

“What happened?”

“The first day or so he didn’t want to come out of his room,” Mrs. Braddock says, “but that’s not unusual. Our new arrivals are always disoriented, and often in distress. Sometimes in great distress, in which case we give them something to calm them down a bit. Your uncle didn’t need that, and yesterday he came out all on his own and sat in the dayroom. He even helped Mrs. Hatfield with her jigsaw puzzle. He watched that crazy judge show he likes—”

John Law, Holly thinks, and smiles. She’s hardly aware that she is constantly checking her mirrors to make sure Chet Ondowsky (I’m very fast) isn’t lurking.

“—afternoon snacks.”

“Beg pardon?” Holly says. “I lost you for a second.”

“I said that when the show was over, some of them headed into the dining hall, where there are afternoon snacks. Your uncle was walking with Mrs. Hatfield, who is eighty-two and rather unsteady. Anyway, she tripped and might have taken quite a bad fall, only Henry grabbed her. Sarah Whitlock—she’s one of our nurses’ aides—said he reacted very quickly. ‘Like lightning’ were her actual words. Anyway, he took her weight and fell against the wall, where there’s a fire extinguisher. State law, you know. He has quite the bruise, but he may have saved Mrs. Hatfield from a concussion or even worse. She’s very frail.”

“Uncle Henry didn’t break anything? When he hit the fire extinguisher?”

Mrs. Braddock laughs again. “Oh, heavens no!”

“That’s good. Tell my uncle he’s my hero.”

“I will. And once again, happy holidays.”

“I’m Holly and therefore must be jolly,” she says, a creaky witticism she’s been using at this time of year since she was twelve. She ends the call on Mrs. Braddock’s laughter, then looks at the dull brick side of the Holiday Inn Express for awhile, arms crossed over her scant bosom, brow furrowed in thought. She comes to a decision and calls her mother.

“Oh, Holly, at last! Where have you been? Isn’t it bad enough I have my brother to worry about without having to worry about you, too?”

The urge to say I’m sorry once more arises, and she reminds herself again that she has nothing to apologize for.

“I’m fine, Mom. I’m in Pittsburgh—”

“Pittsburgh!”

“—but I can be home in a little over two hours, if the traffic isn’t bad and Avis will let me return their car down there. Is my room made up?”

“It’s always made up,” Charlotte says.

Of course it is, Holly thinks. Because eventually I’ll come to my senses and return to it.

“Great,” Holly says. “I’ll be there in time for supper. We can watch some television and go see Uncle Henry tomorrow, if that would be—”

“I’m so worried about him!” Charlotte cries.

But not worried enough to jump in your car and go there, Holly thinks. Because Mrs. Braddock called you and you know. This isn’t about your brother; it’s about bringing your daughter to heel. It’s too late for that, and I think in your heart you know it, but you won’t stop trying. That’s also a default position.

“I’m sure he’s all right, Mom.”

“They say he is, but of course they would, wouldn’t they? Those places always have their guard up in case of lawsuits.”

“We’ll visit and see for ourselves,” Holly says. “Right?”

“Oh, I guess so.” A pause. “I suppose you’ll leave after we visit him, won’t you. Go back to that city.” Subtext: that Sodom, that Gomorrah, that pit of sin and degradation. “I’ll be having Christmas by myself while you have Christmas dinner with your friends.” Including that young black man who looks like he might take drugs.

“Mom.” Sometimes Holly feels like screaming. “The Robinsons invited me weeks ago. Right after Thanksgiving. I told you, and you said it was fine.” What Charlotte had actually said was Well I suppose, if you feel you have to.

“That was when I thought Henry would still be here.”

“Well, how about if I stay Friday night, too?” She can do that for her mother, and she can also do it for herself. She’s sure Ondowsky is perfectly capable of finding out where she lives in the city and showing up there, twenty-four hours early and with murder on his mind. “We could have Christmas early.”

“That would be wonderful,” Charlotte says, brightening up. “I can roast a chicken. And asparagus! You love asparagus!”

Holly hates asparagus, but telling her mother that would be useless. “Sounds good, Mom.”

Holly seals the deal with Avis (at an additional fee, of course) and gets on the road, stopping only once to gas up, grab a Filet-O-Fish at Mickey D’s, and make a couple of calls. Yes, she tells Jerome and Pete, she’s finished her personal business. She’ll be spending most of the weekend with her mother and visiting her uncle in his new residence. Back at work on Monday.

“Barbara is digging the movies,” Jerome tells her, “but she says they’re totally vanilla. She says that watching them, you’d think there was no such thing as black people.”

“Tell her to put it in her report,” Holly says. “I’ll give her Shaft when I get a chance. Now I have to get back on the road. The traffic is very heavy, although I don’t know where they’re all going. I went to a mall and it was half-empty.”

“They’re visiting relatives, just like you,” Jerome says. “Relatives are the one thing Amazon can’t deliver.”

As she merges back onto I-76, it occurs to Holly that her mother will undoubtedly have Christmas presents for her, and she has nothing for Charlotte. She can already see her mother’s martyred look when she turns up emptyhanded.

So she stops at the next shopping center, even though it means she won’t be at casa Gibney until after dark (she hates driving at night), and buys her mother some slippers and a nice bathrobe. She makes sure to keep the sales slip for when Charlotte tells her that Holly has bought the wrong sizes.

Once she’s on the road again, and safe inside her rental car, Holly draws in a deep breath and lets it out in a scream.

It helps.

Charlotte embraces her daughter on the doorstep, then draws her inside. Holly knows what comes next.

“You’ve lost weight.”

“Actually I’m just the same,” Holly says, and her mother gives her The Look, the one that says once an anorexic, always an anorexic.

Dinner is take-out from the Italian place down the road, and as they eat Charlotte talks about how hard things have been without Henry. It’s as if her brother has been gone five years instead of five days, and not to a nearby elder care facility but to spend his old age doing stupid stuff far away—running a bicycle shop in Australia or painting sunsets in the tropic isles. She does not ask Holly about her life, her work, or what she was doing in Pittsburgh. By nine o’clock, when Holly can reasonably plead tiredness and go to bed, she’s started to feel as if she’s growing younger and smaller, diminishing to the sad, lonely, and anorexic girl—yes, it was true, at least during her nightmare freshman year of high school, when she was known as Jibba-Jibba Gibba-Gibba—who lived in this house.

Her bedroom is just the same, with the dark pink walls that always made her think of half-cooked flesh. Her stuffed animals are still on the shelf above her narrow bed, with Mr. Rabbit Trick holding pride of place. Mr. Rabbit Trick’s ears are ragged, because she used to nibble on them when she couldn’t sleep. The Sylvia Plath poster still hangs on the wall above the desk where Holly wrote her bad poetry and sometimes imagined committing suicide in the manner of her idol. As she undresses, she thinks she might have done it, or at least tried it, if their oven had been gas instead of electric.

It would be easy—much too easy—to think this childhood room has been waiting for her, like a monster in a horror story. She’s slept here several times in the sane (relatively sane) years of her adulthood, and it has never eaten her. Her mother has never eaten her, either. There is a monster, but it’s not in this room or in this house. Holly knows she would do well to remember that, and to remember who she is. Not the child who nibbled Mr. Rabbit Trick’s ears. Not the adolescent who threw up her breakfast most days before school. She is the woman who, along with Bill and Jerome, saved those children at the Midwest Culture and Arts Complex. She is the woman who survived Brady Hartsfield. The one who faced another monster in a Texas cave. The girl who hid in this room and never wanted to come out is gone.

She kneels, says her nightly prayer, and gets into bed.

December 18, 2020

Charlotte, Holly, and Uncle Henry sit in one corner of the Rolling Hills common room, which has been decorated for the season. There are ribbons of tinsel and sweet-smelling swags of fir that almost overcome the more permanent aroma of pee and bleach. There’s a tree hung with lights and candy canes. Christmas music spills down from the speakers, tired tunes Holly could live happily without for the rest of her life.

The residents don’t seem exactly bursting with holiday spirit; most of them are watching an infomercial for something called the Ab Lounge, featuring a hot chick in an orange leotard. A few others are turned away from the tube, some silent, some holding conversations with each other, some talking to themselves. A wisp of an old lady in a green housecoat is bent over a huge jigsaw puzzle.

“That’s Mrs. Hatfield,” Uncle Henry says. “I don’t recall her first name.”

“Mrs. Braddock says you saved her from a bad fall,” Holly says.

“No, that was Julia,” Uncle Henry says. “Back at the ohhhh-ld swimmin hole.” He laughs as people do when they are remembering days of yore. Charlotte rolls her eyes. “I was sixteen, and I believe Julia was…” He trails off.

“Let me see your arm,” Charlotte commands.

Uncle Henry cocks his head. “My arm? Why?”

“Just let me see it.” She seizes it and pushes up his shirtsleeve. There’s a good-sized but not especially remarkable bruise there. To Holly it looks like a tattoo gone bad.

“If this is how they take care of people, we should sue them instead of paying them,” Charlotte says.

“Sue who?” Uncle Henry says. Then, with a laugh: “Horton Hears a Who! The kids loved that one!”

Charlotte stands. “I’m going to get a coffee. Maybe one of those little tart things, as well. Holly?”

Holly shakes her head.

“You’re not eating again,” Charlotte says, and leaves before Holly can reply.

Henry watches her go. “She never lets up, does she?”

This time it’s Holly who laughs. She can’t help it. “No. She doesn’t.”

“No, never does. You’re not Janey.”

“No.” And waits.

“You’re…” She can almost hear rusty gears turning. “Holly.”

“That’s right.” She pats his hand.

“I’d like to go back to my room, but I don’t remember where it is.”

“I know the way,” Holly says. “I’ll take you.”

They walk slowly down the hall together.

“Who was Julia?” Holly asks.

“Pretty as the dawn,” Uncle Henry says. Holly decides that’s answer enough. Certainly a better line of poetry than she ever wrote.

In his room, she tries to guide him to the chair by the window, but he disengages his hand from hers and goes to the bed, where he sits with his hands clasped between his thighs. He looks like an elderly child. “I think I’ll lie down, sweetie. I’m tired. Charlotte makes me tired.”

“Sometimes she makes me tired, too,” Holly says. In the old days she never would have admitted this to Uncle Henry, who was all too often her mother’s co-conspirator, but this is a different man. In some ways a much gentler man. Besides, in five minutes he’ll forget she said it. In ten, he’ll forget she was here.

She bends to kiss his cheek, then stops with her lips just above his skin when he says, “What’s wrong? Why are you afraid?”

