She dumps her clogged portable ashtray in a trashcan by the motel office, then smokes beside the ice machine. When she started this nasty habit as a teenager, you could smoke everywhere, even on airplanes. Holly believes the new rules are a big improvement. It makes you think about what you’re doing and how you’re killing yourself by inches.
She calls Penny and gives her a progress report that’s accurate but far from complete. She relates a version of her conversation with Keisha Stone that omits the part about Ellen Craslow, and although she tells Penny about talking to the Dairy Whip Gang, she doesn’t mention Peter “Stinky” Steinman. She will if Craslow and Steinman turn out to be connected, but not until then. Penny’s frame of mind is dire enough without planting the idea of a serial killer in her head.
Holly undresses, puts on the smiley-face shirt (it comes almost to her knees), flumps down onto the bed, and turns on the TV. She stops channel surfing long enough to watch some of an old musical on TCM, then turns it off. In the bathroom she washes her hands thoroughly and brushes her teeth with her finger, scolding herself for not getting a toothbrush along with undies and the nightshirt.
“What cannot be cured must be endured,” she murmurs. Will she sleep tonight after such an eventful day, or will her thoughts turn to her mother as she lies there listening to the drone of semis on the turnpike, a sound that always makes her feel lonely? Oddly enough, she thinks she will sleep. Holly knows herself well enough to understand she’ll never have complete closure with her mother, and that Charlotte’s lies—a new millionaire walks into a bar wondering how her mother could do what she did—may rub at her for a long time to come (especially the hidden stash of jewelry), but does anyone ever get complete closure? Especially from a parent? Holly doesn’t think so, she thinks closure is a myth, but at least she got a little of her own today, smoking in the kitchen and breaking those fracking figurines.
She gets down on her knees, closes her eyes, and starts her prayer as she always does, telling God it’s Holly… as if God doesn’t know. She thanks God for safe travel, and for her friends. She asks God to take care of Penny Dahl. Also Bonnie and Pete and Ellen, if they are still ali—
Something bombs her then and her eyes fly open.
Maybe it’s not location, or not just location.
She sits on the edge of the bed, turns on the light, and calls Lakeisha Stone. It’s Saturday night and she expects her call will go to voicemail. There may be a dance in the longhouse, or—perhaps more likely—Keisha and her friends will be drinking in a local bar. Holly is delighted when Keisha answers.
“Hi, it’s Holly. I have one more quick question.”
“Ask as many as you want,” Keisha says. “I’m in the campground laundry, watching a drier full of towels go around and around and around.”
Why’s a fine-looking young woman like you doing laundry on a Saturday night is a question Holly doesn’t ask. What she asks is, “Do you know if Ellen Craslow had a car?”
Holly is expecting Keisha to say she doesn’t know or can’t remember, but Keisha surprises her.
“She didn’t. I remember her saying she had a Georgia driver’s license, but it was expired and that was a hell of a good way to get in trouble if you were stopped. Driving while Black, you know. Like Maleek Dutton. She wanted to get one from here but kept putting it off. Because the DMV was always so crowded, she said. She rode the bus to and from work. Does that help?”
“It might,” Holly says. “Thank you. I’ll let you get back to watching your towels—”
“Oh, something else,” Keisha says.
“What?”
“Sometimes, if the weather was good, she’d skip the bus and go to the NorBank close to her place.”
Holly frowns. “I don’t—”
“They rent bikes,” Keisha says. “There’s a line of them out front. You just pick the one you want and pay with your credit card.”
Holly finishes her prayer, but now it’s really just a rote recitation. Her mind is on the case. If anything keeps her awake tonight it will be that, not thinking about Charlotte’s Millions. In her mind she sees Deerfield Park, with Ridge Road on one side and Red Bank Avenue on the other. She thinks of the Belfry, the deserted repair shop, and the Dairy Whip. She thinks, location, location, location. And she thinks that none of them had a car.
Well, Bonnie did, but she didn’t use it for going back and forth to work. She rode her bike. Ellen also rode a bike when she didn’t take the bus. And Pete Steinman had his skateboard.
Lying in the dark, hands clasped on her stomach, Holly asks herself the question these two similarities raise. It’s crossed her mind before, but only as a hypothetical. Now it’s starting to feel a lot more practical. Is it just the ones she knows about, or are there more?
February 12, 2021
Barbara stands outside 70 Ridge Road, one of the smaller Victorians on the smoothly sloping street. The temperature has dropped thirty degrees since the day she saw Professor Harris washing what he had (rather grandiloquently) called his chariot, and today her red winter gear—coat, scarf, hat—are a necessity instead of a fashion statement. She is once more holding her folder of poems, and she’s scared to death.
The woman inside that house is her idol, in Barbara’s opinion the greatest American poet of the last sixty years. She actually knew T.S. Eliot. She corresponded with Ezra Pound when he was in St. Elizabeths Hospital for the criminally insane. Barbara Robinson is just a kid who’s never published anything except for a few boring (and no doubt banal) editorials in the high school newspaper.
What is she doing here? How dare she?
Emily Harris thought the poem she’d looked at was good—quite the load of fear and loathing packed into nineteen lines, she’d said. She’d even suggested a couple of corrections that seemed like good ones, but Emily Harris hadn’t written End for End or Cardiac Street. What Emily Harris had written were two books of literary criticism published by the college press. Barbara checked online.
This morning, after she’d started to believe she would hear nothing, she had gotten an email from Olivia Kingsbury.
I have read your poem. If your schedule permits, please come and visit with me at 2 PM this afternoon. If your schedule does not permit, please reply to my email address. I am sorry about the short notice. It had been signed Olivia.
Barbara reminds herself that she has been invited, and that has to mean something, but what if she makes an ass of herself? What if she can’t even open her mouth, only stare like a complete dummocks? Thank God she didn’t tell her parents or Jerome where she was going this afternoon. Thank God she hadn’t told anyb—
The door of 70 Ridge Road opens, and a fabulously old woman emerges, swaddled in a fur coat that comes down to her ankles and walking on two canes. “Are you just going to stand there, young woman? Come in, come in. I have no tolerance for the cold.”
Feeling outside herself—observing herself—Barbara walks to the porch and mounts the steps. Olivia Kingsbury holds out a frail hand. “Gently, young woman, gently. No squeezing.”