by Stephen King
"Tina Annette Saubers."
Saubers. That tinkles a faint bell. Some old case? Maybe.
"What's troubling you, Tina?"
"My brother stole some money." Whispering it. Eyes welling again. "Maybe a lot of money. And he can't give it back, because it's gone. I told Barbara because I knew her brother helped stop the crazy guy who hurt our dad when the crazy guy tried to blow up a concert at the MAC. I thought maybe Jerome could help me, because he got a special medal for bravery and all. He was on TV."
"Yes," Hodges says. Holly should have been on TV, too--she was just as brave, and they sure wanted her--but during that phase of her life, Holly Gibney would have swallowed drain-cleaner rather than step in front of television cameras and answer questions.
"Only Barbs said Jerome was in Pennsylvania and I should talk to you instead, because you used to be a policeman." She looks at him with huge, welling eyes.
Saubers, Hodges muses. Yeah, okay. He can't remember the man's first name, but the last one is hard to forget, and he knows why that little bell tinkled. Saubers was one of those badly hurt at City Center, when Hartsfield plowed into the job fair hopefuls.
"At first I was going to talk to you on my own," Barbara adds. "That's what me and Tina agreed on. Kind of, you know, feel you out and see if you'd be willing to help. But then Teens came to my school today and she was all upset--"
"Because he's worse now!" Tina bursts out. "I don't know what happened, but since he grew that stupid moustache, he's worse! He talks in his sleep--I hear him--and he's losing weight and he's got pimples again, which in Health class the teacher says can be from stress, and . . . and . . . I think sometimes he cries." She looks amazed at this, as if she can't quite get her head around the idea of her big brother crying. "What if he kills himself? That's what I'm really scared of, because teen suicide is a big problem!"
More fun facts from Health class, Hodges thinks. Not that it isn't true.
"She's not making it up," Barbara says. "It's an amazing story."
"Then let's hear it," Hodges says. "From the beginning."
Tina takes a deep breath and begins.
20
If asked, Hodges would have said he doubted that a thirteen-year-old's tale of woe could surprise, let alone amaze him, but he's amazed, all right. Fucking astounded. And he believes every word; it's too crazy to be a fantasy.
By the time Tina has finished, she's calmed down considerably. Hodges has seen this before. Confession may or may not be good for the soul, but it's undoubtedly soothing to the nerves.
He opens the door to the outer office and sees Holly sitting at her desk, playing computer solitaire. Beside her is a bag filled with enough energy bars to feed the four of them during a zombie siege. "Come in here, Hols," he says. "I need you. And bring those."
Holly steps in tentatively, checks Tina Saubers out, and seems relieved by what she sees. Each of the girls takes an energy bar, which seems to relieve her even more. Hodges takes one himself. The salad he had for lunch seems to have gone down the hatch a month ago, and the veggie burger hasn't really stuck to his ribs, either. Sometimes he still dreams of going to Mickey D's and ordering everything on the menu.
"This is good," Barbara says, munching. "I got raspberry. What'd you get, Teens?"
"Lemon," she says. "It is good. Thank you, Mr. Hodges. Thank you, Ms. Holly."
"Barb," Holly says, "where does your mom think you are now?"
"Movies," Barbara says. "Frozen again, the sing-along version. It plays every afternoon at Cinema Seven. It's been there like for-ev-er." She rolls her eyes at Tina, who rolls hers in complicity. "Mom said we could take the bus home, but we have to be back by six at the very latest. Tina's staying over."
That gives us a little time, Hodges thinks. "Tina, I want you to tell it all again, so Holly can hear. She's my assistant, and she's smart. Plus, she can keep a secret."
Tina goes through it again, and in more detail now that she's calmer. Holly listens closely, her Asperger's-like tics mostly disappearing as they always do when she's fully engaged. All that remains are her restlessly moving fingers, tapping her thighs as if she's working at an invisible keyboard.
When Tina has come to the end, Holly asks, "The money started coming in February of 2010?"
"February or March," Tina says. "I remember, because our folks were fighting a lot then. Daddy lost his job, see . . . and his legs were all hurt . . . and Mom used to yell at him about smoking, how much his cigarettes cost . . ."
