Chapter Fifty-Eight
“That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.” Quinn closes Willa Cather’s My ántonia, and smiles.
He’s been captivated by the novel about an orphan on the Nebraska frontier and his memories of a remarkable childhood friend.
He imagines feeling happiness like that someday, for it to come as naturally as sleep, and hasn’t given up on that.
But today, he parks in the small lot of the flower shop, braces himself for what has become a painful ritual: paying his respects at the yearly informal vigil for missing Minnie Agbayani; reporting the lack of any meaningful leads to her parents; seeing the despair in their eyes; watching Mr. Agbayani feign cheerfulness, cling to hope.
Quinn gets out of the car, mentally prepares himself.
On the curb in front of the shop, a woman in her forties wearing an apron and gardening gloves stands directing a man with sleeve tattoos who is unloading a heavy crate of something from the bed of a pickup truck.
A delivery to the store of some sort. The woman’s dark hair is being overtaken by gray and is pulled into a bun.
Inside, Mr. Agbayani looks years older than he did on Quinn’s last visit, the aftermath of his daughter’s disappearance and now his wife’s cancer. Quinn doesn’t know how he gets through the day. How he carries the weight. But Quinn’s learned a lot about carrying weight around.
He’s greeted as always with a cheerful, “Mr. Quinn!”
Quinn asks how Mrs. Agbayani is doing, and Mr. Agbayani lies and says she’s well.
The woman from the pickup truck appears in the shop, carrying a platter of something wrapped in cellophane.
She holds the door open with her back for the man who is carrying the crate.
As the man takes the delivery to the back of the store, the woman places the platter on the table, and comes over and hugs Mr. Agbayani.
She holds his gaze, quietly saying something that seems personal since Mr. Agbayani is tearing up.
Quinn keeps a respectful distance, pretends to browse the store.
After the woman leaves, Mr. Agbayani plants on the fake smile again. “Mrs. Agness makes the best fertilizer for exotic plants. And the best cookies.” He gestures to the platter.
“I remember,” Quinn says. Quinn thinks back on his phone interview with the Agnesses his first year on the case. Something’s gnawing at him.
“Was that the reverend? The man who brought in the crate, I mean.” He was younger than Mrs. Agness, had tattoos, a pitted face, didn’t dress like the head of a church.
Mr. Agbayani smiles. “No, Reverend Agness couldn’t make it today. Mrs. Agness said he got called away to help a member of the church who’s in crisis. The delivery man, Randall, is someone from the church who helps with the fertilizer business now and then.”
Quinn feels a tingling sensation. “Did the man work for them back when Minnie…?”
Mr. Agbayani gets a concerned look on his face. “No, I don’t think so. Randall started about a year ago, I think.”
The fertilizer company has no employees, but Quinn didn’t know they hired people for side jobs. He needs to ask the couple if they hired anyone at the time Minnie disappeared. Mr. Agbayani thinks maybe so, but he can’t remember.
Later, in his small office at Midwest Investigators, Quinn can’t stop thinking about the man who delivered the fertilizer with the reverend’s wife.
He knows the couple was 250 miles away in Fairlane, Iowa, when Minnie disappeared, but what if someone they hired to help with deliveries had seen Minnie previously and came back for her.
He finds the reverend’s number in the file and calls.
An answering machine picks up. A woman’s voice says, “You’ve reached Fairlane Community Church.
We’re not available right now, but please leave a message and we will return your call as soon as possible.
” The woman goes on to give the times for the weekly services.
Quinn leaves his name and number and hangs up.
He glances at Minnie’s file of dead ends again.
The Omaha police had only one piece of evidence—a non-prescription lens from a pair of glasses found near where Minnie was playing when she disappeared.
The investigators at Quinn’s firm had visited more than a dozen optometrists to try to identify anything they could from the lens: the type of glasses, whether there was any way to trace the lens maker, and a never-ending series of questions that led nowhere.
Beyond the lens, Midwest Investigators had identified only one suspect not previously considered by the Omaha police: a convicted sex offender, the son of one of the flower shop’s customers, who turned out to have a solid alibi, a video of him working his shift at a gas station at the time Minnie vanished.
Quinn’s mind flits to his mom’s case. How the video covering Randy Calhoon’s area of the factory was mysteriously turned off during the critical window of time when his mom was murdered.
He tries to stop himself from going down the rabbit hole.
He lost Holly and jeopardized his job at Midwest Investigators over his obsession.
He needs to let it go. Once he starts fixating on his mother’s case, it can swallow an entire day.
He needs to accept that either Randy really did kill his mom—the jury and everyone else’s view—or that he’s never going to uncover the real killer.
One rabbit hole that Quinn has fallen down many times is John Smith—the man the old sheriff identified as a suspect in Megan Tucker’s murder back when Quinn’s parents were teenagers.
His mother wrote “Megan” in her Red Flag file for a reason.
John Smith benefited from having the most common name in the United States.
It also helped him that he was raised in foster care.
Quinn has tried to get foster records, but those are either not public or nonexistent since rural social services agencies in the 1970s weren’t exactly sticklers about recordkeeping.
Still, everything he’s learned about Smith is contrary to the old sheriff’s gut feeling that Smith was involved with Megan’s murder.
Smith was a good student, received a college scholarship to a school in Illinois, according to an old teacher Quinn tracked down.
A good-looking guy, Smith was bounced around several different foster homes, finally landing in Ashwell for his senior year.
The yearbook Quinn found has no photo of him.
It has photos of Dad and Pat senior year, but not Mom since she’d already moved to Monarch to live with her mother after his grandparents’ divorce.
John Smith, wherever he is now, left Ashwell and never looked back. And who could blame him? The town is bleak now; god knows what it was like in the seventies.
Quinn taps on his computer, typing Reverend Agness’s name and Fairlane Community Church into Yahoo. He gets a hit for the church. On the front page of the site is a photo of the kind of old wooden church that punctuates many rural communities.
The site doesn’t have much information. A directory of staff, which Quinn will run down. And then something else catches his eye. A hyperlink: FCC’S COMMUNITY REENTRY PROGRAM PROVIDING SECOND CHANCES TO THE INCARCERATED.
That’s interesting. He clicks and reads about the church’s program that provides services to individuals recently released from the Nebraska State Penitentiary.
Quinn feels goose bumps ripple down his arms. What if Reverend Agness and his wife hired ex-cons for odd jobs? What if one of them made a delivery with them to the store and saw Minnie? What if … He stops himself from spiraling.
There’s only one photo in the Reentry Program section of the site, a group shot of several men working a soup line—a church-organized event, by the looks of it.
He doesn’t see the man from this morning in the photo, the one with the pitted face and tattoos who was helping Mrs. Agness with the delivery.
But another man grabs his attention. He has a beard and wears glasses that are perched on his nose over a patch he wears over one eye.
It’s then Quinn feels the lightning bolt strike through him at the discovery. A one-eyed man.
He jumps up from his desk and races outside to his car, tears out from the lot headed to Fairlane, Iowa.