I sprang for five hundred copies of the flyer at a print shop by the high school. Then I let Shelby navigate for the rest of the afternoon. We expanded the canvassing area well beyond Belmont to include other places Veronica liked: the Drexel movie theater near downtown, a few vintage clothing stores on High Street—Flower Child in the Short North, the Boomerang Room in Clintonville—and the gift shop at the art museum. I didn’t think Veronica had disappeared for going on seventy-two hours in order to go shopping, and no one we talked to remembered seeing her. But we distributed flyers liberally. It didn’t hurt to widen the net.
Later I took Shelby to the Angry Baker, the vegan place I’d told her about last week. We got chai lattes and sat at a small round table in the window, watching in silence as cars splashed through the puddles on Oak Street. It had stopped raining, but the city was atmospherically wet and felt like it would be forever. There was no reason to bring her here, except I was trying to cheer her up. I didn’t know what else to do.
“Veronica would like it in here.” Shelby cupped her hands around her mug. “We never come to this part of downtown. My dad says we shouldn’t because it’s a bad area.”
“This is my ’hood, kiddo,” I said lightly. “Does it look like a bad area to you?”
Her eyes flicked to the boarded-up building across the street and over a few houses but she kept quiet.
I had to laugh. I opened my mouth to say something about Belmont and how it looked nice on the surface but was far from it. But the moment wasn’t right for such horizon-broadening. “Has your dad ever been up here?” I said instead.
“Probably not. He basically only leaves our neighborhood to go to his job.”
“Well, there you go.”
“When Veronica gets back, I’m going to bring her here,” she said.
When Veronica gets back, like she was currently on a camping trip.
Shelby looked into her empty mug for a while. “He asked me if it was possible that she hurt herself. Killed herself. It’s not. It’s so not. She would never do that to me.” She paused again before finally speaking. “My dad probably doesn’t know what he’s talking about, he doesn’t know everything. She’s coming back. Right?”
I didn’t know what to tell her. There were so many life lessons contained in that one question. I was the last person in the world to be giving advice to anyone right now. I didn’t want to lie to her. But I didn’t see any way around it. In that moment, Shelby needed reassurance more than she needed straight shooting. “Yes,” I said. One way or another, at some point, she’d be found. “She is.”
On the way back to her house, we tried the Book Loft and a big thrift store on South High and then, as it neared seven o’clock, Shelby said she wanted to hit up the Belmont Public Library. “Not that Veronica really likes libraries,” she said. “I mean, I do, she doesn’t. But they have a place where you can post flyers and I always see people reading them.”
“Good idea.”
It was cozy and quaint inside, a small space arranged around an actual hearth. An old card catalogue stood in one corner as a museum of sorts, along with a deeply earnest poster about the history of the Dewey decimal system. While Shelby asked for permission to post her flyer, I looked around, trying to picture Brad and Sarah at their weekly writers’ group in this space. But it was hard for me even to imagine their faces. I felt like a physical manifestation of a jammed signal. Nothing was getting out, and nothing was getting in. Shelby turned away from the counter, giving me a thumbs-up as she took her flyers over to the community board. I doubted that any librarian in the world would refuse to post a missing-persons flyer; librarians were, in my experience, some of life’s finer human beings. But it was good to know that there were still some decent people left in Belmont.
I sensed the library doors opening behind me, so I took a step toward the card-catalogue museum. But then I heard the telltale utility-belt creaking of a uniformed cop.
I spun around and came face-to-face with Sergeant Jack Derrow.
“I’m just waiting for someone, come on,” I said, spreading my hands wide. It was hard to believe that I thought he was friendly the first time I met him.
“Maybe I’m just here to check out a book.”
“Why do I get the feeling that you’re not?”
His eyes flicked to my cheekbone he but didn’t comment on it. “I’m sure you understand, I was doing my job.”
“Yeah, of course,” I said. “Good work. Go ahead. Go get your book.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I told you, I’m waiting for someone. Pretty sure that’s not a police matter.” I semi-seriously considered if the cops had LoJacked my car while it was parked on the access road behind the Brayfield house. BOLO or not, the speed with which they seemed to locate me each time I came here was out of control.
Derrow watched me for a minute like he was waiting for me to commit a crime in front of him. But I wasn’t trespassing this time. I wasn’t even loitering. And he’d have a lot of witnesses to refute any disorderly conduct claims. Then his gaze traveled over my shoulder as Shelby came up to us.
She looked at Derrow, then down at her shoes. “They let me put out twenty of them and they said they would make more copies if it runs low,” she said, almost whispering.
“Awesome. You ready?” I said.
“How are you holding up, Miss Shelby?” Derrow said. “How’s your dad?”
“We’re okay,” she said. “I’m ready.”
We walked back out into the cold, Shelby slightly behind me and walking close to my heels. I glanced behind me and saw that her face was bright red.
“Hey,” I said. “Is something wrong?”
She shook her head, pulling at the handle of the car before the vacuum lock had released. Once it did, she jumped inside and pulled the door closed while I was still standing outside. I got in too. “Shelby,” I said. “What? You’re blushing.”
Shelby’s hands went to her knees, fingers digging into the fabric of her pants. “I—” She didn’t any anything else.
“You can tell me,” I said.
“I blush, sometimes. I can’t help it.”
I waited, one hand on the ignition.
Then she said, “I just don’t like him, is all.”
“Derrow?”
“I don’t like him,” she said, more resolutely. “Veronica always said he was so weird in shock.”
I let go of the ignition and turned to her. “In shock,” I repeated, not understanding.
“She had to take this class, her stepdad made her. After she stole, like, one lip gloss from Target. The police run it. Self-discipline, honor, opportunity, um, the ‘c’ is … character. And knowledge. It’s like a, what’s the word, acronym. SHOCK.”
I suddenly felt like I was staring into the barrel of a gun. “Veronica took the class,” I said slowly. Danielle had told me Mallory Evans had taken a class like that. This boot-camp program that the city runs for messed-up kids, she’d said. Colleen’s mother said she’d been sent to one of those scared-straight-type programs the city puts on. Was this the same program? Had Derrow taught those girls too? I shook my head, trying to slow down the racing thoughts. “Weird how? What did Veronica say he did?”