Unexpectedly, Milo - Matthew Dicks [50]
In all, trying to find information on the correct girl was like trying to find a suspected needle in a possible haystack.
Milo had no better luck researching Harry Truman Middle School. There were more than a dozen such schools in the United States (almost all including the letter S from Truman’s full name), stretching from California to Louisiana to Ohio, but there was no record of a Harry Truman Middle School or a Harry S. Truman Middle School anywhere in the Northeast, and neither could he find a Mrs. Walker employed at any of these schools. Milo wasn’t certain that Freckles had grown up in the Northeast or even east of the Mississippi for that matter, but her lack of any discernible accent and a gut feeling told him that she had. Either way, finding a dozen schools with the same name as Freckles’s middle school didn’t get him any closer to ascertaining her real name.
But Freckles’s mention of a ten o’clock fight had intrigued him a great deal (he actually replayed the tape three times to ensure that he hadn’t mistaken the word flight for fight) and sent him searching websites on women’s boxing, wrestling, kickboxing, karate, and other forms of hand-to-hand combat. Though Freckles did not appear to be the boxing or wrestling type, in either build or demeanor, one never knew. So he searched for almost an hour on these websites in hopes of finding a clue or lead.
None materialized.
He learned that women’s boxing had become more popular and mainstream in the past decade, with the World Boxing League, the North America Boxing League, and many statewide and regional tournaments dominating the scene. But looking at images of the female boxers, kickboxers, and wrestlers online showed clearly that Freckles was not built like a female fighter. Furthermore, he wasn’t even able to find a woman’s boxing or wrestling league anywhere in Connecticut.
Even if one existed, what kind of league would hold its fights at ten in the morning?
Milo was sure that he was missing something. He desperately wanted to discuss the matter with someone like Edith Marchand, or perhaps Andy. These were people who might see or think of something that he was overlooking. And though he didn’t want to violate Freckles’s privacy any more than necessary, he needed to speak to someone who he could trust.
Sadly, Christine did not currently occupy this short list.
chapter 13
Milo couldn’t remember the last time he heard Edith Marchand come close to swearing, so when she told him to “watch the goddamn tapes!” he decided to take her advice seriously. After finishing his morning visit with Mr. Coger, Milo had spent the afternoon with Edith, a rare Sunday visit. Edith was hosting a book club that evening and had asked Milo to come over and rake out the rug (a phrase he always found to be a little dirty) and discuss the book with her prior to her friends’ arrival. Though Edith Marchand was a confident and intelligent woman, the members of her monthly book club included a retired high school English teacher, a University of Connecticut biophysicist, and a poet of some local renown, so she constantly worried about the impression that she might make on them during the discussion. In order to compensate, Milo and Edith had an arrangement in which he would read the assigned book and provide a warm-up discussion for her, during which she could try out observations and criticisms for the first time and co-opt some of Milo’s as well.
The biophysicist had chosen this month’s book, and though Milo didn’t usually mind reading the chosen texts, the months in which the biophysicist chose the book tended to be the exception. In the past, the guy had forced the group to read Finnegan’s Wake, To the Lighthouse, and The House of Mirth, as well as this month’s gem, José Saramago’s Blindness, which in Milo’s estimation was the single most depressing book ever published. Had he not liked Edith Marchand as much as he