As she pushes open the door to the street, a particularly vicious bolt of pain strikes the small of her back. Emily stands on the sidewalk, grimacing, waiting for it to let up. It does, at least a little, and she thanks God (who of course doesn’t exist) for the Elf Parfait she ate before leaving the house. She crosses Frederick Street to her car, limping more severely than ever.
The phrase that Holly is screaming at her husband at that very moment comes into her mind and she rejects it.
“IT’S CALLED THE PLACEBO EFFECT, you half brain-dead idi—”
He rushes at her, screaming at her to shut up, the placebo effect doesn’t exist, it’s nothing but the manipulation of statistics by a cadre of lazy, pseudoscientific—
She grabs him the second he comes within reach. Again, there’s no thought, not even a shred of advance planning; she simply shoots her right arm through the bars and curls it around his neck. It hurts her bruised ribs, but in her adrenaline-fired state she barely notices.
He tries to jerk free and almost makes it. Holly redoubles her grip and yanks him against the bars. His bathrobe is sliding off, revealing his ridiculous firetruck pajamas.
“Let me go!” Choking, almost gurgling the words. “Let me go!”
Holly remembers what she has in her left hand. What she’s been squeezing so tightly it’s cut into her palm. It’s a triangular earring, the mate of the one she found in the weeds next to the abandoned auto body shop. She shoves that hand through the bars and, holding the earring tightly between her thumb and forefinger, runs one of its three golden points across Harris’s scrawny throat in a semicircle from one jaw to the other. She expects nothing, just does it. For most of that ten-inch semicircle, the point barely cuts the skin; a paper cut might go deeper and draw more blood. Then it catches on a bulging tendon and digs deeper. Roddy helps by jerking his head to the side, trying to get clear of whatever she’s cutting him with. The earring slices through his jugular vein and Holly takes first one faceful of warm blood and then another as his heart pumps it at her. It’s in her eyes and it burns.
Roddy gives a convulsive jerk and breaks her grip. He staggers toward the stairs with the back of his bathrobe hanging almost to his waist and the rest of it dragging on the floor. He puts his hand to his neck. Blood jets through his fingers. He blunders into the broom that’s propped there and stumbles over it. His head hits the stair-rail and he goes to his knees. The spurts of blood continue, but they’re starting to weaken. He uses the rail to gain his feet and turns to her. His eyes are wide. He reaches out and makes a guttural sound that could be anything, but Holly thinks it might be his wife’s name. The bathrobe slips all the way off. It makes her think of a snake shedding its skin. He takes two steps toward her, waving his arms, then goes down on his face. The front of his skull thuds on the concrete. His fingers twitch. He tries to raise his head and can’t. Blood trickles across the concrete.
Holly is frozen with shock and amazement. Her arms are still sticking out through two of the squares made by the crisscrossing bars. The earring is still in her left hand, which is now wearing a wet red glove. At first the only thought in her mind is Lady Macbeth’s question: who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him?
Then another one surfaces: Where is his wife?
She takes one step backward, then two, then trips over her own foot and sits down hard on the futon. She cries out in the pain of her bruised and outraged ribs. The earring drops from her hand.
She waits for Emily.
Barbara barely glances at the woman who passes her in the lobby of the Frederick Building. She’s thinking of Deduction, Please, a series of children’s detective books that Jerome read as a kid and then passed on to her. She doesn’t know if her and J’s fascination with Holly’s chosen field (his especially) originated in those books, but it might have.
There were thirty or forty mysteries in each Deduction, Please, each only two or three pages long. They featured a sleuth with the unlikely name of Dutch Spyglass. Dutch would come to the scene of the crime, observe, talk to a few people, and then solve the mystery (usually robbery, sometimes arson or a clonk on the head, never murder). Dutch always concluded the same way: “All the clues are there! The solution is in your grasp! Deduction, please?” Jerome was able to solve the cases some of the time, Barbara almost never… although when she turned to the back of the book and read the case summary, it always seemed obvious.
As she goes up in the elevator, she thinks the disappearances Holly has been investigating are like those mini-mysteries she puzzled over when she was nine or ten. Nastier, more sinister, but essentially the same. All the clues are there, the solution is in your grasp. Barbara almost thinks that’s true. She wishes she could turn to the back of the book and read the solution, but there is no book. Only her missing friend.
She goes down the hall and opens the door to Finders Keepers with her key. “Holly?”
No answer, but Barbara has the queerest sensation that either someone is here or has been not long ago. It’s not a smell, just a feeling that the air has been disturbed recently.
“Anyone?”
Nothing. She takes a quick look into Pete’s office. She even checks the coat closet. Then she goes to the door of Holly’s office. She pauses there for a moment, her hand on the knob, afraid she’s going to find Holly dead in her chair, eyes open and glazed. She forces herself to open the door, telling herself she won’t see Holly but if she does she mustn’t scream.
Holly’s not there, but Barbara’s sense of a recent presence doesn’t go away. She looks at Holly’s desk and sees nothing but a blank pad, the one she uses when she’s doodling, taking notes, or both. It’s neatly centered, and that’s Holly all the way. Barbara pushes a key on the computer’s keypad and frowns when nothing happens. Holly almost never turns her computer off, just lets it go to sleep. She says she hates even a short wait while it boots up.
Barbara turns it on and when the starter screen appears, she uses the notebook app on her phone to find the password that opens all the office computers: Qxtt4#%ck. She types it in. Nothing happens except for the quick annoying shake that means the Mac has rejected the password. She tries again in case she’s entered it wrong. Same result. She frowns, then barks a small exasperated laugh as she gets it. The password changes automatically every six months, a security feature that means Qxtt4#%ck became obsolete on July first. Holly has neglected to give her the new one, and Barbara—busy with her own affairs—has forgotten to ask. Jerome may have it, but she’s guessing he doesn’t. He’s also been busy with his own affairs.
Deduction, please?
Barbara has none. She gets up, starts to leave, then, almost on a whim, takes down the Turner landscape print on the wall. The company safe is behind it. And although it’s shut and locked, Barbara sees something that adds to her disquiet. When Holly uses the safe, she always resets the combination dial to zero. It’s one of her little compulsions. Pete wouldn’t bother if he used the safe, but Pete’s been out almost all month.
She tries the handle. Locked. She doesn’t know the combination, so she can’t check to see if anything has been taken. What she can do is reset the dial to zero, put back the painting, and call her brother.
Emily parks in the driveway and gets out of the Subaru a little too fast. Another bolt of pain goes through her back. It’s becoming harder and harder to believe they’re holding back the tide of senescence, a thing they’ve taken as an article of faith since dining on Jorge Castro.