“Didn’t you ever wonder what happened to Alice Metcalf?”
I peer more closely at her face, which is still kind of blurry, thanks to the amount I’ve drunk. Then I squint. This must be another hallucination. “Go away,” I slur.
“Not until you admit that you’re the guy who dropped my mother off, unconscious, at a hospital ten years ago.”
Just like that, I’m stone-cold sober, and I know who this is standing before me. Not Alice, and not just a hallucination. “Jenna. You’re her daughter.”
The light that washes over that girl’s face looks like the kind of thing you see in paintings in cathedrals, the sort of art that breaks your heart even as you stare at it. “She told you about me?”
Alice Metcalf had not told me anything, of course. She wasn’t at the hospital when I went back there the morning after the trampling to take her statement. All the nurse could tell me was that she’d signed her own paperwork for discharge, and that she mentioned someone named Jenna.
Donny took that as proof that Gideon’s story had been the legitimate one, that Alice Metcalf had run off with her daughter as she’d been hoping to. Given the fact that her husband was a whack job, that seemed like a happy ending. At the time, Donny had been two weeks shy of retirement, and I knew he wanted to clear out the paperwork on his desk—including the caregiver’s death at the New England Elephant Sanctuary. It was an accident, Virgil, he said emphatically, when I pushed him to dig deeper. Alice Metcalf is not a suspect. She’s not even a missing person, until someone reports it.
But nobody ever did. And when I tried to, I was stonewalled by Donny, who told me that if I knew what was good for me, I’d just let this one go. When I argued that he was making the wrong call here, Donny lowered his voice. “I’m not the one making it,” he said cryptically.
For a decade, there were things about that case that didn’t sit right with me.
Yet now, ten years later, here is the proof that Donny Boylan was right all along.
“Holy shit,” I say, rubbing my temples. “I can’t believe this.” I let the door fall back so that Jenna walks in, wrinkling her nose at the crumpled fast-food wrappers on the floor and the smell of stale smoke. With a shaking hand, I pull a cigarette from my shirt pocket and light up.
“Those things will kill you.”
“Not fast enough,” I mutter, drawing in for that kick of nicotine. I swear, sometimes that’s the only thing that keeps me alive another day.
Jenna slaps down a twenty-dollar bill. “Well, try to pull it together for just a little bit longer,” she says. “At least long enough for me to hire you.”
I laugh. “Sweetheart, save your piggy-bank change. If your dog’s missing, put up flyers. If a guy dumped you for a hotter girl, stuff your bra and make him jealous. That advice, it’s all free, by the way, ’cause that’s how I roll.”
She doesn’t blink. “I’m hiring you to finish your job.”
“What?”
“You have to find my mother,” she says.
There is something I never told anyone about that case.
The days after the death at the New England sanctuary were, as you can imagine, a freaking PR nightmare—with Thomas Metcalf in a drugged stupor at a residential psychiatric treatment facility and his wife AWOL, the only caregiver left was Gideon. The sanctuary itself was bankrupt and in default, all the cracks in its foundation now laid bare to the public. No food was coming in for the elephants, no more hay. The property was going to be seized by the bank, but in order for that to happen its residents—all thirty-five thousand pounds of them—needed to be relocated.
It’s not easy to find a home for seven elephants, but Gideon had grown up in Tennessee and knew about a place in Hohenwald called The Elephant Sanctuary. They recognized this as an emergency and were willing to do whatever they could for the New Hampshire animals. They agreed to house the elephants in their quarantine barn until a new one could be built for them specifically.
That week a new case got thrown onto my desk—a babysitter, seventeen years old, who was responsible for a six-month-old’s brain damage. I immersed myself in trying to get the girl—a cheerleader with blond hair and a perfect white smile—to admit to shaking the infant. Which is why, on the day of Donny’s retirement party, I was still at my desk when the medical examiner’s report on Nevvie Ruehl came through.
I knew what it said already—that the caregiver’s death was accidental, caused by the trampling of an elephant. But I found myself scrolling through the text, reading the weight of the victim’s heart, brain, liver. On the last page was a list of the articles found with the body.