she’d also be hurt, and that would be worse. Besides, we know what it’s about. Don’t we?”
Jerome had suggested—just suggested—that Barbara could peek at the history on Holly’s home computer when she went to pick up those movies for her school report. If, that was, Holly’s password at home was the same as the one she used at work.
That turned out to be the case, and while Barbara had felt extremely creepy and stalkerish about looking at her friend’s search history, she had done it. Because Holly hadn’t been the same after her trip to Oklahoma and subsequent trip to Texas, where she had nearly been killed by an off-the-rails cop named Jack Hoskins. There was a great deal more to that story than her near miss that day, and both of them knew it, but Holly refused to talk about it. And at first that seemed okay, because little by little the haunted look had left her eyes. She had returned to normal… Holly-normal, at least. But now she was gone, doing something she’d refused to talk about.
So Jerome had decided to track Holly’s location with the WebWatcher app.
And Barbara had looked at Holly’s search history.
And Holly—trusting soul that she was, at least when it came to her friends—had not wiped it.
Barbara discovered Holly had looked at many trailers for upcoming movies, had visited Rotten Tomatoes and Huffington Post, and had several times visited a dating site called Hearts & Friends (who knew?), but many of her current searches had to do with the terrorist bombing at the Albert Macready Middle School. There were also searches for Chet Ondowsky, a TV reporter at WPEN in Pittsburgh, a place called Clauson’s Diner in Pierre, Pennsylvania, and someone named Fred Finkel, who turned out to be a cameraman at WPEN.
Barbara took all this to Jerome and asked if he thought Holly might be on the verge of some sort of weirdo breakdown, maybe kicked off by the Macready School bombing. “Maybe she’s like, flashing back to when her cousin Janey got blown up by Brady Hartsfield.”
Based on her searches, it certainly crossed Jerome’s mind that Holly had caught the scent of another really bad man, but there’s something else that seemed—to him, at least—equally plausible.
“Hearts & Friends,” he says to his sister now.
“What about it?”
“Has it not occurred to you that Holly might be, don’t gasp, hooking up? Or at least meeting a guy she’s exchanged emails with?”
Barbara stares at him with her mouth open. Almost laughs, then doesn’t. What she says is, “Hmmm.”
“Meaning what?” Jerome says. “Give me some insight here. You spend girl-time with her—”
“Sexist, J.”
He ignores that. “Does she have a friend of the male persuasion? Now or ever?”
Barbara considers this carefully. “You know what, I don’t think so. I think she might still be a virgin.”
What about you, Barb? is the thought that immediately jumps into Jerome’s mind, but some questions should not be asked of eighteen-year-old girls by their big brothers.
“She’s not gay, or anything,” Barbara hastens on. “She never misses a Josh Brolin flick, and when we saw that stupid shark movie a couple of years ago, she actually moaned when she saw Jason Statham with his shirt off. Do you really think she’d go all the way to Maine for a date?”
“The plot thickens,” he says, peering into his phone. “She’s not at the airport. If you zoom in, you’ll see it’s Embassy Suites. She’s probably drinking champagne with some guy who likes frozen daiquiris, strolling in the moonlight, and discussing classic films.”
Barbara makes as if to punch him in the face, only springing her hand open at the last second.
“Tell you what,” Jerome says. “I think we better leave this alone.”
“For real?”
“I think so, yeah. We need to remember that she survived Brady Hartsfield. Twice. Whatever happened in Texas, she got through that, too. She’s a little shaky on top, but down deep… solid steel.”
“Got that right,” Barbara says. “Looking at her browser… that made me feel skeevy.”
“This makes me feel skeevy,” he says, and taps the blinking dot on his phone that marks the Embassy Suites. “I’m going to sleep on it, but if I feel the same in the morning, I’m gonna dump it. She’s a good woman. Brave. Lonely, too.”
“And her mother’s a witch,” Barbara adds.
Jerome doesn’t disagree. “Maybe we should just let her alone. Work it out, whatever it is.”
“Maybe we should.” But Barbara looks unhappy about it.
Jerome leans forward. “One thing I know for sure, Barb. She’s never