Holly woke early, toasted two slices of bread, buttered them, slathered on some strawberry jam, and shoved them into her mouth, checking the contents of her purse on the way out the door. She examined herself in the rearview mirror, breathed deep enough for air to penetrate to the tips of her toes, and drove the few blocks to the town square, parking in the lot behind John’s office. His car wasn’t there yet, but she knew he wouldn’t be far behind.
It was probably silly to drive when she could walk the distance in ten minutes, but having her car close by gave her a sense of security. Like she could jump in and escape if she needed to. And from her parking space she could just see the bench where the man usually sat. It was still empty. After their initial encounter four years ago, she’d noticed him several times, but had avoided him like the plague. He gave her the creeps.
Vernon Meracle. That’s the name Stuart Eisenstat had given John. Was he really Father Moody? Right here in Saluki? Stuart said he was, but Holly needed her own proof. She needed to see him, compare him to the man she’d once known. Slouched down in her seat, her face partially concealed by a baseball cap, she waited for him to show. She tried to think through her next actions, step by step, how to approach him without startling him, how to position herself to take the photo with enough good light that his features were easily identifiable. Should she first say something to him, about their earlier encounter, pretend to take a photo of something behind him? Or ambush him, get the photo, and run?
John had wanted to take the photo for her, but if there was any chance the man was connected to her father’s disappearance like Stuart said, she wanted to be the one to take it. She needed to satisfy herself.
John hadn’t even wanted to tell her about Meracle/Moody, hadn’t wanted to raise her hopes that she’d finally find out something about her father’s disapparance. But she could tell something had been bothering him for weeks. The closer she came to finishing the Halfway House and the more she talked of trying to get some programs started for the prisoners when the detention center opened, the weirder he’d become.
Then finally, he spilled the news. He’d had Stuart digging into her father’s disappearance ever since he figured out she was the poor girl who’d pinned her hopes on an eager senatorial aide. “I wasn’t able to find out a damn thing back then,” he’d said, “but Stuart’s got a whole different level of connections.” God, it was such a crazy world. She couldn’t believe it when she found out John’s friend was the same guy who’d shown up at her bar in Cairo. And now he thought this old man on a park bench watching the Islamic Information Center was her father’s Father Moody.
Unbelievable.
She gripped the steering wheel. If it was true, she didn’t know what she’d do. She picked the camera up again. It was Kathy’s. John had loaned her his wife’s digital camera. “It’s the highest resolution digital out there,” he’d said. “Just point and click.” Or point and pull. Her pistol was tucked in her purse, loaded, the safety on.
It was already past 8:00 a.m. The man was nowhere to be seen. Stupidly, she realized he probably didn’t sit on the same bench every time. She got out of her car, and for no good reason, shut the car door quietly. The only thing that gave any sense of reality to this moment was recalling similar scenes from television or movies. And those weren’t real.
She rounded the corner and walked toward the park. And then she saw him, sitting with legs crossed, a cigarette between his lips. Each step she took reminded her she probably didn’t look nearly as nonchalant as she wanted to appear. Every crack in the pavement, every weed growing out of them, caught her attention. Her anxiety heightened as she got closer. Even though she wasn’t doing anything illegal, her heart beat as if the sirens were already singing and red and blue lights were strobing around her.
About twenty yards away, she stopped within his view, leaned back and pretended to be framing a shot of an old tree. Then she looked around and pretended to be surprised to see the man.
“Well, hey there,” she said, cheerfully, as if she had just recognized him. “I remember you.”
The man countered her greeting with a grunt. “What brings you back? You a shutterbug now?”
“Just interested in the view. The fading colors of fall. Those last few leaves hanging on for dear life, you know? Just another day in paradise before they drop for good.”
Holly wanted to believe the man was turning the phrase over in his mind. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought she detected the moment when familiarity hit home. She pounced. “My father used to say, ‘Another day in paradise’ all the time.”
“Is that right?” The man’s brows furrowed and he uncrossed his legs and sat forward.
“He loved the fall colors. Elias Haddad. He’s been missing since ’73. You ever had someone go missing like that?”
She could sense his muscles tense, the emotions move across his face like ripples. “You best make a quick retreat out of here,” he growled. “I don’t think there’s room for two on this bench today.”
