Page 98

Still, she probably should pass on the information about Jorge Castro. She picks up her phone to call Holly, and it rings in her hand. It’s Marie Duchamp. Olivia is in Kiner Memorial with a-fib. This time it’s serious. Barbara forgets about calling Holly and hurries downstairs, telling her mother that she needs to use the car. When Tanya asks why, Barbara says a friend is in the hospital and she’ll explain later. She has good news, but that must also wait until later.

“Is it a scholarship? Did you get a scholarship?”

“No, it’s something else.”

“All right, dear,” Tanya says. “Drive carefully.” It’s her mantra.

5

Holly asks Rodney Harris if he has any idea where Cary Dressler may be now. Did he talk about plans to leave the city? Did he sometimes (this is a fresh bit of embroidery) appear to have large amounts of cash?

“I know he had a drug habit,” she confides. “Thieves often do.”

“He seemed like a nice enough fellow,” Harris says. He’s staring into space, a slight frown creasing his brow. Picture of a man trying to remember something that will help her. “Didn’t know him well but I knew he used drugs. Only cannabis sativa, so he said, but there may have been other ones…?”

His raised eyebrows invite Holly to confide, but she only smiles.

“Certainly cannabis is a known gateway for stronger substances,” he goes on in a pontifical tone. “Not always, but it is habituating, and impairs cognitive development. It also causes adverse structural changes to the hippocampus, the temperature lobe’s center of learning and memory. This is well known.”

Upstairs, Em winces. Temporal lobe, dear… and don’t get carried away. Please.

Gibney doesn’t appear to notice and it’s as if Roddy has heard Em. “Pardon the lecture, Ms. Gibson. I will now climb down from my hobby horse.”

Holly laughs politely. She touches one of the gloves in her pocket and wishes again she could put them on. She doesn’t want Professor Harris to think she’s Howard Hughes, but the idea that everything she touches could be crawling with Covid-19 or the new Delta variant won’t go away. Meanwhile Harris continues.

“Some of the other members of my team used to go out back with Dressler and ‘blow the joint,’ as they say. So did some of the women.”

“The Hot Witches?”

Harris’s frown deepens. “Yes, them. And others. One guesses they fancied him. But as I may have said, I didn’t really know him. He was friendly enough, and he sometimes subbed in for a wounded warrior, so to speak, but we were mere acquaintances. I had no idea of his cash situation and I’m afraid I have no idea where he may have gone.”

Leave it there, love, Emily thinks. See her to the door.

Roddy takes Holly’s elbow and does just that. “Now I’m afraid I must return to my labors.”

“I totally understand,” Holly says. “It was a long shot at best.” She reaches into her bag and gives him her card, careful not to touch his fingers. “If you think of anything that might help, please give me a call.”

When they reach the door, Emily switches to the hall camera. Roddy asks, “May I ask how you plan to proceed?”

Don’t, Emily thinks. Oh, don’t, Roddy. There may be quicksand if you go there.

But the woman—who seems too innocuous for Emily to be too worried—tells Roddy she really can’t talk about it, and offers her elbow. With a smile that says he must suffer fools, Roddy touches it with his own.

“Thank you very much for your time, Mr. Harris.”

“Not at all, Ms…. what was your name again?”

“Gibney.”

“Enjoy the rest of your day, Ms. Gibney, and I wish you success.”

6

As soon as Holly hears the front door close behind her, while she’s still on the walk, she’s reaching deep in her pocket for the hand sanitizer underneath the nitrile glove she wishes she’d worn. Forgetting her mask with the Dairy Whip boys was bad, but at least they were outside; her conversation with Rodney Harris happened in a room where the central air conditioning could waft the virus that had killed her mother anywhere, including into her nose and thus down to her smoke-polluted lungs.

You’re being silly and hypochondriacal, she thinks, but that is the voice of her mother, who died of the fracking virus.

She finds what she was looking for, a little bottle of Germ-X, and pulls it out of her pocket. She squirts a dollop into her palm and rubs both hands vigorously, thinking that the sharp smell of alcohol, which used to terrify her as a child because it meant a shot was coming, is now the smell of comfort and conditional safety.