“How is Pete doing?”
“Not bouncing back as fast as I’d hoped.”
“Sorry to hear it. What can I do for you?”
Holly tells her that Penelope Dahl has hired her to look into her daughter’s disappearance. She didn’t expect Izzy to feel that she was muscling in on a police investigation, and her expectation is fulfilled. Izzy is actually delighted and wishes Holly the best of luck.
“Mrs. Dahl doesn’t believe Bonnie left town,” Holly says, “and she rejects the idea of suicide. Vehemently. What’s your take?”
“Between us? Not for publication?”
“Of course not!”
“It was a joke, Hols. Sometimes I forget how literal you can be. I think the girl either decided on the spur of the moment to light out for sights unseen and pastures new… or she was abducted. If you put a gun to my kitty-cat’s head, I’d favor abduction. Possibly followed by rape, murder, and body disposal.”
“Oough.”
“Oough is correct. I notified the right people, and put the State Police in the loop.”
“Did the right people include the FBI?”
“I spoke to the Cincinnati SAC. They won’t investigate, they’ve got bigger fish to fry, but at least it’s in their database. If something they are investigating touches on the Dahl woman, they’ll know. As for here in town, you know what a shitshow it is. Covid is bad enough, but now we’ve got the Maleek Dutton thing. It’s settled a little bit, no one’s been breaking store windows or setting cars on fire for the last couple of weeks, but it’s still… reverberating.”
“That was unfortunate.” It was a lot more than that, but Dutton is a sensitive subject and an old story: young Black man, busted taillight, traffic stop. The officer approaching says keep your hands on the wheel, but Dutton reaches for his phone.
“Stupid is what it was. Unconscionable is what it was.” Izzy sounds like she’s speaking through clenched teeth. “You didn’t hear me say that.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“The grand jury cleared the trigger-happy asshole—you didn’t hear me say that, either—but at least he’s off the force. He’s not the only one, either. Between Covid and the trouble in Lowtown, we’re down twenty-five per cent. If the governor mandates masks and vaccinations for city and state employees, it will go down more. The thin blue line is thinner than ever.”
Holly makes a sound that might indicate sympathy. She is sympathetic, but only to a point. It was a bad shooting—an indefensible shooting, no matter what the grand jury said—and she will never understand why cops who snap on gloves as a matter of course before injecting ODs with Naloxone are against being vaccinated for Covid. Not all of them refuse the jab, of course, but a sizeable minority do. In any case, she’s used to this sort of grousing. Izzy Jaynes is basically a very unhappy person.
“Look, Hols, I know the Dahl woman thinks we let her down. Maybe we did. Probably we did. But they argued all the time, so the neighbors say, and this city’s infrastructure is almost underwater. Did you know they’re emptying the jails because of Covid? Putting bad guys back on the street? Sometimes I think it’s good Bill didn’t live to see it.”
I wish he had, Holly thinks. I wish he’d lived to see anything. Her mother’s death is a fresh grief on top of the one for Bill she still carries.
Izzy sighs. “Anyway, I’m glad you’re taking her on, kiddo. I feel sorry for her, but she’s one extra pain in an ass that’s already painful. Let me know if I can help.”
“I will.”
Holly ends the call and goes back to looking at the ceiling. She checks her phone to see if Penny has sent her the pics of her daughter. Not yet. She gets down on her knees.
“God, please help me do the best I can for Penny Dahl and for her daughter. If someone took that young woman, I hope she’s still alive, and it’s your will I should find her. I’m taking my Lexapro, which is good. I’m smoking again, which is bad.” She thinks of Saint Augustine’s prayer and smiles into her clasped hands. “Help me to stop… but not today.”
With that taken care of, she opens her Covid drawer. There’s a box of fresh masks beside the box of wipes. She takes one and heads out to begin her investigation into the disappearance of Bonnie Rae Dahl.
2
Twenty minutes later Holly is driving slowly up Red Bank Avenue. Just short of Deerfield Park she passes a Dairy Whip where a bunch of kids are skateboarding in the nearly deserted parking lot. She passes John-Boy’s Storage Center, Rates By Month And By Year. She passes an abandoned Exxon station that’s been sprayed with tags. There’s a Quik-Pik, also abandoned, the front windows boarded up.
After a weedy vacant lot, she comes to the auto repair shop where Bonnie’s bike was discovered. It’s a long building with a sagging roof and rusty corrugated metal sides. The cement parking area out front is sprouting weeds and even a few sunflowers through its cracked surface. To Holly it doesn’t look like a building worth saving, let alone buying, but Marvin Brown must have felt differently, because there’s a SALE PENDING sign in front. The sign features a photo of a smiling moon-faced man who is identified as George Rafferty, Your City Real Estate Specialist. Holly parks in front of the roll-up doors and notes down the agent’s name and number.
She keeps a box of nitrile gloves in the console. Barbara Robinson special-ordered them for her as a birthday present, and they’re covered with various emojis: smiley faces, frowny faces, kissy faces and pissy faces. Quite amusing. Holly snaps on a pair, then goes around to the back of her little car and opens the trunk. There’s a neatly folded raincoat on top of her toolbox. She won’t need that, the day is sunny and hot, but she wants her red rubber galoshes. It isn’t Covid she’s worried about out here in the open, but there are bushes on both sides of the deserted repair shop, and she’s very susceptible to poison ivy. Also, there might be snakes. Holly hates snakes. Their scales are bad, their beady black eyes are worse. Oough.
She pauses to consider Deerfield Park across the street. Most of it is a landscaper’s dream, but over here on the edge of Red Bank Ave, the trees and bushes have been allowed to grow wild, with greenery actually poking through the wrought-iron fence and invading the space of sidewalk strollers. She sees one interesting thing: a rough downward slash, almost a ravine, topped by a slab of rock. Even from across the street Holly can see it’s been heavily tagged, so kids must gather there, possibly to smoke pot. She thinks that rock would have a good view of this side of the avenue, including the auto repair shop. She wonders if any kids were there on the evening Bonnie left her bike, and thinks of the ones she saw goofing off in the parking lot of the Dairy Whip.
She pulls on her galoshes, tucks her pants into them, and walks along the front of the building—past the three roll-up garage doors, then the office. She doesn’t expect to find anything, but stranger things have happened. When she reaches the corner she turns and goes back, walking slowly, head bent. There’s nothing.
Now for the hard part, she thinks. The poopy part.
She starts up the south side of the building, moving slowly, pushing aside the bushes, looking down. There are cigarette butts, an empty Tiparillo box, a rusty White Claw can, an ancient athletic sock. The going is faster along the back, because someone has dumped oil (a big no-no) and there are fewer bushes. She sees something white and pounces on it, but it turns out to be a cracked sparkplug.