The Mystery of Hollow Places Read online

  DEDICATION

  For Mom and Dad—

  Thanks for the books. I love you and whatever.

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Back Ad

  About the Author

  Books by Rebecca Podos

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  ONE

  The bedtime story my dad used to tell me began with my grandmother’s body.

  Back when my dad wasn’t yet my dad, but a young forensic pathologist at Good Shepherd Hospital in the city, a dead woman landed on his table. She was middle-aged and unremarkable, her hair colorless, her face like a vacant moon. Gone already when the ambulance brought her in, she’d died in a park in the evening, quietly and alone. After she was cleaned and scraped and stripped, my dad performed the autopsy. A run-of-the-mill operation until he dug down deep and found her heart.

  It wasn’t the bloody blue thing he’d expected, but a pocked stone the size of his fist. As he lifted it to snip it loose, the veins crumbled away from it, turned to dust. My dad held the heart to the light, rapped on it gently with his knuckles, then locked it in his desk drawer until early the next morning, when he came back with a rock hammer and chisel bought from a hardware store a few blocks away. He laid a blue cloth across the exam table—the kind they use to cover bodies—and settled the heart on the cloth. Hands sweaty inside his surgical gloves, he turned it over until he found a dark seam in the stone. Carefully, he slotted the chisel against it, and with a chink, chink, chink, CRACK, the heart split in two. Inside the thick gray rind of rock there were no vessels, or tissues, or anything warm. Instead, a pocket of crystals like clear teeth winked up at him. This happened, he knew from his school days; with enough time and the right conditions, precious stones could grow in hollow places.

  Weeks later, the dead woman’s daughter was finally tracked down. She’d been studying abroad in Switzerland. She was brought to my dad in the Good Shepherd morgue to claim the body in the cooler. He showed her pictures of the dead woman, taken when the ambulance ferried her in. The daughter shook her head. She hadn’t seen her mother in years beyond counting; this could be anyone’s mother.

  My dad showed her the shabby dress the dead woman had worn, the chipped jewelry, the low-heeled shoes. Still the daughter shook her head. None of it was familiar.

  At last, he unlocked the desk drawer and took out the stone heart, wrapped many times over in the big blue cloth, which smelled always of formaldehyde and earth. When he placed the halves in the daughter’s hands, her face crumpled. “Yes, this is her,” the daughter said softly. “She was a lonely woman.”

  He plucked a tissue from the box, then turned back and saw tears glittering on her round cheeks and her unpainted lips, and the way she clutched the heart with one small hand and her long brown hair with the other. In that moment, he said, he knew for certain he was looking at my mother.

  When my stepmother became my stepmother, I asked her if she knew about the heart. By then, Dad hadn’t mentioned it or shown it to me for years. I’m not sure why I brought it up, except to prove to Lindy that we had plenty of stories before she came along, stories she played no part in. But my stepmother sat my father and me down that evening and persuaded him to tell me the whole truth.

  After my grandmother died in the park by Good Shepherd Hospital, Dad said, he devoted himself to my mother. He married her in the spring and moved them out of the city, into a quiet house with many windows and few doors. He left the morgue early each night and brought her presents—a candy bar from the vending machine, daisies from a flower stand at the train and bus station in Sugarbrook. Dad loved my mother so much he felt his heart would split, and then I was born and I was loved by both of them. But my mother grew sad, stiff, and cold, like her mother before her. (“Nothing to do with you, Immy,” Lindy interrupted. “It was just in her chemistry.”) One night, my mother left us, taking a suitcase, no money, and half of the heart with her. She sent the divorce papers through a process server a little while later. Of course Dad was sorry, but he had his daughter to think of. Ready to put the past behind him, he quit his job at Good Shepherd, trading his scalpel and surgical gloves for pens and paperweights.

