“Tom,” I said, resting a hand over my eyes. “You’re right. About all of it. Except the part about this not mattering to me. Because it does. It does. I just—I don’t know, I get caught up in things. Obsessive. I feel like it’s been worse lately, this hypervigilance. That’s my garbage though, and not anything to do with you. Sometimes I want you so much it freaks me out. I don’t just mean want. But that too.”
“Freaks you out why?”
The conversation had gotten serious fast. “When you want something,” I said, my voice coming out small, “when you really want something and you say that you want it—” But I stopped. What did I want to say? That the power shifts, that you might not get it, that wanting out loud had never worked out for me before? “I don’t know. You’re right. It is hard for me. But I’m trying. I really am.”
“I have to go.”
“Tom, wait.”
“Yes?”
“I’m trying. But I’ll try harder.”
“Okay.”
“And, Tom?”
“Yes?” he said again.
“I’m in Toledo.”
Finally, a smile came through in his voice. “Thanks for the update.”
* * *
It was damp and grey on the grounds in front of the student union, which dulled the enthusiasm for the college students who crossed to and fro but not for the matching shirts of Life Begins, who’d set up a portable white gazebo to protect the giant digital screen they’d brought with them to show a constant loop of propaganda—the twenty-first-century version of the big posters that I remembered.
A young woman in a UT sweatshirt was chatting with a trio of skater boys who looked bored and confused. Her counterpart, a kid with glasses and red hair, thrust a brochure at me. “Have you received this information yet?”
I took the brochure from him. I didn’t look at it; I didn’t want to look. The graphic images were upsetting, which was exactly why they used them. I said, “I’m actually hoping to chat with someone in your organization who’s in charge.”
The boy said, “Talk about what?”
A woman was sitting behind the two young people, older and slightly more bedraggled in a grey rain jacket with too-long sleeves, and she stood up from her spot at the table and looked at me. “Do you want to talk about getting involved?”
“I do not.” I set the brochure down on her table. “I’m a private investigator. I’ve heard that your group has had some run-ins with Nora Health—and,” I said, interrupting an attempt to launch into something, “I’m not going to debate your stance, I just want to know if a kid named Aiden Brant is a part of that.”
“Why, so you can harass him too?”
“Harass?” I spread my arms to indicate their booth. “I don’t know that I’m the one doing the harassing. But the kid is missing. I just want to piece together what his life is like. So I can find him.”
Her expression softened, just a touch. “Missing?”
“Missing. You know him?”
“No.”
I put my hands on my hips.
“His stepdad, though. He used to be involved.”
“Joel.”
A nod.
“Used to be involved?”
“Yes.”
“How so?”
The woman looked at her counterparts under the booth, who were ignoring the students who walked by in favor of listening to our conversation. “Let’s talk elsewhere.”
I got us each a cup of tea inside the student union and we sat at a table near a wide bay window. The timing was right; the rain had picked up already.
“Life Begins is a nonprofit with a board of directors. Joel Creedle was one of them some years back. He was elected, technically, that’s how the board positions work. But he wasn’t a good fit for us, not at all.” Her name was Marcia, and she’d been involved with the group herself for a decade.
“How so?”
“He had very strange ideas. We’re relentless defenders of the rights of the preborn. But we aren’t criminals.”
I felt my eyes widen. “Criminals?”
“He thought, why spend money on printing brochures and sending people to college campuses when we could make a real difference. He kept talking about how we could leverage surveillance to find out everything we could about the people who staff Planned Parenthood. He even suggested that we blackmail someone on the city council to get permits revoked for groups protesting the president.”
“Blackmail?”
“I’m all for getting permits revoked for those snowflakes, but blackmail? Come on.”
“What other crimes did he suggest?”
“Oh,” Marcia said, “it’s not that he was constantly suggesting stuff like that. But he wanted to argue everything we did. He obviously wanted to be a part of a different organization. We confront, but we don’t coerce. We don’t threaten or manipulate. Our tactics are straightforward. The truth works. We don’t need to rely on shady backroom dealings to make a difference. We don’t seek to punish women who have committed preborn murder—we counsel them. He was asked—firmly—not to seek reelection.”
“And he went without a fight?”
“He was pretty disillusioned by the response that he’d gotten from us by then. And he’d been working his way up in the church he’s a part of. So yes.”
“What about Nora Health?”
“What about them?”
“They’ve been getting phone calls, and they think Life Begins is behind it.”
Marcia shook her head so quickly that a damp tendril of hair stuck to her cheek. “We don’t make phone calls. This is what we do.” She pointed out through the window, where the redheaded kid was hugging a young woman in the rain. “We connect with people. We try to heal those who have faltered. Spread the word that anyone can become a defender. We aren’t out here trying to make enemies. And we definitely don’t make harassing phone calls. That sounds like some teenager nonsense.”
* * *
I didn’t agree with Life Begins, and even if I did, I wouldn’t like their approach. But I had to admit that Marcia was right. It did sound like teenage nonsense, to call and hang up, to threaten vaguely. What was Aiden’s goal, to unsettle Constance Archer-Nash so much that she decided to just shut the whole thing down?
