by Stephen King
Holly zipped a thumb across her thin lips and turned an invisible key, a gesture she’d seen Bill Hodges make on many occasions. “So when you re-opened with the new name and the new menu . . . or maybe just before . . .”
“Johnny, he’s my hubby, wanted to paper the neighborhood a week before, but I told him that was no good, people would forget, so we did it the day before. We hired a kid, and printed enough menus for him to cover a nine-block area.”
“Including the parking lot up the street.”
“Yes. Is that important?”
“Would you check your calendar and tell me what day that was?”
“Don’t need to. It’s engraven on my memory.” She tapped her forehead. “April nineteenth. A Thursday. We opened—re-opened, actually—on Friday.”
Holly restrained an urge to correct Mary’s grammar, thanked her, and turned to go.
“Sure you can’t tell me what the guy did?”
“Very sorry, but I’d lose my job.”
“Well, at least come in for dinner, if you’re staying in town.”
“I’ll do that,” Holly said, but she wouldn’t. God knew what else on the menu had been shipped frozen from Paramus.
3
The next step was a visit to the Heisman Memory Unit, and a talk with Terry Maitland’s father, if he was having a good day (presuming he had good days anymore). Even if he was off in the clouds, she might be able to talk to some of the people who worked there. In the meantime, here she was in her pretty-good hotel room. She powered up her laptop and sent Alec Pelley an email titled GIBNEY REPORT #1.
Tommy & Tuppence menus were leafleted in a 9-block area on Thursday, April 19th. Based on interview w/ co-owner MARY HOLLISTER, I am confident this date is correct. Such being the case, we can be sure it was the date MERLIN CASSIDY abandoned the van in nearby parking lot. Note that MAITLAND FAMILY arrived Dayton around noon on Saturday, April 21st. I am almost positive the van was gone by then. I will check w/ local police tomorrow, hoping to close off one more possibility, and will then visit the Heisman Memory Unit. If questions, email or call my cell.
Holly Gibney
Finders Keepers
With that taken care of, Holly went down to the hotel restaurant and ordered a light meal (she never even considered room service, which was always ridiculously expensive). She found a Mel Gibson film she hadn’t seen on the in-room movie menu, and ordered it—$9.99, which she would deduct from her report of expenses when she filed it. The picture wasn’t great, but Gibson did the best he could with what he had. She noted the title and the running time in her current movie log-book (Holly had already filled over two dozen others), giving it three stars. With that taken care of, she made sure both of the room’s door locks were engaged, said her prayers (finishing, as she always did, by telling God that she missed Bill), and went to bed. Where she slept for eight hours, with no dreams. At least none that she remembered.
4
The next morning, after coffee, a brisk three-mile walk, breakfast at a nearby café, and a hot shower, Holly called the Dayton Police Department and asked for Traffic Division. Following a refreshingly brief interval on hold, an Officer Linden came on the line and asked how he could help her. Holly found this delightful. A polite policeman always brightened her day. Although to be fair, most of them were in the Midwest.
She identified herself, said she was interested in a white Econoline van that had been left in a public parking lot on Northwoods Boulevard in April, and asked if DPD regularly checked the city’s honor lots.
“Sure,” Officer Linden said, “but not to enforce the six-hour limit. They’re cops, not meter maids.”
“I understand,” Holly said, “but they must keep an eye out for possible dump-offs, don’t they?”
Linden laughed. “Your company must do a lot of repos and retrievals.”
“Along with bail-jumpers, they’re our bread and butter.”
“Then you know how it works. We’re especially interested in expensive cars that have been hanging around those lots for awhile, both in town and in long-term parking at the airport. Your Denalis, your Escalades, your Jags and Beemers. You say this van you’re interested in had New York plates?”
“Correct.”
“A van like that probably wouldn’t have drawn much attention the first day—people from New York do come to Dayton, strange as it may seem—but if it was still there on the second day? Probably.”
Which still would have been a full day before the Maitlands arrived. “Thank you, Officer.”