  This much I knew already. My father writes popular medical mysteries, the kind you read in airports. Since I was little I’ve been sneaking his books into my room, books with thick spines and blood spatters on the covers, and reading them under my blanket. They’re all about a handsome forensic pathologist who solves deaths that seem extraordinary but are in fact perfectly explainable. Someone poisoned the dead man’s salmon fillet, or switched the dead woman’s asthma medicine with dry ice. Nobody’s organs ever turn to stone. There’s no magic in his books at all.

  But I believed my dad about the heart. I still believe. He had proof—the half left behind—and though I haven’t seen it in forever, I remember it perfectly. A semicircle of gray stone, its inside sharp with small crystals. He would show it to me at night and, sitting in my nest of stuffed bears, I’d run one finger over the roughness of it. “It wasn’t your mother’s fault,” Dad would say with a sigh, “or her mother’s. The women in that family were cursed. They could be lonely wherever they were. But not us, Immy. We have each other. So we’ll never, ever have to feel that way.”

  As he spoke, Dad cradled our piece of the rock, which I was never allowed to hold. He clasped it to his own chest as if to protect it, as if it weren’t already broken.

  TWO

  It’s after ten on Thursday night when Lindy hands Officer Griffin her second cup of coffee. While they talk, I splash what’s left in the pot into my own Mystery Writers of America mug. It’s thick and semicool and tastes like horribly burned toast. Dad has always been the master of coffee in this house. That’s how it works: Lindy is the appointment keeper, the bills mailer, the tax filer, while Dad’s the coffee maker, the grocery shopper, the homework checker. At the moment my homework sits upstairs untouched, my English essay blank but for my name, date, and class number. I’m not worried. Lindy will write me a note. Something like:

  Dear Mr. McCormick,

  Please excuse Imogene Scott’s incomplete homework. We were up late filing a missing persons report for Immy’s father, and the time just got away from us.

  Sincerely,

  Lindy Scott

  Fanned out across the kitchen table are pictures of Dad taken in the past few years. Officer Griffin examines the black-and-white headshot from the back cover of his latest novel, No Shirt, No Pulse, No Problem. Dad is sitting in his home office behind a fortress of books and weird paperweights and framed photos, miniature Lindys and Imogenes unidentifiable in their smallness. He chews the stem of a pipe and stares into the distance, as if a story is writing itself while he waits for the click of the camera. If this picture were to wash up on a foreign shore years from now and a stranger plucked it out of the sand, they’d think Dad was some pompous literary great. But he isn’t either of those things. It isn’t even a real pipe in the headshot, just a plastic joke pipe I bought him in honor of his tenth published book. It blows goddamn bubbles.

  How could anyone recognize him from this picture?

  Officer Griffin sets the headshot down gently and turns to her notebook, where for two
hours she’s been taking notes such as: a description of the individual (tall-ish, pale-ish, gray-ish hair, half Asian-ish, fifty-ish, Dad-ish), full name (Joshua Zhi Scott), last known location (his bed, beside Lindy, Wednesday night), known locations frequented by the individual (the local Starbucks, his home office, whichever of our two and a half bathrooms has whatever book he’s currently reading in the rack beside the toilet), means of travel available to the individual (he left his car and credit card behind, but according to the bank, withdrew $1,500 two days ago—so pretty much any means).

  As I slip into my seat she turns to me.

  “You’re a senior in high school, Imogene?”

  “At Sugarbrook High, yeah.”

  “Tough year. College applications, SATs, prom dates . . .”

  “Immy’s in the honor society,” Lindy jumps in. “And mock trial, aren’t you?”

  “That’s great! What colleges have you applied to?”

  “Um, Emerson? And Amherst and BU. And Simmons.”

  “Local schools, huh?”

  “I want to be close to home. My friend’s brother even commutes from home, and he likes it.” Beneath the table I wrap my right fist around my left thumb, just above the knuckle, and pull until it cracks. I do the same with each finger one by one, a nervous habit Dad says will one day require that my ruined joints be replaced by a robot hand.

  The officer nods. “Sure. I told my own daughter how nice it’d be for her to stay local, but she can’t wait to get across the country. Bet your parents are real proud of you.”

  I shrug.

  “Is he in the habit of pulling you from school, your dad?”