“Last I checked, it was a public park.” She positioned her five-foot frame in front of him and held the camera as if setting up a shot of the courthouse behind him. “Besides, I’m just an amateur photographer out to catch that elusive perfect picture. Maybe today’s the day I finally get what I’m looking for.”
The man started to rise. He didn’t look agile, but his legs were much longer than Holly’s.
“Don’t make life difficult for yourself. Get the hell out of here.” His body began to uncoil and move toward her. Then suddenly he was looming over her, hand outstretched toward the camera. He batted it to the ground as she yelped and took a step back.
He bent to pick it up, and Holly stuck her hand into her purse. When he looked back up, he was staring into the barrel of a gun. With her arm braced snug against her side, she motioned for him to sit back down. He didn’t move.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she said. “If you run, I’ll scream that you assaulted me. I’m on the town council now. I know the police chief, and my friend is an attorney. Neither one of them will take kindly to having a town official attacked right here near the county courthouse.”
The man slowly sank back onto the bench.
With both her gaze and her gun trained on him, she bent at the knees and picked up the camera. “Make a move and you’ll not only fuck up my pictures,” she said, “but you’ll end up getting a different sort of picture taken down at the emergency room. And then at the police station. And mug shots never turn out well.” She wrinkled her nose in distaste as she positioned the camera with her left hand, looked through the lens, and hit the shutter button. She may have snapped three times. She may have snapped thirty. She was too nervous to count.
“Okay, I think we’re done here,” she said, keeping her voice as conversational as possible. “My mom was a cop, you know. And I’ve had this little friend,” she waved the gun slightly, “since I was in high school. Been going to a shooting range for years. The moral of this personal story is that you are not to move a muscle until I am out of this park. If I see you move, you’ll need to be tended to by one of Saluki’s first responders.” She pointed over his shoulders. “Police station is just a few blocks away. But I’m sure you know that.”
Her hands were shaking when she strode in the back door of John’s office and started talking. Before she was done, he shot out of his chair. “YOU DID WHAT? For God’s sake, Holly, you can’t pull a gun on someone in the middle of the city park! What if he reports you?”
“He’s not going to report me.” She handed over the camera and told him word for word what was said. John connected the camera to his laptop and downloaded the images. He picked two of the best, printed them, and then attached the the jpegs to an email to Penndel. Penndel said he had a friend who could flow them through facial recognition software that could project what a person might look like in thirty years—or what he looked like thirty years before. Stuart insisted all this wasn’t necessary, that he already had enough confirmation Meracle and Moody were one and the same. But Holly needed more than Stuart’s word.
John zoomed in on one image and looked up at Holly. “What do you think?”
She peered over his shoulder, close enough that her breasts were pressed up against his back. “I don’t know. I was young then and he’s old now. I just can’t tell if it’s the same man.” Then she smacked him on the shoulder making him flinch. “John! I have to go home.”
“Home? Okay, are you coming right back?”
“No, I mean home home. Joliet. My mom’s storage container. I remember one Fourth of July picnic where my father took a picture of me, Maya, and Moody.” She couldn’t stop herself from shuddering at the memory. “Her old pictures are in her storage locker, and if I can find it I’ll know for sure if the guy is really Moody or not.”
John was on his feet. “I’m coming with you.”
She already had her purse over her shoulder. “No. I need to do this by myself. Besides, you have … you have other obligations.”
He heaved a long sigh and chewed on his lip. Jesus Christ, he wanted to go with her. He wanted to be with her. “Okay, okay. You’re right.”
“I need to borrow your phone, though. I have to call Penndel.”
A stab of jealousy tore through him. “You’re taking Penndel?”
She looked up at him, her head cocked slightly. “No, just letting him know where I’m going and to call you if his guy finds anything.” She held out both hands. “No cell phone, remember. And then I need to call my uncle, let him know I’m coming.”
She left a message for Penndel and then dug through her purse for her old phone book. She dialed the eldest of her uncles and waited as the phone rang and rang. “Pick up, pick up, pick up,” she mumbled. Finally, a deep voice came on the other end of the line.