“I could check the impound yard, if you want.”
“That won’t be necessary. The van next showed up a thousand miles south of here.”
“What’s your interest in it, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Not at all,” Holly said. This was a police officer, after all. “It was used to abduct a child who was subsequently murdered.”
5
Now ninety-nine per cent sure the van had been gone well before Terry Maitland arrived in Dayton with his wife and daughters on April 21st, Holly drove her Prius to the Heisman Memory Unit. It was a long, low sandstone building in the middle of at least four acres of well-kept grounds. A grove of trees separated it from Kindred Hospital, which probably owned it, operated it, and made a tidy profit thereby; it certainly didn’t look cheap. Either Peter Maitland had a large nest egg, good insurance, or both, Holly thought approvingly. There were plenty of empty guest spaces at this hour of the morning, but Holly chose one at the far end of the lot. Her Fitbit goal was 12,000 steps a day, and every little bit helped.
She paused for a minute to watch three orderlies walking three residents (one of the latter actually looked as if he might know where he was), then went inside. The lobby was high-ceilinged and pleasant, but beneath the smells of floor wax and furniture polish, Holly could detect a faint odor of pee wafting out from deeper in the building. And something else, something heavier. It would have been foolish and melodramatic to call it the smell of lost hope, but that was what it smelled like to Holly, just the same. Probably because I spent so much of my early life staring at the hole instead of the doughnut, she thought.
The sign on the main desk read ALL VISITORS MUST CHECK IN. The woman behind the desk (Mrs. Kelly, according to the little plaque on the counter) gave Holly a welcoming smile. “Hello, there. How may I help?”
To this point, all was ordinary and unremarkable. Things only went off the rails when Holly asked if she could visit Peter Maitland. Mrs. Kelly’s smile remained on her lips, but disappeared from her eyes. “Are you a member of the family?”
“No,” Holly said. “I’m a friend of the family.”
This, she told herself, was not exactly a lie. She was working for Mrs. Maitland’s lawyer, after all, and the lawyer was working for Mrs. Maitland, and that qualified as a kind of friendship, didn’t it, if she had been hired to clear the name of the widow’s late husband?
“I’m afraid that won’t do,” said Mrs. Kelly. What remained of her smile was now purely perfunctory. “If you’re not family, I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave. Mr. Maitland wouldn’t know you, anyway. His condition has deteriorated this summer.”
“Just this summer, or since Terry came to visit him in the spring?”
Now the smile was gone entirely. “Are you a reporter? If you are, you are required by law to tell me, and I will ask you to leave the premises at once. If you refuse, I’ll call security and have you escorted. We’ve had quite enough of your kind.”
This was interesting. It might not have anything to do with the matter she had come here to investigate, but maybe it did. The woman hadn’t gone all poopy, after all, until Holly mentioned Peter Maitland’s name. “I’m not a reporter.”
“I’ll take your word for that, but if you’re not a relative, I still must ask you to leave.”
“All right,” Holly said. She took a step or two away from the desk, then had an idea and turned back. “Suppose I had Mr. Maitland’s
son, Terry, call and vouch for me. Would that help?”
“I suppose,” Mrs. Kelly said. She looked grudging about it. “He would have to answer a few questions, though, to satisfy me that it wasn’t one of your colleagues pretending to be Mr. Maitland. That might sound a trifle paranoid to you, Ms. Gibney, but we have been through a lot here, a lot, and I take my responsibilities very seriously.”
“I understand.”
“Maybe you do and maybe you don’t, but it wouldn’t do you any good to speak to Peter, in any case. The police found that out. He’s in end-stage Alzheimer’s. If you talk to the younger Mr. Maitland, he’ll tell you.”
The younger Mr. Maitland won’t tell me anything, Mrs. Kelly, because he’s been dead for a week. But you don’t know that, do you?
“When was the last time the police tried to talk to Peter Maitland? I’m asking as a friend of the family.”
