pinpoint the time that exactly, but apparently they can.”
“Yes,” Chet says, sounding a little distracted, and Holly thinks how tired he must be. And will he be able to sleep tonight? She guesses not. “Yes, that sounds just about right. As you can see, Andrea, the search for victims is winding down, but the forensic work is just beginning. There will be more personnel on the scene by daybreak, and—”
“Excuse me, Chet, but you took part in the search yourself, is that right?”
“Yes, Andrea, we all pitched in. Townspeople, some of them parents. Also Alison Greer and Tim Witchick from KDKA, Donna Forbes from WPCW, and Bill Larson from—”
“Yes, but I’m hearing you pulled two children from the ruins yourself, Chet.”
He doesn’t bother looking falsely modest and aw-shucks; Holly awards him points for that. He keeps it on a reporting level. “That’s correct, Andrea. I heard one of them moaning and saw the other. A girl and a boy. I know the boy’s name, Norman Fredericks. The girl . . .” He wets his lips. The mike in his hand trembles, and Holly thinks not just from the cold. “The girl was in bad shape. She was . . . calling for her mother.”
Andrea Mitchell looks stricken. “Chet, that’s awful.”
It is. Too awful for Holly. She picks up the remote to kill the feed—she has the salient facts, more than she has any use for—and then hesitates. It’s the torn pocket she’s looking at. Maybe torn while Ondowsky was searching for victims, but if he’s Jewish, it might have been done on purpose. It might have been keriah, the rending of garments after a death and the symbolic exposure of a wounded heart. She guesses that is the truth of that torn pocket. It is what she wants to believe.
5
The sleeplessness she expected doesn’t happen; Holly drops off within a matter of minutes. Perhaps crying with Jerome let out some of the poison the news from Pennsylvania had injected in her. Giving comfort and receiving it. As she slips away, she thinks she should talk about that with Allie Winters at their next session.
She wakes sometime deep in the early hours of December 9th, thinking about the correspondent, Ondowsky. Something about him—what? How tired he looked? The scratches and brick dust on his hands? The torn pocket?
That, she thinks. It must have been. Maybe I was dreaming about it.
She mutters briefly into the dark, a kind of prayer. “I miss you, Bill. I’m taking my Lexapro and I’m not smoking.”
Then she’s out and doesn’t wake up until the alarm goes at 6 A.M.
December 9–13, 2020
1
Finders Keepers has been able to move to the new, pricier digs on the fifth floor of the Frederick Building downtown because business has been good, and the rest of that week is busy for Holly and Pete. There’s no time for Holly to watch John Law and little to think about the school explosion in Pennsylvania, though the news reports continue and it never completely leaves her mind.
The agency has working relationships with two of the city’s big law firms, the white-shoe kind with lots of names on the door. “Macintosh, Winesap, and Spy,” Pete likes to joke. As retired police, he has no great love for lawyers, but he would be the second to admit (Holly would be the first) that subpoenas and process-serving pay very well. “Merry fucking Christmas to these guys,” Pete says as he goes out on Thursday morning with a briefcase full of woe and annoyance.
In addition to serving papers, Finders Keepers is on speed-dial at several insurance companies—locals, not affiliated with the big boys—and Holly spends most of Friday investigating an arson claim. It’s a pretty big one, the policy holder really needs the money, and she has been tasked with making sure that he was actually in Miami, as he claimed, when his warehouse went up in flames. Turns out he was, which is good for him but not so good for Lake Fidelity.
In addition to those things, which reliably pay the big bills, there’s an absconding debtor to track (Holly does this on her computer and locates him quickly by checking his credit charges), bail-jumpers to put on the radar—what’s known in the trade as skip-tracing—and lost kids and dogs. Pete usually goes after the kids, and when Jerome’s working, he’s great with the dogs.
She’s not surprised that Lucky’s death hit him so hard, not just because it was so extraordinarily cruel but because the Robinson family