“Uncle Peter? It’s Cheryl. I need to get into Mom’s storage unit.” She’d only been into the storage unit once since her mother’s funeral. It was full of the things no one wanted to part with, but no one wanted to live with, either. “I’m coming up today.”
“Today? Give me an ETA, and I’ll meet you there.”
“No!” Holly hoped she didn’t sound too eager not to have him there. Uncle Peter had always been good to her, in his own gruff way. “What I mean is if you will just give me the code to get into the unit, that’s all I need. I don’t want to inconvenience you. There are some things I’d like to go through. On my own, you know?” She hoped that sounded convincing.
Her uncle gave her the code and she wrote it down and repeated it twice. After she hung up, she turned back to John. She’d been sitting on the edge of his desk, and John had been watching her with something between mild panic at her leaving, happiness at being able to help her find some answers, and a longing so deep it bore right through his soul.
“You know you can’t.”
“I know, but, Jesus, Holly—”
“I’ll call if I find anything. Promise.” And then she was gone.
She pulled into Joliet late afternoon, the sun having neatly tucked itself beneath the horizon for the day. She drove out to the facility on Mall Loop Drive, territory unfamiliar to her. She had only been back to Joliet a handful of times, usually for the ritualistic holidays with family on the other side of town.
The code worked fine, as did the lock on their unit. She pulled up on the cord to the garage-door like entrance and wondered when was the last time anyone had been here.
In no time, she found the deep, plastic storage bin containing shoeboxes full of photographs, some of which had been maniacally categorized, labeled, and organized in her father’s neat script, and others which had been just tossed into boxes. Those had been taken after her father disappeared. The rustic smell of the cedar chest that once held these photographs at the house on Eastern Avenue materialized out of thin air like an old favorite song hanging in memory.
Her father had loved to take pictures. Her mother hated having her picture taken, unless she was in uniform. Holly had always been the stand-in whenever Elias needed a person in his photographs. She remembered the hand-held contraption that printed words on thin strips of hard plastic with an adhesive stubborn enough to someday become an archeological artifact. And she remembered that he had sent photos home to Aleppo, to her grandparents, along with whatever extra money he could part with. All through Father Moody.
Holly opened a box labeled, Shishkabob Feasts. She thumbed through the photographs, but couldn’t help dwelling on several of them. It had been decades since she had seen these, since just her mother’s funeral. Many were of Maya and her family, shots from a distance of her mother, even shots of the food! He had wasted an entire roll, it appeared, on the trays of baklava from different close-up angles. There were plates of food, bowls full of cubes of meat, piles of sliced tomatoes and onions, different shots of cucumber and yogurt salad in various bowls, and slices of bread soaked with the meat’s juices. That was her father, she thought, occupied with the minute details that made life worth living.
The hot, stale air of the corrugated box was stifling, so Holly took a few boxes of photos to her car, sat sideways on the passenger seat, legs stretched and crossed out under the door, ankles resting on the pavement.
Here was a full box of photos of her mother in her police uniform, not as opposed to having her picture taken if she could hide behind her badge. Holly’s eyes prickled despite herself, but she retained her composure. She had a job to do.
She returned to the box labeled the picnic feasts. She looked for the one, recursive memory she had, of being posed by her father with Maya and Father Moody in front of that big black car. Her skin began to crawl in the same way it had so many years ago when the man touched her.
She found a photo of Elias and Father Moody, which must have been taken by her mom, or maybe one of the uncles. After a few more minutes pouring through each of the photographs, she found the one of her as a nine year old with Moody and Maya. Immediately, she matched the outfit she was wearing to the age she was at the time.
From the glove compartment, she picked up the set of photographs she’d taken of the man on the bench. She held the new one next to the older one, faded black and white and yellowed at the edges. No resemblance. Then she compared them in the brighter light of the car’s headlights. She couldn’t even tell whether the heights of the two men were similar since one was taken with him sitting down and the other standing up. Is this what happens when you age, Holly wondered. Or was plastic surgery involved? The face of the man on the bench certainly didn’t seem artificial, but who knew? And who knew who he really was? And what his connection to her father was. He’s a trusted friend, her father always said. “I don’t think so,” she said to the photo.
