She checks in at the motel and has to laugh at herself when she realizes that she has once again arrived without luggage. She could make another trip to Dollar General but decides against it, telling herself the stock market won’t crash if she wears the same undies two days in a row. There’s no point in going to the Elder Care Center tonight, either; visiting hours end at seven PM.
She eats slowly, enjoying her fish sandwich, enjoying the Hershey’s Pie even more. There’s nothing like empty calories, she sometimes thinks, when you’re feeling confused and unsure of what to do next.
Oh, you know perfectly well what to do next, she thinks, and calls Penny Dahl. Who asks if she’s made any progress.
“I don’t know,” Holly says. This is, as Uncle Henry used to say, the God’s honest.
“Either you have or you haven’t!”
Holly doesn’t want to tell Penny that her daughter might have become the latest victim of a serial killer. It may come to that—in her heart Holly is convinced it will come to that—but while she’s still unsure it would be too cruel.
“I’m going to give you a full report, but I want another twenty-four hours. Are you all right with that?”
“No, I’m not all right with that! If you’ve found something, I have a right to know. I’m paying you, for Christ’s sake!”
Holly says, “Let me put it another way, Penny. Can you live with that?”
“I should fire you,” Penny grumbles.
“That’s your prerogative,” Holly says, “but an end-of-case report would still take me twenty-four hours to prepare. I’m chasing a couple of things.”
“Promising things?”
“I’m not sure.” She would like to say something more hopeful and can’t.
There’s silence. Then Penny says, “I expect to hear from you by nine tomorrow night, or I will fire you.”
“Fair enough. It’s just that right now I don’t have my—”
Ducks in a row is how she means to finish, but Penny ends the call before she can.
Next, Holly calls Jerome. Before she can even say hello, he asks if she’s talked to Barbara.
“No—should I?”
“Well, she’s got some pretty amazing news, but I want her to tell you. Spoiler alert, she’s also been writing, and just happens to be in the running for a literary prize with big bucks attached. Twenty-five K.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“I’m not. And don’t you tell Mom and Dad. She may not have told them yet. But that’s not why I called. I finally figured out what was bugging me about that van. The one in the security footage from the store?”
“What was it?”
“The body is too high. It’s not jacked like one of those monster trucks, but it’s noticeable—two or three feet more than normal. I looked online and the only vans like that are custom jobs for people with disabilities. The chassis gets raised to allow for a wheelchair ramp.”
Holly calls Pete from beside the ice machine, where she’s having a smoke. He has come to the same conclusion about the van as Jerome, only he calls that kind of vehicle “a crip wagon.” Holly winces, thanks him, and asks him how he’s doing. He says he’s like the guy in that Chicago song, feeling stronger every day. It crosses her mind that he’s trying to convince himself.
She puts out her cigarette and sits on the stairs to think. Now she has one almost-concrete thing to tell Penny tomorrow night: it seems more and more likely that Bonnie was taken by someone pretending to be disabled. Maybe all of them were. Or maybe not just pretending? Holly thinks of something Imani said: Poor old lady looked like she was in pain. She said she wasn’t, but I know sciatica when I see it.
She wishes now she had gotten eyes on Emily Harris. She should check at the college to see if anyone knows anything about her physical condition, and will be sure to get a good look at Ernie Coggins’s wife when she talks to him tomorrow.
Back in her room, she lies on the bed and calls Barbara. Her call goes straight to voicemail. Holly asks for a callback before ten-thirty, when she’ll shut off her phone, say her evening prayer, and go to sleep. Then she calls Jerome back. “I can’t get Barbara, and my curiosity is killing me. Tell me what’s going on.”
“It’s really Barbara’s news, Holly…”
“Pretty please? With sugar on it? Vanilla sugar?”
“Okay, but only if you promise to act surprised when Barb tells you.”
“I promise.”
So Jerome tells Holly how Barbara has been writing poetry in secret for a long time and met with Olivia Kingsbury—
“Olivia Kingsbury?” Holly exclaims, sitting up straight. “Holy frijoles!”
“You know her, I take it.”
“Not personally, but my God, Jerome, she’s one of America’s greatest poets! I’m amazed that Barbara got up the courage to approach her, but good for her!”
“Barb’s never been short on guts.”
“When I was a teenager trying to write my own poems, I read everything of Kingsbury’s I could get my hands on! I didn’t know she was still alive!”
“Almost a hundred, Barb says. Anyway, this Kingsbury checked out Barbara’s poetry and agreed to mentor her. I don’t know how long that went on, but the end result was Barb got put up for this prize, the Penworth or something—”
“The Penley Prize,” Holly says. She’s awestruck and delighted for her friend, who has done all of this and managed to keep it a dead secret.
“Yeah, that sounds right. But don’t bother asking what I’ve been up to, Hollyberry, my hundred thousand dollars and all. Not to mention my glitzy weekend in Montauk coming up. You wouldn’t want to hear about the party where Spielberg might show up, or any of that boring old stuff.”
Holly does, of course, and they talk for almost half an hour. He tells her about his lunch at the Blarney Stone, the advance check hand-over, discussions about his book’s launch and plans for promotion, plus a possible interview with The American Historical Review, a prospect that excites and terrifies him in equal measure.
When they have exhausted what he calls Jerome’s Excellent New York Adventure, he asks her to update him on the case. She does, finishing by confessing that her investigation of the bowling team is probably a one-way trip down a blind alley. Jerome disagrees.
“Valid line of investigation, Hol. Dressler worked there. He was targeted. I think they all were. No, I’m sure.”
“Maybe,” Holly says, “but I doubt if it was by an elderly bowler. The one I’m seeing tomorrow is actually a stroke victim. I guess I was hoping one of them is protecting a younger relative or friend. Protecting or enabling.”
The truth is, she’s still hoping that. She has less than a day before she needs to bring her client up to date, and she’d like to have something concrete to tell Penny. That isn’t the most important thing, though. She wants something concrete to tell herself.
While Holly is talking to Jerome, Barbara Robinson is sitting with Marie Duchamp in a waiting room at Kiner Memorial. What they’re waiting to find out is whether or not the docs have been able to regulate Olivia’s heartbeat. They are also waiting—although neither of them say it—to find out if the old poet is still alive.