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When this is over, Holly thinks, no one will believe it really happened. Or if they do, they won’t understand how it happened.

“And since then, has Detective Jaynes been in touch?”

“Twice in three weeks,” Penny says. She sounds bitter, and Holly thinks she has a right to be. “Once she came to my house—for ten minutes—the other time she called. She has Bonnie’s picture and said she’d put it on NamUs, which is a nationwide missing persons database, also on NCMEC, that’s—”

“The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children,” Holly says, thinking that was a good call on Izzy’s part even though Bonnie Rae Dahl isn’t a child. Cops often post there if the missing person is young and female. Young females are by far the most common abductees. Of course, they are also the most common runaways.

But, she thinks, if a twenty-four-year-old woman decides to up stakes and start over somewhere else, you can’t call her a runaway.

Penny pulls in a shuddering breath. “No help from the police. Zero. Jaynes says sure, she might have been abducted, but the note suggests she just left. Only why would she? Why? She has a good job! She’s in line for a promotion! She’s good pals with Lakeisha! And she finally dumped that loser of a boyfriend!”

“What’s the name of the loser boyfriend?”

“Tom Higgins.” She wrinkles her nose. “He worked at the shoe store out at the Airport Mall. Then the mall closed down during the first Covid wave. He tried to move in with Bonnie to save on the rent, but she wouldn’t let him. They had a big fight about it. Bon told him they were done. He laughed and said she couldn’t fire him, he quit. Like it was original, you know. Probably he thought it was.”

“Do you think he had anything to do with Bonnie’s disappearance?”

“No.” She folds her arms across her chest, as if to say that ends the subject. Holly waits—a technique Bill Hodges taught her—and Penny finally fills the silence. “That man could barely blow his own nose without an instruction video. Also very immature. I never knew what Bonnie saw in him, and she could never explain it.”

Holly, a fan of the hunks on Bachelor in Paradise, has a good idea what Bonnie might have seen in him. She doesn’t want to say it and doesn’t have to. Penny says it for her.

“He must have been terrific in the sack, a real sixty-minute man.”

“Do you have his address?”

Penny consults her phone. “2395 Eastland Avenue. Although I don’t know if he’s still there.”

Holly records it. “Do you have a picture of the note?”

Penny does, says Lakeisha Stone photographed it when Marvin Brown brought the bike. Holly studies it and doesn’t like what she sees. Block letters, all caps, carefully made: I’VE HAD ENOUGH.

“Is this your daughter’s printing?”

Penny gives a sigh that says she’s at her wit’s end. “It might be, but I can’t be sure. My daughter doesn’t do handwriting. None of them do these days except for their signatures, which you can barely read—just scribbles. She doesn’t usually print in all big letters, but if she wanted to be… I don’t know…”

“Emphatic?”

“Yes, that. Then she might.”

She could be right, Holly thinks, but if that were the case, might she not have printed in even bigger caps? Not I’VE HAD ENOUGH but I’VE HAD ENOUGH? Maybe even with an exclamation point or two? No, Holly doesn’t care for this note at all. She’s not ready to believe Bonnie didn’t write it, but she’s far from ready to believe that Bonnie did.

“Please forward this along with the photos of your daughter. What about you, Penny? Where do you live?”

“Renner Circle. 883 Renner, in Upriver.”

Holly adds it to her notes, where she has also written P and B argued, P says it got heated.

“And what do you do?”

“I’m the chief loan officer at the NorBank branch on the turnpike extension at the airport. At least I was, and I assume I will be again. NorBank has temporarily closed three of their stores—we call them stores—and one of them was mine.”

“Not working from home?”

“No. I’m still getting paid, though. One ray of sunshine in all this… this mess. Which reminds me, I need to give you a check.” She opens her bag and starts rooting through it. “You must have more questions, too.”

“I will have, but I’ve got enough to get started on.”

“When will I hear from you?” Penny is writing a check quickly and efficiently, not pausing at any of the fields. And not printing, either, but writing in a small, rolling, tightly controlled script.