“I’m not—”

“Oh, you are. You are.”

“All right,” she says. “I am. I’m afraid.” Such a relief to admit it. To say it out loud.

“Your mother… my sister… it’s on the tip of my tongue…”

“Charlotte.”

“Yes. Charlie’s a coward. Always was, even when we were children. Wouldn’t go in the water at… the place… I can’t remember. You were a coward, but you grew out of it.”

She looks at him, amazed. Speechless.

“Grew out of it,” he repeats, then pushes off his slippers and swings his feet onto the bed. “I’m going to have a nap, Janey. This isn’t such a bad place, but I wish I had that thing… that thing you twist…” He closes his eyes.

Holly goes to the door with her head down. There are tears on her face. She takes a tissue from her pocket and wipes them away. She doesn’t want Charlotte to see them. “I wish you could remember saving that woman from falling down,” she says. “The nurses’ aide said you moved like lightning.”

But Uncle Henry doesn’t hear. Uncle Henry has gone to sleep.

From Holly Gibney’s report to Detective Ralph Anderson:

I expected to finish this last night in a Pennsylvania motel, but a family matter came up and I drove to my mother’s house instead. Being here is difficult. There are memories, many of them not so good. I will stay tonight, though. It’s better that I do. Mom is out now, buying things for an early Christmas dinner that will probably not be tasty. Cooking has never been one of her talents.

I hope to finish my business with Chet Ondowsky—the thing that calls itself that, anyway—tomorrow evening. I’m scared, no sense lying about that. He promised to never do anything again like the Macready School, promised it right away, without even thinking it over, and I don’t believe it. Bill wouldn’t, and I am sure you wouldn’t, either. He has a taste for it now. He may also have a taste for being the heroic rescuer, although he must know that calling attention to himself is a bad idea.

I phoned Dan Bell and told him I intended to put an end to Ondowsky. I felt that as ex-police himself he would understand and approve. He did, but told me to be careful. I will try to do that, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I have a very bad feeling about this. I also called my friend Barbara Robinson and told her I will be staying over at my mother’s on Saturday night. I need to make sure that she and her brother Jerome think I won’t be in the city tomorrow. No matter what happens to me, I need to know they will not be at risk.

Ondowsky is worried about what I may do with the information I’ve gotten, but he’s also confident. He’ll kill me if he can. I know this. What he doesn’t know is that I have been in these situations before, and won’t underestimate him.

Bill Hodges, my friend and sometime partner, remembered me in his will. There was the death benefit from his insurance policy, but there were other keepsakes that mean even more to me. One was his service weapon, a .38 Smith & Wesson Military and Police revolver. Bill told me that most city police now carry the Glock 22, which holds fifteen rounds instead of six, but that he himself was old-school, and proud of it.

I don’t like guns—hate them, in fact—but I will use Bill’s tomorrow, and I won’t hesitate. There will be no discussion. I had one conversation with Ondowsky, and that was enough. I will shoot him in the chest, and not just because the best shot is always the center mass shot, a thing I learned in the shooting class I took two years ago.

The real reason is

[Pause]

You remember what happened in the cave, when I hit the thing we found there in the head? Of course you do. We dream about it, and we’ll never forget it. I believe the force—the physical force—that animates these things is a kind of alien brain that has replaced the human brain which might have existed before being taken over. I don’t know where it originated, and I don’t care. Shooting this thing in the chest may not kill it. In fact, Ralph, I’m sort of counting on that. I believe there is another way to get rid of it for good. You see there’s been a glitch.

My mother just drove in. I’ll try to finish this later today or tomorrow.

Charlotte won’t let Holly help with the cooking; every time her daughter comes into the kitchen, Charlotte shoos her out. It makes for a long day, but the dinner hour finally arrives. Charlotte has put on the green dress she wears every Christmas (proud of the fact that she can still get into it). Her Christmas pin—holly and holly berries—is in its accustomed place over her left breast.

“An authentic Christmas dinner, just like in the old days!” she exclaims as she leads Holly into the dining room by the elbow. Like a prisoner being led into an interrogation room, Holly thinks. “I’ve made all your favorites!”

They sit across from each other. Charlotte has lit her aromatherapy candles, which give off a lemongrass scent that makes Holly want to sneeze. They toast each other with thimble glasses of Mogen David wine (an authentic oough if ever there was one) and wish each other a merry Christmas. Then comes a salad already dressed with the snotlike ranch dressing Holly hates (Charlotte thinks she loves it), and the dry-as-papyrus turkey, which can only be swallowed with lots of gravy to grease its passage. The mashed potatoes are lumpy. The overcooked asparagus is as limp and hateful as ever. Only the carrot cake (store-bought) is tasty.

Holly eats everything on her plate and compliments her mother. Who beams.

After the dishes are done (Holly dries, as always; her mother claims she never gets all the “smutch” off the pots), they repair to the living room, where Charlotte hunts out the DVD of It’s a Wonderful Life. How many Christmas seasons have they watched it? A dozen at least, and probably more. Uncle Henry used to be able to quote every line. Maybe, Holly thinks, he still can. She’s googled Alzheimer’s and found out there’s no way of telling what areas of the mind remain bright as the circuits shut down, one by one.

Before the film begins, Charlotte hands Holly a Santa hat… and with great ceremony. “You always wear it when we watch this,” she says. “Ever since you were a little girl. It’s a tradition.”

Holly has been a movie buff all her life and has found things to enjoy even in films the critics have roasted (she believes, for example, that Stallone’s Cobra is woefully underestimated), but It’s a Wonderful Life has always made her uneasy. She can relate to George Bailey at the beginning of the film, but by the end he strikes her as someone with a serious bipolar condition who’s arrived at the manic part of his cycle. She has even wondered if, after the movie ends, he creeps out of bed and murders his whole family.

They watch the movie, Charlotte in her Christmas dress and Holly in her Santa hat. Holly thinks, I am moving somewhere else now. I feel myself going. It’s a sad place, full of shadows. This is the place where you know death is very close.

On the screen, Janie Bailey says, “Please, God, something’s the matter with Daddy.”

That night when she sleeps, Holly dreams that Chet Ondowsky comes out of the Frederick Building elevator with his jacket torn at the sleeve and the pocket. His hands are smeared with brick dust and blood. His eyes are shimmering, and when his lips spread in a wide grin, squirming red bugs spill from his mouth and stream down his chin.

December 19, 2020

Holly sits in four lanes of unmoving southbound traffic, still fifty miles from the city, thinking if this miles-long jam-up doesn’t let go, she might be late to her own funeral instead of early.

Like many people who struggle with insecurity, she’s a compulsive planner-aheader, and consequently almost always early. She expected to be at the Finders Keepers office by one o’clock on this Saturday at the latest, but now even three is starting to look optimistic. The cars around her (and a big old dumptruck ahead of her, its dirty butt looming like a steel cliff) make her feel claustrophobic, buried alive (my own funeral). If she had cigarettes in the car, she would be smoking them one after the other. She resorts to cough drops instead, what she calls her anti-smoking devices, but she only stashed half a dozen in her coat pocket and soon they will be gone. That would leave her fingernails, had they not been clipped too short to get a good grip.

I’m late for a very important date.

It wasn’t because of the gift-giving, which came after her mother’s traditional Christmas breakfast of waffles and bacon (it’s not Christmas for almost a week, but Holly was willing to pretend along with Charlotte). Charlotte gave Holly a frilly silk blouse she’ll never wear (even if she lives), a pair of medium heels (ditto), and two books: The Power of Now and Anxious for Nothing: Finding Calm in a Chaotic World. Holly hadn’t had the opportunity to wrap her presents, but she did buy a Christmassy gift bag to put them in. Charlotte oohed over the fur-lined slippers and shook her head indulgently over the bathrobe, a $79.50 purchase.

“This is at least two sizes too big. I don’t suppose you saved the sales slip, honey.”

Holly, who knew damn well she did, said, “I think it’s in my coat pocket.”

So far so good. But then, out of the blue, Charlotte suggested that they go and see Henry and wish him a merry-merry, since Holly wasn’t going to be there on the actual big day. Holly glanced at the clock. Quarter of nine. She’d hoped to be on the road and headed south by nine, but there was such a thing as carrying obsessional behavior too far—why, exactly, did she want to arrive five hours early? Plus, if things went badly with Ondowsky this would be her last chance to see Henry, and she was curious about what he’d said: Why are you afraid?

How did he know that? He had certainly never seemed particularly sensitive to the feelings of others before. More the opposite, actually.

So Holly agreed, and they went, and Charlotte insisted on driving, and there was a fender-bender at a four-way stop sign. No airbags deployed, no one was hurt, no police were summoned, but it did involve certain predictable justifications on Charlotte’s part. She invoked a mythical patch of ice, ignoring the fact that she only slowed rather than stopped at the four-way, as she always did; all of her driving life, Charlotte Gibney had assumed she had the right-of-way.

The man in the other vehicle was nice enough about it, nodding and agreeing with everything Charlotte said, but it involved an exchange of insurance cards, and by the time they were on their way again (Holly was quite sure the man whose fender they’d bumped dropped her a wink before getting back into his own vehicle), it was ten o’clock, and the visit turned out to be a total bust, anyway. Henry had no idea who either of them were. He said he had to get dressed for work and told them to stop bothering him. When Holly kissed him goodbye, he looked at her suspiciously and asked if that was a Jehovah’s Witnesses thing.

“You drive back,” Charlotte said when they were outside. “I’m far too upset.”

Holly was more than happy to do that.

She had left her traveling bag in the front hall. As she slung it over her shoulder and turned to her mother for their usual parting salute—two dry pecks on the cheek—Charlotte flung her arms around the daughter she had denigrated and belittled her whole life (not always unknowingly) and burst into tears.

“Don’t go. Please stay another day. If you can’t stay until Christmas, at least stay through the weekend. I can’t stand to be on my own. Not yet. Maybe after Christmas, but not yet.”

Her mother was clutching her like a drowning woman and Holly had to suppress a panicky urge not just to push her away but to actually fight her off. She endured the hug as long as she could, then wriggled free.

“I have to go, Mom. I have an appointment.”

“A date, you mean?” Charlotte smiled. Not a nice one. There were too many teeth in it. Holly had thought she was done being shocked by her mother, but it seemed that wasn’t the case. “Really? You?”

Remember this could be the last time you see her, Holly thought. If it is, you don’t want to leave with angry words. You can be angry at her again if you live through this.

“It’s something else,” she said. “But let’s have some tea. I have time for that.”

