Much good does it do her.
Roddy Harris comes back from his usual Monday evening visit to Strike Em Out Lanes around quarter to nine. He and Emily take good care of themselves (often in ways of which dimwitted society would not approve), but his once strong hips have grown rather fragile as he advances deeper into his eighties, and it’s been almost four years since he last rolled a ball down a hardwood lane. He still goes on most Mondays, though, because he likes to root for his team. The Golden Oldies play in the Over 65 League. Most of the men with whom he bowled when he joined the Oldies are gone, but a few are left, including Hugh Clippard, once of the Sociology Department. Hugh has to be pushing eighty himself these days, he’s made a pile in the stock market, and he’s still got a wicked hook. Too bad it’s to the Brooklyn side.
Emily comes out of her little office as soon as she hears the front door close. He kisses her on the cheek and asks how her evening was.
“Not wonderful. We may have a slight problem, dear. You know I monitor certain people’s tweets and posts.”
“Vera Steinman,” he says. “And the Dahl woman, of course.”
“I also check in every now and then with the Craslows. There’s not much and they never talk about Ellen. Nobody asks about Ellen, either. Until yesterday.”
“Ellen Craslow,” Roddy says, shaking his head. “That bitch. That…” For a moment the word he wants escapes him. Then it comes. “That intransigent bitch.”
“She certainly was. And someone calling herself LaurenBacallFan has been asking for information about her on Twitter.”
“After almost three years? Why now?”
“Because I’m positive that LaurenBacallFan runs a private investigation firm. Her real name is Holly Gibney, the firm is called Finders Keepers, and Penelope Dahl has engaged her services.”
He is paying close attention now, looming over her upturned face. He’s seven inches taller than Emily, but she’s his equal in intellect, maybe in some ways his superior. She’s… again the word dances away from him, but he catches it as he always does. Almost always.
Emily is sly.
“How did you find out?”
“Mrs. Dahl is very chatty on social media.”
“Chatty Penny,” he says. “That girl, that Bonnie, was a mistake. Worse than the goddam Mexican, and we can excuse ourselves for that, because—”
“Because he was the first. I know. Come in the kitchen. There’s half a bottle of red left from dinner.”
“Wine before bed gives me acid. You know that.” But he follows her.
“Just a splash.”
She gets it from the fridge and pours—a splash for him, a bit more for her. They sit facing each other.
“Bonnie probably was a mistake,” she admits. “But the heat brought back my sciatica… and the headaches…”
“I know,” Roddy says. He takes her hand across the table and gives it a gentle squeeze. “My poor dear with her migraines.”
“And you. I saw you struggling so for words sometimes. And your poor hands, the way they were shaking… we had to.”
“I’m fine now. The shakes are gone. And any… any mental muddiness I might have been dealing with… that’s gone, too.”
This is only half-true. The shakes are gone, true enough (well, sometimes the minutest tremble when he’s very tired), but there are those words that sometimes dance just out of reach.
Everyone sometimes has those blank spots, he tells himself when it happens. You’ve researched it yourself. It’s a temporarily fouled circuit, transient aphasia, no different from a muscle cramp that hurts like Satan and then lets go. The idea that it might be incipient Alzheimer’s is ridiculous.
“In any case it’s done. If there’s fallout, we’ll deal with it. The good news is that I don’t believe we’ll have to. This Gibney woman has had some notable successes—yes, I looked her up—but when those occurred she had a partner, ex-police, and he died years ago. Since then she mostly looks for lost dogs, chases bail-jumpers, and works on a contingency basis with certain insurance companies. Small ones, none of the majors.”
Roddy sips his wine. “Apparently she was smart enough to find Ellen Craslow.”
Emily sighs. “That’s true. But two disappearances almost three years apart don’t make a pattern. Still, you know what you always say—the wise man prepares for rain while the sun shines.”
Does he always say that? He thinks he does, or used to. Along with one monkey don’t make no sideshow, a thing his father used to say, his father had that fabulous sky-blue Packard—
“Roddy!” The sharpness of her tone brings him back. “You’re wandering!”
“Was I?”
“Give me that.” She takes the jelly glass with its splash of wine from in front of him and pours it down the sink. From the freezer she takes a parfait glass containing a cloudy gray concoction. She sprays whipped cream from a can on top and puts it in front of him with a long-handled dessert spoon. “Eat.”
“Do you not want to share?” he asks… but his mouth is already watering.
“No. You have it all. You need it.”
She sits across from him as he begins to spoon the mixture of brains and vanilla ice cream greedily into his mouth. Emily watches. It will bring him back. It has to bring him back. She loves him. And she needs him.
“Listen to me carefully, love. This woman will hunt around for Bonnie, find nothing, take her fee, and go her way. If she should present a problem—one chance in a hundred if not in a thousand—she is unmarried and seems to have no significant other, based on what I’ve read. Her mother died earlier this month. Her only other living relative, an uncle, is in an elder care center with Alzheimer’s. She has a business partner, but he’s apparently hors de combat with Covid.”
Roddy eats a little faster, wiping a dribble that runs down a seam at the side of his mouth. He believes he can already sense a greater clarity in what he’s seeing and in what she’s saying.
“You found all that on that Twitter platform?”
Emily smiles. “There and a few other places. I have my little tricks. It’s like that TV show we watch. Manifest. Where the characters keep saying ‘everything is connected.’ It’s a silly show, but that’s not silly. My point is simple, dear one. This is a woman who has no one. This is a woman who must feel quite normally depressed and grief-stricken after losing her mother. If a woman like that were to commit suicide by jumping in the lake, leaving a suicide note behind on her computer, who would question it?”
“Her business partner might.”
“Or he might understand completely. I’m not saying it will come to that, only—”
“That we should prepare for rain while the sun is shining.”
“Exactly.” The parfait is almost gone, and surely he’s had enough. “Give me that.”
She takes it and finishes it herself.
Barbara Robinson is in her bedroom, reading in her jammies by the light of her bedside lamp, when the phone rings. The book is Catalepsy, by Jorge Castro. It isn’t as good as The Forgotten City, and the title seems deliberately off-putting—a writer’s declaration that he is “literary”—but it’s pretty good. Besides, the working title of her book—Faces Change—isn’t exactly Favorite Fireside Poems for Young & Old.
It’s Jerome, calling from New York. It’s quarter past eleven where she is, so it must already be tomorrow in the eastern time zone.