“Afraid not. I went to school at Chapel Hill and stayed down here after I graduated. I’m originally from upstate New York.”
“What about Emily and Michael Bryson?” Milo asked. “They live over on Federal Street. Do you know them?”
“No, I don’t,” she said. “But maybe they can help you out better than I can. Sorry I couldn’t help out.” Kelly Plante was rising, attempting to end the conversation.
Milo held his hand out, motioning her to stop. “Just one more minute, if you don’t mind?”
“Sure,” Kelly Plante said, resuming her position in the chair. Though her voice remained friendly, her eyes indicated otherwise. It was clear that she wanted the conversation to be over.
“Listen,” Milo said, leaning forward in his chair. “I know this probably won’t make any sense to you, but there’s a chance that Tess Bryson doesn’t want to be found. She might even be afraid to be found. If that’s the case and you know her, you might be protecting her, and I understand that. You don’t know me.”
“Look, I really don’t …”
“Please. Let me finish. If you know where Tess is and can get a message to her, please just tell her this: I’m a friend of Cassidy. I know how Cassidy helped her run away, and I know why. Cassidy isn’t doing well. She thinks Tess is dead, and she blames herself. She’s blamed herself for the past twenty years. I’m hoping that Tess could just give Cassidy a call. Tell her that she’s still alive and well. That she made it to Chisholm in one piece. Just to put Cassidy’s mind at ease.”
“I’m sorry, but I really don’t know who she is. I’d help you out if I could, but I just don’t know the girl.”
“I know,” Milo said, and he meant it. It was clear that Kelly Plante did not know Tess Bryson. But he continued. “But just in case you do, take this.” He passed a slip of paper over to Kelly Plante with his name and cell phone number written on it. “Like I said, I’m sure that you don’t know her, but I just want to play it safe. Okay?”
“All right,” Kelly Plante said, rising from her seat and stuffing the slip of paper into her jeans. “But I mean it. I don’t know the girl.”
“I know. But thanks anyway.”
Once he was back in his car, Milo checked his watch. Twenty past seven. He still had time to stop by the home of Emily and Michael Bryson if he hurried. He figured that eight o’clock was probably the cutoff for knocking on strangers’ doors and asking about a missing girl from twenty years ago.
On his way over to Federal Street, Milo’s hope began to wane. When he had left Connecticut a little more than twenty-four hours ago, he had been so full of anticipation and excitement. He had expected to drive down to North Carolina, spend an afternoon chatting with the locals, and turn up an appreciative and cooperative Tess Bryson without much trouble. She would in turn contact Freckles, and just like that, Freckles’s guilt and uncertainty and pain would be gone. Not only would she discover that her friend was alive, but she would learn that the maps and the planning and the forty dollars that she had lent her friend as a thirteen-year-old had actually done some good. She had helped a young girl escape an abusive and potentially dangerous father and find a new life here in North Carolina.
In discovering that Milo had a hand in this reunion, Freckles might in turn forgive him for watching the tapes, express appreciation and gratitude for his efforts, and move past the possible awkwardness of secrets revealed. Perhaps the two could even find a way to be friends, and maybe, someday, something even more, though Milo could barely admit this secret longing even to himself.
But most important, Freckles would no longer be forced to live with a secret that had plagued her for years. Milo could not envision a better gift. Though it was impossible to rid himself of his own secrets, he found himself in the unique position to do so for Freckles, and he couldn’t begin to imagine the joy and the sense of relief that she would feel on realizing that she was free from her burden. Though hardly a believer in fate, Milo believed that he, more than almost anyone else in the world, could understand Freckles’s circumstance, and that perhaps it was for this reason that he had found the video camera and the tapes. Perhaps he could do for Freckles what no one could ever do for him. Unable to rid himself of his life of secrecy, perhaps the best he could ever do was save someone else from a similar fate.
Perhaps this would be enough.
