He’s a TV reporter, and his beat is what he calls the three Cs: crime, community, and consumer fraud. He does cover community affairs, stuff like groundbreaking ceremonies and the World’s Largest Garage Sale, and he covers consumer fraud—there’s even a segment on his station’s nightly news called Chet on Guard—but what he covers mostly is crime and disaster. Tragedy. Death. Pain. And if all that doesn’t remind you of the outsider who killed the boy in Flint City and the two little girls in Ohio, I’d be very surprised. Shocked, in fact.”
She pauses the recording long enough to take a big drink of her ginger ale—her throat is as dry as the desert—and lets out a resounding belch that makes her giggle. Feeling a little better, Holly pushes the record button and makes her report, just as she would when investigating any case—repo, lost dog, car salesman chipping six hundred dollars here, eight hundred there. Doing that is good. It’s like disinfecting a wound that has begun to show some minor but still troubling redness.
December 15, 2020
When she wakes up the next morning, Holly feels brand new, ready to work and also ready to put Chet Ondowsky and her paranoid suspicions about him behind her. Was it Freud or Dorothy Parker who once said that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar? Whichever one it was, sometimes a dark spot beside a reporter’s mouth is just hair or dirt that looks like hair. Ralph would tell her that if he ever heard her audio recording, which he almost certainly won’t. But it did the job; talking it out cleared her head. In that way it was like her therapy sessions with Allie. Because if Ondowsky could somehow morph into George the Bomber, then morph back into himself again, why would he leave a little piece of George’s mustache behind? The idea is ridiculous.
Or take the green Subaru. Yes, it belongs to Chet Ondowsky, she’s sure of that. She took it for granted that he and his cameraman (Fred Finkel is his name, finding that was a snap, no Jerome necessary) were traveling together in the station’s newsvan, but that was an assumption rather than a deduction, and Holly believes the path to hell is paved with faulty assumptions.
Now that her mind is rested, she can see that Ondowsky’s decision to travel alone is perfectly reasonable and perfectly innocent. He’s a star reporter at a big metro TV station. He’s Chet on Guard, for heaven’s sake, and as such he can get up a little later than the hoi polloi, maybe drop by the station, and later enjoy coffee and pie at his favorite diner while Fred the faithful cameraman goes to Eden to do B-roll (as a film buff, Holly knows that’s what they call it) and maybe even—if Fred has aspirations of rising in the news department hierarchy—pre-interview the people Ondowsky should talk to when he does his World’s Largest Garage Sale stand-up for the six o’clock news.
Only Ondowsky gets the news flash, maybe on a police scanner, about the school explosion and beats feet to the location. Fred Finkel does the same, driving the newsvan. Ondowsky parks beside that ridiculous pine cone and that’s where he and Finkel go to work. All perfectly explicable, no supernatural elements need apply. This is just a case of a private investigator hundreds of miles away who happens to be suffering from Blue Ford Syndrome.
Voilà.
Holly has a good day at the office. Rattner, that master criminal, has been spotted by Jerome in a bar with the amazing (to Holly, at least) name of the Edmund Fitzgerald Taproom, and escorted to county lockup by Pete Huntley. Pete is currently at the Toomey dealership where he will confront Richard Ellis.
Barbara Robinson, Jerome’s sister, drops by, telling Holly (rather smugly) that she has been excused from afternoon classes because she’s doing a report called Private Investigation: Fact vs. Fiction. She asks Holly a few questions (recording the answers on her own phone), then helps Holly with the files. At three o’clock, they settle down to watch John Law.
“I love this guy, he’s so jive,” Barbara says as Judge Law boogies his way to the bench.
“Pete doesn’t agree,” Holly says.
“Yes, but Pete is white,” Barbara says.
Holly looks at Barbara, wide-eyed. “I’m white.”
Barbara giggles. “Well, there’s white and there’s really white. Which is what Mr. Huntley is.”
They laugh together, then watch as Judge Law deals with a burglar who claims he didn’t do anything, he’s just