So they had tea and the date-filled cookies Holly had always hated (they tasted dark, somehow), and it was almost eleven before she was finally able to escape her mother’s house, where the scent of the lemongrass candles still lingered. She kissed Charlotte on the cheek as they stood on the stoop. “I love you, Mom.”

“I love you, too.”

Holly got as far as the door of her rental car, was actually touching the handle, when Charlotte called to her. Holly turned, almost expecting her mother to come leaping down the steps, arms spread, fingers hooked into claws, screaming Stay! You must stay! I command it!

But Charlotte was still on the stoop with her arms wrapped around her middle. Shivering. She looked old and unhappy. “I made a mistake about the bathrobe,” she said. “It is my size. I must have read the tag wrong.”

Holly smiled. “That’s good, Mom. I’m glad.”

She backed down the driveway, checked for traffic, and turned toward the turnpike. Ten past eleven. Plenty of time.

That’s what she thought then.

Her inability to discover the cause of the holdup only adds to Holly’s anxiety. The local AM and FM stations tell her nothing, including the one that’s supposed to have turnpike traffic info. Her Waze app, usually so reliable, is totally useless. The screen shows a smiling little man digging a hole with a shovel above the message WE’RE CURRENTLY UNDER CONSTRUCTION BUT WE’LL BE BACK SOON!

Frack.

If she can make it another ten miles, she can get off at Exit 56 and take Highway 73, but right now Highway 73 might as well be on Jupiter. She feels around in her coat pocket, finds the last cough drop, and unwraps it while staring at the rear end of the dumptruck where a bumper sticker reads HOW’S MY DRIVING?

All these people should be at malls, Holly thinks. They should be shopping at malls and downtown small businesses and helping the local economy instead of giving their money to Amazon and UPS and Federal Express. All of you should get off this fracking highway so people with really important business could…

The traffic starts to move. Holly gives a cry of triumph that’s hardly out of her mouth before the dumptruck stops again. On her left, a man is chatting on his phone. On her right, a woman is freshening her lipstick. Her rental car’s digital clock tells her she now cannot expect to arrive at the Frederick Building until four o’clock. Four at the earliest.

That still would leave me two hours, Holly thinks. Please God, please let me be there in time to get ready for him. For it. For the monster.

Barbara Robinson puts aside her copy of the college catalogue she has been perusing, turns on her phone, and goes to the WebWatcher app Justin Freilander has put on her phone.

“You know that tracking someone without their permission isn’t exactly kosher, right?” Justin had said. “I’m not sure it’s even, like, totally legal.”

“I just want to make sure my friend is okay,” Barbara had said, and gave him a radiant smile that melted any reservations he might have had.

God knows Barbara has her own reservations; just looking at the little green dot on the map makes her feel guilty, especially since Jerome dumped his own tracker. But what Jerome doesn’t know (and Barbara won’t tell him) is that after Portland, Holly went to Pittsburgh. That, combined with the web searches Barbara looked at on Holly’s home computer, makes her think Holly’s interested in the Macready School bombing after all, and that interest seems to focus on either Charles “Chet” Ondowsky, the reporter from WPEN who was first on the scene, or Fred Finkel, his cameraman. Barbara thinks it’s almost certainly Ondowsky Holly is interested in, because there are more searches for him. Holly has even jotted his name on the pad beside her computer… with two question marks after it.

Barbara doesn’t want to think her friend is having some kind of mindfuck, maybe even a nervous breakdown, nor does she want to believe Holly might have somehow stumbled on the trail of the school bomber… but she knows that’s not beyond the realm, as they say. Holly is insecure, Holly spends way too much time doubting herself, but Holly is also smart. Is it possible that Ondowsky and Finkel (a pairing that inevitably reminds her of Simon & Garfunkel) somehow stumbled across a clue to the bomber without knowing it, or even realizing it?

This idea makes Barbara think of a film she watched with Holly. Blow-Up, it was called. In it, a photographer taking pictures of lovers in a park accidentally photographs a man hiding in the bushes with a pistol. What if something like that happened at the Macready School? What if the bomber had returned to the scene of the crime to gloat over his handiwork, and the TV guys had filmed him as he watched (or even pretended to help)? What if Holly had somehow realized that? Barbara knew and accepted that the idea was farfetched, but didn’t life sometimes imitate art? Maybe Holly had gone to Pittsburgh to interview Ondowsky and Finkel. That would be safe enough, Barbara supposes, but what if the bomber was still in the area, and Holly went after him?

What if the bomber went after her?

All of this is probably bullshit, but Barbara is nevertheless relieved when the WebWatcher app tracks Holly leaving Pittsburgh and driving to her mother’s house. She almost deleted the tracker then, certainly doing so would have eased her conscience, but then Holly had called her yesterday, apparently for no reason other than to tell her she’d be staying over at her mom’s on Saturday night. And then, at the end of the call, Holly had said, “I love you.”

Well, of course she does, and Barbara loves her, but that was understood, not the kind of thing you had to say out loud. Except maybe on special occasions. Like if you’d had a fight with your friend and were making up. Or if you were going on a long trip. Or going off to fight in a war. Barbara is sure it was the last thing men and women said to their parents or partners before leaving to do that.

And there had been a certain tone to the way she’d said it that Barbara didn’t like. Sad, almost. And now the green dot tells Barbara that Holly isn’t staying the night at her mother’s after all. She’s apparently headed back to the city. Change of plans? Maybe a fight with her mother?

Or had she flat-out lied?

Barbara glances at her desk and sees the DVDs she’s borrowed from Holly for her report: The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, and Harper. She thinks they’ll be the perfect excuse to talk to Holly when Holly gets back. She’ll affect surprise to find Holly at home, then try to find out what was so important in Portland and Pittsburgh. She may even confess to the tracker—that will depend on how things go.

She checks Holly’s location on her phone again. Still the turnpike. Barbara guesses that the traffic might be jammed up by construction or an accident. She looks at her watch, then back at the green dot. She thinks that Holly will be lucky to get back much before five o’clock.

And I’ll be at her apartment by five-thirty, Barbara thinks. I hope nothing’s wrong with her… but I think maybe there is.

The traffic crawls… then stops.

Crawls… and stops.

Stops.

I’m going to lose my mind, Holly thinks. It’s just going to snap while I sit here looking at the back of that dumptruck. I’ll probably hear the sound when it goes. Like a breaking branch.

The light has begun to drain out of this December day, just two calendar squares away from the shortest day of the year. The dashboard clock tells her that the earliest she can now hope to arrive at the Frederick Building is five o’clock, and that will only happen if the traffic starts to move again soon… and if she doesn’t run out of gas. She’s down to just over a quarter of a tank.

I could miss him, she thinks. He could show up, and call me to text him the door code, and get no answer. He’ll think I lost my nerve and chickened out.

The idea that coincidence, or some malign force (Jerome’s bird, all frowsy and frosty gray), may have decreed that her second face to face with Ondowsky should not happen brings her no relief. Because she’s not just on his personal hit parade now, she’s number one with a bullet. Facing him on her home ground, and with a plan, was to be her advantage. If she loses it, he’ll try to blindside her. And he could succeed.

Once she reaches for her phone to call Pete, to tell him that a dangerous man is going to show up at the side door of their building, and he should approach with caution, but Ondowsky would talk his way out of it. Easily. He talks for a living. Even if he didn’t, Pete is getting on in years and at least twenty pounds over what he weighed when he retired from the police. Pete is slow. The thing pretending to be a TV reporter is fast. She will not risk Pete. She’s the one who let the genie out of the bottle.

Ahead of her, the dumptruck’s taillights go out. It rolls ahead fifty feet or so and stops again. This time, however, the stop is briefer and the next forward advance is longer. Is it possible that the jam is breaking? She hardly dares to believe it, but she has Holly hope.

Which turns out to be justified. In five minutes she’s doing forty. After seven, she’s up to fifty-five. After eleven, Holly puts her foot down and takes possession of the passing lane. When she shoots by the three-car pileup that caused the jam, she barely gives the wrecks that have been pulled over to the median strip a glance.

If she can keep her speed to seventy until she leaves the turnpike at midtown, and if she catches most of the traffic lights, she estimates she can be at her building by five-twenty.

Holly actually arrives in the vicinity of her building at five minutes past five. Unlike the weirdly underpopulated Monroeville Mall, downtown is busy-busy-busy. This is both good and bad. Her chances of spotting Ondowsky in the bustle of bundled-up shoppers on Buell Street are small, but his chances of grabbing her (if he means to do that, and she wouldn’t put it past him) are equally small. It’s what Bill would call a push.

As if to make up for her bad luck on the turnpike, she spots a car pulling out of a parking space almost directly across from the Frederick Building. She waits until it’s gone, then backs carefully into the space, trying to ignore the poophead behind her laying on his horn. Under less fraught circumstances that constant blare might have induced her to let the space go, but she doesn’t see another space on the whole block. That would leave her with the parking garage, probably on one of the upper levels, and Holly has seen too many movies where bad things happen to women in parking garages. Especially after dark, and it’s dark now.

The horn-blower rolls past as soon as the front end of Holly’s rental car has cleared enough space, but the poophead—not a he but a she—slows long enough to wish Holly a little Christmas cheer with her middle finger.

There’s a break in the traffic when Holly exits the car. She could jaywalk to the other side of the street—jay-trot, anyway—but she joins a crowd of shoppers waiting for the walk light at the next corner instead. Safety in numbers. She has her key to the building’s front door in her hand. She has no intention of going around to the side entrance. It’s in a service alley where she’d be an easy target.

As she slips the key into the lock, a man with a muffler over his lower face and a Russian hat jammed down to his eyebrows passes her almost close enough to jostle. Ondowsky? No. At least probably no. How can she be sure?

The shoebox of a lobby is empty. The lights are low. Shadows stretch everywhere. She hurries to the elevator. This is one of downtown’s older buildings, only eight floors, Midwest to the core, and there’s only the one for passengers. Roomy and supposedly state-of-the-art, but one is one. Tenants have been known to grumble about this, and those in a hurry often take the stairs, especially those with offices on the lower floors. Holly knows there’s also a freight elevator, but that one will be locked off for the weekend. She pushes the call button, suddenly sure the elevator will once more be out of order and her plan will collapse. But the doors open immediately and a female robo-voice welcomes her in. “Hello. Welcome to the Frederick Building.” With the lobby empty, it sounds to Holly like a disembodied voice in a horror movie.

The doors close and she pushes for 5. There’s a TV screen that shows news items and ads during the week, but now it’s off. No Christmas music either, thank heaven.

