“Could you call her, tell her to come home?”
“What will I tell her?”
“I don’t know. Something’s come up. A family matter. You need her to come home.”
Glynis looked skeptical. “I can try.” She picked up the receiver on a landline phone that was sitting on a table next to the couch.
She held the phone to her ear and waited. She nodded almost imperceptibly with each ring, then said, “Oh, hi, sweetheart. It’s your mother. Could you please come over? There’s something your father and I need to discuss with you. But” — she looked at me — “it’s not the sort of thing I can talk to you about on the phone.” A pause, then, with forced cheerfulness, “Hope you’re having fun.”
Glynis ended the call. “She’ll either call back or she won’t. She probably saw it was me and didn’t answer. She sees our name and generally ignores it. I could text her, but it wouldn’t make any difference.”
Rodomski shook his head. “Which is really a pain in the ass when you need to get in touch with her. You got kids?”
I hesitated. “A son.”
Rodomski nodded enviously. “You’re better off, believe me. Girls can get into so much more trouble.”
“Have Hanna and Claire been friends a long time?” I asked.
“Since around seventh grade, I think,” Glynis said. “They’re inseparable. Sleeping over at each other’s houses, trading clothes, going on school trips.”
“What do you know about Claire?” I asked.
Glynis shrugged. “She’s a nice girl.”
Her husband said, “She’s the mayor’s daughter, you know.” A pause. “That horse’s ass.”
“You’re not a fan?”
Chris shook his head. “You watch the news? You see the kind of things going on half an hour’s drive south of here? You want that kind of thing happening in Griffon? Far as I’m concerned, the cops here do what they have to do, and I’m okay with it. Bert Sanders is more worried about some troublemaker’s rights than he is about our right to be able to be safe in our beds at night. I signed that petition. Signed it more than once. Every store I go into, I sign it. How about you?”
“I never seem to have a pen on me,” I said.
“You either support Chief Perry or you don’t, that’s how I feel.”
“The chief and I have a complicated relationship,” I said. I wasn’t interested in talking politics any longer. I turned to his wife and asked, “When’s the last time you saw Hanna?”
She glanced at her husband and then back at me. “I didn’t hear her come in last night, and I guess she was off to school pretty early this—”
“Hanna didn’t come home last night,” Chris said. “For God’s sake, Glynis, stop fooling yourself.”
“If she didn’t come home, where was she?”
“With that boy. Sean. She’s over at his house most nights.”
“He lives with his parents?”
Rodomski nodded. “I guess they don’t see anything wrong with it. A girl shacked up in their house with their son.”
“Shacked up,” Glynis said mockingly. “What century are you from?”
“I need Hanna’s cell phone number,” I said to both of them, “and an address for Sean Skilling.”
“I can give you the number, but I don’t know exactly where the Skillings live,” Glynis said. “I’m sure they’re in the book, though.”
She recited the number, which I scribbled into my notebook. “They go to school together?”
Glynis nodded. “And Sean has a car.”
“What kind?”
She looked hopelessly at her husband. “It’s a pickup,” he said. “Probably a Ford. You know Skilling Ford, just outside of town?”
I did.
“That’s them.”
“What kind of work do you do, Mr. Rodomski?”
“I’m a financial adviser,” he said.
“Here in Griffon?”
“No, we have an office down on Military Road.” He pronounced it “milltree,” like everyone else around here did.
“I work, too,” Glynis said indignantly. “Looking after him and our daughter. That’s a full-time job.”
“One of Glynis’ little jokes,” Chris Rodomski said wearily. “She thinks if it’s funny once, it’s funny a hundred times.”
I handed them each a business card. “If Hanna comes home before I run into her, give me a call. Maybe by then I’ll have found Claire anyway.”
They each took a card without looking at it.
“One last question. What’s this business you mentioned?”
“Hmm?” Glynis said, playing dumb.
“When I came in, you asked if this was about that business they’ve been running. You said you told Hanna it could come back and bite her in the ass.”
“It has nothing to do with Claire Sanders,” Chris Rodomski said. “I think we’ve helped you out as much as we can.”
They showed me to the door.
As I walked back to my car, I took a small detour down the side of the house to get a look at the backyard. Even in the darkness, I could make out several garbage cans and an old rusted swing set. It had to have been years since Hanna had played on that. I thought of Chris Rodomski’s nice suit, the hole in his sock. Perfect living room, messy kitchen. Beautiful front yard, a jungle out back.
The Rodomskis liked to make a good first impression, but didn’t give a damn what you thought once you got to know them.
Nine
When she pops in from work to see that he is okay, and to bring him some takeout — Buffalo chicken wings and fries — he is sitting in the chair with a car magazine open on his lap.
“I don’t understand these what-they-call-’em nav systems,” he says. “All the cars have them now. Never had one of those in a car.”
“I hear they don’t work that well,” the woman says. “Heard about some idiot woman, she kept doing what the system told her and drove right into a lake.”
The man laughs softly. “That smells like wings,” he says, taking the Styrofoam box and opening it. “Looks delicious.”
“I brought you lots of napkins and wet wipes,” she says, handing them over. “Try not to drop the bones all over the room.”
Like it would matter. He’s always spilling his food. Once a week or so she tries to get in here and clean up the mess, but honestly, doesn’t she have enough to do? The room reeks, but she stopped noticing the smells long ago.
“Did you think about what I said this morning?” he asks, biting into a wing, tearing at the chicken with his gray teeth.
“What did you say this morning?” she replies. She remembers — she always knows what it will be about — but feigning ignorance stalls things for a while.
“About going in to work? Or just going out?”
“Enough. You’re wearing me out.”
She gathers some magazines on the bed — car magazines, a People and half a dozen National Geographics — and sets them neatly on the bedside table. “You can’t ask me the same thing every day and think you’re going to get a different answer. You — oh for God’s sake, there’s toast crusts in your bed.”
The man says, “If it’s getting me out that worries you, I think I could manage the stairs myself. It’d just take a while, that’s all.”
“It’s not about that,” she says. “You know that.”
Something that troubled her that morning is eating at her again. Where’s the book? The one he writes in three times a day, or more? Now that she thinks about it, she hasn’t seen it for days.