Mr. Mercedes (Unnamed Trilogy #1)(142)

“What about you, Bill?” Jerome asks. “Any plans?”

“Well,” he says, smiling, “I was offered a job with Vigilant Guard Service, how about that?”

Holly clasps her hands together and bounces up and down on the picnic bench like a child. “Are you going to take it?”

“Can’t,” Hodges says.

“Heart?” Jerome asks.

“Nope. You have to be bonded, and Judge Silver shared with me this morning that my chances of being bonded and the chances of the Jews and Palestinians uniting to build the first interfaith space station are roughly equal. My dreams of getting a private investigator’s license are equally kaput. However, a bail bondsman I’ve known for years has offered me a part-time job as a skip-tracer, and for that I don’t need to be bonded. I can do it mostly from home, on my computer.”

“I could help you,” Holly says. “With the computer part, that is. I don’t want to actually chase anybody. Once was enough.”

“What about Hartsfield?” Jerome asks. “Anything new, or just the same?”

“Just the same,” Hodges says.

“I don’t care,” Holly says. She sounds defiant, but for the first time since arriving at McGinnis Park, she’s biting her lips. “I’d do it again.” She clenches her fists. “Again again again!”

Hodges takes one of those fists and soothes it open. Jerome does the same with the other.

“Of course you would,” Hodges says. “That’s why the mayor gave you a medal.”

“Not to mention free bus rides and trips to the museum,” Jerome adds.

She relaxes, a little at a time. “Why should I ride the bus, Jerome? I have lots of money in trust, and I have Cousin Olivia’s Mercedes. It’s a wonderful car. And such low mileage!”

“No ghosts?” Hodges asks. He’s not joking about this; he’s honestly curious.

For a long time she doesn’t reply, just looks up at the big German sedan parked beside Hodges’s tidy Japanese import. At least she’s stopped biting her lips.

“There were at first,” she says, “and I thought I might sell it. I had it painted instead. That was my idea, not Dr. Leibowitz’s.” She looks at them proudly. “I didn’t even ask her.”

“And now?” Jerome is still holding her hand. He has come to love Holly, difficult as she sometimes is. They have both come to love her.

“Blue is the color of forgetting,” she says. “I read that in a poem once.” She pauses. “Bill, why are you crying? Are you thinking about Janey?”

Yes. No. Both.

“I’m crying because we’re here,” he says. “On a beautiful fall day that feels like summer.”

“Dr. Leibowitz says crying is good,” Holly says matter-of-factly. “She says tears wash the emotions.”

“She could be right about that.” Hodges is thinking about how Janey wore his hat. How she gave it just the right tilt. “Now are we going to have some of that champagne or not?”

Jerome holds the bottle while Holly pours. They hold up their glasses.

“To us,” Hodges says.

They echo it. And drink.

2

On a rain-soaked evening in November of 2011, a nurse hurries down the corridor of the Lakes Region Traumatic Brain Injury Clinic, an adjunct to John M. Kiner Memorial, the city’s premier hospital. There are half a dozen charity cases at the TBI, including one who is infamous . . . although his infamy has already begun to fade with the passage of time.

The nurse is afraid the clinic’s chief neurologist will have left, but he’s still in the doctor’s lounge, going through case files.

“You may want to come, Dr. Babineau,” she says. “It’s Mr. Hartsfield. He’s awake.” This only makes him look up, but what the nurse says next gets him to his feet. “He spoke to me.”

“After seventeen months? Extraordinary. Are you sure?”

The nurse is flushed with excitement. “Yes, Doctor, absolutely.”

“What did he say?”

“He says he has a headache. And he’s asking for his mother.”

September 14, 2013