On July 4th, Charlotte attended an anti-mask rally in the state capital, waving a sign reading MY BODY MY CHOICE (a sentiment that did not keep her from being adamantly anti-abortion). On July 7th, she lost her sense of smell and gained a cough. On the 10th, she was admitted to Mercy Hospital, nine short blocks from Rolling Hills Elder Care, where her brother was doing fine… physically, at least. On the 15th, she was placed on a ventilator.
During Charlotte’s final, brutally short illness, Holly visited via Zoom. To the very end Charlotte continued to claim that the Coronavirus was a hoax, and she just had a bad case of the flu. She died on the 20th, and only strings pulled by Holly’s partner, Pete Huntley, prevented her body being stored in the refrigerated truck that was serving as an adjunct to the morgue. She was taken to the Crossman Funeral Home instead, where the funeral director had quickly arranged the Zoom funeral. A year and a half into the pandemic, he had plenty of experience in such televised final rites.
Holly finally cries herself out. She thinks about watching a movie, but the idea has no appeal, which is a rarity. She thinks about lying down, but she’s slept a lot since Charlotte died. She supposes that’s how her mind is dealing with grief. She doesn’t want to read a book, either. She doubts if she could keep track of the words.
There’s a hole where her mother used to be, it’s as simple as that. The two of them had a difficult relationship which only got worse when Holly started to pull away. Her success in doing that was largely down to Bill Hodges. Holly’s grief was bad when Bill passed—pancreatic cancer—but the grief she feels now is somehow deeper, more complicated, because Charlotte Gibney was, tell the truth and shame the devil, a woman who specialized in smotherlove. At least when it came to her daughter. Their estrangement only got worse with Charlotte’s wholehearted embrace of the ex-president. There had been few face-to-face visits in the last two years, the final one on the previous Christmas, when Charlotte cooked all of what she imagined were Holly’s favorite foods, every one of which reminded Holly of her unhappy, lonely childhood.
She has two phones on her desk, her personal and her business. Finders Keepers has been busy during the time of the pandemic, although investigations have become rather tricky. The firm is shut down now, with messages on her office phone and Pete Huntley’s saying the agency will be closed until August 1st. She considered adding “because of a death in the family” and decided that was no one’s business. When she checks the office phone now, it’s only because she’s on autopilot for the time being.
She sees she’s gotten four calls during the forty minutes while she was attending her mother’s funeral. All from the same number. The caller has also left four voicemails. Holly thinks briefly of simply erasing them, she has no more desire to take on a case than she has to watch a movie or read a book, but she can’t do that any more than she can leave a picture hanging crooked or her bed unmade.
Listening doesn’t render an obligation to call back, she tells herself, and pushes play for the first VM. It came in at 1:02 PM, just about the time the last Charlotte Gibney Show got going.
“Hello, this is Penelope Dahl. I know you’re closed, but this is very important. An emergency, in fact. I hope you’ll call me back as soon as possible. Your agency was suggested to me by Detective Isabelle Jaynes—”
That’s where the message ends. Of course Holly knows who Izzy Jaynes is, she used to be Pete’s partner when Pete was still on the cops, but that isn’t what strikes her about the message. What hits, and hard, is how much Penelope Dahl sounds like Holly’s late mother. It’s not so much the voice as the palpable anxiety in the voice. Charlotte was almost always anxious about something, and she passed on that constant gnawing to her daughter like a virus. Like Covid, in fact.
Holly decides not to listen to the rest of Anxious Penelope’s messages. The lady will have to wait. Pete sure isn’t going to be doing any legwork for awhile; he tested positive for Covid a week before Charlotte died. He was double-vaxxed and isn’t too sick—says it’s more like a heavy cold than the flu—but he’s quarantining and will be for some time to come.
Holly stands at the living room window of her tidy little apartment, looking down at the street and remembering that last meal with her mother. An authentic Christmas dinner, just like in the old days! Charlotte had said, cheery and excited on top but with that constant anxiety pulsing away underneath. The authentic Christmas dinner had consisted of dry turkey, lumpy mashed potatoes, and flabby spears of asparagus. Oh, and thimble glasses of Mogen David wine to toast with. How terrible that meal had been, and how terrible that it had been their last. Did Holly say I love you, Mom before she drove away the next morning? She thinks so but can’t remember for sure. All she can remember for sure is the relief she felt when she turned the first corner and her mother’s house was no longer in the rearview mirror.
Holly has left her cigarettes by her desktop computer. She goes back to get them, shakes one out, lights it, looks at the office phone in its charging cradle, sighs, and listens to Penelope Dahl’s second message. It starts on a note of disapproval.
“This is a very short space for messages, Ms. Gibney. I’d like to talk to you, or Mr. Huntley, or both of you, about my daughter Bonnie. She disappeared three weeks ago, on the first of July. The police investigation was very superficial. I told Detective Jaynes that, right to her—”
End of message. “Told Izzy right to her face,” Holly says, and jets smoke from her nostrils. Men are often captivated by Izzy’s red hair (salon-enhanced these days, no doubt) and her misty gray eyes, women less frequently. But she’s a good detective. Holly has decided that if Pete retires, as he keeps threatening to do, she’ll try to lure Isabelle away from the cops and over to the dark side.
There’s no hesitation about going to the third message. Holly has to see how the story ends. Although she can guess. Chances are good that Bonnie Dahl is a runaway, and her mother can’t accept that. Penelope Dahl’s voice returns.
“Bonnie is an assistant librarian on the Bell campus. At the Reynolds? It opened again in June for the summer students, although of course you have to wear a mask to enter, and I suppose soon you’ll have to show a vaccination card as well, although so far they haven’t—”
Message ends. Would you get to the point, lady? Holly thinks, and punches up the last one. Penelope talks faster, almost speed-rapping.
“She rides her bike to and from her job. I’ve told her how unsafe that is, but she says she wears her helmet, as if that would save her from a bad crash or getting hit by a car. She stopped at the Jet Mart for a soda and that’s the last…” Penelope begins to cry. It’s hard to listen to. Holly takes a monster drag on her cigarette, then mashes it out. “The last time she was seen. Please help—”
Message ends.
Holly has been standing, holding the office phone in her hand, listening on speaker. Now she sits and slots the phone back in its cradle. For the first time since Charlotte got sick—no, since the time when Holly realized she wasn’t going to get better—Holly’s grief takes a back seat to these bite-sized messages. She’d like to hear the whole story, or as much of it as Anxious Penelope knows. Pete probably doesn’t know, either, but she decides to give him a call. What else does she have to do, except think about her last few video visits with her mother, and how frightened Charlotte’s eyes were as the ventilator helped her breathe?
Pete answers on the first ring, his voice raspy. “Hey, Holly. So sorry about your mom.”