But with half of his potential contacts now scratched off his list, Milo was depending on Emily and Michael Bryson to save the day, and he was beginning to realize how unlikely and unrealistic this expectation might be. Tess Bryson had disappeared twenty years ago, and even if she had come to Chisholm, North Carolina, the odds that she was still in town were minuscule. If alive, she would be about thirty-two years old today. She could be anywhere, doing anything. What could he have been thinking?
He was beginning to think that this trip had more to do with his getting away from Christine and from Connecticut and less to do with some wistful, near impossible undertaking. Perhaps this had been an opportunity to take a vacation from his problems and find some excitement by living out a fantasy that offered no hope of success.
Perhaps he had needed this distance in order to come to terms with the end of his marriage.
Still, he decided to finish the job. Complete his due diligence. Even if he was likely to fail, he thought that he owed it to Freckles to at least try. So with a forced smile, Milo arrived at 107 Federal Street, a white and green ranch with an overgrown lawn and a sagging garage, hoping against hope that the solution to his dilemma lay behind a front door that still sported a plastic Christmas wreath.
Emily and Michael Bryson turned out to be a half-ton of peculiarity. They were considerably less nervous than Kelly Plante, but Milo thought that the couple had little to be nervous about. Given their enormous girth, he wondered if a bullet could even penetrate the layers of fat surrounding their theoretical muscle. Emily Bryson was the largest woman Milo had ever seen. Round was the best word to describe her, as her torso seemed to lack any specificity of dimension. Beginning around her ears and ending around her knees, her body was composed of opposing parabolas of fatty tissue, expanding to her midsection before narrowing off at either end, thus eliminating any possibility of a neck, waist, or thighs. In fact, she looked more like one of Milo’s Weebles than an actual human being, much more so than Pete at the bar, and by the time he was able to leave her home, Milo found himself half-wanting to jam her in a door frame and watch her pop. She wore a pair of denim shorts and a pink sweatshirt that were somehow too big for a woman who looked as though she could wear a tent, and her feet were dirty and bare. Her face was red and streaked with sweat, and she breathed like a racehorse having sex.
Nevertheless, she also possessed a radiant smile and a surprising spring in her step, both of which were in full force as she herded Milo into her kitchen before he could even tell the woman his name. Seconds later, he found himself sitting at a cluttered table in an impossibly cluttered kitchen, being served biscuits on a paper plate.
Milo was stunned at the sheer volume of items in the kitchen, and from his brief view into what might have been a living room or dining room, he noted that this was not the only space in the home that the Brysons had filled. The countertops were piled high with magazines, newspapers, empty cans and jars, pots and pans, bowls filled with nails and screws, the plastic lids to water bottles, keys, and other assorted items. Boxes and baskets were piled alongside the walls of the room, and random pieces of furniture, including a rolltop desk, several lamps, and a baby changing table were pushed into the corners, covered in dust. It was a wonder, Milo thought, that the kitchen hadn’t collapsed into the basement long ago.
Milo attempted to introduce himself and explain his situation, but every time he tried to get her attention, Emily Bryson began moving again, first to the refrigerator, where she poured Milo more than a pint of milk into what appeared to be a pickle jar, and then to the stove, where she began frying sausage links and mushrooms
in a cast iron skillet. “Just gimme two shakes and I’ll have some of this ready for you, mister.”
“Please, call me Milo,” he asked for the third time. “If I could just have a minute to explain—”
“You like grits?”
“Huh?”
“Do you like grits?” she repeated. “I still got some from this morning.”
“Mrs. Bryson, I just ate dinner. I’m really not hungry.”
“I know. I know. That’s why I’m not going overboard. But mister, this is what we do in the South. We feed our guests.” Then, without taking her eyes off the sausage already sizzling in the pan, she shouted, “Michael!”
From somewhere down a hallway lined with boxes, stacks of newspapers, and books, someone, presumably Michael Bryson, shouted, “Coming!”
