It was half past ten in the morning when Virginia Calhoun tripped down the hall and darkened my doorway. The pebbled window of the half-glass door refracted her form, turning her into a white spatter.

She knocked fast and hard, jerking me out of my stupor. I had a few hot ounces of the hair of the dog boiling away in my stomach, and couldn’t work up the strength to answer her frenzy right away. She got the door open on her own and spilled into my cluttered broom-closet office while I was still closing the drawer.

The scotch bottle clunked as I sat up. I might not be much for manners these days, but if she saw me indulging, it would have been rude not to offer her some. I didn’t have much to spare, but I thought I might have to get it back out when I saw how bothered she was. She might need something to steady her nerves before she got to talking straight.

She stammered, breathless, holding air like a ripped sail in gale winds. What words she found tumbled out with no regard for where they were meant to go. “My son… acting… only thirteen… California… I never should have…”

Her beak clacked as she tried to get a grip. I waited for her, taking her in. Her feathers were rumpled in places and parts of her face drooped, but she was slender in a tight-fitting, dark blue dress with a skirt that just brushed the top of her calf.

“Try a breath,” I said after catching my own. “The air tastes like ash here, but it’s better than passing out and breaking your beak on the hardwood. At least sit down.”

The spindly chair opposite my desk was the only part of the room not consumed by the strata of rumpled newspapers, half-full coffee cups, and bits of ephemera my work produced. Sometimes, keeping the client’s chair clear felt like juvenile optimism, but it paid off in this case.

Virginia slumped into the seat, then began to compose herself. She looked good doing it. From up close, I saw how age had started catching up with her. It nipped at her heels, but she still clung to the je ne sais quois of a starry-eyed ingénue.

Her neck was a delicate stalk. Her legs were even more fragile, but damned if they didn’t go all the way down. A desire to keep up with current fads had skived away some of her signature curves, but she wore the waifish look well. Her appearance had evolved to suit a more sultry, smoky maturity.

In all honesty, neither archetype was quite my preference. Give me a woman with pointy teeth, sharp eyes, and a bushy tail to chase and I’d—

Howl, you dog! I had bigger things to worry about than getting laid.

Virginia fumbled in her purse for a cigarette. I unearthed a half-filled ash tray and set it on top of the stack of folders in front of her. She got the cigarette stuck into her bill by herself, but her clumsy fingers struggled with the lighter.

Frustration bloomed in her eyes. I heard her breath hitch again but got out ahead of a second meltdown with a deftly lit match. She leaned in to the flame, clinging to it like a bad boyfriend. She knew it was no good for her, but she couldn’t help herself.

When the tip became a radiant cherry, she floated back and let the smoke slither out through the slits of her nares. Her shoulders trembled as she took another drag, but they stopped when the stimulating compounds in the smoke hit her nervous system.

“Start from the beginning,” I said when I thought she could handle it.

“John…” Her eyes darted down to the nameplate holding back an avalanche of junk at the edge of my desk. “Er… Detective O’Howell.”

“Howl’s fine.”

“Sorry, what was that?”

The gulp of scotch I took before she walked in sloshed, revealing the needling hangover beneath. I bit back a snarl. She had interrupted my writhing and put me in a sour mood just by being there, but I couldn’t afford to snap at her. I needed the cash as much as she needed answers.

“I’m not a detective. Not anymore. Just Howl is fine.”

“But your assistant said…” She turned in her chair, looking over her shoulder at the door she had blown in through. The lettering on the window had mostly flaked off, so only a few specks of tarnished gold were still caught in the glass ripples. She had to squint to make out the words Private Investigator under my name.

“I don’t have an assistant.”

Confusion broke through the grip of panic on her face.

“Green guy? Pink suit? Black eyes?” I said, describing Casey Calypso. “That’s Cal. He rents from me.”

“But if he…” She didn’t need to ask. I read the question on her face. I had been asking myself the same ones for years.

If I own the place, why does Cal have the bigger office? Why had I been shunted to the back, down a hallway with busted lights and a view of the polluted Gutter? The biggest question, however—the one that hung over my head like a storm cloud no matter what I did and rang through my mind every time I made the mistake of closing my eyes sober—was, “What the hell happened to you?”

“If you trust his sign, Cal might be able to figure out what you’re after without any details, but I’m going to need more,” I said. “You mentioned a son?”

“Ethan!” The name honked out of her mouth before she flung up a wing to catch it. While her hand was there, she took another drag and tried to reclaim some of that demure posture a dame like her was meant to have.

My molars ground, and I let out a cloud of sour whiskey fumes with a heavy sigh. “Please, Miss Crane.”

Her eyes lit up and her wrist went limp. “You know me?”

“Sure. Me and most men my age. And everyone who was a teenage boy about fifteen years ago.”

