Holly has been standing, holding the office phone in her hand, listening on speaker. Now she sits and slots the phone back in its cradle. For the first time since Charlotte got sick—no, since the time when Holly realized she wasn’t going to get better—Holly’s grief takes a back seat to these bite-sized messages. She’d like to hear the whole story, or as much of it as Anxious Penelope knows. Pete probably doesn’t know, either, but she decides to give him a call. What else does she have to do, except think about her last few video visits with her mother, and how frightened Charlotte’s eyes were as the ventilator helped her breathe?
Pete answers on the first ring, his voice raspy. “Hey, Holly. So sorry about your mom.”
“Thank you.”
“You gave a great eulogy. Short but sweet. I only wish I could have…” He breaks off as a coughing fit strikes. “…only wish I could have seen you. What was it, some kind of computer glitch?”
Holly could say it was, but she makes it a habit to tell the truth except on those rare occasions when she feels she absolutely can’t. “No glitch, I just turned off the video. I’m kind of a mess. How are you feeling, Pete?”
She can hear the rattle of phlegm as he sighs. “Not terrible, but I was better yesterday. Jesus, I hope I’m not going to be one of those long haulers.”
“Have you called your doctor?”
He gives a hoarse laugh. “I might as well try to call Pope Francis. You know how many new cases there were in the city yesterday? Thirty-four hundred. It’s going up exponentially.” There’s another coughing fit.
“Maybe the ER?”
“I’ll stick with juice and Tylenol. The worst part of it is how fucking tired I am all the time. Every trip to the kitchen is a trek. When I go to the bathroom, I have to sit down and pee like a girl. If that’s too much information, I apologize.”
It is, but Holly doesn’t say so. She didn’t think she had to worry about Pete, breakthrough cases usually aren’t serious, but maybe she does have to worry.
“Did you call just to bat the breeze, or did you want something?”
“I don’t want to bother you if—”
“Go ahead, bother me. Give me something to think about besides myself. Please. Are you okay? Not sick?”
“I’m fine. Did you get a call from a woman named—”
“Penny Dahl. Right? She’s left four messages on my company voicemail so far.”
“Four on mine, too. You didn’t get back to her?”
Holly knows he didn’t. What she knows is this: Anxious Penelope looked on the Finders Keepers website, or maybe Facebook, and found two office numbers for two partners, one male and one female. Anxious Penelope called the male, because when you’ve got a problem—an emergency, she termed it—you don’t ask for help from the mare, at least not at first. You call the stallion. Calling the mare is your fallback position. Holly is used to being the mare in the Finders Keepers stable.
Pete sighs again, producing that disturbing rattle. “In case you forgot, we’re closed, Hols. And feeling like shit, as I currently do, I didn’t think talking to a weepy-ass divorced mom would make me feel any better. Having just lost your own mom, I don’t think it would make you feel any better, either. Wait until August, that’s my advice. My strong advice. By then the girl may have called Momzie from Fort Wayne or Phoenix or San Fran.” He coughs some more, then adds: “Or the cops will have found her body.”
“You sound like you know something, even if you didn’t talk to the mother. Was it in the paper?”
“Oh yeah, it was a big story. Stop the presses, extra, extra, read all about it. Two lines in the Police Beat between a naked man passed out on Cumberland Avenue and a rabid fox wandering around in the City Center parking lot. There’s nothing else in the paper these days except Covid and people arguing about masks. Which is like people standing out in the rain and arguing about whether or not they’re getting wet.” He pauses, then adds rather reluctantly, “The lady’s voicemail said Izzy caught the squeal, so I gave her a call.”
Smiles have been in short supply for Holly this summer, but she feels one on her face now. It’s nice to know that she’s not the only one addicted to the job.
It’s as if Pete can see her, even though they’re not Zooming. “Don’t make a big deal of it, okay? I needed to catch up with Iz anyway, see how she’s doing.”
“And?”
“Covid-wise she’s fine. Shitcanned her latest boyfriend is all, and I got a fair amount of wah-wah-wah about that. I asked her about this Bonnie Dahl. Izzy says they’re treating it as a missing persons case. There are some good reasons for that. Neighbors say Dahl and her mother argued a lot, some real blow-outs, and there was a buh-bye note taped to the seat of Dahl’s ten-speed. But the note struck the mom as ominous, and Izzy as ambiguous.”
“What did it say?”
“Just three words. I’ve had enough. Which could mean she left town, or—”
“Or that she committed suicide. What do her friends say about her state of mind? Or the people she works with at the library?”
“No idea,” Pete says, and starts coughing again. “That’s where I left it and it’s where you should leave it, at least for now. Either the case will still be there on August first, or it will have solved itself.”
“One way or the other,” Holly says.
“Right. One way or the other.”
“Where was the bike found? Ms. Dahl said her daughter got a soda at Jet Mart the night she disappeared. Was it there?” Holly can think of at least three Jet Mart convenience stores in the city, and there are probably more.
“Again, I have no idea. I’m going to lie down for awhile. And again, I’m sorry your mother passed.”
“Thanks. If you don’t start to improve, I want you to seek medical attention. Promise me.”
“You’re nagging, Holly.”
“Yes.” Another smile. “I’m good at it, aren’t I? Learned at my mother’s knee. Now promise.”
“Okay.” He’s probably lying. “One other thing.”
“What?” She thinks it will be something about the case (that’s already how she’s thinking of it), but it’s not.
“You’ll never convince me that this Covid shit happened naturally, jumping to people from bats or baby crocodiles or whatever in some Chinese wet market. I don’t know if it escaped from a research facility where they were brewing it up or if it got released on purpose, but as my grandfather would have said, t’aint natcherl.”
“Sounding kind of paranoid there, Pete.”
“You think? Listen, viruses mutate. It’s their big survival skill. But they’re just as apt to mutate into a less dangerous strain as one that’s more dangerous. That’s what happened with the Bird Flu. But this one just keeps getting worse. Delta infects people who’ve been double-vaxxed—I’m a case in point. And people who don’t get really sick from Delta carry four times the viral load as the original version, which means they can pass it on even more easily. Does that sound random to you?”