Page 65 of What Boys Learn

“Heck no. He’s got more summertime business than he can handle.”

Doug was a foreign and luxury sports car mechanic. That’s why I was calling. “This is going to sound strange, Grace, but Benjamin heard a noisy car—maybe a beater—without seeing it. It had a hard time starting up, and then it kept making a repetitive sound. The owner of that car matters, if we can find him.”

“Is this about the girls?”

“Yes,” I said, trying not to sound tense. “Do you think if I called up all the mechanics in our area and described the sound for them, they might be able to recall if any old car came in for a repair in the last couple of weeks?”

“Gosh. No idea. But you could go to YouTube. There are all kinds of automotive sound libraries and diagnostic videos on there. Car owners are pretty fanatical. If it’s a beater and the person is a DIY kind of guy, he may not have gone to a mechanic. What’d the car sound like?”

I tried to remember Benjamin’s exact words. “Like a typewriter.”

“That’s called tappets. A lot of engines make that sound. Not low-value beaters, exclusively. Fancy vintage cars, too.”

“That’s fantastic. Thanks, Grace.”

“Doug can confirm it. You want him to call you, or the cops?”

“He’d call the police directly?”

“If it helps the girls’ families. Of course.”

“That would be incredible. Ask for Detective Hernández or Wood. You can mention that I was the person who asked about the sound, and he’ll understand why. But I’m sure they’ll be happier to hear from Doug than from me.”

Not a beater, necessarily. It could even be a fancy vintage car. More suspects. More possibilities. Ralph King thought that sleuthing was none of my business, but if no one was going to ask the right questions, I had little choice.

On my worst days, I’d been a fool, hiding information in a confused panic. But I could make up for that, as long as I believed Benjamin had done nothing wrong. If he had, Curtis wouldn’t be looking so relaxed and upbeat each time I showed up to collect my son. I had to cling to that assumption. For now, I had nothing else.

23

Iwas making French toast on Sunday, a day with no therapy sessions scheduled, when Benjamin emerged from his room and asked me to drive him to the pool. I had a spatula in one hand, my phone in the other, scrolling the news with my thumb until I suddenly stopped. There she was. The girl I’d seen on Green Bay Road.

“Mom,” Benjamin said. “Smoke.”

I pulled the pan off the burner and shrugged my shoulders up to my ears, sure the fire alarm was going to go off any second. In our last apartment, it would have.

“Can you open all the windows?” I asked Benjamin.

He ran around levering and waving his arms. I turned the hood knob, trying out the fan for the first time since we’d moved in. It whirred and rumbled, emitting the faint smell of mouse droppings, but it did little to eliminate the smoke.

Benjamin came back to the kitchen several minutes later. “The good news is we won’t go deaf. The bad news is the smoke detector doesn’t work. The batteries inside look corroded.”

“Right,” I said, looking around for a pen to add to the chore list on the fridge.

My phone was still in my hand.Arlington Heights woman reported missing. Veronica Lynn Lovell.

“So?” Benjamin asked.

I was reading about where she’d last been seen—at a sports bar out in Fox Lake, far to the northwest of us. I tried to remember what he’d been asking me.The pool. “You want to swim?”

“Not to swim.”

I didn’t understand. “You don’t play tennis. We don’t even have rackets.”

“No. Just to see it.”

“Thepool?”

“The parking lot. The front of the building. Can you drive me or not?”