"I hate yelling," Holly says matter-of-factly. "It makes me sick in my stomach."
Tina gives her a grateful look.
"The conversation about the doubloons," Hodges puts in. "Was that before or after the money-train started to roll?"
"Before. But not long before." She gives the answer with no hesitation.
"And it was five hundred every month," Holly says.
"Sometimes the time was a little shorter than that, like three weeks, and sometimes it was a little longer. When it was more than a month, my folks would think it was over. Once I think it was like six weeks, and I remember Daddy saying to Mom, 'Well, it was good while it lasted.'"
"When was that?" Holly's leaning forward, eyes bright, fingers no longer tapping. Hodges loves it when she's like this.
"Mmm . . ." Tina frowns. "Around my birthday, for sure. When I was twelve. Pete wasn't there for my party. It was spring vacation, and his friend Rory invited him to go to Disney World with their family. That was a bad birthday, because I was so jealous he got to go and I . . ."
She stops, looking first at Barbara, then at Hodges, finally at Holly, upon whom she seems to have imprinted as Mama Duck. "That's why it was late that time! Isn't it? Because he was in Florida!"
Holly glances at Hodges with just the slightest smile edging her lips, then returns her attention to Tina. "Probably. Always twenties and fifties?"
"Yes. I saw it lots of times."
"And it ran out when?"
"Last September. Around the time school started. There was a note that time. It said something like, 'This is the last of it, I'm sorry there isn't more.'"
"And how long after that was it when you told your brother you thought he was the one sending the money?"
"Not very long. And he never exactly admitted it, but I know it was him. And maybe this is all my fault because I kept talking to him about Chapel Ridge . . . and he said he wished the money wasn't all gone so I could go . . . and maybe he did something stupid and now he's sorry, and it's too l-l-late!"
She starts crying again. Barbara enfolds her and makes comforting sounds. Holly's finger-tapping resumes, but she shows no other signs of distress; she's lost in her thoughts. Hodges can almost see the wheels turning. He has his own questions, but for the time being, he's more than willing to let Holly take the lead.
When Tina's weeping is down to sniffles, Holly says, "You said you came in one night and he had a notebook he acted guilty about. He put it under his pillow."
"That's right."
"Was that near the end of the money?"
"I think so, yeah."
"Was it one of his school notebooks?"
"No. It was black, and looked expensive. Also, it had an elastic strap that went around the outside."
"Jerome has notebooks like that," Barbara said. "They're made of moleskin. May I have another energy bar?"
"Knock yourself out," Hodges tells her. He grabs a pad from his desk and jots Moleskine. Then, returning his attention to Tina: "Could it have been an accounts book?"
Tina frowns in the act of peeling the wrapper from her own energy bar. "I don't get you."
"It's possible he was keeping a record of how much he'd paid out and how much was left."
"Maybe, but it looked more like a fancy diary."
Holly is looking at Hodges. He tips her a nod: Continue.
"This is all good, Tina. You're a terrific witness. Don't you think so, Bill?"
He nods.
"So, okay. W
hen did he grow his moustache?"
"Last month. Or maybe it was the end of April. Mom and Daddy both told him it was silly, Daddy said he looked like a drugstore cowboy, whatever that is, but he wouldn't shave it off. I thought it was just something he was going through." She turns to Barbara. "You know, like when we were little and you tried to cut your hair yourself to look like Hannah Montana's."
Barbara grimaces. "Please don't talk about that." And to Hodges: "My mother hit the roof."
"And since then, he's been upset," Holly says. "Since the moustache."
"Not so much at first, although I could tell he was nervous even then. It's really only been the last couple of weeks that he's been scared. And now I'm scared! Really scared!"
Hodges checks to see if Holly has more. She gives him a look that says Over to you.
"Tina, I'm willing to look into this, but it has to begin with talking to your brother. You know that, right?"
"Yes," she whispers. She carefully places her second energy bar, with only one bite gone, on the arm of the sofa. "Oh my God, he'll be so mad at me."