I’d never seen a bird blush before. I’m not sure how it even showed through the feather. For one sweltering summer you couldn’t enter a teenager’s bedroom or beer-gutted bachelor’s garage without seeing a pinup of Barnyard’s Miss July, Virginia Crane. She had burned out fast, but by God had she burned bright.

“It’s actually Calhoun…” she said. “For now.”

It was the first meaningful bit of information I got from the woman. I filed it away in the empty folder in my mind, resisting the urge to reach for my notepad.

“Ethan,” I said, bringing her back. “Ma’am, I get the impression what you’ve got is urgent, so if you wouldn’t mind…”

Her beak quirked when I said ma’am. A smile? A grimace? Hard to tell with no lips. Either way, I’d guess nobody had said that to her with much enthusiasm in a while.

“Yes. Sorry. My son, Ethan… He’s gone.”

“It pains me to say”—a spike in my head made the pain physical, reminded me I was almost out of whiskey and completely out of petty cash with which to replace the bottle—“but you might be better off going to the police. They don’t have my charming disposition, but they have more resources—”

“No police!” she shouted, surprising herself. “I mean…they’d want me to wait. He just… It’s only been… They wouldn’t…”

As much as I appreciated her shared disdain for The Beast, her blubbering grated on me. If she had gone to the police, they would have turned her away until she got her story straight. I didn’t have the luxury. I had to use tact, coax her into giving me something.

“How’d you get here today, Mrs. Calhoun?”

Sensing the moment was right, I pulled out my notepad and flipped it open.

As I suspected, starting away from the hot-button of her son’s disappearance allowed some amount of calm to settle over Virginia’s mania. She answered the question without hysterics. “I took the bus.”

“Long ride?”

“Not too long.”

It sounded innocuous, but it gave me a lot. If taking part in Hot Type City’s famously run-down public transit system wasn’t bad enough, a single bus had taken her from her house to Moire Park. It explained the greasy diesel fumes I smelled when she opened the door and meant wherever she was from wasn’t a nice neighborhood. The years hadn’t been too rough on her body, but they had been on her status. I could relate.

It might not be the only thing we had in common. My eyes drifted toward the red cap hanging near the door, but I dragged them back to Virginia.

“When was the last time you saw Ethan?”

I prepared for her to get flustered again, but a drag on her cigarette kept her grounded. “This morning. A car came by to pick him up and take him to the airport. I would have gone with him—to the gate at least—but I had work and… God damn it! If only I would have taken him myself.”

A police officer might have given her guff about cursing, told her it wasn’t befitting a proper lady, much less a mother, but I didn’t mind. She took another breath, this time for dramatics. She wasn’t in the industry anymore, but she couldn’t help injecting a little flare.

I let her put on her show and waited for the next act. “He was supposed to go to California. Had a public service campaign lined up with Natalie Counsel. Something about bicycle helmets. It wasn’t much of a paycheck, but it was going to show across the country. Ethan was going to be a star.”

“I’m familiar with the kind of job,” I said.

“Right, of course you are.” She folded her hands in her lap and watched the stub of her cigarette smolder. “He was supposed to call when he got to the airport. I thought he might’ve forgotten, but I knew something was wrong when he didn’t call when he should have landed. The airline confirmed the plane took off when it was supposed to and touched down when it was supposed to, but nobody could say whether he was on it.”

“Someone with him? You trust them?”

“His agent, Adora Counsel, sent an old wolverine. Looked tough. Seemed professional.”

“Professional? With Adora? Doubt it.” Virginia looked up in shock, but I waved her off. I didn’t want to get into it. “I think I’ve got a handle on the scope of your problem. Your kid’s missing and you want me to find him. I can look, but it’ll cost you seventy-five dollars a day, plus expenses.”

It looked like Virginia had spontaneously laid an egg. I felt bad about what I needed to charge, but seventy-five dollars a day was poverty wages. With as few jobs as I got, I’d already needed to borrow extra off Cal just to pay my apartment’s rent and the mortgage on this dump.

I prepared for her to haggle or snatch up her purse and march out, but she sat still. She took the last pull her cigarette had to give, singeing her feathers on the embers at the tip, then stamped it out against the disk of compacted ash in the ashtray.

“You really think you can find him?”

I tried to nod, but my neck was stiff. Truth is, poor kids like Ethan go missing all the time. Occasionally they’re found unharmed in a day, but happy those reunions are the exception. Usually, the kids aren’t found. Sometimes, it’d be better if they hadn’t been. A hopeful vigil, no matter how delusional, beats a funeral every time.

“I can’t guarantee anything other than that I’ll try my damnedest to bring him home.”

Virginia cocked her head. Instead of turning her off, the frank admission ingratiated her to me. She was canny enough to see the truth in place of an empty promise.

“But I’ll need to know more,” I said. “Where did he go to school? Who did he talk to? Anyone else know where he was going? That kind of thing.”

