In addition to serving papers, Finders Keepers is on speed-dial at several insurance companies—locals, not affiliated with the big boys—and Holly spends most of Friday investigating an arson claim. It’s a pretty big one, the policy holder really needs the money, and she has been tasked with making sure that he was actually in Miami, as he claimed, when his warehouse went up in flames. Turns out he was, which is good for him but not so good for Lake Fidelity.

In addition to those things, which reliably pay the big bills, there’s an absconding debtor to track (Holly does this on her computer and locates him quickly by checking his credit charges), bail-jumpers to put on the radar—what’s known in the trade as skip-tracing—and lost kids and dogs. Pete usually goes after the kids, and when Jerome’s working, he’s great with the dogs.

She’s not surprised that Lucky’s death hit him so hard, not just because it was so extraordinarily cruel but because the Robinson family lost their beloved Odell to congestive heart failure the year before. There are no dogs on the docket, either lost or abducted, on that Thursday and Friday, which is good, because Holly is too busy and Jerome is at home, doing his own thing. The project that started as a school paper has now become a priority with him, if not an outright obsession. His folks are doubtful about their son’s decision to take what he calls “a gap year.” Holly isn’t. She doesn’t necessarily think Jerome is going to shock the world, but she has an idea he will make it sit up and take notice. She has faith in him. And Holly hope. That, too.

She can only follow developments on the middle school explosion out of the corner of her eye, and that’s okay, because there haven’t been many. Another victim has died—a teacher, not a student—and a number of kids with minor injuries have been released from various area hospitals. Mrs. Althea Keller, the only person who actually spoke to the delivery guy/bomber, has regained consciousness, but she had little to add, other than the fact that the package purported to be from a school in Scotland, and that cross-Atlantic relationship was in Pineborough’s weekly newspaper, along with a group photo of the Nemo Me Impune Lacessit Society (perhaps ironic but probably not, all eleven of the Impunies, as they called themselves, survived the explosion uninjured). The van was found in a nearby barn, wiped clean of prints and bleach-cleaned of DNA. The police have been inundated with calls from people eager to identify the perp, but none of the calls has produced results. Hopes of an early capture are being replaced by fears that the guy may not be done but only getting started. Holly hopes this isn’t so, but her experience with Brady Hartsfield makes her fear the worst. Best case scenario, she thinks (with a coldness that once would have been alien to her), he’s killed himself.

On Friday afternoon, as she’s finishing her report to Lake Fidelity, the phone rings. It’s her mother, and with news Holly has been dreading. She listens, she says the appropriate things, and she allows her mother to treat her as the child she thinks Holly still is (even though the purpose of this call will involve Holly acting like a grownup), asking if Holly is remembering to brush after every meal, if she is remembering to take her medication with food, if she is limiting her movies to four a week, etc., etc. Holly tries to ignore the headache her mother’s calls—and this call in particular—almost always bring on. She assures her mother that yes, she will be there on Sunday to help, and yes, she will be there by noon, so they can eat one more meal as a family.

My family, Holly thinks. My fracked-up family.

Because Jerome keeps his phone off when he’s working, she calls Tanya Robinson, Jerome and Barbara’s mom. Holly tells Tanya she won’t be able to eat Sunday dinner with them because she needs to go upstate. Kind of a family emergency. She explains, and Tanya says, “Oh, Holly. I’m so sorry to hear that, sweetie. Are you going to be all right?”

“Yes,” Holly says. It’s what she always says when someone asks her that horrible loaded question. She’s pretty sure she sounds okay, but as soon as she hangs up, she puts her hands over her face and begins to cry. It’s that sweetie that does it. To have someone call her, who was known in high school as Jibba-Jibba, sweetie.

To have that, at least, to come back to.

2

On Saturday night Holly plans her drive using the Waze app on her computer, factoring in a stop to pee and gas up her Prius. To get there by noon, she will have to leave at seven-thirty, which will give her time for a cup of tea (decaf), toast, and a boiled egg. With this groundwork laid to a nicety, she lies awake for two hours as she didn’t on the night after the Macready School blew up, and when she does sleep, she dreams of Chet Ondowsky. He is telling about the carnage he saw when he joined the first responders, and saying things he would never say on television. There was blood on the bricks, he says. There was a shoe with a foot still in it, he says. The little girl who cried for her mommy, he says, screamed in pain even though he tried to be gentle when he took her in his arms. He tells these things in his best just-the-facts voice, but as he talks he rends his clothes. Not just his suit coat pocket and sleeve, but first one lapel and then the other. He yanks off his tie and rips it in two. Then the shirt right down the front, popping off the buttons.

The dream either fades before he can go to work on the trousers of his suit, or her conscious mind refuses to remember it the next morning when her phone alarm goes off. In any case, she wakes feeling unrested, and she eats her egg and toast with no pleasure, just fueling up for what will be a trying day. She usually enjoys a road trip, but the prospect of this one sits on her shoulders like a physical weight.

Her little blue bag—what she thinks of as her notions bag—is by the door, packed with a clean change of clothes and her toiletries, in case she has to spend the night. She slides the strap onto her shoulder, takes the elevator down from her cozy little apartment, opens the door, and there is Jerome Robinson sitting on the front step. He’s drinking a Coke and his backpack with its JERRY GARCIA LIVES sticker is resting beside him.

“Jerome? What are you doing here?” And because she can’t help it: “And drinking Coke at seven-thirty in the morning, oough!”

“I’m going with you,” he says, and the look he gives her says that arguing will do no good. That’s okay, because she doesn’t want to.

“Thanks, Jerome,” Holly says. It’s hard, but she manages not to cry. “That’s very good of you.”

3

Jerome drives the first half of the journey, and at the gas-and-pee stop on the turnpike, they switch. Holly feels her sense of dread at what’s awaiting her (us, she corrects herself) starting to close in as they get closer to the Cleveland suburb of Covington. To keep it at bay, she asks Jerome how his project is going. His book.

“Of course, if you don’t want to talk about it, I know some authors don’t—”

But Jerome is willing enough. It began as a required assignment for a class called Sociology in Black and White. Jerome decided to write about his great-great-grandfather, born of former slaves in 1878. Alton Robinson spent his childhood and early adulthood in Memphis, where a thriving black middle class existed in the latter years of the nineteenth century. When yellow fever and white vigilante gangs struck at that nicely balanced sub-economy, much of the black community simply pulled up stakes, leaving the white folks they’d worked for to cook their own food, dispose of their own garbage, and wipe their own babies’ beshitted bottoms.