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

“What time was this?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Go on.”

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

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

“Where did Mr. Brown find the bike?”

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

“Did you talk to Mr. Brown?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Any further developments since then?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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