“Going up,” the robo-voice says.

He’ll be waiting for me, she thinks. He’s gotten in somehow, he’ll be waiting for me when the elevator doors open, and I’ll have nowhere to run.

But the doors open on an empty hall. She walks past the mail-drop (as old-fashioned as the talking elevator is newfangled), past the women’s and men’s, and stops at a door marked STAIRS. Everybody complains about Al Jordan, and with cause; the building’s superintendent is both incompetent and lazy. But he must be connected somehow, because he keeps his job in spite of the way the trash piles up in the basement, the broken side entrance camera, and the slow—almost whimsical—delivery of packages. Then there’s the matter of the fancy Japanese elevator, which pissed everybody off.

This afternoon Holly is actively hoping for more of Al’s carelessness, so she doesn’t have to waste time getting a chair to stand on from the office. She opens the door to the stairs, and she’s in luck. Clustered there on the landing—and blocking the way to the sixth floor, probably a fire code violation—is a cache of cleaning supplies which include a mop leaning against the stair rail and a squeegee bucket half-filled with wash water.

Holly considers dumping the bucket’s murky contents down the stairs—it would serve Al right—but in the end she can’t bring herself to do it. She pushes it into the women’s, removes the squeegee attachment, and dumps the filthy water down one of the sinks. She then rolls it to the elevator with her satchel of a purse hanging awkwardly from the crook of her arm. She pushes the call button. The doors open and the robo-voice tells her (just in case she’s forgotten), “This is five.” Holly remembers the day when Pete came puffing into the office and said, “Can you program that thing to say ‘Tell Al to fix me, then kill him’?”

Holly turns the bucket over. If she keeps her feet together (and is careful), there’s just room for her to stand on it between the rollers. From her purse she takes out a Scotch tape dispenser and a small package wrapped in brown paper. Standing on tiptoe, stretching until the bottom of her shirt pulls free of her pants, she tapes the package in the far left corner of the elevator car’s ceiling. It’s thus high above eye level, where (according to the late Bill Hodges) people tend not to look. Ondowsky better not. If he does, she’s hung.

She takes her phone out of her pocket, holds it up, and snaps a picture of the package. If things go as she hopes, Ondowsky will never see this photo, which isn’t much of an insurance policy in any case.

The elevator’s doors have closed again. Holly pushes the open button and rolls the mop bucket back up the hall, returning it to where she found it on the stair landing. Then she goes past Brilliancy Beauty Products (where no one seems to work except for one middle-aged man who reminds Holly of an old cartoon character named Droopy Dog) to Finders Keepers, at the end. She unlocks the door and lets herself in with a sigh of relief. She looks at her watch. Nearly five-thirty. Time is now very tight, indeed.

She goes to the office safe and runs the combination. She takes out the late Bill Hodges’s Smith & Wesson revolver. Although she knows it’s loaded—an unloaded handgun is useless even as a club, another of her mentor’s dictums—she rolls the chamber to make sure, then snaps it closed.

Center mass, she thinks. As soon as he comes out of the elevator. Don’t worry about the box with the money; if it’s cardboard, the slug will go right through, even if he’s holding it in front of his chest. If it’s steel, I’ll have to go for a headshot. The range will be short. It could be messy, but—

She surprises herself with a little laugh.

But Al has left cleaning supplies.

Holly looks at her watch. 5:34. That leaves her twenty-six minutes before Ondowsky shows up, assuming he’s on time. She still has things to do. All are important. Deciding which is the most important is a no-brainer, because if she doesn’t survive this, someone has to know about the thing that bombed the Macready School in order to eat the pain of the survivors and the bereaved, and there is one person who will believe her.

She turns on her phone, opens the recording app, and begins to speak.

The Robinsons gave their daughter a nifty little Ford Focus for her eighteenth birthday, and as Holly is parking downtown on Buell Street, Barbara is three blocks from Holly’s apartment building, stopped at a red light. She takes the opportunity to glance at the WebWatcher app on her phone and murmurs “Shit.” Holly hasn’t gone home. She’s at the office, although Barbara can’t understand why she’d go there on a Saturday evening this close to Christmas.

Holly’s building is straight ahead, but when the light turns green, Barbara turns right, toward downtown. It won’t take her long to get there. The front door of the Frederick Building will be locked, but she knows the code for the side door in the service alley. She’s been at Finders Keepers with her brother many times, and sometimes they go in that way.

I’ll just surprise her, Barbara thinks. Take her out for coffee and find out what the hell’s going on. Maybe we can even grab a quick bite and hit a movie.

The thought makes her smile.

From Holly Gibney’s report to Detective Ralph Anderson:

I don’t know if I’ve told you everything, Ralph, and I don’t have time to go back and check, but you know the most important thing: I’ve stumbled across another outsider, not the same as the one we dealt with in Texas, but related. A new and improved model, let’s say.

I’m in the little reception area of Finders, waiting for him. My plan is to shoot him as soon as he steps out of the elevator with the blackmail money, and I think that’s how this is going to go. I think he has come to pay me off rather than kill me, because I think I convinced him that I only want money, along with his promise never to commit another mass killing. Which he probably doesn’t mean to keep.

I’ve tried to think as logically about this as I can, because my life depends on it. If I were him, I’d pay off once, then see what happens. Would I plan to leave my job at the Pittsburgh station afterwards? I might, but I might stay. To test the blackmailer’s good faith. If the woman were to come back, try double-dipping, then I’d kill her and disappear. Wait a year or two, then resume my old pattern. Maybe in San Francisco, maybe in Seattle, maybe in Honolulu. Start working at a local indie, then move up. He’ll get new ID and new references. God knows how they can stand up in this age of computers and social media, Ralph, but somehow they do. Or have so far.

Would he worry about me passing on what I know to someone else? Maybe to his TV station? No, because once I blackmail him, I become complicit in his crime. What I’m counting on most is his confidence. His arrogance. Why wouldn’t he be confident and arrogant? He’s been getting away with this for a long, long time.

But my friend Bill taught me to always have a backup plan. “Belt and suspenders, Holly,” he’d say. “Belt and suspenders.”

If he suspects I mean to kill him instead of blackmail him out of three hundred thousand dollars, he’ll try to take precautions. What precautions? I don’t know. Surely he must know I have a firearm, but I don’t think he can get one in because he has to assume the metal detector would alert me. He may use the stairs, and that could be a problem even if I hear him coming. If that happens, I’ll have to play it by ear.

[Pause]

Bill’s .38 is my belt; the package I taped to the elevator ceiling is my suspenders. My insurance. I have a picture of it. He’ll want it, but there’s nothing in that package but a tube of lipstick.

I have done the best I can, Ralph, but it may not be enough. In spite of all my planning there’s a chance I won’t come out of this alive. If that’s the case, I need you to know how much your friendship has meant to me. If I do die, and you choose to continue what I’ve started, please be careful. You have a wife and son.

It’s 5:43. Time is racing, racing.

That fracking traffic jam! If he comes early, before I’m ready…

If that happens I’ll make something up to keep him downstairs for a few minutes. I don’t know what, but I’ll think of something.

Holly powers up the reception area’s desktop. She has her own office, but this is the computer she prefers, because she likes to be right out front instead of buried in the back. It’s also the computer she and Jerome used when they got tired of listening to Pete complain about having to climb to the fifth floor. What they did certainly wasn’t legal, but it solved the problem and that information should still be in this computer’s memory. It better be. If it’s not, she’s fracked. She may be fracked anyway, if Ondowsky uses the stairs. If he does that, she’ll be ninety per cent sure that he’s come to kill her rather than pay her.

The desktop is a state-of-the-art iMac Pro, very fast, but today it seems to take forever booting up. While she waits, she uses her phone to email the sound file containing her report to herself. She takes a flash drive from her purse—this is the one containing the various photos Dan Bell has amassed, plus Brad Bell’s spectrograms—and as she plugs it into the back of the computer, she thinks she hears the elevator moving. Which is impossible, unless someone else is in the building.

Someone like Ondowsky.

Holly flies to the office door with the gun in her hand. She throws the door open, sticks her head out. Hears nothing. The elevator is quiet. Still on five. It was her imagination.

She leaves the door open and hurries back to the desk to finish up. She has fifteen minutes. That should be enough, assuming she can remove the fix Jerome figured out and reinstate the computer glitch that had everyone climbing the stairs.

I’ll know, she thinks. If the elevator goes down after Ondowsky gets off, I’m okay. Golden. If it doesn’t…

But it’s no good thinking about that.

The stores are open late because of the Christmas season—the sacred time when we honor the birth of Jesus by maxing out our credit cards, Barbara thinks—and she sees at once that she won’t find parking on Buell. She takes a ticket at the entrance to the parking garage across from the Frederick Building and finally finds a space on the fourth level, just below the roof. She hurries to the elevator, looking around constantly, one hand in her purse. Barbara has also seen too many movies where bad things happen to women in parking garages.

When she arrives safely on the street, she hurries to the corner just in time to catch the walk light. On the other side she looks up and sees a light on the fifth floor of the Frederick Building. At the next corner, she turns right. A little way down the block is an alley marked with signs reading NO THROUGH TRAFFIC and SERVICE VEHICLES ONLY. Barbara turns down it and stops at the side entrance. She’s bending to tap in the door code when a hand grips her shoulder.

Holly opens the email she’s sent herself and moves the attachment to the flash drive. She hesitates for a moment, looking at the blank title strip below the drive’s icon. Then she types IF IT BLEEDS. A good enough name. It’s the story of that thing’s fracking life, after all, she thinks, it’s what keeps it alive. Blood and pain.

She ejects the drive. The desk in the reception area is where they do all their mailing, and there are plenty of envelopes, all different sizes. She takes a small padded one, slips the flash drive into it, seals it, then has a moment of panic when she remembers that Ralph’s mail is going to some neighbor’s house. She knows Ralph’s address by heart and could send it there, but what if some mailbox pirate grabbed it? The thought is nightmarish. What was the neighbor’s name? Colson? Carver? Coates? None of those are right.

Time, racing away from her.

She’s about to address the envelope to Ralph Anderson’s Next Door Neighbor when the name comes to her: Conrad. She slaps on stamps willy-nilly and jots quickly on the front of the envelope:

Below this she adds C/O CONRADS (Next Door) and DO NOT FORWARD HOLD FOR ARRIVAL. It will have to do. She takes the envelope, runs flat-out to the mail-drop near the elevator, and tosses it in. She knows that Al is as lazy about collecting the mail as he is about everything else, and it may lie at the bottom of the chute (which, to be fair, few people use in this day and age) for a week, or—given the holiday season—even longer. But there is really no hurry. Eventually it will go.

