The Mystery of Hollow Places(38)
I flop onto the unmade bed and reach into my book bag, extracting my copy of A Time to Chill, the stone heart, and the stack of photos. All of these I tuck into my nightstand drawer, except for one picture: Mom on the lawn of her childhood home, in front of the forked paper birch, the chain-link fence, the queasy storm sky. On the drive home from the ski slopes, Jessa tried dialing Lil’s number to get an address a couple times, but she never picked up, and she never returned our messages. So no help’s coming from her.
I squint at the small white house behind my mother. An American flag dangles from the lamppost along the front walk, limp and greasy-looking. If there’s a number on the door, I can’t see it.
In the next picture of Mom and Lil, they stand on the lawn of the church, a steeple towering over them with a pale green roof. I pull my own laptop from the desk. Speaking of problems that never crop up in detective stories these days, where’s a genius computer hacker when I need one? The main mystery-solver always has a friend they can go to and say, “Hey, Sullivan, the perp seems to have disappeared by the old town hall.” Then Sullivan sits at the computer, cracks his neck, and with a little pitter-patter on the keyboard, he says “Okay, I’ve accessed the security footage for the past twenty-four hours from the bank across the street, and here he is going into the storm drain behind the Pretzel Shack!” A friend like that could, I don’t know, break into the Fitchburg real estate records and find the Fayes’ and the Wards’ old addresses in a heartbeat.
My Watson is busy eating dinner with her own family up the road. So I’ve got work to do before I get her back tomorrow morning.
THIRTEEN
“Since when are you busy?”
Jessa sighs over the phone. “I know, I know. Sucks, right? I totally forgot. I promised Mom we’d have a girls’ day before this big pediatric conference she’s going to, and this is her only day off all week. She booked us a treatment for two at In Your Facial, that spa in Newton? And she paid ahead of time.”
“Okay, I understand.”
“I’m really, really sorry. Trust me, Im, I’d rather go to Fitchburg with you than get a candlelight couples’ massage with my mother.”
Pressing my free ear against my bedroom door, I can clearly hear Lindy down in the kitchen. Right about now, she’ll be scanning the political section of the morning paper and eating her usual breakfast: one cup Greek yogurt, one hard-boiled egg minus the yolk, two cups basic black coffee. I’ve got ten minutes till she marches upstairs to pack her briefcase, pops her head in my room to say good-bye, and is out the door by eight forty-five. After which, I’d planned to pick up my partner.
Sherlock Holmes was never stymied by Watson’s pedicure appointments. But Jessa has plans with her mom, and I can’t judge her for that. I wouldn’t even know how.
“No, it’s completely okay. Of course you should go. I’ll be fine on my own.”
“Excuse you?” she scoffs. “You may not go to a strange city and knock on strangers’ doors alone. You will so get kidnapped, and I won’t know how to find you without you.”
“I won’t get kidnapped because I’m not a kid.”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s what everyone says before they get kidnapped. But hey, Chad can totally go with you! He’s not working and he doesn’t have class on Tuesdays.”
“I’m not dragging your brother—”
“Chadwick!” she shouts into the speaker.
I cringe. “Jessa, no!”
“I’m not letting you go if you don’t take someone with you, so who else? Maybe that policewoman? Maybe Lindy?”
A harsh point. But honestly, I’ve sort of gotten used to having someone in the passenger seat, and if nothing else I could use a navigator. So after I shower and scrape my hair into a neat ponytail and, at the last moment, stuff a Ziploc bag of Lucky Charms into my coat pocket, I drive over to the Prices’ house. A miserable-looking Jessa waves at me from their bay window while Chad slides into the frost-fogged car. Slumping down in his jacket with the ski pass permanently affixed to the zipper, he palms back the white-blond jumble of his hair and yawns, rubs his eyes with the heel of one hand. “Cold one, huh?”
So now we’re talking about the weather. I fiddle with the heating vents to delay conversation. Like the coffee Lindy left in the pot Thursday night—bitter to begin with and by Friday morning, toxic—the awkwardness between us is exponentially worse in the daylight. I only make it halfway down Cedar before pulling onto a dead-end side street and throwing the Civic into park. “We know you know something’s going on.”
Carefully, Chad watches a pack of boys in winter jackets and athletic shorts wrestle for a basketball below a hoop at the end of the cul-de-sac. “It’s your secret, Imogene. I’m sorry Jessa opened her mouth. You really don’t need to tell me.”
Untrue. I have to give him something if I want him to look at me the way he used to, and not as a doctor-in-training trying to diagnose the wounded. I breathe deeply. “We’ve been trying to find my dad. But I think—I know—Dad is looking for my mother. My real mom, I mean, who left when I was two years old. So, I am too. It’s . . . complicated.”
“Sounds like it.” He whistles low. “That’s heavy stuff.”