He shrugs, going along with it until we walk out the entryway of the building, and he sees me unlock my bike.
“What the fuck is that?”
“If you don’t know, you’re drunker than I thought,” I say, and I climb on the seat.
“When you said you’d drive,” Virgil mutters, “I assumed you had a car.”
“I’m thirteen,” I point out and gesture at the handlebars.
“Are you kidding? What is this, 1972?”
“You can run alongside instead if you want,” I say, “but with the headache I’m guessing you have, I’d take Door Number One instead.”
Which is how we wind up arriving at the diner with Virgil Stanhope sitting on my mountain bike, his legs spread, while I stand up between them and pedal.
We seat ourselves at a booth. “How come there weren’t any flyers?” I say.
“Huh?”
“Flyers. With my mom’s face on them. How come no one set up a command center at a crappy Holiday Inn conference room and manned a telephone bank for tips?”
“I told you already,” Virgil replies. “She was never a missing person.”
I just stare at him.
“Okay, correction: If your grandmother actually filed a missing persons report, it got lost in the shuffle.”
“You’re saying I grew up without a mother because of human error?”
“I’m saying I did my job. Someone else didn’t do theirs.” He looks at me over the edge of his mug. “I was called in to the elephant sanctuary because there was a dead body there. It was ruled an accident. Case closed. When you’re a cop, you don’t try to make messes. You just clean up the spills.”
“So you’re basically admitting you were too lazy to care that one of your witnesses for the case had disappeared.”
He scowls. “No, I was making the assumption that your mother left of her own free will, or else I would have heard otherwise. I assumed she was with you.” Virgil narrows his eyes. “Where were you when your mother was found by the cops?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes she left me with Nevvie during the day, but not at night. I just remember eventually being with my grandma, at her place.”
“Well, I should start by talking to her.”
I shake my head immediately. “No way. She’d kill me if she knew I was doing this.”
“Doesn’t she want to know what happened to her daughter?”
“It’s complicated,” I say. “I think maybe it hurts her too much to keep dragging it up. She’s from that generation that just puts on a stiff upper lip or whatever and soldiers through the bad stuff and pretends it never happened. Whenever I used to cry for my mom, my grandma tried to distract me—with food, or a toy, or with Gertie, my dog. And then one day when I asked she said, She’s gone. But the way she said it, it sounded like a knife. So I learned pretty fast to stop asking.”
“What took you so long to come forward? Ten years isn’t just a cold case. It’s a freaking Arctic wasteland.”
A waitress walks by, and I signal to her, trying to get her attention, since Virgil needs coffee if he’s going to be of any use to me. She doesn’t see me at all.
“That’s what it’s like to be a kid,” I say. “No one takes you seriously. People look right through you. Even if I’d been able to figure out where to go when I was eight or ten … even if I’d managed to get myself to the police station … even if you hadn’t left your job and the sergeant at the front desk told you a kid wanted to get you to reopen a closed case … what would you have done? Would you have let me stand in front of your desk talking while you smiled and nodded and didn’t pay attention? Or told your cop buddies about the girl who showed up and wanted to play detective?”
Another waitress bustles out of the kitchen, and a wedge of noises—frying, banging, clattering—squawks through the swinging door. This one, at least, comes right toward us. “What can I get you?” she asks.
“Coffee,” I say. “A whole pot.” She looks at Virgil, snorts, and retreats. “It’s like that old saying,” I tell him. “If no one hears you, are you even talking?”
The waitress brings us two cups of coffee. Virgil hands me the sugar even though I haven’t asked for it. I meet his gaze, and for a moment, I can see through the haze of the booze, and I am not sure if I’m comforted by what I see, or a little scared. “I’m listening now,” he says.
The list of what I remember about my mother is embarrassingly short.
There’s that moment where she fed me cotton candy: Uswidi. Iswidi.