by Abby Jimenez
“So what does he do for a living?” I asked.
She scoffed. “Lose money? He was a student. He went to college for business, but he graduated last spring. Absolutely refuses to get a job. He’s always got some disastrous side hustle he’s super into.”
“Like what?”
“Oh God, herbal supplements, skin-care products—you name it. To be fair, I did like the leggings though.” She blew into her hands. “Right now he’s trying to get me to invest in some business he wants to start. Not interested.”
“Why doesn’t he just go to a bank? Get a loan?”
She pressed her lips into a line. “Can’t. His credit is fucked. All our credit is fucked. When Melanie got sick, we almost lost everything. The medical bills were astronomical, and insurance didn’t cover even half of it. Dad had to file for bankruptcy. We were living on credit cards at the end.”
She stood up. “You want to wait for me in the car? It’s trash day the day after tomorrow. I figure since I pay for the service, I might as well fill the bin. I realize it’s an effort in futility at this point, but at least it’s something.”
I pushed up on my knees. “I’ll help you.”
She paused by the door. “You sure? There’s probably at least one of the hepatitises in there.”
“If you’re getting one of the heps, I’ll get it too,” I mumbled.
She laughed and it made her eyes twinkle and I felt instantly glad I offered.
I didn’t want to go back in there—but neither did she. And I wanted to help her. Even if the thing we were doing was pointless, making her feel less alone in it wasn’t.
Gerald was standing in the kitchen when we came back inside, blowing on a mug of soup. “He returns,” he muttered.
Vanessa gave him a look as she pulled some trash bags from under the sink. She shoved one into his chest. “Help.”
He eyed her. “Help with what? What, pray tell, do you think you’re throwing away, Daughter?”
“Trash,” she said. “And you are too.”
“There is no trash here. Everything in this house has a purpose.”
She picked up a broken vase. “Oh yeah? And what’s the purpose of this?” She jiggled it.
“As soon as I find the missing shards, I’m gluing it back together,” he said, completely straight-faced.
She let out a slow, patient breath and set the vase on the counter with a clink. “Dad? This house is seriously not okay. I understand this is difficult, but I need you to work with me. We’ve got three bags. These bags are going to get filled up and taken out. You can do this.”
He frowned. Then he turned to me. “What are your intentions with my daughter?”
“Dad! Focus!” Vanessa snapped.
I put my hands up. “I’m just here to help.”
He narrowed his eyes at me and Vanessa huffed. “Three bags. You do the upstairs,” she said, pushing the trash bag into his chest again.
Gerald gave me one last narrow-eyed look and set his mug down. Then he snatched the bag and wandered off up the staircase, muttering to himself.
Vanessa watched him go and then turned to me, blowing air through pursed lips. “So, you wanna see something?” She smiled.
I shrugged. “Sure.”
She led me back down the narrow hallway and opened a door. The room was full of bikes. Full. They were piled on top of one another in some sort of macabre bicycle graveyard. Mountain bikes with bent rims, fat-tire bikes with flats, rusted children’s bikes with the training wheels still on them.
“This was my room,” she said. “I used to sleep over there under the one with the tassels and the basket. Before the bikes,” she added.
She didn’t say it with any sort of regret in her tone. She was just showing me. Like she could separate what it was now versus what it used to be without it making her sad.
I think this was one of the most impressive things about her. Especially now that I saw the other side of it. She didn’t let anything get her down. She took things like a blow to a punching bag. She got knocked back, but then she was up again. So resilient.
I wasn’t like that. I couldn’t let things go.
I crossed my arms and leaned in the doorway. “Did Child Protective Services ever get involved?”
Vanessa shook her head, leaning her back on the door frame. “I mean, they were called. But the few times they came out, he’d pull off some eleventh-hour save, get the house livable again, and we’d get to stay. It was the only time I ever really saw him bust his ass.” She looked back at me. “Dad screwed up a lot of things, but he always managed to keep this family together. Family is the most important thing to him. Even if he has a weird way of showing it,” she mumbled.
