At the bottom of the stack of files is one Bailey Kirk has labeled as “The Ghost.”
If I dug myself a shallow grave, you must have dug yourself a pretty deep one. In your file, there are only a few pictures that I have already seen. Different versions of you, younger, maybe happier incarnations. There are printouts of your Torch profiles with different names but all virtually identical verbiage.
There’s no birth certificate, no driver’s license, or any official documents. There’s a printout of the Airbnb listing. There are some handwritten notes on this page, I assume by Bailey Kirk. His handwriting is tight and precise, each letter carefully formed. “Two messages left for Joe, the host, at the number obtained from RC/WG. No response. Likewise, email not returned. Will follow up in person.”
There are other notes about your company Blackbox. “Cybersecurity. Owned by a shell corporation, all accounts offshore. Another ghost lead.”
I scan through the rest of the files, one for Mia, one for Melissa, one for Bonnie—a raft of pictures, official documents, newspaper articles, emails, social media profiles, statements from friends.
But I can see why Bailey Kirk is frustrated. When I’m done, I have a sketch, a sense of each woman, but there’s nothing obvious that connects them. Melissa and I have The Hollows in common, so maybe that’s something. But she and I never met.
Abandoned apartments, cars, cell phones. All of them stepped away from her life, or were taken, not leaving a trace behind, or even a digital trace to follow. They all dropped off the grid.
I am the only one left.
I was probably days away from knowing what happened to the others.
What were you going to ask me?
Adam, if you had asked me to fold up my life and walk away leaving everyone and everything behind. Would I have done it? Would I have followed you, like my mother followed my father? If you had said to me, like he did to her, the world is broken, let’s leave it behind and create another kind of life, would I have gone with you?
I don’t know.
There’s Jax and her family. There’s Dear Birdie and all the people who need her.
My conversation with Jax rings back. Anyone could be Dear Birdie. There’s a certain amount of relief in that idea. Is it true? Maybe anyone can be anyone. Robin Carson can be Emily Stone. Emily Stone can become Wren Greenwood. Wren Greenwood can become Dear Birdie. I have not so much dug a shallow grave for myself, as woven a tangled web of lies and false identities. Am I the spider or the fly?
“Find what you’re looking for?”
His voice moves through me like an electric shock. I turn to see a dark form filling the doorway. For just a second, I think it’s you. And a tsunami of anger, sadness, fear rushes through me. But when he steps closer, I see that it’s Bailey Kirk—bigger and broader than he seemed to me the first time I met him. I hold my ground, won’t give him the satisfaction of a flustered apology.
“No,” I say. “Not at all.”
He moves into the room and shuts the door behind him. He seems unruffled, a slight smile on his face. I don’t suppose, as a PI, you can muster much anger for someone invading your space and rifling through your stuff.
“Yeah,” he says. “Welcome to my world.”
I close the file in my lap, shutting out your face, and look at Bailey. He seats himself on the edge of the bed and rests his hands on his thighs. There’s something solid about him, something comforting and good.
“You know everything there is to know about me,” I say.
“Not everything,” he says gently. “We never know everything about each other, do we?”
Based on what I read in those files, he knows more about my past than anyone. I am seen. Revealed. There’s a kind of relief to that, a tension sheds.
For the first time, the feeling I thought might be love, the weight of my sadness and loss, the sharp edge of my disappointment have all shifted to anger.
“I’ll help you,” I say. “I’ll help you find him.”
thirty-two
The sun is setting outside, the room growing darker. But neither of us gets up to turn on the light. He stays on the bed, and I sit uncomfortably on the stiff desk chair my arms wrapped around my middle.
In the dim of this cheap motel room, I tell Bailey how my father came home from war, moved us from our happy “city” life and out to his family property. How Jay, my mother, and I left everything and everyone we knew behind, because my father wanted us to live off the grid, away from the world of men.
“So, he was a doomsday prepper,” Bailey says.