Trouble Never Sleeps

by Stephanie Tromly

  TWENTY-FOUR

  We walk out of the building.

  “Digby, what are you doing?” I say when Digby reaches into the shallow pond and fishes out one of the guns I’d thrown in.

  Digby wipes off the gun with his sleeve and says, “Relax. It’ll just be a prop.”

  When we get to Art’s sedan, Digby tells me to step back. He points the gun and is about to pop the trunk when a gush of water comes out the barrel. He wipes it off again and says, “It’s okay. This is why we rehearse.”

  I tighten my hold on the shovel and steel myself for a fight. Digby opens the trunk and is about to yell something when we both realize . . .

  “Are they asleep?” I say.

  We watch Silk and his father pretzeled together and snoring in the trunk.

  “How can they sleep? They’ve been stuffed in a trunk against their will,” I say. “Is extreme relaxation a side effect of stupidity?”

  “I would mock them, except I haven’t slept in forever,” Digby says. “I would seriously trade a couple of IQ points for that kind of chill.”

  When it becomes clear that Silk and his father aren’t going to wake up on their own, Digby has me bang on the trunk with the shovel. Finally, Silk and his father stir and sit up.

  Silk sees the gun and cowers. “Please . . .”

  “Get out of the car,” Digby says.

  Digby listens to Silk’s and his father’s incoherent begging for a while before saying, “Stop crying.” And then he throws Silk the keys to the Bentley.

  “What’s this?” Silk asks.

  “Press the remote start,” Digby says.

  Silk does and jumps when the Bentley’s engine comes on. He turns to Digby, incredulous.

  “Do you have a guy?” Digby asks Silk’s father.

  Silk’s father smiles, finally understanding. “Yeah. I got a guy.”

  “Don’t take less than a hundred for it. That car’s your get-out-stay-out money. Start fresh. Brand-new street corner,” Digby says. “On some other Main Street far, far away. Where you will forget all about River Heights.”

  Digby looks nauseated to do it but when Silk’s father stretches out his hand and says, “Deal,” Digby takes it and says, “Far, far away.”

  “I’ve been feeling a little tropical lately,” Silk’s father says.

  “You have a week before people start looking for this thing,” Digby says.

  “Plenty of time,” Silk’s father says.

  Silk still looks confused. His father takes the keys from him and says, “Just get in the car.”

  “What about this guy?” Silk says.

  Silk’s father says, “You mean the guy who’s giving you a hundred grand to completely forget him?”

  When Silk still doesn’t get it, his father smacks him upside the head. Finally, Silk says, “Oh . . . right.” And they get in the Bentley and drive away.

  “Just like that? You really think they’ll stay away?” I say.

  Digby waves me off. “Meh . . . at least one of them will get the other killed and then spend the rest of his short life running away from the person they double-crossed.”

  Art and Jim come out in time to watch Book’s Bentley pulling out of the lot. Digby hands Art the gun.

  Art sniffs the end of the barrel and groans. “Chlorine . . .”

  “Aw . . . did we ruin your gun?” Digby says. “Oh, also, we’re taking your car now.” Digby’s already walking to the sedan when an idea occurs to him and he comes back to say, “I’m sending someone to you next week. His name’s Aldo and you’re going to hire him as a driver.”

  “What?” Art says.

  “He needs a job. I don’t care if you pay him to drive your farts into the wind. He needs a job. Benefits. Place to live. Understand?” Digby says. “Start working off some of that nighttime guilt, friend.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Art says. But he sees Digby is a hundred percent serious, so Art says, “Fine. I’m sure there’s something we can use him for.”

  Digby unlocks the door and we start to climb in.

  “Wait a minute, you put the money in a safety-deposit box? Downtown?” Digby says.

  Art nods.

  “Which bank?” Digby says.

  “First Union Atlantic,” Art says.

  “Which branch?” Digby says.

  “Third and Catherine,” Art says. “But that branch is gone now. I went back last week to look—”

  “At the time, you never went back? Asked around? Looked at CCTV to see who was picking up the money?” Digby says.

  “At the time, all I could think of was that I just wanted it all to go away,” Art says.

  “You don’t even know if that person did what they said they would. They could’ve taken the money and drowned her in a lake,” Digby says.

  “Don’t you think that’s the thought that’s haunted me all these years?” Art says. “I even stuck my neck out to get a copy of the police files to see if I’d recognize something that’d help me find who took her.”

  “And?” I say.

  Art shakes his head. “I’m sorry.”

  I see Digby wants to say a million angry things to Art but he eventually just sighs and takes the data tape out of his pocket. He throws it at Art and says, “Tell Book it’s done. I’m done with all of you.” He stops and realizes, “I’m done with all of this.”

  “Wait,” Art says. “Will I get my car back?”

  Digby throws him a nasty look, gets in the car, and starts the ignition. But then we just sit in the parking lot, engine idling. He doesn’t put the car into drive until Art and Jim finally turn and walk back into the building.

  “I didn’t trust myself not to yank on the wheel and run them over,” Digby says.

  “I can’t believe you didn’t,” I say. “I would’ve.”

