Unidentified Woman #15 by David Housewright

question and asked, “What else did she take?”
    “Five thousand dollars in cash,” I said. “I didn’t tell the MPD about the money, though.”
    Bobby nodded his head as if he understood perfectly.
    “What are we going to do?” Nina repeated. “Fifteen is all alone. She’s all alone and she’s scared. She’s probably trying to hide.”
    “What do you know about Howard?” Bobby asked.
    “Only what I told you.”
    “I don’t even have a legitimate reason to pull his jacket.”
    “Maybe not, but you’re going to do it anyway.”
    “We need to find her,” Nina said. “Should we offer a reward?”
    “What would the notice say?” Bobby asked. “Wanted—a pretty, young, blue-eyed blonde with pale skin? In Minnesota, that shouldn’t generate more than ten thousand phone calls. I’m sorry, Nina. I don’t mean to be rude, only it would be like looking for a needle in a stack of needles. We don’t even have a name.”
    “That’s not entirely true,” I said.
    Nina looked at me with high expectations. Bobby’s expression suggested annoyance.
    “Have you been holding out on us, McKenzie?” he asked.
    “She let it slip the other day. Her name is El.”
    “Elle? As in Elle Macpherson, the model? Or short for Ellen, Eloise, Eleanor?”
    “Or just the letter L, ” Nina said. “Linda, Laurel, Loraine…”
    “Something else,” I said. “Yesterday morning on the balcony, she said that there wasn’t a single building over two stories in Deer River.”
    Bobby tried to contain himself and nearly succeeded. Yet for the briefest of moments an expression flicked across his face that I had seen before, albeit not very often. It was the one that said, “You’re smarter than you look.”

 
    FIVE
    I started at the Holiday Stationstore off U.S. Highway 2 just inside the city limits.
    “Yeah,” I said. “I have a place, a cabin, about fifty miles north of here. I must have driven through Deer River a thousand times to get there, and this is the only place I’ve ever stopped. I ran into a couple of kids in the Cities, though, especially this pretty young thing called herself El, and they said I should give DR a try. Do you know El?”
    I spoke the name loud enough for everyone to hear. The woman working the cash register didn’t know it. Neither did anyone else by the way the other customers acted.
    I tried the same gag over a mug of tap beer at the joint next door and received a head shake from the bartender for my trouble. The folks at the Outpost Bar and Grill, Otte Drug Store, and the U-Save Food Store also claimed they had never heard of a blue-eyed blonde named El. I found it very discouraging. Small towns don’t have much of a transient population. Everyone who was there was usually there to stay, and I figured the thousand or so people who lived in Deer River would know everyone else. I was starting to think I had figured wrong.
    Next, I pulled into the parking lot of the Deer River High School, home of the Warriors. The school was housed in an aging flat brown building, and if it had any athletic fields, they were buried under three and a half feet of snow. It must have been doing something right, though, because the plaque just inside the front entrance proclaimed that U.S. News & World Report had awarded Deer River a bronze medal, designating it as one of the best high schools in the country.
    The secretary was old enough that she could have turned over the first shovel of dirt when the school was built. She looked up expectantly when I approached. I asked if there were copies of the yearbook dating back the past five years that I could look at. She asked why. I told her that I wanted to look up a young lady I met in the Cities—a girl called El. She asked why. I asked if she knew El. She responded by picking up a phone and making a call. I told her that wasn’t necessary. She told me to wait. I did.
    Less than a minute later, another woman approached. She extended her hand and told me her