My voice sounded cold. Holder was right in at least one way: all the emotions of the past few days were bubbling up, and I was in danger of saying something I shouldn’t. Losing control of myself wasn’t going to help.
“Where is Detective Amanda Beck?” I said.
“Who?” He shook his head. “That’s the officer from Featherbank, right? I don’t know where she is. I think she might have gone.”
“What about Billy Roberts? You know that he’s dead?”
“Of course I do.” Holder looked at me, his face almost plaintive now. He gestured at the doll. “But that has nothing to do with this. We already have individuals in custody, and—”
“Who? Who do you have?”
Holder took a second to gather himself.
“I’m really not at liberty to divulge that information right now, Mr. Adams.”
“You think I’m lying.” I stood up and picked up the doll. “Or that I’ve lost my mind.”
“No, I’m just—”
“Thank you for absolutely fucking nothing.”
“Mr. Adams—”
But I wasn’t prepared to listen to whatever else he had to say. And by the time I got back to the car, I was even more furious. I felt exactly as powerless and frustrated as I had as a teenager. I opened the trunk and threw the doll in so hard it almost bounced out, then slammed the lid down loudly enough to attract glances from passersby.
Which I ignored.
Then I stood on the sidewalk, unsure what to do next. The police station was on a busy main road, lined mostly by shops, and there were dozens of people wandering along in the sunshine, bags in hand. I found myself searching their faces, looking for anyone familiar, or who seemed to be watching me.
Are you here somewhere?
Was it really Charlie I was looking out for?
As I stood there in the sun, surrounded by the mundane activity of ordinary life, it seemed absurd to be thinking such a thing. And yet I realized I really was doing just that. Scanning the people around me for the face of a boy I hadn’t seen in twenty-five years. Dyed black hair swept to one side. Empty eyes. Grown up now, but not so far removed from what he had been that I wouldn’t recognize him.
A boy who nobody knew for sure was really gone.
The world carried on around me, apparently oblivious. Nobody appeared to be paying me even the slightest attention.
I started walking.
Partly it was because I didn’t know what else to do, but there was also the thought in the back of my mind that if someone really was following me, this might be the best way of spotting them. So I wandered along, doing my best to pretend to appear careless while keeping an eye on the people around me.
Nothing.
And then twenty minutes later, I realized what street I had found myself on. I looked around in wonder, hardly recognizing the bright new shops, the sidewalks that had been swept clear of trash. When I’d been a teenager, most of these units had been boarded up, and the ones that weren’t had been run-down. Now everything was taken and thriving. There were even trees planted neatly in little fenced-off plots along the road.
It can’t still be here.
I started walking a little more quickly now.
That first time I’d ever visited Jenny’s house, this was the street she’d brought me to, her carrying a bag full of books. She had taken me to a shop that—like so many here back then—had appeared derelict at first glance. The door had been old and flimsy, the windows had wire mesh across the outside, and the glass behind had been so misty with dust that it was difficult to see through.
It can’t still be here.…
And yet it was.
I stopped on the corner. The door was new, the wire mesh was gone, and the glass was clean. But in so many ways it felt like the place hadn’t changed at all. I looked up. The green sign had been repainted, but it still stretched the length of the shop, the name written in an elaborate cursive script, like something from another age.
Johnson & Ross.
I stood there for a moment, staring at the place. It was so familiar, and the world around me was suddenly so quiet, it was difficult to escape the sensation that I’d somehow traveled back in time.
I reached out and turned the handle slowly.
Pushed.
A bell tinkled within.
And then, feeling as nervous as I had twenty-five years ago on that first visit with Jenny, I stepped into the shop, out of the present and into the past.
TWENTY-SEVEN
BEFORE
I fell in love with Johnson & Ross the second I followed Jenny inside that first day.
The door led into a cramped main room. I was immediately assailed by a cacophony of sensation; the whole store was alive with texture. Books were packed in shelves along every wall, filling cabinets and covering the surface of tables, and there was a comforting, musty aroma to the air, as though all the leather and paper surrounding me had saturated it over the years. I remember exactly what it was like. Not only was I seeing the books, I was feeling them on my skin and breathing them deep inside me as well.
Jenny led me down one of the overcrowded aisles. But in that moment I was distracted—looking around in wonder, almost shocked by my visceral reaction to the shop. Walking in here was like receiving an embrace from someone who had cared for me when I was too young to remember them properly. I had never been here before, and yet it felt like coming home.
The counter turned out to be little more than a cave among the shelves and cabinets. At first glance, I couldn’t work out how anyone got behind it, but a woman was sitting there with a newspaper open on the counter before her. She was in her forties, her long hair dyed so blond that it was practically white, and she was wearing small glasses. She peered curiously at me over the top of the frames as we approached.
Then she looked at Jenny and smiled warmly, clearly delighted to see her.
“Jenny! And what have you brought me today?”
Jenny held up the bag of books. “A few from last month.”
“I was not talking about the books, young lady.”
Jenny glanced back at me, and for the first time that I could remember she looked slightly nervous herself.
“I’m her … trainee,” I said.
“Ah!” The woman seemed even more pleased now. She closed the newspaper and gave Jenny a conspiratorial wink. “The one you told me all about, right?”
“This is Paul,” Jenny said. “Yes.”
From the look on her face, it was like she was no longer sure this was such a good idea. But then she turned to me.
“And this is my friend Marie.”
* * *
It turned out that Marie was the Johnson of the bookshop’s name. Ross had been the name of the man who’d owned it before, and whom she’d worked for until he retired several years earlier.
“But I kept his name on there as well,” Marie told me. “Tradition is important, isn’t it? You’ve got to have lineage. Places are like people. They have to know where they came from—and where they are now—or else they’ll never know where they’re going.”
I agreed that was true, but it was honestly difficult to do anything else. Marie was a force of nature. She spent the next twenty minutes bustling around, dragging me off to see different parts of the shop and bombarding me with questions the whole time. The latter were often accompanied by amused glances in Jenny’s direction, as though they were designed to tease her as much as probe me.