  Digby is silent for a long time. “No one came out of this happy, Princeton. De Groot’s been sitting in that white bubble of his, thinking about death for ten years. Book buys himself insanely expensive cars so he doesn’t have to deal with the fact that he’s just a gopher for a half-dead maniac. And then those two idiots . . .” Digby waves at the office park receding in our rearview mirror to indicate he means Art and Jim. “What we have here is a bunch of people trying to outthink each other when, really, we’re just all living the same sick cosmic joke . . . but nobody gets to laugh.”

  “There’s Sally,” I say. “She’s still out there.”

  Digby sighs and says, “I don’t know, Princeton. When I said back there that I was done with all this, it felt pretty true.”

  * * *

  • • •

  There is no question of his driving himself home and when we get to my house, Digby follows me into the living room and collapses onto the sofa. He stares at the ceiling and laughs.

  “Are you okay?” I say.

  “I haven’t been this okay in nine years,” he says. “Why? Don’t I look okay?” He turns to face me. His eyes are red and they’re clearly having trouble focusing. The skin on his face is gray and he looks clammy.

  “Um . . . let me get you a glass of water or something?” I say.

  Digby makes a vaguely grateful sound.

  When I get to the kitchen, I suddenly remember that besides the small bites of food I’d managed to steal while serving food in the diner, I haven’t eaten in a really long time. I am starving. It starts with taking a few bites from the leftover pizza in the fridge, moves on to finishing off a bowl of pasta salad, and ends with my eating straight out of the peanut butter jar as I fill a bottle with water for Digby.

  I get back to the living room and I am not surprised to find Digby is fast asleep already. All I want to do is crawl into bed but I catch a whiff of myself and drag myself through the shower. As the layers of adrenaline-tinged sweat roll off me, I contemplate the
image of Digby, standing in de Groot’s garden, telling me that the truth is almost always a disappointment.

  And then I realize that I am having a problem accepting it really is over for the same reason I haven’t stopped thinking about Digby’s telling my mother that he planned to go to college and become an actuary. In all my subsequent googlings of the field of actuarial science, I have yet to find a way to think this is not the saddest surrender to banality ever. I can’t handle thinking Digby could be the peak-in-high-school guy that everyone mocks in the “remember when” game during class reunions. That thought is so tragic, I start to cry and I fall asleep, my wet hair still wrapped in a towel.

  * * *

  • • •

  I wake up the next morning with a headache, a mouthful of unbrushed teeth, and eyes bloodshot from crying. I’ve never had a post-alcohol hangover but I doubt it could be much worse than this feeling.

  I look at the time and marvel that I am as alert as I am after only three hours of sleep. I try to fall back asleep but can’t, so I get dressed and decide to do something about my headache.

  Downstairs, I’m surprised to find an almost-full pot of fresh-made coffee in the kitchen. My mother is still asleep in her room and Cooper is still not back from his shift, so I wonder if maybe Digby is already awake. And then I notice the jar of peanut butter is gone from the cupboard and I know he is.

  “Digby?” The couch is empty. I wonder if he’s gone home but then I hear the whirr of my mom’s printer. I head to the study and find Digby printing off something from Cooper’s laptop. “Hey.” I close the door behind me and say, “Hey, man. What are you doing?”

  Digby looks up at me, eerily bright-eyed and fresh. “Oh, I bought some new kicks. I’m just printing the receipt,” he says.

  “Oh.” It feels weird to be disappointed about that but there it is. “What color?”

  “What color?” Digby gives me a weird look and hands me a piece of paper from the pile he’s printed. “Did you really think I was buying shoes? Are you okay, Princeton?”

  It takes me a while to register that I’m in fact looking at a River Heights Police Department document. The header says PAYROLL and the rest of the page is a long list of names and addresses in a tiny font.

  “What is this?” I say.

  “If we assume that Art’s police department contact chose to ask for the First Union Atlantic safety-deposit box at Third and Catherine specifically because it was either on their beat or that they lived near there . . .” Digby says.

  “I thought you said you were done,” I say.

  “What?” he says.

  I say, “Last night, you said you were done looking for Sally—”

  “I hadn’t eaten in hours and hadn’t slept in two days,” he says. “Temporary madness. Why did you even listen to me?” He gets up to look over the list with me. “See a name you recognize?” When I don’t find it fast enough, Digby points at a name halfway down the page. “Michael Alphonse Cooper.”

  “Whaaat?” I say. It’s too preposterous to contemplate. “That’s ridiculous. Cooper? Our Cooper? He thinks even free-range eggs are too cruel. And you’ve heard him talking about the fricking bees . . . he couldn’t kidnap a kid.”

  “Maybe that vegan crap is his way of repenting,” Digby says. When I roll my eyes, Digby says, “I mean, it makes some sense. Why else would he let us get away with everything he does?”

  “Digby, the man saved up for six months to buy a fruit dehydrator. He does not have a box of money lying around,” I say. “It must be someone else.” I go back to reading the names on the sheet and suddenly, I see something that trips a switch in my brain. “This name.”

