The others break out laughing. Richie Glenman gives him a shoulder-punch. “There’s no such guy as Slender Man, you douchebag. He’s an urban legend, like the Witch of the Park.”
“Ow! You made me spill my shake!”
To Tommy Edison, who seems the brightest, Holly says, “Do you really think your friend Peter disappeared the night you last saw him?”
“Not positive, that was over two years ago, but I think so. Like I said, he wasn’t in school the next day.”
“Skippin,” Ronnie Swidrowski says. “Stinks did it all the time. Cause his mother’s a—”
“Nah, it was later,” Richie Glenman insists. “I know because I was matching quarters with him in the park after that. Over in the playground.”
They go back and forth about it and Swidrowski starts giving a reasoned and logical argument for the existence of Slender Man, who he hears also got some teacher from the college back in the old days, but Holly has heard enough. The disappearance of Peter “Stinky” Steinman (if he has in fact disappeared at all) almost certainly has nothing to do with the disappearance of Bonnie Dahl, but she intends to find out a little more, if only because the Dairy Whip and the auto repair shop are just half a mile apart. The Jet Mart, where Bonnie was last seen, is also fairly close.
Jerome gives Holly a look, and she gives him a nod. Time to go.
“You guys have a nice day,” he says.
“You, too,” Tommy Edison says.
The clown points at them with a ketchup-stained finger and says, “Veronica Mars and John Shaft!”
They all break up laughing.
Halfway across the parking lot, Holly stops and goes back. “Tommy, the night you and Richie saw him here, he had his skateboard, right?”
“Always,” Tommy says.
Richie says, “And he still had it a week later when we were matching for quarters. That lame Alameda with the crooked wheel.”
“Why?” Tommy asks.
“Just curious,” Holly says.
It’s the truth. She’s curious about everything. It’s how she rolls.
As they walk back up the hill to their cars, Holly takes the earring out of her pocket and shows it to Jerome.
“Whoa! Hers?”
“Almost positive.”
“How come the cops didn’t find it?”
“I don’t think they looked,” Holly says.
“Well, you win the Sherlock Holmes Award for superior detection.”
“Thank you, Jerome.”
“Which of them did you believe about Stinky Steinman? The redhead or the goofball?”
Holly gives him a disapproving look. “Why don’t we call him Peter? Stinky is an unpleasant nickname.”
Jerome doesn’t know Holly’s entire history (his sister Barbara knows more), but he knows when he’s inadvertently pressed on a sore spot. “Peter. Got it, got it. Pete now, Pete forever. So was the night they saw him at the Dairy Whip the last time they saw him, or was he matching quarters with Mr. French Fries Up the Nose in the park a week later?”
“If I had to guess, I’d say Tommy’s right and Richie got his times mixed up. It was two and a half years ago, after all. That’s a long time when you’re that age.”
They have reached the auto repair shop. Jerome says, “Let me work Steinman a little. Can I?”
“What about your book?”
“I told you, I’m waiting for information. Editor insists. We’re talking Chicago ninety years ago, give or take, and that means mucho research.”
“Are you sure you’re not just procrastinating?”
Jerome has a wonderful smile—mucho charming—and flashes it now. “There might be an element of that, I guess, but chasing after lost kids is more interesting than chasing after lost dogs.” Which is Jerome’s usual part-time gig with Finders Keepers. “You don’t really think Dahl and Steinman are related, do you?”
“Different ages and different sexes, over two years apart, so probably not. But what do I always say about probably, Jerome?”
“It’s a lazy word.”
“Yes. It—” She gasps and puts a hand to her chest.
“What?”
“We weren’t wearing our masks! I never even thought of it! And neither were they!”
“But you’re vaxxed, right? Double-vaxxed. And so am I.”
“Do you think they were?”
“Probably not,” Jerome says. He realizes what he’s said, and laughs. “Sorry. Old habits die hard.”
Holly smiles. Old habits do indeed die hard, which is exactly why she wants a cigarette.
Jerome says he’ll talk to the boy’s parents. He can at least pin down whether Steinman actually disappeared or went to live with his uncle or what. If Steinman’s mother was a juicer, as Andy Vickers suggested, the kid might even have been taken into foster care. The job, as Jerome sees it, is simply to confirm Steinman has nothing to do with Dahl.
Holly promises him a hundred dollars a day, two-day minimum, plus expenses. She’s pretty sure he’ll get Barbara to do the online stuff, but he’ll split with her, even-Steven, so that’s okay.
“What are you going to do?” Jerome asks.
“I think I’ll take a walk in the park,” she says. “And think.”
“You do that. It’s a skill.”
Holly finds the path shooting off to the left and follows it to the big rock overlooking Red Bank Avenue. There she sits down and lights up.
She keeps coming back to Bonnie Dahl’s bike helmet. The earring might have dropped off and been lost, but the bike helmet didn’t just drop off. If Bonnie decided, pretty much on the spur of the moment, that she was sick enough of arguing with her mother to blow town, why leave her bike and take the helmet? For that matter, why leave a fairly expensive ten-speed where it almost begged to be stolen? It was only luck that it hadn’t been… assuming Marvin Brown was telling the truth, that is, and Holly thinks she can satisfy herself on that score with reasonable certainty.
The missing bike helmet is the most compelling reason she has to believe that Dahl was abducted. Holly imagines a scenario where Bonnie tried to run from her potential kidnapper and only made it to the far end of the auto repair shop. She struggles. Her earring comes off. She’s bundled into her kidnapper’s vehicle (in her mind’s eye Holly sees a small windowless panel truck) with her helmet still on. Perhaps the man knocks her out, perhaps he ties her up, maybe he even kills her right there, either on purpose or by accident. He leaves a printed note taped to the seat of the bike: I’ve had enough. If someone steals the bike, good. If no one steals it, the assumption will be that she decided to leave town—also good.
Holly doubts if it happened exactly that way (if it happened at all), but it could have; nearing dark, not much traffic on Red Bank Avenue, a brief struggle that might look like nothing but a conversation or a lovers’ embrace to someone passing by… sure, it could have.
As for the other possibility, leaving town on the spur of the moment, how likely is that, really? A teenager might suddenly decide it was all too much and bug out, Holly entertained such fantasies herself while in high school, but a twenty-four-year-old woman with a job she apparently enjoyed? What about her last paycheck? Is it sitting in her boss’s office? And no suitcase, just the stuff in her backpack? Holly doesn’t believe it, and she’s sure Isabelle Jaynes doesn’t, either. But if anyone can give her a state-of-mind check, it will probably be Bonnie’s friend and co-worker, Lakeisha Stone.
Holly finishes her cigarette, butts it, and puts it in her little tin box with the other dead soldiers. There are butts scattered all around the big rock, but that doesn’t mean she has to add her own filth to the general litter.
She takes her phone out of her purse. She’s had it on Do Not Disturb since leaving her office, and she’s missed two calls since then, both from someone named David Emerson. The name rings a faint bell, something to do with her mother. He’s left a VM but she ignores it for the time being and calls Jerome. She doesn’t want to distract him while he’s driving, so she keeps it brief.