like boys. “A smart boy, too. And you don’t have to tell me your story if you don’t want to—although I would love for you to fill in certain details I’m curious about—but before I tell you what I know, I must insist that you tell me what caused you to suspect Ondowsky in the first place.”
This is a reasonable request, and she runs down her reasoning… such as it is. “Mostly it was that little spot of hair beside his mouth that kept bugging me,” she finishes. “It was as if he put on a false mustache and was in such a hurry when he peeled it off that he didn’t get all of it. Only if he could change his whole physical appearance, why would he even need a false mustache?”
Bell waves his hand dismissively. “Did your outsider have facial hair?”
Holly thinks, frowning. The first person the outsider impersonated (that she knew of), an orderly named Heath Holmes, didn’t. The second one didn’t have face hair, either. His third target had a goatee, but when Holly and Ralph confronted the outsider in the Texas cave, his transformation hadn’t been complete.
“I don’t think so. What are you saying?”
“I don’t think they can grow facial hair,” Dan Bell says. “I think if you saw your outsider naked—I assume you never did?”
“No,” Holly says, and because she can’t help it: “Oough.”
That makes Dan smile. “If you had, I think you would have seen no pubic hair. And clean armpits.”
“The thing we met in that cave had hair on his head. So does Ondowsky. So did George.”
“George?”
“What I call the man who delivered the package with the bomb in it to the Macready School.”
“George. Ah, I see.” Dan appears to meditate on this for a moment. A little smile touches the corners of his mouth. Then it fades. “Head hair is different, though, isn’t it? Children have hair on their heads before puberty. Some are born with hair on their heads.”
Holly sees his point, and hopes it really is a point and not just another facet of this old man’s delusion.
“There are other things the bomber—George, if you like—can’t change the way he changes his physical appearance,” Dan says. “He needed to put on a fake uniform and wear fake glasses. He needed a fake truck and a fake package reader. And he needed a fake mustache.”
“Ondowsky may also have fake eyebrows,” Brad says, coming in with a tray. On it are two mugs of tea and a pile of turnovers. “But probably not. I’ve studied pictures of him until my eyes are practically rolling down my cheeks. I think he may have had implants to normalize what would otherwise have just been fuzz. The way baby eyebrows are just fuzz.” He bends to put the tray on the coffee table.
“No, no, your workroom,” Dan says. “Time to get this show on the road. Ms. Gibney—Holly—will you push me? I’m rather tired.”
“Of course.”
They pass a formal dining room and a cavernous kitchen. At the end of the hall is a stair-chair, which runs up to the second floor on a steel rail. Holly hopes it’s more reliable than the elevator in the Frederick Building.
“Brad had this put in when I lost the use of my legs,” Dan says. Brad hands Holly the tray and transfers the old man to the stair-chair with the ease of long practice. Dan pushes a button and begins to rise. Brad takes the tray back and he and Holly walk along beside the chair, which is slow but sure.
“This is a very nice house,” Holly says. Must have been expensive is the unspoken corollary.
Dan, nevertheless, reads her mind. “Grandfather. Pulp and paper mills.”
The penny drops for Holly. The supply closet at Finders Keepers is stacked with Bell copier paper. Dan sees her face and smiles.
“Yes, that’s right, Bell Paper Products, now part of an overseas conglomerate that kept the name. Until the nineteen-twenties, my grandfather owned mills all over western Maine—Lewiston, Lisbon Falls, Jay, Mechanic Falls. All shuttered now, or turned into shopping malls. He lost most of his fortune in the Crash of ’29 and the Depression. That was the year I was born. No life of Riley for my father or me, we had to work for our beer and skittles. But we managed to keep the house.”
On the second floor, Brad transfers Dan to another wheelchair and hooks him up to another bottle of oxygen. This floor seems to consist of one large room