"You might be surprised," Holly says. "He might be relieved that someone finally forced the issue."
Holly, Hodges knows, is the voice of experience in this regard.
"Do you think so?" Tina asks. Her voice is small.
"Yes." Holly gives a brisk nod.
"Okay, but you can't this weekend. He's going up to River Bend Resort. It's a thing for class officers, and he got elected vice president next year. If he's still in school next year, that is." Tina puts the palm of her hand to her forehead in a gesture of distress so adult that it fills Hodges with pity. "If he isn't in jail next year. For robbery."
Holly looks as distressed as Hodges feels, but she's not a toucher and Barbara is too horrified by this idea to be motherly. It's up to him. He reaches over and takes Tina's small hands in his big ones.
"I don't think that's going to happen. But I do think Pete might need some help. When does he come back to the city?"
"S-Sunday night."
"Suppose I were to meet him after school on Monday. Would that work?"
"I guess so." Tina looks utterly drained. "He mostly rides the bus, but you could probably catch him when he leaves."
"Are you going to be all right this weekend, Tina?"
"I'll make sure she is," Barbara says, and plants a smack on her friend's cheek. Tina responds with a wan smile.
"What's next for you two?" Hodges asks. "It's probably too late for the movie."
"We'll go to my house," Barbara decides. "Tell my mom we decided to skip it. That's not exactly lying, is it?"
"No," Hodges agrees. "Do you have enough for another taxi?"
"I can drive you if you don't," Holly offers.
"We'll take the bus," Barbara says. "We both have passes. We only took a taxi here because we were in a hurry. Weren't we, Tina?"
"Yes." She looks at Hodges, then back to Holly. "I'm so worried about him, but you can't tell our folks, at least not yet. Do you promise?"
Hodges promises for both of them. He can't see the harm in it, if the boy is going to be out of the city over the weekend with a bunch of his classmates. He asks Holly if she'll go down with the girls and make sure they get on to the West Side bus okay.
She agrees. And makes them take the leftover energy bars. There are at least a dozen.
21
When Holly comes back, she's got her iPad. "Mission accomplished. They're off to Teaberry Lane on the Number Four."
"How did the Saubers girl seem?"
"Much better. She and Barbara were practicing some dance step they learned on TV while we waited for the bus. They tried to get me to do it with them."
"And did you?"
"No. Homegirl don't dance."
She doesn't smile when she says this, but she still might be joking. He knows she sometimes does these days, but it's always hard to tell. Much of Holly Gibney is still a mystery to Hodges, and he guesses that will always be the case.
"Will Barb's mom get the story out of them, do you think? She's pretty perceptive, and a weekend can be a long time when you're sitting on a big secret."
"Maybe, but I don't think so," Holly says. "Tina was a lot more relaxed once she got it off her chest."
Hodges smiles. "If she was dancing at the bus stop, I guess she was. So what do you think, Holly?"
"About which part?"
"Let's start with the money."
She taps at her iPad, brushing absently at her hair to keep it out of her eyes. "It started coming in February of 2010, and stopped in September of last year. That's forty-four months. If the brother--"
"Pete."
"If Pete sent his parents five hundred dollars a month over that period, that comes to twenty-two thousand dollars. Give or take. Not exactly a fortune, but--"
"But a mighty lot for a kid," Hodges finishes. "Especially if he started sending it when he was Tina's age."
They look at each other. That she will sometimes meet his gaze like this is, in a way, the most extraordinary part of her change from the terrified woman she was when he first met her. After a silence of perhaps five seconds, they speak at the same time.
"So--" "How did--"
"You first," Hodges says, laughing.
Without looking at him (it's a thing she can only do in short bursts, even when she's absorbed by some problem), Holly says, "That conversation he had with Tina about buried treasure--gold and jewels and doubloons. I think that's important. I don't think he stole that money. I think he found it."
"Must have. Very few thirteen-year-olds pull bank jobs, no matter how desperate they are. But where does a kid stumble across that kind of loot?"
