The old man interrupts with something. Brad says he’ll tell her, but that isn’t good enough for Holly. She’s suddenly impatient with both of them. It’s been a long day.

“Brad, put the phone on speaker.”

“Huh? Oh, okay, good idea.”

“I think he was doing it on radio, too!” Dan bawls. It’s as if he thinks they’re communicating with tin cans on a waxed string. Holly winces and holds the phone away from her ear.

“Grampa, you don’t have to talk so loud.”

Dan lowers his voice, but only slightly. “On the radio, Holly! Even before there was TV! And before there was radio, he might have been covering bloodshed for the newspapers! God knows how long he—it—has been alive.”

“Also,” Brad says, “he must have a rolling file of references. Probably the aspect you call George writes some for Ondowsky, and the one you call Ondowsky has written some for George. You understand?”

Holly does… sort of. It makes her think of a joke Bill told her once, about brokers marooned on a desert island getting rich trading each other’s clothes.

“Let me talk, goddammit,” Dan says. “I understand as well as you do, Bradley. I’m not stupid.”

Brad sighs. Living with Dan Bell can’t be easy, Holly thinks. On the other hand, living with Brad Bell is probably no bed of roses, either.

“Holly, it works because TV talent is a seller’s market at big local affiliates. People move up, some quit the business… and he’s good at the job.”

“It,” Brad says. “It’s good at the job.”

She hears coughing and Brad tells his grandfather to take one of his pills.

“Jesus, will you stop being such an old woman?”

Felix and Oscar, yelling at each other across the generation gap, Holly thinks. It might make a good sitcom, but when it comes to getting information it’s extremely poopy.

“Dan? Brad? Will you stop…” Bickering is the word that comes to mind, but Holly can’t quite bring herself to say it, even though she’s wound tight. “Stop your discussion for a minute?”

They are blessedly quiet.

“I understand what you’re saying, and it makes sense as far as it goes, but what about his work history? Where he went to broadcasting school? Don’t they wonder? Ask questions?”

Dan says gruffly, “He probably tells them he’s been out of the business for awhile and decided to get back in.”

“But we don’t really know,” Brad says. He sounds pissed, either because he can’t answer Holly’s question to her satisfaction (or to his own), or because he’s smarting over being called an old woman. “Listen, there was a kid in Colorado who posed as a doctor for almost four years. Prescribed drugs, even did operations. Maybe you read about it. He was seventeen passing for twenty-five, and didn’t have a college degree in anything, let alone medicine. If he could slip through the cracks, this outsider could.”

“Are you done?” Dan asks.

“Yes, Grampa.” And sighs.

“Good. Because I have a question. Are you going to meet him, Holly?”

“Yes.” Along with the pictures, Brad has included a spectrograph screen grab of Freeman, Ondowsky, and Philip Hannigan—aka George the Bomber. To Holly’s eye, all three look identical.

“When?”

“I hope tomorrow, and I’d like you both to keep completely quiet about this, please. Will you do that?”

“We will,” Brad says. “Of course we will. Won’t we, Grampa?”

“As long as you tell us what happens,” Dan says. “If you can, that is. I used to be a cop, Holly, and Brad works with the cops. We probably don’t have to tell you that meeting him could be dangerous. Will be dangerous.”

“I know,” Holly says in a small voice. “I work with an ex-cop myself.” And worked with an even better one before him, she thinks.

“Will you be careful?”

“I’ll try,” Holly says, but she knows there always comes a point when you have to stop being careful. Jerome talked about a bird that carried evil like a virus. All frowsy and frosty gray, he said. If you wanted to catch it and wring its fracking neck, there came a time when you had to stop being careful. She doesn’t think that will happen tomorrow, but it will soon.

Soon.

16

Jerome has turned the space over the Robinsons’ garage into a writing room and is using it to work on his book about great-great-Gramps Alton, also known as the Black Owl. He’s beavering away on it this evening when Barbara lets herself in and asks Jerome if she’s interrupting. Jerome tells her he can use a break. They get Cokes from the small refrigerator nestled beneath one sloping eave.

“Where is she?” Barbara asks.

Jerome sighs. “No how’s your book going, J? No did you find that chocolate Lab, J? Which I did, by the way. Safe and sound.”

“Good for you. And how’s your book going, J?”

“Up to page 93,” he says, and sweeps a hand through the air. “I’m sailing.”

“That’s good, too. Now where is she?”

Jerome takes his phone out of his pocket and touches an app called WebWatcher. “See for yourself.”

Barbara studies the screen. “The airport in Portland? Portland, Maine? What’s she doing there?”

“Why don’t you call her and ask?” Jerome says. “Just say ‘Jerome snuck a tracker on your phone, Hollyberry, because we’re worried about you, so what are you up to? Spill it, girl.’ Think she’d like that?”

“Don’t joke,” Barbara says. “She’d be super-pissed. That would be bad, but she’d also be hurt, and that would be worse. Besides, we know what it’s about. Don’t we?”

Jerome had suggested—just suggested—that Barbara could peek at the history on Holly’s home computer when she went to pick up those movies for her school report. If, that was, Holly’s password at home was the same as the one she used at work.

That turned out to be the case, and while Barbara had felt extremely creepy and stalkerish about looking at her friend’s search history, she had done it. Because Holly hadn’t been the same after her trip to Oklahoma and subsequent trip to Texas, where she had nearly been killed by an off-the-rails cop named Jack Hoskins. There was a great deal more to that story than her near miss that day, and both of them knew it, but Holly refused to talk about it. And at first that seemed okay, because little by little the haunted look had left her eyes. She had returned to normal… Holly-normal, at least. But now she was gone, doing something she’d refused to talk about.

So Jerome had decided to track Holly’s location with the WebWatcher app.

And Barbara had looked at Holly’s search history.

And Holly—trusting soul that she was, at least when it came to her friends—had not wiped it.

Barbara discovered Holly had looked at many trailers for upcoming movies, had visited Rotten Tomatoes and Huffington Post, and had several times visited a dating site called Hearts & Friends (who knew?), but many of her current searches had to do with the terrorist bombing at the Albert Macready Middle School. There were also searches for Chet Ondowsky, a TV reporter at WPEN in Pittsburgh, a place called Clauson’s Diner in Pierre, Pennsylvania, and someone named Fred Finkel, who turned out to be a cameraman at WPEN.