Just to be sure she was imagining things, she punches the elevator call button. The doors open; the car is there and the car is empty. So it really was her imagination. She runs back to Finders Keepers, not exactly gasping but breathing hard. Some of it’s the sprint; most of it is stress.

Now the last thing. She goes to the Mac’s finder and types in what Jerome titled their fix: EREBETA. It’s the brand name of their troublesome elevator; it’s also the Japanese word for elevator… or so Jerome claimed.

Al Jordan adamantly refused to call a local company to fix the glitch, insisting that it had to be done by an accredited Erebeta repairperson. He invoked dire possibilities should anything else be done and there was an accident: criminal liability, million-dollar lawsuits. Better to just close the elevator’s eight floor-stops off with yellow OUT OF ORDER tape and wait for the proper repairperson to show up. It won’t be long, Al assured his irate tenants. A week at most. Sorry for the inconvenience. But the weeks had stretched into almost a month.

“No inconvenience for him,” Pete grumbled. “His office is in the basement, where he sits on his ass all day watching TV and eating doughnuts.”

Finally Jerome stepped in, telling Holly something that she—a computer whiz herself—already knew: if you could use the Internet, you could find a fix for every glitch. Which they had done, by mating this very computer to the much simpler one controlling the elevator.

“Here it is,” Jerome had said, pointing at the screen. He and Holly had been by themselves, Pete out making the rounds of bail-bondsmen, drumming up trade. “Do you see what’s happening?”

She did. The elevator’s computer had stopped “seeing” the floor stops. All it saw were its terminal points.

Now all she has to do is pull off the Band-Aid they put on the elevator’s program. And hope. Because there will be no time to test it. Time is too tight. It’s four minutes of six. She calls up the floor menu, which shows a real-time representation of the elevator shaft. The stops are marked, B through 8. The car is stopped on 5. At the top of the screen, in green, is the word READY.

Not yet you’re not, Holly thinks, but you will be. I hope.

Her phone rings two minutes later, just as she’s finishing.

Barbara utters a small scream and whirls around, back against the side entrance, looking up at the dark shape of the man who has grabbed her.

“Jerome!” She pats her hand against her chest. “You scared the bejesus out of me! What are you doing here?”

“I was just about to ask you the same question,” Jerome says. “As a rule, girls and dark alleys don’t mix.”

“You lied about taking the tracker off your phone, didn’t you?”

“Well, yes,” Jerome admits. “But since you obviously put on one of your own, I don’t think you can exactly claim the moral high grou—”

That’s when another dark shape looms up behind Jerome… only it’s not entirely dark. The shape’s eyes are glaring like the eyes of a cat caught in a flashlight beam. Before Barbara can shout at Jerome to look out, the shape swings something at her brother’s head. There’s a terrible dull crunch and Jerome collapses to the pavement.

The shape grabs her, shoves her against the door, and pins her there with one gloved hand wrapped around her neck. From the other he drops a chunk of broken brick. Or maybe it’s concrete. All Barbara knows for sure is that it’s dripping with her brother’s blood.

He bends toward her close enough for her to see a round, unremarkable face below one of those furry Russian hats. That weird glare is gone from his eyes. “Don’t scream, girlfriend. You don’t want to do that.”

“You killed him!” It comes out in a wheeze. He hasn’t choked off all her air, at least not yet, but he’s cut off most of it. “You killed my brother!”

“No, he’s still alive,” the man says. He smiles, showing two rows of teeth that are orthodontic perfection. “I’d know if he was dead, believe me. But I can make him dead. Scream, try to get away—annoy me, in other words—and I’ll hit him until his brains spurt like Old Faithful. Are you going to scream?”

Barbara shakes her head.

The man’s smile widens into a grin. “That’s a good girlfriend, girlfriend. You’re afraid, aren’t you? I like that.” He breathes deeply, as if inhaling her terror. “You should be afraid. You don’t belong here, but on the whole I’m glad you came.”

He leans closer. She can smell his cologne and feel the meat of his lips as he whispers in her ear.

“You’re tasty.”

Holly reaches for her phone with her eyes fixed on the computer. The elevator’s floor menu is still on the screen, but below the diagram of the shaft there’s now a choice box offering EXECUTE or CANCEL. She only wishes she could be completely sure that selecting EXECUTE will cause something to happen. And that it will be the right something.

She picks up the phone, ready to text Ondowsky the code for the side door, and freezes. It’s not ONDOWSKY in the window of her phone, and it’s not UNKNOWN CALLER. It’s the smiling face of her young friend Barbara Robinson.

Oh dear God no, Holly thinks. Please God no.

“Barbara?”

“There’s a man, Holly!” Barbara is crying, barely understandable. “He hit Jerome with something and knocked him out, I think it was a brick and he’s bleeding so bad—”

Then she’s gone, and the thing masquerading as Ondowsky is there, speaking to Holly in his trained TV voice. “Hi, Holly, Chet here.”

Holly freezes. Not for long in the outside world, probably less than five seconds, but inside her head it feels much longer. This is her fault. She tried to keep her friends away, but they came anyway. They came because they were worried about her, and that makes it her fault.

“Holly? Are you still there?” There’s a smile in his voice. Because things have broken his way, and he’s enjoying himself. “This changes things, wouldn’t you say?”

Can’t panic, Holly thinks. I can and will give up my life if it will save theirs, but I can’t panic. If I do that we’re all going to die.

“Have they?” she says. “I still have what you want. Hurt that girl, do anything more to her brother, and I’ll blow up your life. I won’t stop.”

“Have you also got a gun?” He doesn’t give her a chance to answer. “Of course you do. I don’t, but I did bring a ceramic knife. Very sharp. Remember I’ll have the girl when I come to our little tête-à-tête. I won’t kill her if I see you with a gun in your hand, that would be the waste of a good hostage, but I’ll disfigure her while you watch.”

“There won’t be a gun.”

“I think I’ll trust you on that.” Still amused. Relaxed and confident. “But I don’t think we’ll be exchanging money for the flash drive, after all. Instead of money, you can have my little girlfriend. How does that sound?”

Like a lie, Holly thinks.

“It sounds like a deal. Let me talk to Barbara again.”

“No.”

“Then I won’t give you the code.”

He actually laughs. “She knows it, she was getting ready to tap it in when her brother accosted her. I was watching from behind the Dumpster. I’m sure I could persuade her to tell me. Do you want me to persuade her? Like this?”

Barbara screams, a sound that makes Holly cover her mouth. Her fault, her fault, all her fault.

“Stop. Stop hurting her. I just want to know if Jerome is still alive.”

“For the time being. He’s making weird little snuffling sounds. May have a brain injury. I hit him hard, felt I had to. He’s a big one.”

He’s trying to freak me out. He doesn’t want me thinking, just reacting.

“He’s bleeding quite a bit,” Ondowsky continues. “Head-wounds, you know. But it’s pretty cold, and I’m sure that will aid the clotting. Speaking of cold, let’s stop fucking around. Give me the code unless you want me to twist her arm again, and this time I’ll dislocate it.”

“Four-seven-five-three,” Holly says. What choice?

The man does indeed have a knife: black handle, long white blade. Holding Barbara by one arm—the one he hurt—he points the tip of the knife at the lock pad. “Do the honors, girlfriend.”

Barbara pushes the numbers, waits for the green light, then opens the door. “Can we put Jerome inside? I can drag him.”

“I’m sure you could,” the man says, “but no. He looks like a chill dude. We’ll just let him chill a little more.”

“He’ll freeze to death!”

“Girlfriend, you’ll bleed to death if you don’t get a move on.”

No, you won’t kill me, Barbara thinks. At least not until you get what you want.

But he could hurt her. Put out one of her eyes. Flay her cheek open. Cut off an ear. His knife looks very sharp.

She goes in.

Holly stands in the open door of the Finders Keepers office, looking down the hall. Her muscles thrum with adrenaline; her mouth is as dry as a desert stone. She holds her position when she hears the elevator start down. She can’t hit execute on the program she has running until it comes back up.

I have to save Barbara, she thinks. Jerome too, unless he’s beyond help.

She hears the elevator stop on the ground floor. Then, after an eternity, it starts up again. Holly steps backward, her eyes not leaving the closed elevator doors at the end of the hall. Her phone is lying beside the computer’s mousepad. She slips it into the left front pocket of her pants, then looks down just long enough to position the cursor over EXECUTE.

She hears a scream. It’s muffled by the rising elevator car, but it’s a girl’s scream. It’s Barbara.

My fault.

All my fault.

The man who hurt Jerome takes Barbara by the arm, like a guy escorting his best girl into the ballroom where the big dance is going on. He hasn’t relieved her of her purse (or ignored it, more likely), and the metal detector gives a feeble beep when they pass through, probably from her phone. Her captor ignores it. They pass the stairwell that until lately was used every day by the Frederick Building’s resentful residents, then enter the lobby. Outside the door, in another world, Christmas shoppers are passing to and fro with their bags and packages.

I was out there, Barbara marvels. Just five minutes ago, when things were still all right. When I still foolishly believed I had a life ahead of me.

The man pushes the elevator button. They hear the sound of the descending car.

“How much money were you supposed to pay her?” Barbara asks. Beneath her fear, she feels a dull disappointment that Holly would deal with this man at all.

“Doesn’t matter now,” he says, “because I’ve got you. Girlfriend.”

The elevator stops. The doors open. The robo-voice welcomes them to the Frederick Building. “Going up,” it says. The doors shut. The car begins to rise.

The man lets go of Barbara, takes off his furry Russian hat, drops it between his shoes, and lifts his hands in a magician’s flourish. “Watch this. I think you’ll like it, and our Ms. Gibney certainly deserves to see it, since it’s what made all this trouble in the first place.”

What happens next is horrible beyond Barbara’s previous understanding of the word. In a movie it could be dismissed as no more than a cool special effect, but this is real life. A ripple runs up the round middle-aged face. It starts at the chin and rises not past the mouth but through it. The nose wavers, the cheeks stretch, the eyes shimmer, the forehead contracts. Then, suddenly, the whole head turns to semi-transparent jelly. It quivers and shimmies and sags and pulses. Inside it are confused tangles of writhing red stuff. Not blood; that red stuff is full of flocking black specks. Barbara shrieks and falls back against the wall of the elevator. Her legs fail her. Her purse slips off her shoulder and thumps to the floor. She slides down the wall of the elevator with her eyes bulging from their sockets. Her bowels and bladder let go.