  “No,” Lindy says at once. “Absolutely not.”

  “Uh-huh.” Officer Griffin jots a note. “So why’d he take you out yesterday, do you think?”

  “Um. I don’t know. It was a nice day?”

  My first half truth. Wednesday was sunny but cold, capped by a brilliant blue sky that never lived up to its promise. That morning I crawled from bed, prepared as always to spend half an hour bullying my straight, dark hair into almost-waves; to make a desperate swipe at eye makeup only to rub it all off self-consciously; to shun whatever outfit had seemed cool the night before and rummage hopelessly through my closet; to sprint out the door with a granola bar between my teeth and homework and car keys trailing behind me; to sputter into Sugarbrook High’s senior parking lot in my unreliable little Civic with three minutes to spare. Except before all of that, Dad headed me off at the pass. When I slumped out into the hall on my way to the bathroom, he was waiting.

  “How are you feeling today, Immy?” he asked.

  I blinked. While Lindy was usually out the door for work by the time I’d punched the snooze button, it was rare to find Dad awake before I left for school. Stranger still, he was dressed, with his glasses on, furrows from the comb’s teeth still fresh in his smoothed-back hair. His eyes, very dark and shaped like Ma Ma Scott’s, like mine, were bright and alert.

  “Hummuh?” I groaned.

  “I’m just checking, because you don’t look well.”

  “Grur,” I wheezed.

  “What I’m saying is, if you weren’t feeling up to school, I’d sympathize. I don’t want you going in sick.”

  “Are you . . . saying I don’t have to go to school?”

  Dad shrugged and stared out the window, where the sky was flushing pink in the east. “It’s supposed to be a great day. The first nice day in months. I was just thinking it’d be a shame to waste it. Unless you’ve got a test or something?”

  I shook my head. Dad had never made an offer like this. He was a big one for education. I knew he’d worked through four years of premed, four years of med school, four years of clinical training and residency, and all this before I was born. I don’t even remember his long days in the lab at Good Shepherd, before he gave it up. Staying home sick was hard enough—even if he was out of practice, he could still sniff out a fake flu in the time it took me to blow my nose. And staying home just because? Unheard of.

  I asked, “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Always. I just, you know, I thought we could spend some time together. Catch up.”

  So he called the school while I dressed, a little dazed. It wasn’t normal, but I wasn’t about to turn down a day off. Maybe because it was the last school week before February break, and he’d caught the same bug us students had.

  As it happened, Dad had a plan. We got on I-95 North and after forty-something miles of Bob Dylan and CCR on Boston’s oldies station we took the off-ramp toward Newbury. By that time I’d figured out where we were headed: Victory Island.

  There are dozens and dozens of beachy day-trip towns in Massachusetts, and countless more along the East Coast, but Victory Island is ours. Brick-laid walking paths wind between candle shops, toy shops, cheese shops. Fish and Chips is scrawled on the chalkboard menus of every bar and restaurant. Then there’s the water. Cleaner than Revere and far less crowded than the Nantucket beaches, Victory Island Beach is sandy and sloping. The water is cold even in the haziest, hottest summer, and almost impossible to ease into. Ten feet from the shore and you’re up to your shoulders.

  Dad parked in the sandy lot down the street. There wasn’t a parking attendant, and there wouldn’t be for months yet. Obviously we hadn’t bothered with swimsuits or towels—according to the little electric thermometer on the rearview mirror, it was hovering below fifty—so I didn’t have much baggage. Just my sunglasses and coat and a book I’d snatched from my nightstand, rushing so Dad wouldn’t change his mind. Dad rummaged in the trunk and came up with the ragged quilt he kept for roadside emergencies.

  We crossed one of the boardwalks between dunes furred with beach grass and turned left down the rockier stretch of sand. Dad laid out the quilt and I huddled down on it in my jacket. It was a glassy, just-thawed kind of cold. Brisk wind stirred grit over the blanket, into our laps, and between my teeth when I talked. At least it was too early for the mosquitoes and greenhead flies that plagued the beach in summer. The water spread out in front of us, a flat bruise-blue. I snuck down to the wet sand and stuck a finger in the shallows and shrieked despite myself. The cold of it was like fire.