Moments later, he emerged, his enormous frame rubbing up against the piles of detritus on either side of the hallway, causing the bundles of newspapers and stacks of books to teeter as he passed. Michael Bryson, a little over five feet tall, was smaller than his wife, but only in height. The man’s dimensions were so askew that Milo could not even ascribe a Weeble-like description to his body. While also spherical in nature, he resembled more of a two-layered snowman propped up on a pair of tree stumps, his small head perched atop an enormous, ovoid body. He had a shock of curly red hair and a complexion to match. Like his wife, he was sweating and breathing heavily as he pushed through the door frame and into the kitchen.
“Michael Bryson,” he said, sounding as if his tongue were getting in the way of his words. “Nice to meet you.” He thrust his right hand out to Milo, who shook it while marveling at its size. It was like shaking a Christmas Day ham.
“Hi, I’m Milo. I was just explaining the reason for my visit to your wife.”
“Did you want grits or not, Milo?” she asked, removing sausage links from the skillet with a pair of tongs.
“No, thanks, Mrs. Bryson. I really am full already. The biscuits were great.”
“Sausage is coming right up. I fried some up for you too, Michael.”
Milo turned his attention back to Mr. Bryson, who had taken a seat at the end of the table. Because of his girth, his stomach was pressing against the table’s edge even though he was sitting nearly two feet from it. Though Milo had no appetite, he was suddenly curious to see how Michael Bryson would manage to eat with his mouth so far from the table. “Mr. Bryson, I came from Connecticut looking for an old friend of mine from grade school, and I was hoping that you might know her. Her last name is Bryson.”
“You hear that, Emmy? We’ve got a carpetbagger in our midst. A Yankee, for goodness’ sakes! Shut the doors and board up the windows!” The man barely finished his sentence before bursting into a fit of laughter, his tongue still obstructing his giggles. “No offense, Milo,” he finally managed. “Just a little southern humor.”
“That’s right,” Emily Bryson added. “Good food and better hospitality. That’s what we’re known for here.”
“Right,” said Milo. “That’s great. And thank you so much. But you see, I’m wondering if you know of my friend. She would’ve come to Chisholm about twenty years ago. Her name is Tess. Tess Bryson.”
“Tess Bryson,” Michael Bryson repeated, appearing to search his memory banks for a match.
“You have a second cousin named Bessie,” Emily Bryson said. “Isn’t that right, Michael?”
“Sure do. But she lived in West Virginia. Grew up there, I think. Maybe Virginia, but I don’t think she’s ever lived up north. Probably never been farther north than Baltimore, if I had to guess.”
“And besides,” Emily Bryson said as she added six sausage links and a spoonful of fried mushroom to Milo’s plate. “Her name’s Bessie. Not Tess.”
“That’s true,” Michael Bryson agreed. “But you know, Milo, there is a Tess living over on Harris Road, I think. Isn’t there, honey? Tess Dailey? Or Bailey?”
For a moment, Milo’s hopes soared. Perhaps Tess Bryson had changed her last name, or maybe she had married and taken on her husband’s last name.
“You fool,” Emily Bryson said. “That was Tally Bailey, and she died five years ago.”
“Really?”
“Michael. We went to the funeral. Don’t you remember?”
This quality of discussion went on for another thirty minutes, during which time Milo consumed a total of three biscuits, ten sausage links, and two servings of fried mushrooms. He watched as Michael Bryson turned himself and his chair sideways, facing away from his plate, allowing him to sidle up to the table on his left side, where the distance from his plate was reduced to just under a foot. From this position, he was able to lean over his plate and shovel sausage, mushrooms, and grits into his mouth (appearing to hold his breath while doing so) before retracting to an upright position in order to chew and swallow. Between his own bites, Milo also managed to interject the rest of his story between the ongoing litany of non sequiturs, finally wrapping up by passing his phone number to a greasy-fingered Emily Bryson, who immediately placed it under a magnet on the refrigerator. The thought that his phone number would be here long after he had left made him want to retrieve it immediately. He felt as if he were leaving a wounded man behind on the battlefield.
Milo was then subjected to another fifteen minutes of suggestions and recommendations from the Brysons, which ranged from putting an ad in the county’s Rare Reminder to hiring a crop duster to fly over Chisholm with a banner that included Tess Bryson’s name and his phone number. All the while, Milo shook his head in mock appreciation while searching for an opening that would allow him to leave.