Then the jelly head solidifies, but the face that appears is entirely different from that of the man who knocked Jerome unconscious and forcibly escorted her to the elevator. It’s narrower, and the skin is two or three shades darker. The eyes are tilted at the corners instead of round. The nose is sharper and longer than the blunt beak of the man who hauled her into the elevator. The mouth is thinner.

This man looks ten years younger than the one who grabbed her.

“Good trick, wouldn’t you say?” Even his voice is different.

What are you? Barbara tries to say this, but no words will come out of her mouth.

He bends down and gently places the strap of her purse back on her shoulder. Barbara shrinks from the touch of his fingers but can’t entirely avoid them. “Don’t want to lose your wallet and credit cards, do you? They’ll help the police to identify you, in case… well, in case.” He makes a burlesque of holding his new nose. “Dear me, did we have a little accident? Oh well, you know what they say, shit happens.” He titters.

The elevator stops. The doors slide open on the fifth-floor hall.

When the elevator stops, Holly takes one more quick glance at the screen of the computer, then clicks the mouse. She doesn’t wait to see if the floor-stops, B through 8, gray out as they were when she and Jerome did their repair-job, following the steps Jerome found at a webpage titled Erebeta Bugs and How to Fix Them. She doesn’t need to. She’ll know one way or the other.

She walks back to the office door and looks down the twenty-five yards of hallway to the elevator. Ondowsky has Barbara by the arm… only when he looks up, she sees it’s no longer him. Now it’s George, minus the mustache and the delivery man’s brown uniform.

“Come on, girlfriend,” he says. “Move those feet.”

Barbara comes stumbling out. Her eyes are huge and blank and wet with tears. Her beautiful dark skin has gone the color of clay. Spittle runs from one side of her mouth. She looks almost catatonic, and Holly knows why: she saw Ondowsky change.

This terrorized girl is her responsibility, but Holly can’t think about that now. She has to stay in the moment, has to listen, has to have Holly hope… although that has never seemed so distant.

The elevator doors slide closed. With Bill’s gun removed from the equation, any chance Holly has depends on what happens next. At first there’s nothing and her heart turns to lead. Then, instead of staying put, as Erebeta elevators are programmed to do until they are called, she hears it descending. Thank God, she hears it descending.

“Here’s my little girlfriend,” George the killer of children says. “She’s kind of a bad girlfriend. I believe she’s gone pee-pee and poo-poo in her pants. Come closer, Holly. You’ll smell it for yourself.”

Holly doesn’t move from the doorway. “I’m curious,” she says. “Did you actually bring any money?”

George grins, showing teeth that are a lot less TV-ready than those of his alter-ego. “Actually, no. There’s a cardboard box behind the Dumpster where I hid when I saw this one and her brother coming, but there’s nothing in there but catalogues. You know, the kind that come addressed to Current Resident.”

“So you never intended to pay me,” Holly says. She takes a dozen steps down the hall, stopping when they’re fifteen yards apart. If this was football, she’d be in the red zone. “Did you?”

“No more than you ever intended to give me that flash drive and let me go,” he says. “I can’t read minds, but I have a long history of reading body language. And faces. Yours is completely open, although I’m sure you think otherwise. Now pull your shirt out of your pants and lift it. Not all the way, those bumps on your chest hold no interest for me, just enough so I can make sure you’re not armed.”

Holly lifts her shirt and does a complete turn without being asked.

“Now pull up your pantslegs.”

She does this, too.

“No throwdown,” George says. “Good.” He cocks his head, looking at her the way an art critic might study a painting. “Gosh, you’re an ugly little thing, aren’t you?”

Holly makes no reply.

“Have you ever in your life had so much as a single date?”

Holly makes no reply.

“Ugly little waif, no more than thirty-five but already going gray. Not bothering to cover it up, either, and if that isn’t waving the white flag, I don’t know what is. Do you send your dildo a card on Valentine’s Day?”

Holly makes no reply.

“My guess is you compensate for your looks and insecurity with a sense of…” He breaks off and looks down at Barbara. “Jesus Christ, you’re heavy! And you stink!”

He lets go of Barbara’s arm and she collapses in front of the women’s room door with her hands spread, her bottom raised, and her forehead on the tiles. She looks like a Muslim woman about to begin Isha’a. Her sobs are low, but Holly can hear them. Oh yes, she can hear them very well.

George’s face changes. Not back to Chet Ondowsky’s, but into a feral sneer that shows Holly the real creature inside him. Ondowsky has a pig face, George has a fox face, but this is the face of a jackal. Of a hyena. Of Jerome’s gray bird. He kicks Barbara’s bluejeaned butt. She wails in pain and surprise.

“Get in there!” he shouts. “Get in there, clean yourself up, let the grownups finish their business!”

Holly wants to run those last fifteen yards, shouting at him to stop kicking her, but of course that’s what he wants. And if he really means to stash his hostage in the women’s bathroom, it may give her the chance she needs. At the very least it opens the playing field. So she holds her ground.

“Get… in there!” He kicks her again. “I’ll deal with you after I deal with this meddling bitch. You want to pray she plays straight with me.”

Sobbing, Barbara pushes the door to the women’s bathroom open with her head and crawls inside. Not, however, before George administers another kick to her backside. Then he looks at Holly. The sneer is gone. The smile is back. Holly guesses it’s supposed to look charming, and on Ondowsky’s face it might. Not on George’s.

“Well, Holly. Girlfriend’s in the shithouse and now it’s just us. I can go in and open up her guts with this…” He holds up the knife. “…or you can give me what I came for and I’ll leave her alone. I’ll leave you both alone.”

I know better, Holly thinks. Once you get what you came for, no one is walking away, including Jerome. If he isn’t dead already.

She tries to project both doubt and hope. “I don’t know if I can believe you.”

“You can. Once I have the drive, I’ll fade away. From your life and from the world of Pittsburgh broadcasting. It’s time to move along. I knew that even before this guy—” He draws the hand not holding the knife slowly down the length of his face, as if drawing down a veil. “—planted the bomb. I think maybe that’s why he planted it. So yes, Holly, you can believe me.”

“Maybe I should run back to the office and lock the door,” she says, and hopes her face shows she’s actually considering this. “Call 911.”

“And leave the girl to my tender mercies?” George points his long knife at the door to the women’s room and smiles. “I don’t think so. I saw how you looked at her. Besides, I’d have you before you took three steps. As I told you in the mall, I’m fast. Enough talk. Give me what I want and I’ll go away.”

“Do I have a choice?”

“What do you think?”

She pauses, sighs, wets her lips, finally nods. “You win. Just leave us alive.”

“I will.” As at the mall, the response is too fast. Too glib. She doesn’t believe him. He knows and doesn’t care.

“I’m going to take my cell phone out of my pocket,” Holly says. “I have to show you a picture.”

He says nothing, so she takes it out, very slowly. She opens her photo stream, selects the picture she took in the elevator, and holds the phone out to him.

Now tell me, she thinks. I don’t want to do it myself, so tell me, you bastard.

And he does. “I can’t see it. Come closer.”

Holly steps toward him, still holding the phone out. Two steps. Three. Twelve yards away, then ten. He’s squinting at the phone. Eight yards now, and see how reluctant I am?

“Closer, Holly. My eyes are a little wonky for a few minutes after I change.”

You’re a black liar, she thinks but takes another step, still holding the phone out. He’ll almost certainly take her with him when he goes down. If he goes down. And that’s okay.

“You see it, right? It’s in the elevator. Taped to the roof. Just take it and g—”

Even in her hyper-alert state, Holly barely sees George move. At one moment he’s standing outside the women’s, squinting at the picture on her phone. At the next, he’s got one arm around her waist and the other gripping her outstretched hand. He wasn’t kidding about being fast. Her phone tumbles to the floor as he drags her toward the elevator. Once inside, he’ll kill her and take the package taped to the ceiling. Then he’ll go into the bathroom and kill Barbara.

That, at least, is his plan. Holly has another one.

“What are you doing?” Holly cries—not because she doesn’t know, but because this is now the required line.

He doesn’t answer, only pushes the call button. It doesn’t light, but Holly hears the elevator hum into life. It’s coming up. She will try to break free of him at the last second. Likewise he’ll try to break free of her when he understands what’s happening. She cannot let that happen.

George’s narrow fox face breaks into a smile. “You know what, I think this is all going to work out just fi—”

He stops because the elevator doesn’t. It passes the fifth floor—they can see a brief shutter of light from inside as it goes by—and keeps rising. His hands loosen in surprise. Only for a moment, but it’s long enough for Holly to break his grip and step back.

What happens next takes no more than ten seconds, but in her current amped-up state, Holly sees it all.

The door to the stairwell bangs open and Jerome lurches out. His eyes stare from a mask of caked blood. In his hands is the mop that was on the stairwell, the wooden shaft leveled. He sees George and charges at him, yelling as he comes: “Where’s Barbara? Where’s my sister?”

George sweeps Holly aside. She strikes the wall with a bone-rattling thud. Black dots swarm across her vision. George reaches for the mop’s shaft and yanks it easily out of Jerome’s hands. He pulls it back, meaning to strike Jerome with it, but that is when the women’s room door bangs open.

Barbara runs out with the pepper spray from her purse in her hand. George turns his head in time to catch a faceful. He screams and covers his eyes.

The elevator reaches the eighth floor. The hum of the machinery stops.

Jerome is going for George. Holly screams “Jerome, no!” and drives her shoulder into his midsection. He collides with his sister and the two of them hit the wall between the two bathroom doors.

The elevator alarm goes off, an amplified bray that screams panic panic panic.

George turns his red and streaming eyes toward the sound just as the elevator doors open. Not just the doors on five, but on all the floors. This is the glitch that caused the elevator to be shut down.

Holly runs at George with her arms outstretched. Her scream of fury merges with the bellowing alarm. Her outstretched hands connect with his chest and she pushes him into the shaft. For a moment he seems to hang there, eyes and mouth wide with terror and surprise. The face starts to sag and change, but before George can become Ondowsky again (if that is what’s happening), he’s gone. Holly is hardly aware of the strong brown hand—Jerome’s—that grabs the back of her shirt and saves her from following George down the shaft.

The outsider screams as he goes.

Holly, who considers herself a pacifist, is savagely delighted by the sound.

Before she can hear the thud of his body at the bottom, the elevator doors slide shut. On this floor and all the other floors. The alarm stops and the car starts down, on the way to the basement, its other terminal point. The three of them watch the brief flash of light from between the doors as the car passes five.