"I don't know. I can craft a computer search with a timeline and get a dump of cash robberies, I suppose. We can be pretty sure it happened before 2010, if he found the money in February of that year. Twenty-two thousand dollars is a large enough haul to have been reported in the papers, but what's the search protocol? What are the parameters? How far back should I go? Five years? Ten? I bet an info dump going back to just oh-five would be pretty big, because I'd need to search the whole tristate area. Don't you think so?"
"You'd only get a partial catch even if you searched the whole Midwest." Hodges is thinking of Oliver Madden, who probably conned hundreds of people and dozens of organizations during the course of his career. He was an expert when it came to creating false bank accounts, but Hodges is betting that Ollie didn't put much trust in banks when it came to his own money. No, he would have wanted a cushy cash reserve.
"Why only partial?"
"You're thinking about banks, check-cashing joints, fast credit outfits. Maybe the dog track or the concession take from a Groundhogs game. But it might not have been public money. The thief or thieves could have knocked over a high-stakes poker game or ripped off a meth dealer over on Edgemont Avenue in Hillbilly Heaven. For all we know, the cash could have come from a home invasion in Atlanta or San Diego or anyplace in between. Cash from that kind of theft might not even have been reported."
"Especially if it was never reported to Internal Revenue in the first place," Holly says. "Right right right. So where does that leave us?"
"Needing to talk to Peter Saubers, and frankly, I can't wait. I thought I'd seen it all, but I've never seen anything like this."
"You could talk to him tonight. He's not going on his class trip until tomorrow. I took Tina's phone number. I could call her and get her brother's."
"No, let's let him have his weekend. Hell, he's probably left already. Maybe it will calm him down, give him time to think. And let Tina have hers. Monday afternoon will be soon enough."
"What about the black notebook she saw? The Moleskine? Any ideas about that?"
"Probably has nothing at all to do with the money. Could be his 50 Shades of Fun fantasy journal about the girl who sits behind him in homeroom."
Holly makes a hmph sound to show what she thinks of that and begins to pace. "Yo
u know what bugs me? The lag."
"The lag?"
"The money stopped coming last September, along with a note that said he's sorry there isn't more. But as far as we know, Peter didn't start getting weird until April or May of this year. For seven months he's fine, then he grows a moustache and starts exhibiting symptoms of anxiety. What happened? Any ideas on that?"
One possibility stands out. "He decided he wanted more money, maybe so his sister could go to Barbara's school. He thought he knew a way to get it, but something went wrong."
"Yes! That's what I think, too!" She crosses her arms over her breasts and cups her elbows, a self-comforting gesture Hodges has seen often. "I wish Tina had seen what was in that notebook, though. The Moleskine notebook."
"Is that a hunch, or are you following some chain of logic I don't see?"
"I'd like to know why he was so anxious for her not to see it, that's all." Having successfully evaded Hodges's question, she heads for the door. "I'm going to build a computer search on robberies between 2001 and 2009. I know it's a longshot, but it's a place to start. What are you going to do?"
"Go home. Think this over. Tomorrow I'm repo'ing cars and looking for a bail-jumper named Dejohn Frasier, who is almost certainly staying with his stepmom or ex-wife. Also, I'll watch the Indians and possibly go to a movie."
Holly lights up. "Can I go to the movies with you?"
"If you like."
"Can I pick?"
"Only if you promise not to drag me to some idiotic romantic comedy with Jennifer Aniston."
"Jennifer Aniston is a very fine actress and a badly underrated comedienne. Did you know she was in the original Leprechaun movie, back in 1993?"
"Holly, you're a font of information, but you're dodging the issue here. Promise me no rom-com, or I go on my own."
"I'm sure we can find something mutually agreeable," Holly says, not quite meeting his eyes. "Will Tina's brother be all right? You don't think he'd really try to kill himself, do you?"
"Not based on his actions. He put himself way out on a limb for his family. Guys like that, ones with empathy, usually aren't suicidal. Holly, does it seem strange to you that the little girl figured out Peter was behind the money, and their parents don't seem to have a clue?"
The light in Holly's eyes goes out, and for a moment she looks very much like the Holly of old, the one who spent most of her adolescence in her room, the kind of neurotic isolate the Japanese call hikikomori.
