“Nothing,” she amended. “Just thinking, that’s all.” She tucked the necklace—excuse me, theGeorgette McKeown—into the inside pocket of her tote bag for safekeeping. “So, next steps. I think thelogical thing to do is talk to some of these guys, right? See if they let anything slip about last night that they haven’t already mentioned?”
“Wait wait wait.” I held my hands up, startled. When I’d sent Holiday that text this morning, I hadn’t for a second actually imagined us going around doing interviews like a couple of crack private detectives from a film noir on the classic movie channel. It felt like a ridiculous, farcical endeavor, like we needed trench coats and magnifying glasses and theme music, and also for someone to tell us to grow the fuck up. “I mean—no. These are myfriends,Holiday. I can’t just stroll back into their house and start asking all kinds of weird, nosy questions.”
“I’m not suggesting interrogation lights and zip ties, Michael,” Holiday said reasonably. “Ninety percent of good detective work is shutting up and letting people say what they want to say anyway. I just want to hear what that might be.”
“Holiday—”
“Michael.” She fixed me with a look across the table; just for a second I remembered what it was like to be the focus of all her attention, to feel like there was nothing about me she hadn’t already figured out. “Look,” she said. “Clearly, we haven’t really hung out in a while. And if I had to guess, you probably thought long and hard about bailing on coffee today. But I still know you well enough to know that you wouldn’t have told me about any of this to begin with if you didn’t think there was at least an outside possibility something weird was going on.” She shrugged. “Also, it’ll be fun. I’ll bring chips.”
I hesitated. On the one hand, she wasn’twrong,exactly. Onthe other, in addition to the absurdity of this particular enterprise, there was still some part of me that felt strange bringing her around the Kendricks in the first place, and it must have shown on my face because Holiday rolled her eyes. “Okay,” she said, reaching for her notebook. “Well, it was good to see you. You can tell your mom you did your due diligence, or whatever—”
“No,” I said immediately, my voice cracking a bit. “You’re right.” As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I realized they were true—Ihadcome to her looking for help, even if I didn’t want to admit it. “You’re right.”
Holiday gazed at me for a long moment, looking faintly but unmistakably amused. “I mean,” she reminded me, “I usually am.”
Neither one of us said anything then, a weird, awkward gulf opening up between us. Holiday cleared her throat. When I glanced at my phone, I realized that we’d been sitting here for hours, the time evaporating while we talked and argued and theorized. There were empty plates and glasses scattered all around us; the other tables were mostly empty, and the sun had taken on that late-afternoon toastiness through the wide glass windows at the front of the shop. Jasper had texted forty minutes earlier:Dude,he’d said, what happened to you?
“Okay,” I said, swallowing down a feeling that I’d gotten caught doing something embarrassing. I could remember plenty of afternoons like this from when we were kids, Holiday and I losing whole days in elaborate adventures of our own making. But we weren’t little kids anymore. We were way too old to be playing pretend. “I should probably get back.”
“Me too,” Holiday said, gathering up her supplies and tuckingthem back into her overstuffed tote bag as I bused our plates and cups to the counter. “You need a ride?”
I shook my head. “I’m good,” I said, holding the door open for her. The sun may have been waning, but the heat hit surprisingly hard after sitting in the AC for so long, the air thick and humid and salty. “I’ll text you about whatever’s going on tonight.”
Holiday nodded quickly. “Okay,” she said, though I could tell there was a part of her that didn’t entirely believe me. I guess I couldn’t blame her—in that moment, I wasn’t even sure if I entirely believed myself. “See you, Linden.”
She waved, then hitched up her bag on her shoulder and headed across the parking lot. She was almost to her car when I yelled her name.
Holiday turned and looked at me. With her big hair and lipstick she looked like some kind of old-fashioned movie star, on the Vineyard for a quick rendezvous with a Kennedy before heading out west to film her next major motion picture. Holiday Proctor, I thought, live in technicolor. “What’s up?” she called. “You remember something else?”
“No, it’s not that.” I shook my head again. “I guess I just wanted to say thanks? I don’t know if it showed, but I was like, pretty rattled this morning.”
“Oh, it definitely showed,” she admitted, her smile bright and almost mischievous. “But you don’t have to thank me. We’re friends, right?”
“I—yeah,” I said, realizing that it was still true even as it made me feel a little built guilty to hear her say it out loud. If I was being honest with myself, I wasn’t sure if I’d have shown up for Holidayif the situation had been reversed. Probably not, actually. But—even after all this time—somehow I wasn’t surprised that she’d shown up for me. As I waved goodbye and headed for the bike rack in brilliant afternoon sunshine, I promised myself I wouldn’t take that for granted again. “We’re friends.”
