Penny opens the video and hands her phone to Holly. “Just hit play.”
5
The security camera is looking down from a high angle, and it’s far from crystal clear; no one has cleaned the lens in a long time, if ever. It shows the so-called Beer Cave, the clerk, the front door, the miserly parking area, and a slice of Red Bank Avenue. The time-stamp in the lower lefthand corner reads 8:04 PM. The date-stamp in the righthand corner reads 7/1/21. It’s not dark yet, but—as Bob Dylan says—it’s getting there. Plenty of light still left in the sky, enough for Holly to see Bonnie pull up on her bike, take off her helmet, and shake out her hair, which was probably sweaty. The last week of June and the first week of July were very hot. Poopy hot, in fact.
She puts her helmet on the seat of her bike but enters the store still wearing her backpack. She’s in tan slacks and a polo shirt with Bell College above the left breast, and the bell tower logo above the words. The clip is soundless, of course. Holly looks at the little movie with the fascination she supposes anyone feels when looking at someone who went from a clean, well-lighted place into the unknown.
Bonnie Rae goes to the back cooler and gets a bottle of soda, looks like a Coke or Pepsi. On her way to the cash register she stops to inspect the snack rack. She picks up a package. Might be Ho Hos, might be Yodels, doesn’t matter because she puts it back, and in Holly’s mind she hears Charlotte Gibney say, I must maintain my girlish figger.
At the register she has a brief conversation with the clerk (middle-aged, balding, Hispanic). It must be something funny because they both laugh. Bonnie rests her pack on the counter, unbuckles the flap, and puts her bottle of soda inside. It’s big enough for the shoes she wears at work, maybe, plus her phone and a book or two. She slides the straps back over her shoulders and says something else to the clerk. He gives her some change and a thumbs-up. She leaves. Puts on her helmet. Mounts her bike. Pedals away to… wherever.
When Holly looks up and hands back the phone, Penny Dahl is crying.
Tears are hard for Holly to handle. There’s a box of tissues beside her mousepad. She pushes it toward Penny without making eye contact, nibbling at her lower lip and wishing for a cigarette. “I’m sorry. I know how hard this is for you.”
Penny looks at her over a bouquet of Kleenex. “Do you?” It’s almost a challenge.
Holly sighs. “No, probably not.”
There’s a moment of silence between them. Holly thinks of telling Penny she recently lost her mother, but it’s not the same. She knows where her mother is, after all: under dirt and sod at Cedar Rest. Penny Dahl only knows there’s a hole in her life where her daughter is supposed to be.
“I’m curious about your daughter’s helmet. Was it with her bike when it was found?”
Penny’s mouth falls open. “No, just the bike. You know what, Detective Jaynes never asked about that and I never thought of it.”
Penny gets a pass, but Izzy Jaynes sinks a bit in Holly’s estimation. “What about her pack?”
“Gone, but you’d expect that, wouldn’t you? You might wear a pack after you got off your bike, she wore it into the store, but you’d hardly keep wearing your helmet, would you?”
Holly doesn’t answer, because this isn’t a conversation, it’s an interrogation. It will be as gentle as she can make it, but an interrogation is what it is.
“Catch me up, Penny. Tell me everything you know. Start with what Bonnie does at the Reynolds Library and when she left that evening.”
6
There are four assistant librarians at the Reynolds Library on the Bell College of Arts and Sciences campus. During the summer, the library closes at seven. The head librarian, Matt Conroy, sometimes stays until closing, but that night he didn’t. Margaret Brenner, Edith Brookings, Lakeisha Stone, and Bonnie Dahl saw out the last few visitors by five past. Before locking they split up and took a quick sweep through the stacks for anyone who either didn’t hear the closing bell or chose to ignore it while reading one more page or taking one more note. Bonnie had told her mother that sometimes they found people fast asleep in the reading room or the stacks, and on a few occasions they came across couples who had been overcome with passion. In flagrant delicious, she called it. They also checked the restrooms on the main level and on the third floor. That night all the customers were gone.
The four gabbed for a bit in the break room, discussing weekend plans, then turned out the lights. Lakeisha got into her Smart car and drove away. Bonnie got on her bike and headed for her efficiency apartment, where she never arrived. Penny hadn’t been very concerned when she called Bonnie the next morning and got voicemail on the first ring.
“I wanted to ask if she’d like to come over on Friday or Saturday night and watch something on Netflix or Hulu,” Penny says, then adds, “I was going to make popcorn.”
“Is that all?” Holly’s nose for a lie isn’t as strong as Bill Hodges’s was, but she’s good at knowing when someone’s shading the truth.
Penny colors. “Well… we’d had an argument a couple of nights before. It got a little heated. Mothers and daughters, you know. Movies are how we make up. We both love the movies, and now there’s so much to watch, isn’t there?”
“Yes,” Holly says.
“I assumed she was on the phone with someone else and she’d call back.”
But there was no callback. Penny tried again at ten, then at eleven, with the same result: one ring and then voicemail. She called Lakeisha Stone, Bonnie’s best bud on the library staff, to ask if Bonnie was still mad at her. Lakeisha said she didn’t know. Bonnie hadn’t come in that morning. That was when Penny began to get worried. She had a key to her daughter’s condo apartment and drove there.
“What time was this?”
“I was worried and not checking the time. I think around noon. I wasn’t afraid she’d gotten sick with Covid or something else—she always takes precautions, and she’s always been healthy—but I kept thinking about an accident. Like a slip in the shower, or something.”
Holly nods but is remembering the security video. Bonnie Rae wasn’t wearing a mask when she went into the store and neither was the guy at the register. So much for always taking precautions.
“She wasn’t at her apartment and everything looked normal so I drove to the library, really getting worried now, but she still wasn’t there and hadn’t called in. I called the police and tried to file a missing persons report, but the man I talked to—after being on hold for twenty minutes—told me that it had to be at least forty-eight hours for a ‘teen minor’ or seventy-two hours for a legal adult. I told him how she wasn’t answering her phone, like it was turned off, but he didn’t seem interested. I asked to speak with a detective and he said they were all busy.”
At six that evening, back home, Penny got a call from Bonnie’s friend, Lakeisha. A man had arrived at the Reynolds with a blue and white Beaumont City ten-speed in the back of his pickup. That kind of bike has a package carrier, to which Bonnie had pasted a bumper sticker reading I REYNOLDS LIBRARY. The man, Marvin Brown, wanted to know if it belonged to someone who worked at the library, or maybe someone who used the library a lot. Otherwise, he said, he guessed he probably should take it to the police station. Because of the note on the seat.