“You did that,” Jerome says.

“Damn right,” Holly says.

Barbara’s knees fold and she goes down in a half-faint. The can of pepper spray falls from her relaxing hand and rolls to a stop against the elevator doors.

Jerome kneels beside his sister. Holly pushes him gently away and takes Barbara’s hand. She brushes back the sleeve of Barbara’s coat, but before she can even begin to take a pulse, Barbara is trying to sit up.

“Who… what was he?”

Holly shakes her head. “No one.” This might actually be the truth.

“Is he gone? Holly, is he gone?”

“He’s gone.”

“Down the elevator shaft?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Good.” She starts to get up.

“Just lie still for a minute, Barb. You only grayed out. It’s Jerome I’m worried about.”

“I’m okay,” Jerome says. “Hard head. That was the TV guy, wasn’t it? Kozlowski, or whatever.”

“Yes.” And no. “You look like you’ve lost at least a pint of blood, Mr. Hard Head. Look at me.”

He looks at her. His pupils are the same size, and that’s good news.

“Can you remember the name of your book?”

He gives her an impatient look through his raccoon mask of congealing blood. “Black Owl: The Rise and Fall of an American Gangster.” He actually laughs. “Holly, if he’d scrambled my brains, I never could have remembered the code for the side door. Who was he?”

“The man who blew up that school in Pennsylvania. Not that we’re ever going to tell anyone that. It would raise too many questions. Lower your head, Jerome.”

“It hurts to move it,” he says. “My neck feels sprung.”

“Do it anyway,” Barbara says.

“Sis, don’t mean to get personal and all, but you don’t smell so good.”

Holly says, “I’ve got this, Barbara. There’s a pair of pants and some tee-shirts in my closet. They’ll fit you, I think. Take something to change into. Clean yourself up in the bathroom.”

It’s clear that Barbara wants to do just that, but she lingers. “You sure you’re all right, J?”

“Yes,” he says. “Go on.”

Barbara goes down the hall to Finders Keepers. Holly feels the back of Jerome’s neck, finds no swelling, and tells him again to lower his head. She sees a minor laceration at the crown and a much deeper gash lower down, but the occipital bone must have caught (and withstood) the brunt of the blow. She thinks Jerome got lucky.

She thinks they all did.

“I need to clean myself up, too,” Jerome says, looking at the men’s room.

“No, don’t do that. I probably shouldn’t have let Barbara do it, either, but I don’t want her meeting the cops with her… in her current state of disarray.”

“I sense a woman with a plan,” Jerome says, then wraps his hands around himself. “God, I’m cold.”

“That’s shock. You probably need a hot drink. I’d make you tea, but there’s no time for that.” She is struck by a sudden, horrible thought: if Jerome had taken the elevator, her whole plan—rickety thing that it was—could have fallen apart. “Why did you take the stairs?”

“So he wouldn’t hear me coming. Even with the world’s worst headache, I knew where he’d be. You were the only one in the building.” He pauses. “Not Kozlowski. Ondowsky.”

Barbara returns with the clean clothes bundled in her arms. She has begun crying again. “Holly… I saw him change. His head turned to jelly. It… it…”

“What in God’s name is she talking about?” Jerome asks.

“Never mind now. Maybe later.” Holly gives her a brief hug. “Clean up, change your clothes. And Barbara? Whatever it was, it’s dead now. Okay?”

“Okay,” she whispers, and goes into the bathroom.

Holly turns back to Jerome. “Were you tracking my phone, Jerome Robinson? Was Barbara? Were both of you?”

The bloody young man standing in front of her smiles. “If I promise to never, ever, call you Hollyberry again, do I have to answer those questions?”

In the lobby, fifteen minutes later.

Holly’s pants are too tight for Barbara, and they’re highwater, but she managed to get them buttoned. The ashy look is fading from her cheeks and forehead. She’ll survive this, Holly thinks. There will be bad dreams, but she’ll come through.

The blood on Jerome’s face is drying to a crack-glaze. He says he has a bitch of a headache but no, he’s not dizzy. Not nauseous. Holly isn’t surprised about the headache. She has Tylenol in her purse, but she doesn’t dare give him any. He’ll get stitches—and an X-ray, no doubt—at the ER, but right now she has to make sure their stories are straight. Once that’s taken care of, she has to finish cleaning up her own mess.

“You two came here because I wasn’t at home,” she says. “You thought I must be at the office, catching up, because I’d spent a few days with my mother. Right?”

They nod, willing to be led.

“You went to the side door in the service alley.”

“Because we know the code,” Barbara says.

“Yes. And there was a mugger. Right?”

More nods.

“He hit you, Jerome, and tried to grab Barbara. She got him with the pepper spray in her purse. Full face. Jerome, you jumped up and grappled with him. He ran off. Then you two came inside to the lobby and called 911.”

Jerome asks, “Why did we come to see you in the first place?”

Holly is stumped. She remembered to reinstate the elevator fix (did it while Barbara was in the bathroom cleaning up and changing, easy-peasy), and she dropped Bill’s gun into her handbag (just in case), but she hasn’t even considered the thing Jerome is asking about.

“Christmas shopping,” Barbara says. “We wanted to pry you out of the office to go Christmas shopping with us. Didn’t we, Jerome?”

“Oh yeah, that’s right,” Jerome says. “We were going to surprise you. Were you here, Holly?”

“No,” she says. “I was gone. In fact, I am gone. Christmas shopping on the other side of town. That’s where I am right now. You didn’t call me right after the attack because… well…”

“Because we didn’t want to upset you,” Barbara says. “Right, Jerome?”

“Right.”

“Good,” Holly says. “Can you both remember that story?”

They say they can.

“Then it’s time for Jerome to call 911.”

Barbara says, “What are you going to do, Hols?”

“Clean up.” Holly points at the elevator.

“Oh, Christ,” Jerome says. “I forgot there’s a body down there. I clean forgot.”

“I didn’t,” Barbara says, and shudders. “Jesus, Holly, how can you ever explain a dead guy at the bottom of the elevator shaft?”

Holly is remembering what happened to the other outsider. “I don’t think it will be an issue.”

“What if he’s still alive?”

“He fell five stories, Barb. Six, counting the basement. And then the elevator…” Holly turns one hand palm up and brings the other down on it, making a sandwich.

“Oh,” Barbara says. Her voice is faint. “Right.”

“Call 911, Jerome. I think you’re basically okay, but I’m no doctor.”

While he does that, she goes to the elevator and brings it up to the first floor. With the fix in place again, it works fine.

When the doors open, Holly spies a furry hat, the kind the Russians call an ushanka. She remembers the man who passed by her as she was opening the lobby door.

She returns to her two friends, holding the hat in one hand. “Tell me the story again.”

“Mugger,” Barbara says, and Holly decides that’s good enough. They’re smart, and the rest of the story is simple. If everything works out the way she thinks it will, the cops aren’t going to care about where she was, anyway.

Holly leaves them and takes the stairs to the basement, which stinks of old cigarette smoke and what she’s afraid is mold. The lights are off and she has to use her phone to look for the switches. Shadows leap as she shines it around, making it all too easy to imagine the Ondowsky-thing in the dark, waiting to spring out at her and fasten its hands around her neck. Her skin is lightly sheened with sweat, but her face is cold. She has to consciously stop her teeth from chattering. I’m in shock myself, she thinks.

At last she finds a double row of switches. She flips them all, and banks of fluorescents light up with a hive buzzing. The basement is a filthy labyrinth of stacked bins and boxes. She thinks again that their building superintendent—whose salary they pay—is your basic man-slut.

She orients herself and goes to the elevator. The doors (the ones down here are filthy and the paint is chipped) are firmly shut. Holly puts her bag on the floor and takes out Bill’s revolver. Then she removes the elevator drop-key from its hook on the wall and jams it into the hole on the lefthand door. The key hasn’t been used for a long time, and it’s balky. She has to put the gun in the waistband of her slacks and use both hands before it will turn. Gun once more in hand, she pushes one of the doors. Both of them slide open.

A smell of mingled oil, grease, and dust wafts out. In the center of the shaft is a long piston-like thing which she’ll later learn is called the plunger. Scattered around it, among a litter of cigarette butts and fast food bags, are the clothes Ondowsky was wearing when he went on his final trip. A short one, but lethal.

Of Ondowsky himself, also known as Chet on Guard, there is no sign.

The fluorescents down here are bright, but the bottom of the shaft is still too shadowy for Holly’s liking. She finds a flashlight on Al Jordan’s cluttered worktable and shines it carefully around, making sure to check behind the plunger. She’s not looking for Ondowsky—he’s gone—but for bugs of a certain exotic type. Dangerous bugs that may be looking for a new host. She sees none. Whatever infested Ondowsky may have outlived him, but not for long. She spies a burlap sack in one corner of the cluttered, filthy basement, and stuffs Ondowsky’s clothes into it, along with the fur hat. His undershorts go last. Holly picks them up between two tweezed fingers, revulsion pulling her mouth down at the corners. She drops the shorts into the sack with a shudder and a little cry (“Oough!”) and then uses the flats of her hands to run the elevator doors closed. She relocks them with the drop-key, then hangs the key back on its hook.

She sits and waits. Once she’s sure Jerome, Barbara, and the 911 responders must be gone, she shoulders her purse and carries the bag containing Ondowsky’s clothes upstairs. She leaves by the side door. She thinks about tossing the clothes into the Dumpster, but that would be a little too close for comfort. She takes the bag with her instead, which is perfectly okay. Once she’s on the street, she’s just one more person carrying a parcel.

She’s barely started her car when she gets a call from Jerome, telling her that he and Barbara were victims of a mugging just as they were about to let themselves into the Frederick Building by the side door. They’re at Kiner Memorial, he says.

“Oh my God, that’s terrible,” Holly says. “You should have called me sooner.”

“Didn’t want to worry you,” Jerome says. “We’re basically okay, and he didn’t get anything.”

“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

Holly dumps the burlap bag containing Ondowsky’s clothes in a trashcan on her way to John M. Kiner Memorial Hospital. It’s starting to snow.

She turns on the radio, gets Burl Ives bellowing “Holly Jolly Christmas” at the top of his fracking voice, and turns it off again. She hates that song above all others. For obvious reasons.

You can’t have everything, she thinks; into every life a little poop must fall. But sometimes you do get what you need. Which is really all a sane person can ask for.

And she is.

Sane.

