really needs to meet him face to face. She thinks she does. She thinks she’s convinced him that she’s got the goods on him (as Bill would say). Now she has to look him in the eye and give him a way out. Has to convince him that she’s willing to make a deal. And what kind of deal? Her first wild idea was to tell him she wants to be like him, that she wants to live… maybe not forever, that seems too extreme, but for hundreds of years. Would he believe that, or would he think she was conning him? Too risky.
Money, then. Has to be.
That he will believe, because he has been watching the human parade for a long time. And looking down on it. Ondowsky believes that for lesser beings, for the herd he sometimes thins, it always comes down to money.
Sometime after midnight, Holly finally drops off. She dreams of a cave in Texas. She dreams of a thing that looked like a man until she hit it with a sock loaded with ball bearings and the head collapsed like the false front it was.
She cries in her sleep.
December 17, 2020
1
As an honor roll senior at Houghton High, Barbara Robinson is pretty much free to go as she lists during her free period, which runs from 9:00 to 9:50. When the bell rings releasing her from her Early English Writers class, she wanders down to the art room, which is deserted at this hour. She takes her phone from her hip pocket and calls Jerome. From the sound of his voice, she’s pretty sure she woke him up. Oh for the life of a writer, she thinks.
Barbara doesn’t waste time. “Where is she this morning, J?”
“Don’t know,” he says. “I dumped the tracker.”
“True?”
“True.”
“Well . . . okay.”
“Can I go back to sleep now?”
“No,” she says. Barbara has been up since 6:45, and misery loves company. “Time to get up and grab the world by the balls.”
“Mouth, sister,” he says, and boom, he’s gone.
Barbara stands by some kid’s really bad watercolor of the lake, staring at her phone and frowning. Jerome is probably right, Holly went off to meet some guy she met on that dating website. Not to fuck him, that’s not Holly, but to make a human connection? To reach out, as her therapist has no doubt been telling her she must do? That Barbara can believe. Portland has got to be at least five hundred miles from the site of that bombing she was so interested in, after all. Maybe more.
Put yourself in her shoes, Barbara tells herself. Wouldn’t you want your privacy? And wouldn’t you be mad if you ever found out that your friends—your so-called friends—were spying on you?
Holly wasn’t going to find out, but did that change the basic equation?
No.
Was she still worried (a little worried)?
Yes. But some worries had to be lived with.
She slips her phone back into her pocket and decides to go down to the music room and practice her guitar until 20th Century American History. She’s trying to learn the old Wilson Pickett soul shouter, “In the Midnight Hour.” The bar chords in the bridge are a bitch, but she’s getting there.
On her way out, she almost runs into Justin Freilander, a junior who’s a founding member of Houghton’s geek squad, and who has—according to rumor—a major crush on her. She smiles at him and Justin immediately turns that alarming shade of red of which only white boys are capable. Rumor confirmed. It suddenly occurs to Barbara that this might be fate.
She says, “Hey Justin. I wonder if you could help me with something?”
And takes her phone out of her pocket.
2
While Justin Freilander is examining Barbara’s phone (which is still, oh God, warm from being in her back pocket), Holly is landing at Pittsburgh International. Ten minutes later she’s in line at the Avis counter. Uber would be cheaper, but having her own ride is wiser. A year or so after Pete Huntley came onboard at Finders Keepers, the two of them took a driving course meant to teach surveillance and evasion—a refresher for him, new for her. She doesn’t expect to need the former today, but recourse to the latter isn’t out of the question. She is meeting a dangerous man.
She parks in the lot of an airport hotel to kill some time (early to my own funeral, she thinks again). She calls her mother. Charlotte doesn’t answer, which doesn’t mean she’s not there; direct-to-voicemail