“GOD, PLEASE HELP ME DO THE BEST I CAN FOR PENNY DAHL and for her daughter. If someone took that young woman, I hope she’s still alive, and it’s your will I should find her. I’m taking my Lexapro, which is good. I’m smoking again, which is bad.” She thinks of Saint Augustine’s prayer and smiles into her clasped hands. “Help me to stop . . . but not today.”
With that taken care of, Holly Gibney opens her Covid drawer. There’s a box of fresh masks beside the box of wipes. She takes one and heads out to begin her investigation into the disappearance of Bonnie Rae Dahl.
TWENTY MINUTES LATER HOLLY IS DRIVING SLOWLY UP RED BANK Avenue. Just short of Deerfield Park she passes a Dairy Whip where a bunch of kids are skateboarding in the nearly deserted parking lot. She passes John-Boy’s Storage Center, Rates By Month And By Year. She passes an abandoned Exxon station that’s been sprayed with tags. There’s a Quik-Pik, also abandoned, the front windows boarded up.
After a weedy vacant lot, she comes to the auto repair shop where Bonnie’s bike was discovered. It’s a long building with a sagging roof and rusty corrugated metal sides. The cement parking area out front is sprouting weeds and even a few sunflowers through its cracked surface. To Holly it doesn’t look like a building worth saving, let alone buying, but Marvin Brown must have felt differently, because there’s a sale pending sign in front. The sign features a photo of a smiling moon-faced man who is identified as George Rafferty, Your City Real Estate Specialist. Holly parks in front of the roll-up doors and notes down the agent’s name and number.
She keeps a box of nitrile gloves in the console. Barbara Robinson specialordered them for her as a birthday present, and they’re covered with various emojis: smiley faces, frowny faces, kissy faces and pissy faces. Quite amusing. Holly snaps on a pair, then goes around to the back of her little car and opens the trunk. There’s a neatly folded raincoat on top of her toolbox. She won’t need that, the day is sunny and hot, but she wants her red rubber galoshes. It isn’t Covid she’s worried about out here in the open, but there are bushes on both sides of the deserted repair.