  Back at the blanket, I crossed my arms over my growling stomach. It’s a long drive from Sugarbrook, and it was lunchtime already. “Did we bring any food or anything?” I asked, though one look around and you could see Dad hadn’t. Not even a Ziploc bag of Lucky Charms in his pocket, his usual breakfast.

  “Oops, no. I guess it slipped my mind. We’ll grab something in town later, huh?”

  While Dad sat with his arms around his knees, I hunkered down against the blanket and tried to read my book. Tried to reread it, actually. Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier, is one of my all-time beloved darling favorites. You know how there are precious books you hold like eggs or something, and you only read them in special places when you want to feel like a grown-up, and you wash your hands so you won’t blotch them with your terrible human fingers? Rebecca isn’t one of those. It’s stained with Pepsi and pen ink and makeup from rattling around the bottom of every backpack I’ve owned. The spine is cracked from me falling asleep on it. The fifth chapter has fallen out all apiece, so I use an alligator clip to keep it in the book when I’m not reading. My love is killing it. It’s so good that even people who look down their noses at genre stuff still call it a “modern classic.” But really it’s just an awesome mystery. It’s about a girl who goes to work in Monte Carlo and is wooed by Maximilian de Winter, a handsome, super-rich Englishman who marries her after two weeks (the thirties were a different time). They move to his giant mansion in Manderley, where the girl meets the housekeeper, who turns out to be horrible, a shrew who’s obsessed with Mr. de Winter’s dead wife, Rebecca. She convinces the girl that Rebecca was perfect, beautiful, that the husband will never love her the way he did his first wife. It’s all Rebecca, Rebecca, Rebecca. The housekeeper even convinces the girl she should just give up and jump o
ut a window, and then—

  “Good book?” Dad interrupted.

  Irritated, I refused to take my eyes off the page. “It’s not No Shirt, No Pulse, No Problem.”

  “You know you’re not supposed to read my stuff. All those corpses, they’ll give you nightmares.”

  I could’ve reminded him of my long-retired bedtime story, but instead I huffed, “I’m seventeen. Not seven.”

  He sighed. “So you are. Sometimes, Immy, I wish I could go back. Be your age again.”

  “Cool. You can go to high school tomorrow, and I’ll sit around in my underwear and write all day.”

  Dad laughed dryly. “Someday you’ll appreciate it. You’ll look back and remember when all these doors were open to you. You just wait and see. You get older, and you make your choices, and one by one the doors shut.”

  I closed Rebecca. Dad didn’t usually talk this way. I rolled away on my side, awkward, and cramped from reading on my stomach, and annoyed. I couldn’t see what was so great about being my age anyway. I spent every morning in the bathroom cataloguing what I didn’t like about myself, I had crushes on boys who had no use for me, and I had friends I wasn’t even sure I liked half the time. “Why did you really let me skip today?”

  I felt him stand, sand shifting beneath the blanket to fill the empty space he’d left behind. “Oh, I don’t know. Sometimes I just . . . wish we had more time.”

  I craned my neck over my shoulder to watch him walk down the beach, his sneakers crunching shells and seaweed strands, his head down against the wind.

  By the time I picked up my book again, the sun had ducked behind the clouds, and I was colder than before. I tucked myself deeper into my jacket, pressed my sunglasses into my nose, and shut my eyes.

  I woke up stiff to Dad shaking my shoulder, saying, “Immy, we have to head out. Lindy will wonder where we are.” I could tell it was late by the slant of the sun on the sand, the blue shadows that stretched behind us like our own private pools of water. There was no time to grab food in town—we’d barely beat Lindy home from work, even if we sped—so we stopped at a McDonald’s for fries to fill us up until dinner. Just before pulling out of the drive-through and back onto the highway, Dad turned off the engine, twisted in his seat, and looked me in the eyes.