The place was now lit only by yellow halogen lights. Loneliness hung over the facility and she felt like a child frustrated and fearful she couldn’t find her way out of a maze. No, she was now finding her way to the end of that damn maze. Finally. She heard the crunch of gravel. At the other end of the row of storage units, another car had parked. A woman got out of the vehicle and proceeded to unlock her unit. Whatever it was the woman was looking for, Holly hoped she’d find it.
Holly put the box in the back seat and went back into the unit. Seeing the images of the clothes her father used to wear brought back the scent of tobacco, the cigarettes, small cigars, and even the long periods when he smoked a pipe. The smell had permeated everything that originally came from Syria, lingering with a tenacity that she even now marveled at. It had been an odor beyond her ability to categorize, and now it called to her. She dug a flashlight out of her trunk and started rummaging through boxes. Her mother had saved all of his clothes after all, instead of disposing of them like she’d threatened so many times.
An hour later, she pulled out an old wool sweater, held it to her nose and inhaled. She felt like she’d found an old friend, The fabric was thick, baggy, and sturdy, a supple form of burlap, if such a thing existed, and with two large buttons and a belt, it was more like a short bathrobe than the kinds of sweaters people wore now. It hung low, below the hips and the large pockets on each sides could comfortably house a puppy. She remembered her father wearing it. And later, after he was gone, she remembered slipping it off the hanger and wearing it when her mother wasn’t around. She ran a finger around one of the buttons and then folded it carefully and put it back in the box. She stood to go, stretching her back and wondering what time it was. She was about to pull down the door, but then stopped. What was she thinking? She didn’t know when she’d get back to Joliet to sort through everything one final time. She’d have to do it sooner or later. But for now, there was one thing she knew she was taking with her. She went back to retrieve the sweater.
Once in receipt of Holly’s photograph of the two girls standing next to the man in front of a long black sedan, John sent a copy to Penndel and Stuart. Penndel’s friend’s friend, the facial recognition expert, matched the recent photo Holly took in the park and the old one Holly retrieved from her mother’s storage container. “The match has a ninety-five percent confidence level,” he told Holly.
“I knew it,” she said.
In DC, Stuart took one look at it and knew it was the same Vernon Meracle he’d interviewed. John told him Holly was the girl on the left, but Stuart knew immediately which one she was. The blonde proprietor of Holly Chicago’s bar in Cairo was still years in the future, but the shape of the face and the little girl’s eyes hadn’t changed. He still remembered them from all those years ago.
As a child, Holly’s hair had been dark brown, almost black. She made a sour face at the camera and visibly leaned away from the man next to her. Her shorts hung down to above her knees, and she wore a peasant blouse with a cap like a Greek sailor would wear, short brimmed, almost like a beret, cocked to one side.
The waste of it all washed over Stuart again. Holly’s life had been upended because of the political calculations some bureaucrat made, calculations that did not include the unintended consequences of little girls losing their daddys. His heart clenched and he thought of his own daughters.
He swore under his breath, picked up the phone to let John know Holly’s photo provided more confirmation, as if any more was needed, that Moody and Meracle were the same man, and that Holly could be confident he’d definitely been involved in her father’s disappearance.
“Nothing is more satisfying than solving a problem from multiple directions and arriving at the same answer,” Stuart told John. “Convergence in data mining is sublime.”
“So, now that we’re positive this Vernon Meracle character is the one associated with Holly’s father and that her father is at Guantanamo,” John said, “what do we do now?”
“You tell Holly.”
The Saturday after she returned from Joliet, Holly woke up needing coffee more than normal. She slipped on her father’s sweater and drove to Egyptian Grounds. She ordered her usual and went outside. It was cloudy and looked like it could rain, but it was still nice enough to sit at one of the little café tables. She set her coffee down, and, unconsciously pushed each hand into the respective pockets of her father’s sweater. A piece of paper rustled. It felt odd against the skin of her fingers. Something of her father’s, an errant grocery list or a receipt? The paper was folded into a tight square. The smoothness of Scotch tape on one end.
She lifted it out; regarded it closely. On the one side, her mother had written: For Cheryl - March 1994. Holly’s heart sank as so many thoughts ran through her head, she couldn’t possibly grab one of them, tie it down, or make sense of it. The date was one month before her mother had died.