The Mystery of Hollow Places(39)
“But thanks to you, we’ve kind of got a lead. Dr. Sorbousek told us that my mother said she was going back home, and we know she’s from Fitchburg originally, so—”
“So that’s where we’re headed. Makes sense. But . . . are you okay?”
There’s that question again. “Always,” I quote my dad with a smile, hoping I sound so much cooler than I feel. Then Chad looks at me, studies me with perfect, sea-glass-green eyes and for a heart-pumping second I’m carried away by butterflies—no, bigger. By full-size Victoria crowned pigeons.
“You’re so tough, Imogene Scott.” He not-quite-smiles back. “How did you get to be so tough?”
Later, I’ll come up with a thousand possible retorts. For now, I can only shrug and stare helplessly back until he flashes a dimple and shakes his head.
“So what’s the plan when we get there?”
I perk up—my own strategic genius is a safer topic—and drop the envelope of bills Lindy left for me in his lap. Two hundred bucks! Seems like way too much money for a prom dress, but I’m not complaining. Fitchburg’s more than an hour northwest, and my car is running on fumes and hope.
He flips through the cash, then sits up straighter. “Holy bankroll. Are we opening a meth lab?”
“We’re ‘buying a prom dress,’” I air-quote.
“Oh, well, now I understand why Jessa thought I should come along.”
I throw the car into drive, and once we’re moving forward again, I feel tough. Which is exactly what I want to be. Tough means strong. It means even if you’re sad—or god forbid, lonely—you won’t crumble like a dry granola bar in the bottom of a backpack, destined to spill out over the lap of the first person who fumbles open your foil wrapper. Tough is the opposite of troubled waters.
Calvinistic Congregational is beautiful. Old, ornate, and red-bricked, with a roof the light green color of weather-beaten copper, like the Statue of Liberty. It’s the only building in Fitchburg I could find that matches the one in the photo of Lil and my mom. Chad and I stand on the sidewalk outside and tilt our heads back to examine the steepled clock towers from below.
“That’s a church,” Chad says.
“I agree.” I turn in circles on the concrete. Behind us is Main Street, and beyond that is the Fitchburg Art Museum, which Wikipedia called “one of the most treasured cultural institutions in Central New England.” A pretty high bar, considering the gallery of crayon-colored kids’ placemats above the register at Bingo’s Breakfast in Sugarbrook.
All around the church are businesses, some in old-style brick and brownstone, some in new but not particularly shiny white buildings. There’s something labeled a “Theater Guild,” a thrift store called Odds-N-Ends, a credit union, restaurants. According to Google Maps, the nearest homes lie directly northwest. But we don’t walk straight there.
Shoving our hands into our pockets against the cold—the semi-warmth of last Wednesday at Victory Island has yet to be repeated—we plod a little ways down Circle Street, which crosses over a thin river, and there in front of us lies Crocker Field. The park where my mom and Lil used to stop on their way home from church. It’s huge, ringed by a track and circled by tall trees, with painted lines for all kinds of sports. Probably it’s gotten fancier since Mom was a kid.
“Did you ever play here?” I ask Chad.
“A couple of times in Fitchburg, yeah, but not in this park. Weren’t you at one of the games? When Fitchburg’s midfielder got hurt?”
That’s right, I was. I used to tag along with the Prices to games, because why wouldn’t I watch Chad’s thighs sprint across a soccer field in nylon shorts? But the game Chad’s talking about happened when he was a junior, and he collided with a boy in the center of the field. They went down together with a terrible dry sound I swear you could hear from the bleachers, like the husk being ripped from a corncob. Nobody knew whose body had broken until Chad untangled himself and bounced away, flushed and shaking but fine. The other boy wasn’t; he’d shredded his knee. After that I got this sick, nervous feeling I couldn’t control whenever I went to one of Chad’s matches.
“Huh, I don’t remember that.” I shrug and we keep going, all the way around the field, onto Broad Street and then River Street, which spits us back onto Main a ways up from the church.
“Maybe we should go get the car and drive around for a while?” Chad suggests.
I chew the inside of my lip until I realize it’s Jessa’s nervous habit. “The house has to be close. My mom . . . she could hear the baseball games from the backyard. It must be one of these streets.”
We cut across light traffic on Main Street and head up Chestnut, the first residential street nearest the field, comparing the houses on either side of the road to the photo clutched in my fingers. Their matted brown lawns peek through a dusting of snow that came in the night. Christmas lights still cling to one or two gutters. But I don’t see the house, and Chestnut dead-ends after a block and a half. We backtrack to the cross street, Arlington, and head left in the direction of the field. That takes us to Prospect, where the houses seem entirely too big, thinning out into businesses just a little down the road.
Maybe this won’t work after all. Maybe I won’t recognize the house, or Lil was totally exaggerating when she said she could practically smell the ballpark hot dogs. I pry my phone out of my pocket and try her number again; no answer, and because I was too preoccupied with research to charge it last night, my phone is blinking on its last battery bar. So we’re on our own for now.