Unexpectedly, Milo - Matthew Dicks [49]
Milo hated the man or woman who had added this song to their playlist, but he listened in reverence anyway, trying to diminish the diminishment of the song and its meaning.
Had he been wearing a hat, he would have removed it out of respect.
As Springsteen was singing the final verse of his song, Milo spotted Timothy Coger rounding the front of the aisle and heading his way. As he passed by, the large man lifted his meaty hand and offered a hearty “Good morning, Milo!” It managed to return a smile to Milo’s face.
Milo could always depend on the oddities of people like Mr. Coger to keep him happy. Amusing, unapologetic, and, most important, odd, these were the people in his life that helped him to feel normal. Timothy Coger, Edith Marchand, and even Arthur Friedman had all reached a point in their lives, and in their relationships with Milo, at which they could be themselves, as strange and bizarre as they may be. Arriving to the grocery store with him but pretending otherwise. Masturbating to Internet porn with the help of Viagra. Raking shag carpets in preparation for guests. Not all, but most of his clients had been willing to reveal secrets like these to Milo, and in turn, he never judged them for their oddities, knowing full well how difficult a secret is to bear, and of course having his own oddities with which to compare. Oftentimes his clients were the people whose company and friendship he valued the most, for he felt that these relationships were more honest than those he had with his wife and friends.
Though in truth, Timothy Coger wasn’t Milo’s choice of company at this particular moment. Freckles was still firmly on his mind, and after a night of fruitless research, he desperately wanted to review the situation with someone who might offer a varying perspective. Though he had known Timothy Coger for quite a while, he did not have the same kind of casual, friendly relationship as he did with a client like Arthur Friedman or Edith Marchand. Formality ruled the roost in the Coger household, so the unnecessary exchange of personal anecdotes and information did not occur.
There were others more willing to listen and dispense advice.
Milo had spent more than two hours researching online the previous evening, beginning with Freckles’s deceased friend, Mira. He had expected to find a bounty of information on the dead woman, particularly because of the way that Freckles had alluded to her friend’s death as less than ordinary, but regardless of his query, he could find nothing related to a recently or otherwise deceased woman named Mira formerly living in or around Connecticut.
His search on the name Sherry Ferroni, a.k.a. Ragamuffin, provided no matches whatsoever, which both surprised and frustrated Milo. Though he had never known anyone with the last name of Ferroni, it didn’t sound unusual enough to be absent from the Internet entirely. After reviewing the tape again and recording the names of the seven other girls that Freckles mentioned, he searched for information on them as well and was marginally more successful.
Searches on Melissa Davis, Kim Maynard, Meghan Phelps, and even Lisa Palumbo produced many results, too many in fact, but Milo was unable to connect any of these names to Harry Truman Middle School, the state of Connecticut, or even one another, and sorting through the hundreds of possible hits was nearly impossible. Searching with the names Charity Dumars and Annette Ryler produced no results (Milo was less surprised with these more unusual-sounding names), and though hits on the name Kristen Sloane were abundant, the number