Beneath the notes is a MapQuest printout of Deerfield Park and the surrounding area. Curious, Barbara picks it up. It has nothing to do with Jerome’s book and everything to do with Holly’s current case. There are three red dots with Jerome’s neat printing below each of them.
Bonnie D, July 1 2021 is on the east side of the park, across from the overgrown few acres known as the Thickets.
The dot for Ellen C, November 2018 is on the Bell College campus, placed directly on top of the Memorial Union, home of the Belfry. Barbara and some of her friends sometimes go there for burgers after using the Reynolds Library. As high school students they don’t have check-out privileges, but the reference room is good, and the computer room is awesome.
The last red dot is for Peter S, Late November 2018. Barbara also knows this location: it’s the Dairy Whip, considered déclassé by high school students, but a favorite hangout of the younger fry.
One of them could have been me, she thinks. There but for the grace of God.
Her chore in here is done. She shuts down the computer and gets up to leave. Then she sits down again and picks up the MapQuest printout. There’s a coffee mug filled with pens on the desk. She takes the red one Jerome must have used to mark the map. She makes another dot on Ridge Road, across from Olivia Kingsbury’s house. Because that’s where she saw him the night she was thinking about the poem she says was her last good one.
Beneath the dot she prints: Jorge Castro, October 2012. Even as she does it, she feels she’s being silly.
Probably Castro just said “Fuck this stupid English Department” and left. Also “Fuck Emily Harris and her unsuccessfully disguised homophobia, too.”
But with Castro added to Jerome’s map, she sees something interesting and a tiny bit disturbing. The dots almost seem to circle the park. It’s true that Bonnie’s came a bit sooner than the others, summer instead of fall, but didn’t Barbara see somewhere—maybe on that Netflix show Mindhunter—that homicidal maniacs have a tendency to wait a shorter and shorter time between their kills? Like drug addicts shooting up at ever more frequent intervals?
Ellen C and Peter S don’t fit the pattern; they came close together. Maybe because the killer didn’t get whatever he wanted from one of them? Because he or she didn’t fully turn on the killer’s bloodlight?
You’re giving yourself the creeps, Barbara thinks. Seeing monsters—like Chet Ondowsky—where there’s really nothing but shadows.
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.
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.”
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.
Upstairs, Emily is watching this and smiling. Not much can amuse her these days, given the constant pain in her back and down her leg, but seeing that mousy little bitch frantically dry-washing her hands? That’s funny.