I looked back into the room. I was getting nose blind to the smell of the house, thank God.
There were things of hers still on the walls, half covered by the rising mound of bikes. Evidence of an abandoned life. Pussycat Dolls posters, the mirror of a vanity with photos stuck to it, a blue first-place ribbon.
I wondered what it must have been like to grow up in a place like this. It couldn’t have been easy. Vanessa must have risen from the ashes like a phoenix.
“We should get started,” she said. She turned back for the kitchen and I followed her. She began tossing garbage on her way. “Just so you know, he’s going to fight me on every single thing. He’ll go through the bags, so make sure your trash is legit.”
“Legit trash. Got it.” I grabbed a crumpled chip bag and a greasy Chinese takeout container. “There’s some mail here,” I said, nodding at the end table. “Should we make a pile? Looks like these are for your sister.”
She was looking at a toaster with a frayed wire. “Yeah. Thanks.” She shoved it in her bag.
The toaster was concerning. This place was a huge fire hazard. Exits were blocked, the stove had crap all around it. I bet the smoke alarms didn’t work, and there was no way he’d ever find an extinguisher in this mess. This was dangerous. I didn’t like the thought of Grace being here. At all.
“Did Annabel live here with the baby?”
Vanessa shook her head. “No, never with the baby. She had some roommates at a house in Hopkins. When she started using again, they kicked her out and she stayed here for a few weeks. I have no idea where she slept. Her old room is full of car parts.”
I wandered the living room, leaving things so obviously garbage it made me cringe. I found more mail and added it to the pile. Then more. And more. It looked like he’d grab it from the mailbox and then set it down somewhere in the living room and forget it. “There’s a lot of mail here. You said you pay the bills, right?”
“Yeah. I get all the important stuff sent to my apartment.” She made a face at a plastic fish tank with a rotting tomato in it. She looked up at me over it. “I bet when you woke up this morning you couldn’t imagine how many times you’d be muttering ‘What the fuck?’ by ten a.m.”
I snorted.
She scanned the living room and sighed. “You know, I’m not usually humiliated this frequently in front of the same person. This is a new personal best for me.”
“You shouldn’t be embarrassed about this. It’s not your fault,” I said.
“Where’s the mail pile?” Vanessa asked, waving a white envelope. “I found another one.”
I nodded to the end table by the sofa and she walked to it. She stood over the stack I’d already begun and picked up the top letter. The corners of her lips fell. Then she tore it open and stood there reading it, her frown deepening.
“What is it?” I asked.
She shook her head and looked from the page to the pile of letters. “Oh my God…” she breathed. “It’s so much worse than I thought.”
I set my trash bag down. “What?” I cleared the space between us and took the paper from her hand.
It was a bill for Annabel for an emergency room visit.
I looked at the stack and picked up half of the envelopes and flipped through them. There had to be
twenty, twenty-five different bills here. Clinics, urgent cares, hospitals.
Vanessa looked at me, her face white. “She was drug seeking. Faking injuries to get prescription meds.” She paused. “And she was doing it while she was pregnant.”
* * *
Vanessa was quiet the whole way home. When we pulled into the parking garage and I turned off the engine, she sat there a moment, staring straight through the windshield.
“Look,” I said. “There was only one clinic visit while she was pregnant. And we don’t know if she took the pills they prescribed her.”
She shook her head. “I don’t understand how a doctor could give a pregnant woman a narcotic.”
“Liability. Doctors can’t prove or disprove pain. If they deny her pain control, they can be sued.”
She took a deep breath and then pivoted to face me in the seat. “Do you want to go to Duluth today?”
I wrinkled my forehead. “What?”
“Duluth. You know, two hours up north? We could go see the Christmas lights at Bentleyville and do the lake walk.”
