Jones Cooper gave him a flat look, didn’t seem interested in what Bailey had read or what his opinion might be. “Where are we headed?” he asked.
He held up the phone to Cooper who squinted in to look at the map. “Rural road 181. I know where that is.”
He nodded and peeled out, surprising Bailey. He’d had the older man pegged as a slow driver. The big SUV must have been souped-up. It ate the dark road ahead of them, engine growling.
Bailey didn’t love being in the passenger seat, but it was that or the hospital where he surely belonged. He forced himself to sit up straight and keep his eyes on the road ahead, fought back waves of pain, anger, fear.
He flashed on the ghost standing there, a black form in the dark, a gun in his hand; the orange of the muzzle-flash. God, so stupid—careless. He’d let Nora distract him. He hadn’t checked his surroundings.
And Wren. How did he not predict that she’d go after him alone?
Bailey watched the blue dot pulse on his screen, surrounded by nothing, just the green that signified trees. If he was in the driver’s seat, he’d be pushing his foot to the floor, trying to close the distance faster, faster. He leaned forward, the seat belt pressing uncomfortably on the wound.
“We’ll get to her,” said Cooper, probably reading his body language. “We’ll find her.” The other man picked up speed; Bailey leaned back.
“Tell me about your case,” said Cooper. “Start from the beginning.”
Bailey Kirk didn’t like lost things. And he wasn’t going to lose the ghost again, Mia—and Wren—with him.
forty-one
The road, a great unfurling black ribbon, the engine, a low hum in my brain. It’s hypnotic and I fight to stay awake. My phone is off and stowed, a nod to your request—demand? Maybe you won’t show because you know I’ve disobeyed. Or maybe this is just a game you are playing with me. How far can I get her to run? How long will she chase? Will she follow me wherever I go?
My mother told us over and over about the night she met my father. How she was a waitress in a diner, and he came in with a group of his friends, many of them coworkers on the same construction site. They were a rowdy, funny group, bawdy, flirty but not disrespectful as groups of men can sometimes be. They ordered a ton of food—burgers, big subs, fries, onion rings, and milkshakes mostly.
As a kid, I liked to imagine it. In my mind the diner was a sunny, glossy place, colorful, and kitschy with red booths and big menus, a pie case with deserts circling slowly, vintage ads and a sizzling grill. Probably it was nothing like that; it was just a dump at a truck stop. But in my imagination, it gleamed with shiny surfaces, the Beatles playing on a jukebox.
My mom, Alice, she was in a bad place that day. She’d run out of money and had to drop out of community college, was taking care of my grandmother who was sick. She never even knew her father; he’d left her mother before Alice was even born. She got the occasional Christmas card from him, which she tossed right in the trash. Alice wasn’t prone to depression or dark moods, but she was feeling lost, adrift in her life—not sure what was coming next.
“I saw him right away,” she said. “There was just this one second when they all walked in, crowded into a couple of booths, and our eyes met. I swear, I knew right that second. Felt it right here.”
She’d always put her hand to her heart.
While she served the tables, the men joked with her and hit on her, and all the while she just smiled and kept to her work. When one of the guys got handsy, wrapping an arm around her hips when she came to stand beside him, my dad stepped up.
“Show some respect,” he told his friend, who tipped his baseball cap and apologized to my mom with a sheepish grin.
Show some respect.
It was those words that moved Alice, who said that she rarely felt respected as a young woman with no money, a struggling student until she couldn’t even afford to be that anymore. Just a waitress then, working for tips. Respect was for other people. She blushed, was embarrassed for herself and even for the handsy guy who probably meant no harm.
After a while, my father rose to talk to her when she was at the register.
“Sorry about my friend,” he said. “They’re good guys. It’s just that—they’re guys.”
“It’s fine,” she said. It was fine. There were good men, and bad men, she thought then. Bad men who hurt you, left you, broke you—like her father. But Alice had my dad and his friends pegged for good men—maybe rowdy, silly, but not dangerous, not cruel.