I went back to the motel and lay on the bed. With the low, grey light outside and the heavy curtains closed against it, the room was near dark. Disorienting. Up here I was disconnected, a satellite arm of myself. I didn’t understand why it was always so easy for me to put cards on the table with Catherine, and so hard with Tom. Maybe because with Catherine I knew deep down that the stakes were low, that it didn’t matter how clear I was about my feelings since she’d disregard them anyway. Things with Catherine were always temporary. She was always on the brink of leaving, even when she acted like she wanted to stay. It was the opposite with Tom. I could count on him to stay just as sure as I could count on Catherine to leave, and there was pressure in that somehow.
The phone rang. I half expected it to be Catherine, because she had a knack for calling at the exact moment I was thinking about her. But that was a parlor trick, not love. And anyway, it wasn’t her. “Hi, this is Elliott Brant, returning your phone call from earlier.”
I sat up, pity party concluded. “Hi,” I said, “Geoffrey’s brother, right?”
“That’s right. Your message said that you wanted to know if I was still in touch with Geoff’s wife, Nadine?”
“Are you?”
“No, I’m not, other than a card at Christmas or what have you. But my ex-wife was pretty good friends with her, when we were together. I’m not sure if they still talk. But maybe.”
“Do you think she’d be willing to speak with me?”
“I bet she would,” Elliott Brant said, “she actually works for a private investigator, so she’d probably get a kick out of it. Her name is Lindy Brant.”
CHAPTER 23
I was hoping Keir Metcalf would leave the AA Se
curity office first, but it didn’t work out that way.
At four fifteen, the fashion-plate receptionist emerged from the tinted glass door and got into a dark purple Honda Fit and drove away, me following three cars behind. While I’d been waiting for Metcalf to leave so I could talk with her in semiprivate, I’d learned all about Lindy Brant, née Lindora Pletko. She’d lived in Perrysburg most of her life, attended Perrysburg High School, went to Owens Community College, and worked as a receptionist or office manager for half a dozen small businesses in the intervening twenty-five years before winding up at AA Security.
Lindy drove to a boxing gym on Boundary Street and went inside with a duffel bag. Assuming she was there to work out and not hold up the place, I stayed in the Range Rover and pulled more background on her: house in Lemoyne, two kids, a girl and a boy, public school students both. Lindy had a dating profile on Plenty of Fish—the thought gave me chills—and appeared to sell Pampered Chef, Tupperware, and Jamberry in her spare time. Facebook listed her religious views as Presbyterian, which seemed like a good sign. She’d never been arrested in Ohio. On paper she seemed a little boring in contrast to her loud sense of style, but I remembered the farming magazine on her desk; she was a woman of contradictions.
She came out of the gym after forty minutes, having traded her denim jumpsuit and matching jacket for basic-black leggings and an electric-blue sports bra. Her blond hair was pulled up in a high ponytail and I was surprised to see that she was ripped, her shoulders sculpted like antique furniture legs.
She got back in the car and drove on.
We went to a small white house on a big, fenced lot off of Route 23. A girl about Aiden’s age was in the side yard, kicking a soccer ball against the house, ears in headphones. She looked up as Lindy went inside, but neither said anything. A few minutes after that the girl went inside too.
I rang the doorbell; the soccer player answered. “Hi, is Lindy at home?” I said.
The girl glanced over her shoulder. “She’s in the shower.”
“You’re not supposed to say that,” an unseen youth called.
“Oh, okay—”
“Sorry,” the girl said, and then she shut the door.
A certain demeanor ran in the family.
I went back to the car and waited, wondering how long a woman like Lindy Brant would take in the shower. But before I could make up my mind about that, she came out of the house—re-dressed in her denim getup, her wet hair restyled into a braid—and got behind the wheel of her car again.
We got on I-90 and then took 75 North for a while. After a few miles she threw on her turn signal and merged to the left, and I thought for a moment that she was settling in for a long ride and would be heading to the St. Clair Club too. But in reality, she was just passing a truck emitting a noxious cloud of fumes from its tailpipe, and we exited the freeway near the university, where I’d just been earlier.
She parked on a side street, got a stack of catalogs out of her hatchback, and hurried down the sidewalk. I drove past her and parked farther up, realizing that I was also near Rebecca Newsome’s rental properties. Where were we going? I didn’t know the Toledo area well enough to hazard any more guesses.
Then Lindy’s denim form turned a corner, and I saw the neon Bloom sign from two blocks away.
* * *
Everyone in the area was apparently in need of soul-stirring. As I walked up the block to the flower shop, I saw almost a dozen other women go through its front door. Some were college-age, like the hyacinth-loving Kyla who had sold me the sickly jade plant. Some were my age, businesswomen in business-casual workwear. And some were in their sixties and seventies in billowy art-museum shawls.
The common denominator? Everyone went in alone.