With great effort, Milo finally extracted himself from the Brysons’ home just after nine, toting a bag of biscuits and a Tupperware container of gravy in his hands, courtesy of Emily Bryson. All he wanted to do was find the motel that Macy had told him about, pay for a room, and close his eyes for the next ten hours. He had lost all hope of finding Tess Bryson. Kelly Plante had proven to be a dead end, and despite the sausage and ample string of suggestions that they provided, Michael and Emily Bryson had been equally unhelpful. He could look into the Bryson family that Kelly Plante had mentioned earlier that evening, but since it was likely that none of them lived in town anymore and he had no definite address, he suspected that finding even a scrap of information on them would be impossible.
Since he had no other means of finding her and no ideas about how to proceed, his mission had sadly come to an end. He would need to leave Chisholm by the next afternoon if he had any hope of making it back to Connecticut in time for his visit with Edith Marchand on Saturday. Maybe once he was back in Connecticut, he would hire a private investigator to locate Tess Bryson. He was feeling more and more foolish for even embarking on this pipe dream of a journey.
chapter 26
Milo was certain that the Do Not Disturb sign was hanging off the door to his motel room, and besides, it was seven A.M. Even though this was hardly a five-star inn, he doubted that the cleaning crew of the Pinecrest Motor Lodge began their work this early in the morning, sign or no sign. And yet there it was again. A knocking on his motel room door.
Milo knew that there were people in the world who would shout at the closed door from the confines of their bed, ordering the disturber to take a hike or hit the road, and though Milo sometimes wished that he were one of these people, he was not. His distaste for confrontation and his genuine desire to be liked kept him from shouting at even unseen strangers. Instead, he stumbled to the door in his stocking feet, trying to adjust his eyes to the light creeping in from the edges of the thick brown curtains.
The woman standing at the door was a slender brunette wearing glasses, an Orioles cap, and a floral scarf wrapped tightly around her neck. A sweater stretched from her shoulders down to her knees, where dark leggings took over and canvas sneakers completed the outfit. Emblazoned across the chest of the sweater was a red-eyed tabby cat slurping down the hindquarters and tail of a doomed mouse. Knit in bursts of oran
ges and yellows and reds, the sweater was the most garish piece of clothing that Milo had ever seen. He couldn’t help but stare at it a moment before raising his gaze and meeting the woman’s eyes, which were round, large, and hazel.
“Milo?” she asked.
He was surprised to hear his name spoken from this stranger, but realization quickly dawned as she repeated herself.
“Are you Milo Slade?” she asked again. Her voice had a hint of a southern accent, but nothing close to that of Emily or Michael Bryson, or the man who had handed him his room key late the night before.
“Yes,” he said, staring in astonishment. “I’m Milo.”
“You’re a friend of Cassidy Glenn?”
“Huh?” He was still so stunned by this woman’s appearance that he could not answer.
“Cassidy Glenn. You know her?”
“Yes,” he managed. “I know her, I know Cassidy.” He nearly held his breath as he asked the next question. “Are you Tess Bryson?”
“No. I’m Emma. But I’m a friend of Tess’s. She sent me here to see you.”
Milo had expected the sky to open up with her response, revealing the sun in all its glory, accompanied by a thousand angels, all singing in harmony. Perhaps this would’ve happened had this woman been Tess Bryson, but she was not. Nevertheless, a rush of adrenaline shot through his body with her response. He was standing in front of a woman who knew Tess Bryson. Someone who claimed to be a friend of Tess Bryson’s. Someone who had spoken with Tess Bryson in the past twenty-four hours.
Tess Bryson.
He had found her.
“Tess Bryson? You know her?” Milo asked. “She’s here in Chisholm? How did you know that I was looking for her?”
“Hold on, Milo. I get to ask the questions first. That’s the way this works, okay?”
“Sure. Go ahead.”
“Not here. Let’s get some breakfast. Why don’t you get dressed and meet me somewhere. Have you eaten anywhere in town yet?”