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At last her voice trembles, and her eyes take on the shine of tears. Roddy is relieved.

“Keep your promise.”

July 27, 2021

1

Holly returns to her former parking spot in the two-hour zone and smokes a cigarette with the door open and her feet on the pavement. It comes to her that there’s something exceptionally perverse about taking all the proper precautions against Covid and then filling her lungs with this carcinogenic crap.

I have to stop, she thinks. I really do. Just not today.

The Golden Oldies bowling team is probably a bust. It’s hard for her to remember now why she ever thought it would lead to something. Was it just because Cary Dressler also visited the Jet Mart Bonnie used on a regular basis? Well, Dressler’s also gone, leaving his moped behind, but those are pretty thin connections. It certainly doesn’t seem to her that Roddy Harris is a likely candidate for the Red Bank Predator (if there even is such a person). She doesn’t know if Harris’s wife suffers from sciatica as well as migraines—finding out might be possible, although Holly doesn’t think it’s a priority—but it’s pretty obvious Harris has got his own problems. Onguarding for regarding, Clover for Covid, temperature lobe for temporal lobe, forgetting her name. There’s also the way he simply stopped a couple of times, frowning and looking into space. It doesn’t necessarily mean he’s suffering the onset of Alzheimer’s disease, but the age is right. Also…

“That’s the way it started with Uncle Henry,” she says.

But since she’s started running the Oldies down, she might as well finish the job. She snuffs her cigarette in her portable ashtray and heads for the turnpike. Ernie Coggins lives in Upriver, which is only four exits away. A quick run. But now that Uncle Henry has come into her mind, she can’t stop thinking about him. When was the last time she visited? In the spring, wasn’t it? Yes. Her mother nagged her into it—guilt-tripped her into it—last April, before Charlotte got sick.

Holly gets to the Upriver exit, slows, then changes her mind and continues north toward Covington, location of both her mother’s house and the Rolling Hills Elder Care Center, where Uncle Henry is now living (if you want to call it that). It’s also where another member of the Golden Oldies bowling team is living, so she can get two for the price of one. Of course Victor Anderson may not be any more compos mentis than her uncle; according to Hugh Clippard, Anderson suffered a stroke, and if he’s in long-term care, he’s probably not in recovery mode. Holly can check him off her list, though, and talk to Ernie Coggins tomorrow, when she’s fresh. Plus, turnpike driving soothes her, and when Holly’s in a tranquil state of mind, things sometimes occur to her.

But the whole thing is starting to feel like a wild goose-chase.

Her phone lights up three times on the four-hour drive to the same Days Inn where she stayed three nights before. She doesn’t answer even though her car is Bluetooth-equipped. One call is from Jerome. One is from Pete Huntley. The third is from Penny Dahl, who undoubtedly wants an update. And deserves one.

2

By the time she gets to Covington, Holly’s stomach is growling. She enters the Burger King drive-thru and orders without hesitation when her turn comes. She has favorites at all the fast food franchises. At Burger King it’s always a Big Fish, a Hershey’s Pie, and a Coke. As she approaches the payment window, she reaches into her left pocket for one of her emoji gloves and only finds the bottle of Germ-X. She grabs a Kleenex out of the center console and uses that to offer her money and take her change. The girl in the window gives her a pitying look. Holly finds a glove in her right pocket and puts it on just in time to drive up to the second window and take her food. She has no idea what happened to the missing glove and doesn’t care. There’s a whole box of them in the trunk, courtesy of Barbara Robinson.

She checks in at the motel and has to laugh at herself when she realizes that she has once again arrived without luggage. She could make another trip to Dollar General but decides against it, telling herself the stock market won’t crash if she wears the same undies two days in a row. There’s no point in going to the Elder Care Center tonight, either; visiting hours end at seven PM.

She eats slowly, enjoying her fish sandwich, enjoying the Hershey’s Pie even more. There’s nothing like empty calories, she sometimes thinks, when you’re feeling confused and unsure of what to do next.

Oh, you know perfectly well what to do next, she thinks, and calls Penny Dahl. Who asks if she’s made any progress.

“I don’t know,” Holly says. This is, as Uncle Henry used to say, the God’s honest.

“Either you have or you haven’t!”

Holly doesn’t want to tell Penny that her daughter might have become the latest victim of a serial killer. It may come to that—in her heart Holly is convinced it will come to that—but while she’s still unsure it would be too cruel.

“I’m going to give you a full report, but I want another twenty-four hours. Are you all right with that?”

“No, I’m not all right with that! If you’ve found something, I have a right to know. I’m paying you, for Christ’s sake!”

Holly says, “Let me put it another way, Penny. Can you live with that?”

“I should fire you,” Penny grumbles.

“That’s your prerogative,” Holly says, “but an end-of-case report would still take me twenty-four hours to prepare. I’m chasing a couple of things.”

“Promising things?”

“I’m not sure.” She would like to say something more hopeful and can’t.

There’s silence. Then Penny says, “I expect to hear from you by nine tomorrow night, or I will fire you.”

“Fair enough. It’s just that right now I don’t have my—”

Ducks in a row is how she means to finish, but Penny ends the call before she can.