I was greeted at the door by a blond young woman—not Kyla, but basically a clone—who welcomed me effusively and thrust a name tag at me. “I’m so glad you’re here! We have sparkling water, coffee, tea, snacks, so feel free to make a little plate for yourself and mingle! We’ll get started in a few minutes. Oh, and we ask that you refrain from using your phone until the end, when it’s picture time. To foster a sense of community and togetherness for the next ninety minutes.”
I filled in the name tag with a purple marker; for Favorite Bloom I wrote daisy and hoped nobody would ask me what kind.
Things had been moved around on the sales floor since I was here the other day, with most of the shelves rolled out of the way to make space for two long tables with picnic-style benches attached. Each place setting was delineated by a white place mat emblazoned with the Bloom logo, and an empty ceramic pot. Barrels of dark, loamy potting soil stood at the ends of each table and made the space smell a bit like rain.
I didn’t see Lindy right away, but her stack of catalogs was on the end of one of the tables. The rest of the women attending the gathering appeared to be bad at mingling—those who had taken seats at the table did so with several spaces between each other, and the rest were paying close attention to the snack table. I got in line behind a woman who was surreptitiously checking her phone from within the confines of her large burgundy handbag.
“What about fostering a sense of community and togetherness?” I whispered.
She looked stricken and dropped the phone into the depths of the bag. “I was just checking on my daughter. She was home sick today.”
“That was a joke. Not a very good one.”
“Oh.” A blush crept along her cheekbones. Her name tag said MAURA|FAVORITE BLOOM: LILY. “Sorry. Haha.”
We moved up in the line. I saw a cheese tray and some very nice-looking cheesecake brownie bites in little crimped foil cups.
“Have you been to one of these before?” I tried.
Maura nodded. “Last month we made autumn wreaths. It’s really a very nice group. I like how they aren’t pushy.”
I wasn’t so sure that was true, based on her expression when I called her out for using her phone. I said, playing dumb, “Pushy about what?”
“Oh, um, the worship aspect. This isn’t a prayer group if that’s not what you’re here for. It can be just about taking time for yourself.”
“Prayer group?”
But Maura saw someone else she knew and scuttled away, apparently uninterested in fostering a sense of anything with me.
I put a few cubes of Colby-Jack on a clear plastic plate. The tray for the brownie bites contained a plastic serving knife, which had been used in a performative slice-off to see who could cut the smallest possible piece of dessert—someone had actually cut one of them into quarters and left three segments behind.
I ignored the knife and took two of the foil cups, and the woman in line behind me raised her eyebrows.
A few minutes after seven, one of the Kyla look-alikes went to the front of the room and clapped her hands. “Okay, we’re going to get started pretty soon here! I see a lot of you still standing around in the back—please, come on over, take a seat, there’s room for everybody, I assure you.”
I was one of the lurkers, and I preferred to keep it that way. The small store was full enough that Lindy might not notice me at first, and I wanted to figure out how involved with this group she was before I let her know that I’d made this connection. But Not-Kyla locked eyes with me and called me out. “There’s space right here, come on over, you can sit right next to Lindy.”
Lindy glared at both of us. “This seat is taken.”
“We don’t save seats, everyone is welcome here.”
I squeezed in beside her. “What are the odds?”
“I’m saving this seat for a friend.”
“Well, if your friend comes, I’ll get up.”
“What are you even doing here?”
“Fellowship and community?”
She narrowed her eyes at me but said nothing, just calmly chewed a piece of celery, keeping her eyes on the door like she was looking for someone.
I noticed that the rest of the attendees were giving us a wide berth. At first I tho
ught it was me, but then I realized that it was Lindy. She was seated on the end of a row, next to the snack table. Rather than line up beside her, people started going around the opposite side of the table and reaching across. I saw Maura, the phone criminal, go up to one of the Not-Kylas and whisper something, pointing.
Lindy folded her arms over her chest. “Here we go,” she muttered.
Not-Kyla came over, smiling hugely. “Lindy, could I chat with you for just a sec?”
“Go for it.”
“I meant, over there, maybe.” The young woman pointed toward the back of the shop.
“I’m quite comfortable here, thanks. What would you like to chat about?”
“Well, it’s just, um.” Not-Kyla struggled, glanced at me, at the floor. I pointedly looked away and listened carefully as she dropped her voice to a whisper. “Some of the women aren’t comfortable having you here. After last time.”
“I’m just sitting here, minding my own business.”
“Yes, well, this environment is about community, and you’re not even trying, Lindy, is the thing. So it’s hard to accept that you genuinely want to be here.”
“Would I be here if I didn’t want to be?”
Not-Kyla sighed. “You know I can’t tell you to leave.”
“I know that.”
They had reached an impasse.
“Well, okay, then.” She clapped her hands again to get everyone’s attention. “Welcome to October’s women’s crafting circle meeting! As always, we want to thank you for showing up as your best self today in the spirit of Christ’s love. Let’s take the next few minutes to get to know the person you’re seated beside.”
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