The Victor County Sheriff’s Office could have been a dentist’s office. It reminded Merrily a bit of the cube farm she’d so recently worked in, and she thought suddenly of the messages on her phone from Kath, left unread.
She’ll think I’m dead.
“Help you?”
Merrily wasn’t sure which man behind the counter had spoken, since neither of them looked in her direction. She focused on the younger man, tender-aged, with a scrawny look about him. An intern? Or did people just look that young to her now? He finally glanced over, did a double take, then hopped up to be of service. He was several inches shorter than she was, but he didn’t seem to mind looking up.
He had a name tag. “Zachary, hi. I could use your help. How can I get a copy of a police report from . . .” She sucked her teeth to show it was a big ask. “Thirty years ago?”
Zachary cleared his throat and answered a spot over her shoulder. “Well, that’s not too difficult. All you need to do is fill out a request for public information and there’s a small fee once we know how many pages we need to copy, but then you’d get a response within thirty days.”
“Thirty days?” It came out sounding harsh, unfriendly. She turned on her ChatX charm. “Thirty days is too long for my . . . needs. Is there any other option? Is there anything you could do, perhaps?”
The stress she put on the word was almost a physical stroke, like a hand reaching to pet a cat. The cat, arching its back to meet the touch.
His voice lowered. “I could—”
“What’s going on, Zach?” The other man had finally looked her way. “Freedom of Information Act forms are right there on the counter.”
“Thank you,” she said. Some people you didn’t need to bother with. This guy had a fat gold band on his left ring finger and a scowl. His wife was cutting back on treats in his lunch bag. His shoes pinched. Whatever it was, she could sense it like a cloud, an aura, around him. She reached for one of the forms. “Thank you, Zachary,” she whispered. “I’ll just take this and be going. Where’s the ladies’ room, please?”
Zachary’s neck was pink. “Down the hall to the right.”
She winked at him, rotated, walked away. When she was sure he could see the length of her, she glanced back over her shoulder.
Down the hall to the right, she waited outside the ladies’, checking her phone. She messaged Kath and heard back immediately, with a panting message about Billy, their old boss. He’s accused of sexual harassment, Kath wrote. No one is shocked.
Who turned him in? she typed but didn’t care. It was like another life. It was like a prehistoric time, something out of a history book. Billy? Dinosaur. If she’d stayed, it might have been her, and all the women on fourth would be burning up their data plans trying to figure out what she’d worn, what she’d said, how much she had asked for it.
She felt someone at her shoulder and turned. “Hey, Zachary,” she purred.
NO POLICE REPORT. None. The kidnapping might not have ever happened, for how much the local law knew about it. But Zachary went back and looked up Rick’s name, too, all of them, just in case. Under his last name of Banks, Rick showed up in the system as a string of moving violations—failing to stop at a stop sign, speeding—and one outstanding ticket he’d never paid. Headlight out. Merrily looked over the handwritten list Zachary had brought her. Bad driver. Bad luck. But then there was one last notation: B&E.
“Breaking and entering? What happened after that?” she asked, the paper gently shaking in her hands.
“Nothing,” Zachary said. “No more traffic stops, nothing.”
“When was this?”
Zachary had to go back and look. When he came back out, he looked less hopeful. He gave a date. Thirty years.
“So he’s ticketed, ticketed, ticketed . . . is that normal?”
Zachary dragged his eyes away from her chest. “And then nothing for thirty years. That’s probably the abnormal part.”
That part she could explain. Zachary had thought to jot down an address, current at the time of Rick’s last arrest. Merrily entered the address into her phone’s search bar. It was only a couple of blocks away.
Breaking and entering . . . where? “I can’t,” Zachary said. “My boss just asked if I have an upset stomach, I’m visiting the john so much. I better get back to work.”
His tone begged for an excuse not to, but she had what she’d come for and another lead or two. He passed her one last slip of paper, a phone number. From the lobby she texted him an emoji kiss. Hashtag thankYOU. She didn’t wait around for him to consider it an invitation.
She was standing on the steps, the map to Rick’s old house on her phone, when a shadow fell across her hand. Merrily jumped back.
Alice Fine stood in front of her. “What are you doing here?”
Her face was a fierce, hot white, long strands of hair flying outward in the wind. Merrily stared, captivated by the sight of human combustion in process.
“What. Are. You. Doing. Here?”
“What? What are you— I just wanted to see the place.” She wouldn’t say this was her second trip. “Rick used to live here.”
Alice dismissed her and the town with a wave, a piece of yellow paper flapping in her hands. “This shithole. Well, I wouldn’t want to stand in the way of you getting to know Daddy.” She brushed past Merrily, down the stairs.
What was her problem? “Not everyone gets raised as royalty.”
Alice whipped around. “What do you mean by that?”
“You act like you’re somehow better than everyone else. Juby says—”
“Juby!”
“She says you’re not the absolute lunatic I think you are, that I should give you a chance.”
“A chance to what?”
Merrily put her phone away. “She said you were fun.”
“I’m not that fun.”
Merrily felt a smile twitch at her lips. “What’s fun to Alice Fine? What do you do for hobbies, besides hanging out with dead people?”
Alice flinched. “I don’t fucking knit, OK? I’m only here because I have to be.”
“So we have that in common,” Merrily said. “We’re just a couple of . . .” She couldn’t think of the right way to say it.
“Blank slates?”
She practices mean lines in the mirror. “I wasn’t going to go that far.”
“How far would you go?”
Alice was still in the conversation they were having, but Merrily pictured Searcher’s hundred-dollar bills flying at her. She could taste those bills in the back of her throat. The ones he’d forced her to take, shoved into her pocket with his hot hand, grazing her hip through her coat—those were folded up and hidden in her purse. She should have taken them all. “I have somewhere to be.”
Merrily pulled out her phone again and held it up. She took the steps down and followed the blue arrow down the block.
Alice fell into step with her. “And where is that?”
“Nowhere you’d care about.”
“I used to live in this town, too, you know.”
“This shithole?” Merrily said.
They walked in silence for a block, turned up a street lined with houses left to fight off nature and time. Merrily checked her phone, faltered.
“Where are we going?” Alice said.
Merrily continued down the street. Within a few steps, Alice caught up again. “Is your mom doing OK?” Alice said.
Merrily glanced her way. “The guy she loved died but outed her as a liar on his way to the grave. She’s great. Oh, and we think our house might have been bugged.”
“Bugged? Why would your place be bugged?”
“Rick was in witness protection. That’s federal shit. They can do anything they want. Bugging a little casita in Port Beth, Indiana, that’s probably a ten-minute job. Our phones? No problem.”
Alice stared. “Witness—”
“Shh!”
“If your house was bugged and your phone, who do you think we’re keeping secrets from at this point?”
Merrily stopped. “That’s the problem, Alice. I don’t know. Maybe it’s you I should be scared of. Maybe you’re the enemy.”
Alice looked away. “I might be.”
Merrily checked the map on her phone screen. Alice leaned in. “Is that the phone you think is—”
“New phone, untouched by human hands other than mine. Are you coming?”
Alice followed, feet scuffing the sidewalk. But Merrily knew that trick, one of her mom’s favorites, and it wasn’t going to slow her down.