Mrs. Kelly considered this, then said: “I don’t believe you, and I’m not answering your questions.”
Bill would have gotten all chummy and confidential at this point, he and Mrs. Kelly might even have ended by exchanging email addresses and promising to stay in touch on Facebook, but although Holly was an excellent deductive thinker, she was still working on what her analyst called “people skills.” She left, a bit disheartened but not discouraged.
This kept getting more interesting.
6
At eleven o’clock on that bright and sunny Tuesday morning, Holly sat on a shady bench in Andrew Dean Park, sipping a latte from a nearby Starbucks and thinking about her queer interview with Mrs. Kelly.
The woman hadn’t known Terry was dead, probably none of the Heisman staff knew, and that didn’t surprise Holly very much. The murders of Frank Peterson and Terry Maitland had happened in a small city hundreds of miles away; if it had made the national news at all during a week when an ISIL sympathizer had shot eight people in a Tennessee shopping mall and a tornado had leveled a small Indiana town, it would only have been as a blip far down on Huffington Post, there and gone. And it wasn’t as if Marcy Maitland would have been in touch with her father-in-law to tell him the sad news—why would she, considering the man’s condition?
Are you a reporter? Mrs. Kelly had asked. We’ve had quite enough of your kind.
All right, reporters had come to call, also the police, and Mrs. Kelly, as the out-front person at the Heisman Memory Unit, had had to put up with them. But their questions hadn’t been about Terry Maitland, or she would have known he was dead. So what had been the great big fracking deal?
Holly set her coffee aside, took her iPad from her shoulder-bag, powered it up, and verified that she had five bars, which would save her from having to go back to the Starbucks. She paid a small fee to access the archives of the local paper (duly noting it for her expense report), and began her search on April 19th, the day Merlin Cassidy had dumped the van. Also the day it had almost certainly been re-stolen. She went through the local news carefully, and found nothing relating to the Memory Unit. That was true for the following five days, as well, although there was plenty of other news: car crashes, two home invasions, a nightclub fire, an explosion at a gas station, an embezzlement scandal involving a school department official, a manhunt for two missing sisters (white) from nearby Trotwood, a police officer accused of shooting an unarmed teenager (black), a synagogue defaced with a swastika.
Then, on April 25th, the front page headline screamed that Amber and Jolene Howard, the missing Trotwood girls, had been found dead and mutilated in a ravine not far from their home. An unnamed police source said “those little girls were subjected to acts of unbelievable savagery.” And yes, both girls had been sexually molested.
Terry Maitland had been in Dayton on April 25th. Of course he had been with his family, but . . .
There were no new developments on the 26th of April, the day Terry Maitland had visited his father for the last time, and nothing on the 27th, the day the Maitland family had flown home to Flint City. Then, on Saturday the 28th, the police announced that they were questioning “a person of interest.” Two days later, the person of interest was arrested. His name was Heath Holmes. He was thirty-four years of age, a Dayton resident who was employed as an orderly at the Heisman Memory Unit.
Holly picked up her latte, drank half of it in large gulps, then stared off into the shadowy depths of the park with wide eyes. She checked her Fitbit. Her pulse was galloping along at a hundred and ten beats a minute, and it wasn’t just caffeine pushing it.
She went back to the Daily News archives, scrolling through May and into June, following the thread of the story. Unlike Terry Maitland, Heath Holmes had survived his arraignment, but very much like Terry (Jeannie Anderson would have called it a confluence), he would never be tried for the murders of Amber and Jolene Howard. He had committed suicide in Montgomery County Jail on June 7th.
She checked her Fitbit again and saw her pulse was now up to one-twenty. She chugged down the rest of her latte anyway. Living dangerously.
Bill, I wish you were on this with me. I wish that so much. And Jerome, him, too. The three of us would have grabbed the reins and ridden this pony until it stopped running.
But Bill was dead, Jerome was in Ireland, and she wouldn’t get any closer to figuring this out than she already was. At least not on her own. But that didn’t mean she was done in Dayton. No, not quite.