I had my notepad open, ready to jot down enough answers to solve the case like a Monday morning crossword puzzle. Virginia blinked at me. The barrage of questions had overwhelmed her, so I changed tack. “Got any pictures. It’d help to know who I’m looking for.”

Virginia flapped opened her purse again but she didn’t need to dig around; the prints were right up near the top. She stared at the portrait on top for a second before handing the stack over.

Based on what she had said when she first gusted in, I assumed the picture was a few years old. The boy in the picture was a young goat with hair as white as his mother’s feathers and short, nubby horns stuck out through a shaggy mop on top of his head. The photograph was professionally shot, and the blazer and tie the billy wore brought to mind nuns wielding rulers and phallic etchings carved into school desks. He was a scrawny kid, whatever his age, but his smile was bright, charismatic, and just a little devilish.

I couldn’t stop myself from thinking of Growl. Last time I saw Growl alive, he was the same age as Ethan was in the picture, but they never would have been friends. Ethan seemed more like the kind to get into trouble than try to stop it.

In the next shot, the kid sat behind a lumpy cake with ten candles poking out of it. Virginia was behind him with her arms draped lovingly over his shoulders. He might not have fit the technical definition of a teenager but his scowl could have competed at a high school level.

“Dad in the picture?” I asked as I flipped to the next glossy print in the stack, a recent head shot. “Don’t see him busting down my door.”

“Sure, Peter’s in the picture. Doesn’t mean he’s got his arm around anyone.”

I shuffled through the photos and landed on a Polaroid of a fidgety-looking primate kneeling next to a much younger Ethan—maybe six years old. The man wore a bucket hat and fishing vest, both pierced with an array of lures and bobbers. He held a long rod in one hand and tried to comfort his crying son with the other. The slow loris’s eyes were as big as Cal’s, but his swam with tears. Aside from them both seeming desperately out of place, father and son couldn’t have looked more different. Funny how genetics worked.

“You two divorced?” Just looking at him, I couldn’t imagine how the relationship had lasted this long—or how it had started. He looked timid, the kind to flinch at the sound of a lighter clicking, but Virginia had been fiercely confident back in her model days. Her looks alone should have put her well out of an average man like Peter’s league.

“Not officially. He moved out about a month ago.”

“The split amicable?”

“Depends on who you ask.”

I jotted on my pad, and Virginia’s panic-stricken mind realized the implications of what she had said. “He didn’t do anything to Ethan, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“It doesn’t hurt to check.”

“He loves Ethan every bit as much as I do,” Virginia said, showing a spark of that buried fierceness. “Besides, he’s been out of town. I called him just before I came here, but he said it would be the better part of a week before he’s back.”

“Got anyone who will corroborate where he’s been?”

“Sure. The other members of the band he’s touring with will vouch for him. If that’s not enough, he must’ve played at a dozen venues.”

“Band?” I asked. “He’s a musician?”

Virginia nodded. “Plays bass for any jazz band that needs one.”

I pictured the man in the photograph hung over an instrument as tall as he was, plunking away all sad and slow. The image fit nicely, and it explained how Virginia had ended up with him in the first place. The decline of Jazz had already begun by the time my mental math said they got together, but it wouldn’t have mattered. There was something about musicians of any stripe that young, free-spirited women found irresistible. The starving artist shtick can be cute for a couple years, but it’s got to get old when you’re trying to raise a kid without a steady paycheck.

“What’d he have to say when you called him?”

“He said he’s on his way home, but not to worry. He told me to trust the police.”

“You don’t?”

Her brow dipped and her fingers twitched, wanting to bring the ghost of her burned cigarette to her lips. “They’d say to wait. They’d think Ethan’s some rebellious youth who ran away on his own and will show up in a day or two.”

“I know you trust him, but have you considered—”

“No!” she snapped, her beak clacking. “I know my son. He acted out like any strong-willed boy his age, but he wouldn’t have run. Ever since he was little, all he wanted to do was act. He couldn’t sleep for two weeks waiting for today. He wouldn’t have risked messing it up for anything.”

I had a lot more questions, but it wouldn’t do any good to pry. Virginia was getting heated and our interview had taken a turn toward antagonistic. I didn’t expect her to like me much, but I wouldn’t get anywhere if I had to fight her.

“I’ll have more to ask later, but why don’t you head home? Try to relax. Wait. Maybe Ethan comes back on his own. Maybe you get a phone call.”

I stood up, and Virginia stood on reflex. She followed along when I put my hand on her elbow. I had guided her halfway to the door before she started stammering. “But I can’t just— What if he— What are you—”

“It’s okay,” I said, holding the door open for her and gesturing down the tenebrous hallway to the flickering fluorescence of the lobby. “You can take some time to gather your thoughts. I’ll talk to Adora and see what I can get about this guy who was with him.”

I ducked back inside to grab my hat and coat off the hook. Her beak rattled some more, but she didn’t come up with anything before I returned to lead her down the hallway—a knight in creaky, rusted armor.