Then I heard a man’s booming voice behind me…
“She ain’t dead.”
Chapter Five
• • • • •
This may shock you,but Jersey wasn’t his real name. He wasn’t even from New Jersey. He grew up in Indiana, but he spent summers working as a carny in Wildwood before he got into managing girls. He told me all of this over a big-boy breakfast at the Comet Café. He looked much less intimidating under this light.
People were always telling me things. I guess I seem so harmless that just sitting there alone at the skating rink at Melanie’s eleventh birthday party meant her dad could confide in me, slurring his words, that he’d lost his job in pharmaceutical sales and had to steal from Melanie just to cover the Mrs. Fields cookie cake. Or when I got a soft pretzel at the food court and Jessica Kerry told me she’d blown Quincy Evans in a stairwell next to the American Eagle. We weren’t even friends. I think she just needed to tell someone. I was like beige wallpaper, physically small, temperamentally flat. I didn’t seem like I’d ever tell anyone anything, and even if I wanted to, who would I tell?
Daisy had hardly unpacked her side of the dorm room when she told me about her bipolar disorder, her demons, the pills she had to take daily. How they didn’t mix well with alcohol, so she mostly stuck to mint tea. How she’d gotten a scholarship to study art in New York but her dad wouldn’t let her go.
“It’s strange. I feel like I can tell you anything,” she said, sitting on the end of my bed, drinking tea from her Monet’sWater Liliesmug, holding it with both hands.
This ability to extricate people’s darkest secrets without even trying made me want to become a journalist. Why be wallpaper listening to a confessional in a corner at the Fun Zone Ice Arena when I could blast it from the rooftops in a dying print publication? I wanted to know everything, and I also wanted people to return my calls.
I’d worked at the college newspaper, but no one was particularly impressed with my investigation into the salmonella outbreak at the faculty mess hall. I needed clips in actual publications, but I couldn’t afford to take an unpaid internship to get clips and I couldn’t get a newspaper job without clips. I lied on my résumé to temp at BuzzFeed, to organize a fashion closet at Refinery29. I bombed my interview atGlamourafter one of the editors asked if I was a “makeup junkie,” as if looking at my bare face and unshaped brows didn’t answer that question. I talked my way into the IT department of Vox Media before they realized I thought C++ was a grade. I made twenty-five dollars an hour fact-checking out of a supply closet atDomino,right before the print magazine folded.
But when it came to applying for jobs, the managing editors all told me that they only hired from the Ivy League. Really,Domino, you needed a Harvard grad to write captions about the best plastic watering cans for spring? Maybe in another life, I’d be shouting questions in a White House briefing room or sharing truffle fries with a celebrity at the Polo Lounge.
But instead, I was using my extraction skills to try to get Jersey, the manager at Club Crush, to tell me anything he could remember about Daisy. I want to say “The House of the Rising Sun” was playing on the jukebox, but I may be imagining that.
“And that was when?” I asked Jersey, jotting in my reporter’s notebook.
“Six, maybe seven years ago?” he said, wiping up some ketchup with a piece of white bread.
I flipped back to my earlier Daisy notes. “Strange. I got nothing on OnlyFans. One hit on Myspace on the Wayback. If you’ve got a cell? Or an email?”
He chewed, washed it down with coffee, then said, “You’ve got to change your way of thinking.”
Jersey had been managing Atlantic City “titty bars” since 2012 and fashioned himself a bit of a local legend. He used to work in hard core. “And I’m not talkin’ online. Any asshole incel with a dial-up can find hard core on Pornhub. I mean the high end, the, uh, services your, uh, ‘friend’ was into, or shit, perfected…”
I listened silently. People always want to fill silences. I noticed two very drunk girls, all lip gloss and Lycra, laughing at the counter.
“Look, this Daisy, or whatever, she’s been through it…” Jersey said, making a circling motion with his index finger at the side of his head. “Jesus willing, she comes out of it on the other side. But there are people…” He briefly glanced at the diner’s entrance. “There are reasons why I can’t tell you anything else.”
The waitress laid the check on the table. Jersey eyed it. I pulled out some cash, pleading, “Do you know how I can find her?”
“Try her grandma? They were close. She used to call her. I’m a big believer in family.” He stood up, sure that the grandma was in “some old-age home” in Texas.
Queenie. Daisy’s grandmother. Of course. Why hadn’t I thought of that? “Thank you. If you see Daisy, can you tell her—”
He shook his head. “Lady. You need a professional.”
I stopped him, putting my hand on his hand. “I can’t afford a PI. Just tell her I’m looking for her? Please.”
He looked at our hands, touching. A wry smile. He hung on, moving his forefinger a touch on my wrist. I jerked away. Jersey stood up to leave. “Be good, now.”
I sat alone watching the drunk girls, thinking of Daisy. One of them suddenly fell off her stool, sloppy. Her bag spilled on the floor.
—
“Her name was Lola. She was a showgirl. With yellow feathers in her hair and a dress cut down to there…” I was rushing through George Bush Intercontinental Airport toward the Avis counter singing Barry Manilow. I’d tried Elmo, the Laurie Berkner Band, “Baby Beluga,” “Baby Shark,” the Okee Dokee Brothers, the Kiboomers, and the Wiggles. TheJuju Beanmoms sent me playlists. Recorded themselves singing lullabies, playing the harmonica. But nothing soothed Holden like “Copacabana.”
“Hold up,” Roman said, cutting off my big finish. I clenched my teeth, anticipating the fight. He was cool with one night in Atlantic City, but I don’t think Roman had grasped my full commitment to this missing person search until I booked the next flight to Houston to chase down a lead from a New Jersey pimp.
“Roman,” I said slowly, trying again to explain why the trip to Katy, Texas, was life-or-death. “Jersey said that Daisy is alive, and her grandma is the only person she kept in touch with.”