She went back to her hotel room, ordered a sandwich from room service (damn the expense) and opened her laptop. She added what she now knew to the notes she had taken during her telephone conversation with Alec Pelley. She stared at the screen, and as she scrolled back and forth, an old saying of her mother’s popped into her head: Macy’s doesn’t tell Gimbels. The police in Dayton didn’t know about Frank Peterson’s murder, and the police in Flint City didn’t know about the murders of the Howard sisters. Why would they? The killings had taken place in different regions of the country and months apart. No one knew that Terry Maitland had been in both places, and no one knew about the connection to the Heisman Memory Unit. Every case had an information highway running through it, and this one was washed out in at least two places.
“But I know,” Holly said. “At least some of it. I do. Only . . .”
The knock at the door made her jump. She let in the room service waiter, signed the check, added a ten per cent tip (after making sure a service gratuity was not included), and hustled him out. Then she paced the room, munching away at a BLT she hardly tasted.
What didn’t she know that could be known? She was bothered, almost haunted, by the idea that the puzzle she was trying to work had missing pieces. Not because Alec Pelley had purposely held things back, she didn’t think that at all, but possibly because there was information—vital information—that he considered unimportant.
She supposed she could call Mrs. Maitland, only the woman would cry and be all sad and Holly wouldn’t know how to comfort her, she never did. Once not so long ago she had helped Jerome Robinson’s sister through a bad patch, but as a rule she was terrible at things like that. Plus, the poor woman’s mind would be fogged by her grief, and she also might neglect important facts, those little things that could make a whole picture out of the fragments, like the three or four jigsaw pieces that always seem to fall off the table and onto the floor, and you couldn’t see the whole picture until you hunted around and found them.
The person most apt to know all the details, the small ones as well as the big ones, was the detective who had done most of the witness interviews and arrested Maitland. After working with Bill Hodges, Holly believed in police detectives. Not all of them were good, to be sure; she’d had little respect for Isabelle Jaynes, Pete Huntley’s partner after Bill had retired from the force, and this one, Ralph Anderson, had made a bad mistake by arresting Maitland in a public place. A bad choice didn’t necessarily make him a bad detective, though, and Pelley had explained the crucial mitigating circumstance: Terry Maitland had been in close contact with Anderson’s
son. Certainly the interviews Anderson had done seemed thorough enough. She thought he was the one most likely to have any missing pieces.
It was something to think about. In the meantime, a return visit to the Heisman Memory Unit was in order.
7
She arrived at two thirty, this time driving around to the left side of the building, where signs announced EMPLOYEE PARKING and KEEP AMBULANCE BAY CLEAR. She chose a space at the far end of the lot, backing in so she could watch the building. By two forty-five, cars began to drift in as those working the three-to-eleven shift arrived. Around three, the day shift employees—mostly orderlies, some nurses, a couple of guys in suits, which probably made them doctors—began to leave. One of the suits drove away in a Cadillac, the other in a Porsche. They were doctors, all right. She evaluated the others carefully, and settled on a target. She was a middle-aged nurse wearing a tunic covered with dancing teddy bears. Her car was an old Honda Civic with rust on the sides, a cracked taillight that had been mended with duct tape, and a fading I’M WITH HILLARY sticker on the bumper. Before getting in, she paused to light a cigarette. The car was old and cigarettes were expensive. Better and better.
Holly followed her out of the parking lot, then three miles west, the city giving way first to a pleasant suburb, then to one not so pleasant. Here the woman turned into the driveway of a tract house on a street where others just like it stood almost hip to hip, many with cheap plastic toys marooned on the little patches of lawn. Holly parked at the curb, said a brief prayer for strength, patience, and wisdom, and got out.
“Ma’am? Nurse? Pardon me?”
The woman turned. She had the creased face and prematurely gray hair of a heavy smoker, so it was hard to tell her age. Maybe forty-five, maybe fifty. No wedding ring.