December 22, 2020

Holly has to give a deposition at the offices of McIntyre and Curtis at ten o’clock. It’s one of her least favorite things, but she’s just a minor witness in this custody case, which is good. It’s a Samoyed at issue, rather than a child, and that lowers the stress level a bit. There are a few nasty questions from one of the lawyers, but after what she’s been through with Chet Ondowsky—and George—the interrogation seems pretty tame. She’s done in fifteen minutes. She turns on her phone once she’s in the corridor, and sees she’s missed a call from Dan Bell.

But it isn’t Dan who answers when she calls back; it’s the grandson.

“Grampa had a heart attack,” Brad says. “Another heart attack. It’s actually his fourth. He’s in the hospital, and this time he won’t be coming out.”

There’s a long, watery intake of breath. Holly waits.

“He wants to know how things went with you. What happened with the reporter. The thing. If I could give him good news, I think it would make it easier for him to go.”

Holly looks around to make sure she’s alone. She is, but she lowers her voice anyway. “It’s dead. Tell him it’s dead.”

“Are you sure?”

She thinks of that final look of surprise and fear. She thinks of the scream as he—it—went down. And she thinks of the abandoned clothes at the bottom of the shaft.

“Oh yes,” she says. “I’m sure.”

“We helped? Grampa, he helped?”

“Couldn’t have done it without either of you. Tell him he may have saved a lot of lives. Tell him Holly says thanks.”

“I will.” Another watery intake of breath. “Do you think there are more like him?”

After Texas, Holly would have said no. Now she cannot be sure. One is a unique number. When you have two, you may be seeing the beginning of a pattern. She pauses, then gives an answer she doesn’t necessarily believe… but wants to believe. The old man watched for years. For decades. He deserves to go out with a win under his belt.

“I don’t think so.”

“Good,” Brad says. “That’s good. God bless, Holly. You have a merry Christmas.”

Under the circumstances she can’t wish him the same, so she simply thanks him.

Are there more?

She takes the stairs rather than the elevator.

December 25, 2020

Holly spends thirty minutes of her Christmas morning drinking tea in her bathrobe and talking to her mother. Only it’s mostly listening, as Charlotte Gibney goes through her usual litany of passive-aggressive complaints (Christmas alone, achy knees, bad back, etc., etc.), punctuated by long-suffering sighs. Finally Holly feels able, in good conscience, to end the call by telling Charlotte she will be there in a few days, and they’ll go see Uncle Henry together. She tells her mother that she loves her.

“I love you, too, Holly.” After another sigh that indicates such loving is hard, hard, she wishes her daughter a merry Christmas, and that part of the day is over.

The rest is more cheerful. She spends it with the Robinson family, happy to fall in with their traditions. There’s a light brunch at ten, followed by the exchange of gifts. Holly gives Mr. and Mrs. Robinson certificates for wine and books. For their children, she was happy to splurge a little more: a spa day (mani-pedi included) for Barbara, and wireless earbuds for Jerome.

She, in turn, is given not only a $300 gift card for the AMC 12 cinemas close to her, but a year’s subscription to Netflix. Like many deeply committed cineastes, Holly is conflicted about Netflix and has so far resisted it. (She loves her DVDs but firmly believes movies should first be seen on the big screen.) Still, she has to admit she’s been sorely tempted by Netflix and all the other streaming platforms. So many new things, and all the time!

The Robinson household is normally gender-neutral and everyone-is-equal, but on Christmas afternoon there’s a reversion (perhaps out of nostalgia) to the sexual roles of the previous century. Which is to say, the women cook while the men watch basketball (with occasional trips to the kitchen for tastes of this and that). As they sit down to an equally traditional holiday dinner—turkey with all the trimmings and two kinds of pie for dessert—it begins to snow.

“Could we join hands?” Mr. Robinson asks.

They do.

“Lord, bless the food we are about to receive from your bounty. Thank you for this time together. Thank you for family and friends. Amen.”

“Wait,” Tanya Robinson says. “That’s not enough. Lord, thank you so much that neither of my beautiful children was badly hurt by the man who attacked them. It would break my heart if they weren’t at this table with us. Amen.”

Holly feels Barbara’s hand tighten on hers, and hears a faint sound from the girl’s throat. Something that might have been a cry, had it been set free.

“Now everyone has to tell one thing they’re grateful for,” Mr. Robinson says.

They go around the table. When it’s Holly’s turn, she says she’s grateful to be with the Robinsons.

Barbara and Holly try to help with the washing-up, but Tanya shoos them out of the kitchen, telling them to “do something Christmassy.”

Holly suggests a walk. Maybe to the bottom of the hill, maybe all the way around the block. “It will be pretty in the snow,” she says.

Barbara’s up for it. Mrs. Robinson tells them to get back by seven, because they’re going to watch A Christmas Carol. Holly hopes it will be the one with Alastair Sim, which in her opinion is the only one worth watching.

It’s not just pretty outside; it’s beautiful. They are the only ones on the sidewalk, their boots crunching in two inches of new-fallen powder. Streetlights and Christmas lights are surrounded by swirling halos. Holly sticks out her tongue to catch some flakes, and Barbara does the same. It makes them both laugh, but when they reach the bottom of the hill and Barbara turns to her, she’s solemn.

“All right,” she says. “It’s just the two of us. Why are we out here, Hols? What did you want to ask?”

“Just how you’re doing with it,” Holly says. “Jerome I don’t worry about. He got clobbered, but he didn’t see what you did.”

Barbara takes a shuddering breath. Because of the snow melting on her cheeks, Holly can’t tell if she’s crying. Crying might be good. Tears can be healing.

“It’s not that so much,” she says at last. “The way he changed, I mean. The way his head seemed to turn to jelly. It was horrible, sure, and it opens the gates… you know…” She puts her mittened hands to her temples. “The gates in here?”

Holly nods.

“You realize anything could be out there.”

“See ye devils, then shall ye not see angels?” Holly says.

“Is that the Bible?”

“It doesn’t matter. If what you saw isn’t troubling you, Barb, then what is?”

“Mom and Dad could have buried us!” Barbara bursts out. “They could have been at that table alone! Not eating turkey and stuffing, they wouldn’t want anything like that, maybe just S-Sp-Spam—”

Holly laughs. She can’t help it. And Barbara can’t help joining in. Snow is gathering on her knitted cap. To Holly she looks very young. Of course she is young, but more like a twelve-year-old than a young woman who will be going to Brown or Princeton next year.

“Do you see what I mean?” Barbara takes Holly’s gloved hands. “It was close. It was really, really close.”

Yes, Holly thinks, and it was your regard for me that put you there.

She embraces her friend in the falling snow. “Sweetheart,” she says, “we’re all close. All the time.”

Barbara starts up the steps to the house. Inside, there will be cocoa and popcorn and Scrooge trumpeting that the spirits have done it all in one night. But there’s a final bit of business that needs to be done out here, so Holly takes Barbara’s arm for a moment in the thickening snow. She holds out a card she put in her coat pocket before leaving for the Robinsons’, in case it might be needed. There’s nothing on it but a name and a number.

Barbara takes it and reads it. “Who’s Carl Morton?”

“A therapist I saw after I came back from Texas. I only saw him twice. That was all the time I needed to tell my story.”

“Which was what? Was it like…” She doesn’t finish. She doesn’t have to.

“I might tell you someday, you and Jerome both, but not on Christmas. Just know that if you need to talk to someone, he’ll listen.” She smiles. “And because he’s heard my story, he might even believe yours. Not that that matters. Telling it is what helps. At least it did me.”

“Getting it out there.”

“Yes.”

“Would he tell my parents?”

“Absolutely not.”

“I’ll think about it,” Barbara says, and puts the card in her pocket. “Thank you.” She hugs Holly. And Holly, who once upon a time feared to be touched, hugs back. Hard.

It is the Alastair Sim version, and when Holly drives slowly home through the blowing snow, she can’t remember a happier Christmas. Before going to bed, she uses her tablet to send Ralph Anderson a text message.

She says her prayers before turning in, finishing as she always does, by saying that she’s not smoking, she’s taking her Lexapro, and she misses Bill Hodges.

“God bless us every one,” she says. “Amen.”

She gets in bed. Turns out the light.

Sleeps.

February 15, 2021

Uncle Henry’s mental decline has been rapid. Mrs. Braddock has told them (regretfully) that it’s often the case once patients are in care.

Now, as Holly sits beside him on one of the couches facing the big-screen TV in the Rolling Hills common room, she finally gives up trying to make conversation with him. Charlotte already has; she’s at a table across the room, helping Mrs. Hatfield with her current jigsaw puzzle. Jerome has come with them today, and is also helping. He’s got Mrs. Hatfield laughing, and even Charlotte can’t help smiling at some of J’s amiable chatter. He’s a charming young man, and he’s finally won Charlotte over. Not an easy thing to do.

Uncle Henry sits with his eyes wide and his mouth agape, the hands that once fixed Holly’s bicycle after she crashed it into the Wilsons’ picket fence now lying slack between his splayed legs. His pants bulge with the continence pants beneath. Once he was a ruddy man. Now he’s pale. Once he was a stout man. Now his clothes hang on his body and his flesh sags like an old sock that’s lost its elastic.

Holly takes one of his hands. It’s just meat with fingers. She laces her own fingers through his and squeezes, hoping for a return, but no. Soon it will be time to go, and she’s glad. It makes her feel guilty, but there it is. This isn’t her uncle; he’s been replaced by an oversized ventriloquist’s dummy with no ventriloquist to lend it speech. The ventriloquist has left town and isn’t coming back.

An ad for Otezla, urging these wrinkled, balding oldsters to “Show more of you!” ends, and is replaced by the Bobby Fuller Four: “I Fought the Law.” Uncle Henry’s chin has been sinking toward his chest, but now it comes up. And a light—low-wattage, to be sure—comes into his eyes.

The courtroom appears and the announcer intones, “Steer clear if you’re a louse, because John Law is in the house!”

As the bailiff comes forward, Holly suddenly realizes why she gave the Macready School bomber the name she did. The mind is always at work, making connections and making sense… or at least trying to.

Uncle Henry finally speaks, his voice low and rusty from disuse. “All rise.”

“All rise!” George the bailiff bellows.

The spectators don’t just rise; they get on up, clapping and swaying. John Law jives his way in from his chambers. He grabs his gavel and tick-tocks it back and forth to the music. His bald head gleams. His white teeth flash. “What have we got today, Georgie, my brother from another mother?”

“I love this guy,” Uncle Henry says in his rusty voice.

“So do I,” she says, and puts an arm around him.

Uncle Henry turns to look at her.

And smiles.

“Hello, Holly,” he says.