She drove down the stretch of smoke shops, free clinics, and pay-by-the-hour motels that ran along Meadow View. The address landed her in front of a small square building, a bright yellow banner hanging across the front that read WE BUY GOLD. A picture of a capering leprechaun was painted across one window. The iron bars over the glass made it look like he was in jail.
There was a bell on the door that jingled as she entered. A smell of burnt coffee and heavy-duty cleaner stung her nostrils. Inside was a waiting area, with a small vinyl chair adjacent to an empty water cooler. There was a service window in the wall, filled with warped Plexiglas like a bank-teller’s station. To the left of that was a door, with a sign that read EMPLOYEES ONLY.
“Hello?”
A blurry shape appeared on the other side of the glass. Then a small window shot open, and a sagging, doughy face with bloodshot eyes and wiry gray hair appeared.
Veronica unfolded a copy of her flyer from her purse. “You called me. About the flyer?”
His expression didn’t change, but a little glint came into his eyes. They were pale watery blue, veined like a cracked marble. “Is there some kinda reward?”
“Depends what you’ve got.” She let her smile drop. “If you give me a lead I can use I have a crisp hundred dollar bill with your name on it. Actually, it’s more like five crumpled twenties. But it spends the same.”
“A hundred seems a little thin when there’s a ten-K reward for finding the girl.”
“Oh, does that mean you’re going to bring her home?” Veronica mimed wiping her forehead. “That is a relief. Because I’ve been running all over town looking for information, but if you know where she is, that lets me off the hook.”
“Hey, I just want to make sure my information is appraised at its proper value.” He mournfully raised the straw of a Big Gulp to his lips and slurped loudly, eyes tracking her every move.
Veronica pressed her lips together. There might be other ways to get his information—but every second she stood here was another lost opportunity to find the girls.
“Okay. I have a hundred and fifty for you to tell me everything you know, right now. And if I find Hayley Dewalt, I’ll come back and give you another fifty.”
He suckled at his soda for a moment, slurping the dregs up from the bottom. Then he slammed the Plexiglas window shut.
For a moment she thought that was it—she was dismissed. Then the door in the wall swung open. The face was now a body, slouching and slow, in a wrinkled khaki-colored shirt the same miserable shade as the carpet and the walls. He beckoned for her to follow him to the back room.
His work space was cramped and cluttered, every surface covered with a hodgepodge of equipment—electronic probes and scanners, tweezers, scales, gauges. Small bins lined the shelves on the walls, dusty and full of odd parts. A broken watch lay in pieces across a counter. A small TV was perched precariously on the corner of his workstation, tuned to Fox News, the screen smeared with something greasy.
The shopkeeper leaned down and pulled a small basket from a shelf below his workstation. A label on one end read 3/12. Inside, Veronica could see a jumble of plastic baggies, each containing something different—a gold-link bracelet, an ugly old brooch. A few engagement rings. She wondered briefly if any of their owners had been her or her dad’s clients.
“She’s not wearing it in any of the pictures they’re showing on the news,” he muttered. “But I recognized it the second I saw that flyer. Never seen another one like it.”
Veronica was about to ask him what he was talking about when he found what he was looking for. He ripped open the bag and poured a necklace out into one surprisingly fine-boned hand.
It was a pendant—a tiny gold birdcage, on a slender golden chain.
Veronica stared at the necklace in his hand. For a moment she didn’t recognize what she was looking at. Then, all at once, she understood. She reached into her purse and pulled out one of her flyers. There it was, hanging from Hayley’s neck on the night she disappeared. It dangled into her cleavage, the cage hitting the curve of a breast.
“This came in two days after that girl disappeared.”
“It’s pretty.” Veronica shrugged, playing it cool. “Are you sure all the girls aren’t wearing them? It’s not being mass-produced for Urban Outfitters or anything? Birds are sort of ‘in’ these days.”
“That’s not mass-produced,” he scoffed. “Whoever made it is a real craftsman. And look …” He opened the cage door on tiny hinges. “Her initials are engraved inside. I noticed ’em, but I didn’t put it together until I saw your flyer.”
Veronica held out her hand. The man reluctantly let the necklace slide into her palm. He was right—even she could see it, and she wasn’t exactly a jewelry expert. The birdcage was skillfully cast, the bars on the cage delicate and glittering. A cluster of three small diamonds was set in the roof. And there, inside, were the initials HD.
“Most of the stuff I get I sell for scrap. This? This is special. I was going to try to resell it.”
“Do you keep records on your clients? Who brought this in?”
He set his drink down on the counter and shuffled painfully over to the TV. A small stack of VHS tapes sat next to it. “It’s lucky I saw your flyer when I did. I usually only keep ’em for a week and then tape over ’em.” He selected the tape that said WEDNESDAY and pushed it into the built-in VCR.
There were a few tense moments as he fast-forwarded through the day’s tape. It looked like he didn’t get a lot of business until late evening—but by 9:00 p.m. the parade of despair commenced. Very young women with young children clinging to their legs; wobbly old men with unkempt beards; strung-out, bone-thin beings of indeterminate age. They filed in, one by one, the black-and-white cameras picking up their raw hope, and then their defeat when they realized how little time their treasures had bought them.