“How’d the Kayla Holman case turn out?” I asked.
She shook her head: no.
Four more women filed in, passing a bottle of sunblock among themselves, slathering it on bare arms and shoulders and noses. The room smelled like coconuts.
“By the way, Nick,” Boney said. “Remember when I asked if Amy had friends in town—what about Noelle Hawthorne? You didn’t mention her. She left us two messages.”
I gave her a blank stare.
“Noelle in your complex? Mother of triplets?”
“No, they aren’t friends.”
“Oh, funny. She definitely seems to think they are.”
“That happens to Amy a lot,” I said. “She talks to people once, and they latch on. It’s creepy.”
“That’s what her parents said.”
I debated asking Boney directly about Hilary Handy and Desi Collings. Then I decided not to; I’d look better if I were the one leading the charge. I wanted Rand and Marybeth to see me in action-hero mode. I couldn’t shake the look Marybeth had given me: The police definitely seem to think it’s … close to home.
“People think they know her because they read the books growing up,” I said.
“I can see that,” Boney said, nodding. “People want to believe they know other people. Parents want to believe they know their kids. Wives want to believe they know their husbands.”
Another hour and the volunteer center began feeling like a family picnic. A few of my old girlfriends dropped by to say hello, introduce their kids. One of my mom’s best friends, Vicky, came by with three of her granddaughters, bashful tweens all in pink.
Grandkids. My mom had talked about grandkids a lot, as if it were doubtlessly going to happen—whenever she bought a new piece of furniture, she’d explain she favored that particular style because “it’ll work for when there’s grandkids.” She wanted to live to see some grandkids. All her friends had some to spare. Amy and I once had my mom and Go over for dinner to mark The Bar’s biggest week ever. I’d announced that we had reason to celebrate, and Mom had leaped from her seat, burst into tears, and hugged Amy, who also began weeping, murmuring from beneath my mom’s smothering nuzzle, “He’s talking about The Bar, he’s just talking about The Bar.” And then my mom tried hard to pretend she was just as excited about that. “Plenty of time for babies,” she’d said in her most consoling voice, a voice that just made Amy start to cry again. Which was strange, since Amy had decided she didn’t want kids, and she’d reiterated this fact several times, but the tears gave me a perverse wedge of hope that maybe she was changing her mind. Because there wasn’t really plenty of time. Amy was thirty-seven when we moved to Carthage. She’d be thirty-nine in October.
And then I thought: We’ll have to throw some fake birthday party or something if this is still going on. We’ll have to mark it somehow, some ceremony, for the volunteers, the media—something to revive attention. I’ll have to pretend to be hopeful.
“The prodijal son returns,” said a nasally voice, and I turned to see a skinny man in a stretched-out T-shirt next to me, scratching a handlebar mustache. My old friend Stucks Buckley, who had taken to calling me a prodigal son despite not knowing how to pronounce the word, or what its meaning was. I assume he meant it as a fancy synonym for jackass. Stucks Buckley, it sounded like a baseball player’s name, and that was what Stucks was supposed to be, except he never had the talent, just the hard wish. He was the best in town, growing up, but that wasn’t good enough. He got the shock of his life in college when he was cut from the team, and it all went to shit after. Now he was an odd-job stoner with twitchy moods. He had dropped by The Bar a few times to try to pick up work, but he shook his head at every crappy day-job chore I offered, chewing on the inside of his cheek, annoyed: Come on, man, what else you got, you got to have something else.
“Stucks,” I said by way of greeting, waiting to see if he was in a friendly mood.
“Hear the police are botching this royally,” he said, tucking his hands into his armpits.
“It’s a little early to say that.”
“Come on, man, these little pansy-ass searches? I seen more effort put into finding the mayor’s dog.” Stucks’s face was sunburned; I could feel the heat coming off him as he leaned in closer, giving me a blast of Listerine and chaw. “Why ain’t they rounded up some people? Plenty of people in town to choose from, they ain’t brought a single one in? Not a single one? What about the Blue Book Boys? That’s what I asked the lady detective: What about the Blue Book Boys? She wouldn’t even answer me.”