  “Rosetta Pickles? Early retirement,” Digby says. “What about her? She wasn’t on the case. Her name’s not on any of the reports . . .”

  “You don’t remember her? The lady with the big mole on her lip?” I say. I know I sound crazy and there’s really no better way to explain what I’m thinking, so I run over to Cooper’s computer and go down the Google hole until I find the news footage I’d watched months ago.

  “She was the sweetest little girl,” Rosetta Pickles says on the news footage.

  “She used the past tense,” Digby says. “That’s weird. Cops are trained not to do that when they talk to media.”

  “Weird, right?” I say, and then I google again and show him the real estate listing for the Central Park–adjacent apartment that Rosetta Pickles had bought after she’d left the River Heights police force.

  “When did you see this?” Digby says.

  “Last year,” I say.

  “Last year?” Digby says. “And you never said anything?”

  “I’d just met you,” I say. “I was snooping around, trying to figure out what your deal was . . .”

  Digby goes back into the police pension database and starts looking into Rosetta Pickles’s record.

  “I can’t believe you’ve been sitting on this,” he says.

  “It didn’t seem like it was anything . . .” I say. “I just thought it was strange . . . how she sounded on the news.”

  Digby stops at a screen.

  “Wait,” I say. “Does that say ‘deceased’?”

  Digby presses the down arrow and sees a name and address in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. “Her sister’s the beneficiary.”

  “No mention of a kid. I guess that’d be too much to ask,” I say. By the time I turn to him and ask, “What do you think?” Digby has already opened a new tab and is looking at flights to Philadelphia. “When are you going?” I say. I see him click today’s date. And then I see him click “2” passengers. “I’ll go get dressed.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  “Ah, Cherry Hill,” I say.

  “You’ve been there before?” Digby says.

  “My mother went to college in Philadelphia and she used to go to Cherry Hill to bowl and eat Chinese food,” I say. “She took me during one of her class reunions.”

  “Great schools, bad traffic, insane property taxes—first-world problems,” Digby says.

  “That’s good, right?” I say. “That she’s probably in a good situation?”

  “Is it?” he says. “I don’t know what to hope for.”

  We print out our boarding passes and go through security. We stop at the Hudson News, where I read some of the more embarrassing gossip magazines before buying a copy of The Economist to redeem myself. I finish paying and join Digby as he stares, unmoving, at a rack of Disney princess junk.

  “She’s thirteen, Digby.” I point at the rack of lip balms and tampons. “This is probably more her deal now.”

  “Nine years is a long time,” Digby says.

  We board the plane and I try to relax, but Digby is sitting rigid and staring straight ahead in the seat next to me. I read and reread the same article on something I immediately forget about mere seconds after I look up from the page. After a half an hour of this, I give up and put away the magazine.

  “Hey. Are you okay?” I say.

  He nods.

  “Digby, you have to take a breath,” I say.

  “I mean, there was no mention of a kid or anything,” Digby says. “So we might get there and . . . nothing.” He sounds weirdly relieved by the thought.

  “Is that what you want?” I say.

  “I don’t know what to hope for,” he says again.

  * * *

  • • •

  “Well,” Digby says. “It’s a bakery.”

  Skolnik’s looks like a pillar-of-the-community kind of family joint. “Since 1945,” its masthead announces.

  “Is this the right place?” Digby checks the piece of paper with the details of Rosetta Pickles’s benefits payout over and over. “It can’t be the right place.”

  “So they have a bakery. Why not?” I say, even though I can’t quite make the concep
tual leap myself. I think about the kidnapping, the extortion, the running, the screaming, the lying. And then I look at the old-timey bagel place going through a hipster gentrification. Nothing about it makes sense.

  But, to be sure, I Yelp it and find that: “Yeah, it says here, Owned and operated by the original founding family, the Pickleses.”

  “What else does it say?” Digby says.

  “Please don’t make me read Yelp. The comments on it are just so absurd . . .” I say, but I can’t physically stop my eyes from seeing the words. “Like this. Two stars because the plain bagel is too plain. And then this one says the salmon is too fishy. . . .” I can’t stop.

  “Okay, okay, I’m sorry I asked. May I?” Digby takes the phone from me.

  He scrolls through and reads out, “The service is awful. When I asked for the manager, the aggressive counter girl told me her family owned the place and then threw a bagel at me. Also, the bagels are really hard.” Digby thinks for a second. “Sally?”

  “Wow. So you’re saying your rudeness is in there at a genetic level?” I say.

  We stare at the shopfront for a few seconds more.

  “Are you ready?” When he nods, I set off toward the door. But then he pulls me back.

  “What?” I say.

  “Hit me,” he says.

  “What?” I say.

  “I’m nervous. I need you to hit me,” he says. “As hard as you can. Take your best shot.”

  “Are you kidding me? No,” I say. “You’re nervous? Aww, poor little nervous baby. Is little baby nervous?” I tickled his chin to really sell the condescension. “It’s okay, baby. You’ll be okay, baby—”

  Digby snaps out of it. He straightens his suit and gives back my phone.

  “Emotional brutality. Thank you. Works as good as a slap,” he says, and strides to the door.