Tears are hard for Holly to handle. There’s a box of tissues beside her mousepad. She pushes it toward Penny without making eye contact, nibbling at her lower lip and wishing for a cigarette. “I’m sorry. I know how hard this is for you.”
Penny looks at her over a bouquet of Kleenex. “Do you?” It’s almost a challenge.
Holly sighs. “No, probably not.”
There’s a moment of silence between them. Holly thinks of telling Penny she recently lost her mother, but it’s not the same. She knows where her mother is, after alclass="underline" under dirt and sod at Cedar Rest. Penny Dahl only knows there’s a hole in her life where her daughter is supposed to be.
“I’m curious about your daughter’s helmet. Was it with her bike when it was found?”
Penny’s mouth falls open. “No, just the bike. You know what, Detective Jaynes never asked about that and I never thought of it.”
Penny gets a pass, but Izzy Jaynes sinks a bit in Holly’s estimation. “What about her pack?”
“Gone, but you’d expect that, wouldn’t you? You might wear a pack after you got off your bike, she wore it into the store, but you’d hardly keep wearing your helmet, would you?”
Holly doesn’t answer, because this isn’t a conversation, it’s an interrogation. It will be as gentle as she can make it, but an interrogation is what it is.
“Catch me up, Penny. Tell me everything you know. Start with what Bonnie does at the Reynolds Library and when she left that evening.”
There are four assistant librarians at the Reynolds Library on the Bell College of Arts and Sciences campus. During the summer, the library closes at seven. The head librarian, Matt Conroy, sometimes stays until closing, but that night he didn’t. Margaret Brenner, Edith Brookings, Lakeisha Stone, and Bonnie Dahl saw out the last few visitors by five past. Before locking they split up and took a quick sweep through the stacks for anyone who either didn’t hear the closing bell or chose to ignore it while reading one more page or taking one more note. Bonnie had told her mother that sometimes they found people fast asleep in the reading room or the stacks, and on a few occasions they came across couples who had been overcome with passion. In flagrant delicious, she called it. They also checked the restrooms on the main level and on the third floor. That night all the customers were gone.
The four gabbed for a bit in the break room, discussing weekend plans, then turned out the lights. Lakeisha got into her Smart car and drove away. Bonnie got on her bike and headed for her efficiency apartment, where she never arrived. Penny hadn’t been very concerned when she called Bonnie the next morning and got voicemail on the first ring.
“I wanted to ask if she’d like to come over on Friday or Saturday night and watch something on Netflix or Hulu,” Penny says, then adds, “I was going to make popcorn.”
“Is that all?” Holly’s nose for a lie isn’t as strong as Bill Hodges’s was, but she’s good at knowing when someone’s shading the truth.
Penny colors. “Well… we’d had an argument a couple of nights before. It got a little heated. Mothers and daughters, you know. Movies are how we make up. We both love the movies, and now there’s so much to watch, isn’t there?”
“Yes,” Holly says.
“I assumed she was on the phone with someone else and she’d call back.”
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?”