I sucked air through my teeth. “I don’t know…”
“What?”
“Why don’t we just stay here? I can make us lunch.”
She smiled. “Oh, I see. You do want to hang out with me, but you don’t do spontaneity.”
“I can be spontaneous,” I said defensively.
She smirked. “Oh yeah? When’s the last time you did something that wasn’t thoroughly planned? And stuff inside your apartment building doesn’t count. That’s still your safe space.”
“Well, I saved a man from an avalanche today.”
She laughed. It was good to see the humor return to her face.
“Doesn’t count,” she said, still smiling. “You’re a fixer, so today’s emergency was totally in your wheelhouse. I’m talking about a genuine, spur-of-the-moment, seat-of-your-pants fun thing.”
I had nothing.
How did this woman have my card so thoroughly pulled?
When I didn’t answer, she cocked her head. “That’s what I thought. You thrive on predictability.” She narrowed her eyes. “I bet that’s why you like the job you have.”
“How do you mean?”
“You like being in control. And what better way to feel like the master of destiny than to beat all the odds with everything stacked against you? Make innocent men out of the guilty.”
I mulled this over. “I never thought of it that way.”
“You’re not that hard to figure out, Adrian Copeland. Even your hobbies are planned. You run races that you train for for months, you work, work, work—you are a creature of habit. A total control freak. Your dang junk drawer is organized.”
I arched an eyebrow. “You looked in my junk drawer?”
“I was looking for a spoon for my coffee. I was not prepared to see that. Your paper clips were all color coordinated, and you had a little caddy for your loose batteries—” She shuddered. “I can’t even talk about it. It really freaked me out.”
I snorted.
“I promise you, you will not implode if you do something you didn’t plan on today.” She grinned at me. “Come with me. It’ll be an adventure. And there’s this Italian restaurant on Lake Superior and I swear to God, it’s the best Italian food in Minnesota.”
Coming from her, this was high praise.
“I can’t remember the last time I went up north,” I said somewhat distantly. “Dad used to take me, but I haven’t been in ages.”
“You’re missing out. The North Shore is ridiculously gorgeous. So. Duluth. Are we going?”
She waited for me to answer like a puppy wagging its tail.
“Okay. But I’m driving.”
She clapped her hands excitedly. “Yay!”
I smiled. I realized that doing what she wanted gave me a little high. She was some kind of mood booster for me—even when all we were doing was picking up trash in a hoarded house.
I liked her.
And that gave me a little high too.
CHAPTER 10
HOW TO FIND WHAT
YOU’RE MISSING USING THIS
ONE WEIRD TRICK!
ADRIAN
I walked into my office after a court visit on Monday morning feeling like my two-day weekend had been a six-month vacation from life. Despite the amount of actual shit I now dealt with on an hourly basis, I was smiling.
I’d spent the whole weekend hanging out with Vanessa. We hadn’t gotten home from Duluth until almost midnight last night.
We’d bundled up the baby and walked through the Christmas lights at Bentleyville, an outdoor village completely decked out for the holiday. Got hot chocolate, had dinner at the place on Lake Superior—and Vanessa was right. It was the best Italian food in Minnesota.
I’d had a good time. A great time. I couldn’t remember when I’d ever enjoyed a date so much—not that it had been a date. It wasn’t, of course. But I couldn’t help acknowledging that I hadn’t had that much fun with someone in ages.
Vanessa made me laugh. She made me forget. About everything other than what we were doing in that moment. It felt like a rest for my soul. I’d been living under the constant pressure of work and Mom and Richard and now this breakup with Rachel, and suddenly I was distracted and having fun and all those stressors got shut off. Now they were duller somehow. They mattered less. And I wondered if this is what Vanessa meant about always having something to look forward to. Only, the thing I seemed to be looking forward to was her.
Not in any inappropriate way. I just wanted to see what she’d do next. It was like I’d found some cool new restaurant and the menu was never the same and I wanted to keep going back to see what they were serving.
