Ink and Bone(48)

“Kid?”

“She’s twenty-one.”

“Wow.”

“I know,” said Jones, rubbing his eyes. “I don’t even remember twenty-one.”

Merri smiled a little.

“This is not a bait and switch if that’s what you’re thinking,” said Jones. “It’s not an exact thing, whatever it is we do. But I will say Eloise has had some big successes. Finley is untried, but she’s the one who’s picking up the signals—or whatever it is. So, up to you if you want me to continue.”

He was giving her an out. Maybe she should take it.

“We didn’t discuss your fee,” said Merri.

“There’s no fee unless we find your daughter,” he said. “Then we can discuss what you think is fair. We don’t do this for the money.”

Merri, who was not surprised very often, found herself taken aback. “Then why do you do this?”

He looked up at her, as if considering the answer.

“It’s just what we do.”

He’d polished off his patty melt, and he was working on his fries. She’d barely touched her soup, which had grown cold while they talked. She thought about what that meant, taking money out of the equation for now, how it shifted the balance of power. She could hardly insist that he take money from her. She turned it over a moment, stirring at the greasy liquid in her bowl.

“So with that said, is there anything surrounding Abbey’s disappearance, before or after that you didn’t tell the police?”

Merri felt a rise of indignation, of defensiveness. There had been so many accusations, suspicious stares, brows wrinkled in a kind of curious pity. Like: I feel bad for you, but surely this is your fault somehow. Cooper lifted a palm, as if he could see the protest in her. And maybe he could; her shoulders had hiked up around her ears.

“What I mean is, is there anything that you dismissed as inconsequential, silly even? Ideas, feelings, suspicions. Given the nature of this investigation, is there anything?”

The waitress was behind the counter; there was no one else in the restaurant. Outside, the sky had gone a threatening white gray. Instead of censoring herself, she told him about Jackson’s premonition instigated by the news story he’d overheard regarding the two missing children, about Abbey’s dreams. She told him also about Jackson’s fixation on the missing man. He took a small notebook out of his pocket and started scribbling. No judgment. When she was done:

“Does that help?”

He shook his head and offered a slight shrug. “I don’t know. I’m not the psychic.”

Here he smiled a little, which made his face surprisingly warm and boyish. When she’d researched him, she’d learned that he was a former school sports star turned cop. There’d been some kind of problem that caused him to retire early—she wasn’t sure what. He was a big man, with graying brown hair, a ruddy complexion, and blue (or were they gray?) eyes, still handsome, virile. He was the kind of man that made women silly with the desire to please. And very married. Anyone could see that. It was one of the things that had always upset her about Wolf, even before she knew what it was. He never took himself off the market. He was always looking. Jones Cooper was taken—not that she was interested in him or anyone. Just an observation.

“I had already planned to go see Betty Fitzpatrick, mother of the other missing children,” he said. “And that news story about the developer caught my attention this morning.”

He was still writing.

“It’s not so different, what they do and what I do,” he said when he was done. She knew he was talking about Eloise and her granddaughter. “A lot of it has to do with instinct. Going where other people didn’t think or didn’t bother to go.”

She took a sip of her tea, which had gone cold like her soup.

“Oh,” she said, remembering. She dug into her bag and took out Abbey’s binky. It was so tattered and worn, so threadbare that it almost looked like a rag. Once pink with hopping bunnies, it had gone gray. It had been a gift from Merri’s mother, and it had been in Abbey’s crib since before she was even born. It became her most beloved binky; she never slept without it. Merri had slept with it every night since her girl went missing. “I brought this for Eloise—or I guess Finley. Please don’t lose it.”

It was a silly thing to say. A man like Jones Cooper never lost anything.

“The change purse I gave you,” she said. “It didn’t mean anything to her, just a trinket I bought her when we got to town. But this—”

She found she couldn’t go on.

“I’d like to make promises,” he said. His voice was soothing, even though his words weren’t. “But we both know I can’t do that.”

“I know,” she said.

This was rock bottom. That same man in the support group that she and Wolf had dutifully attended had said one evening: When you engage the psychic, you have allowed despair to separate you from reality.

She wondered if he was right. She really didn’t care. Honestly, whether it was self-delusion or not, there was a sparkle of hope that had been all but lost before she came to see Jones Cooper. And that was something, wasn’t it? Reality, especially Merri’s, was highly overrated.

“Will I get to meet her?” Merri asked. “Finley, I mean?”