Becky stood at the door of my office waiting for me like she did every morning, holding my coffee and wearing that searching look on her face that she gave me these days, trying to discern my mood.
“Did you, like, go tanning or something?” she said, handing me my cappuccino. “You look brighter.”
I walked around my desk, sat, and unbuckled my briefcase to pull out the Keller file. “I didn’t,” I said, ignoring her narrowed eyes. “What’s on my schedule for the day?”
“You have a consultation at ten, lunch with Marcus at eleven fifteen to go over the Keller case, and the rest of your day is free.” She looked around. “Um, where’s the dog? You do remember you have one, right?”
“With all the shitting it does? How could I forget.” I logged on to my desktop.
“You just left him at home? He can’t be in the apartment all day by himself, he’ll be lonely.”
“He’s got the demon he’s possessed with to keep him company.”
She scowled at me.
I tried not to let her see my smile. “He’s with a friend. I’m keeping him until he gets adopted.” I didn’t look up to see the triumphant grin I knew she was giving me.
Vanessa liked Harry. She’d asked to dog-sit him while I was at work and I’d happily agreed.
I signed in to my email. “I need you to call Sonja Duggar to see if she’s available. I might have a full-time job for her. And don’t put anything on my schedule after lunch. I’m leaving early again. I’ll finish listening to the Buller tapes from home.”
Becky didn’t speak to give me her opinion on this like she usually would. A silent Becky was cause for concern, and I was forced to look up to make sure she hadn’t died where she stood.
She stared at me, slack jawed. “You’re going home early? Again?”
My cell phone pinged, and I pulled it out. It was a video from Vanessa. Harry in a diaper, growling at a chair leg. I laughed.
When she’d had my phone the other day, she’d changed my lock screen to the selfie of us. I didn’t notice it until a few hours later.
I hadn’t changed it back.
She was wearing that stupid cereal necklace in it and I had on that Maryland crab shirt and a glow stick bracelet. Her arm was peppered with stickers. The
baby was smiling and the dog had his tongue out. It was this colorful, fun slap of happy right in the middle of my black, serious phone—and it made me smile every time I looked at it.
“What is going on?” Becky demanded. “Are you on drugs?”
I squinted up at her. “No, I am not on drugs.” I looked back at my computer. “I just had a good weekend.”
“Is it a girl?” She gasped into her hands. “Oh my God, if it’s a girl, it’s serious. Your horoscope today said your soul mate is in your midst!”
I scoffed. We had the same sign, and the idiot Becky was dating was definitely not anyone’s soul mate, let alone hers.
I waited a moment before replying, just to torture her.
Becky was practically gyrating.
“She’s a neighbor,” I said. “Her name is Vanessa, and we’re just friends.”
She squealed, obviously ignoring the just-friends part. “Oh my God! Okay, tell me everything. What does she do? Is she pretty?” Then she stopped bouncing and went serious. “You’re not acting all gloomy and Interview with the Vampire around her, right?”
I gave her a look as my cell phone rang. It was my PI returning my message.
“She’s a YouTuber. She’s beautiful. And again, we’re just friends,” I said, swiping the Answer Call button and putting the phone to my ear. “This is Adrian.”
“Tom Hillbrand here. Got your message.”
I swiveled my chair to give Becky my back. “Thanks for returning my call so quickly. The ring was stolen on Friday. A police report was filed with the Eagan police department by a Vanessa Price. Can you get access to that?”
Wind came through the phone like he was outside. “Shouldn’t be a problem. Any identifying features?”
“She said it’s got an inscription inside. ‘Kismet.’”
“Good. Makes it easier to know what I’m looking for. How hard do you want to hit this? I can get my guys over to the pawn shops easy enough, but if it’s not there, hunting this thing down could get expensive.”
I smoothed my tie down. “Whatever it takes. It has sentimental value. Just find it.”