Thirty-One
Alicia had been discharged from Sharnwood first. When Holden got out a week later, she was the first person he phoned.
“How’s it going?” he’d asked her.
“So far, so good. Got a lead on a job but it’s just weekends so I got time Monday to Friday if you want to hang or anything.”
“Let me check with my secretary,” he said, paused, then said, “My schedule appears to be wide open.” He did have a line, he
said, on doing some drywall work, but it would be intermittent.
The thing was, Alicia did kind of like him. He was funny, self-deprecating, not full of himself. Did an impression of Ben
that was spot-on. And he wasn’t totally wrapped up in himself. He went on one time about frogs, how he used to find them in
the pond behind his house, but now you hardly saw them anymore, same with toads, and how if a species vanished, it could throw
off the entire ecosystem.
Like she cared about whether toads disappeared from the face of the earth.
But yeah, he was a generally nice, if severely messed-up, guy. So she felt a little badly, lying to him about who her aunt
really was.
She’d actually considered coming clean, admitting that based on what he’d revealed, it was as good as certain that his mother
had murdered her aunt. But that could go very wrong. He’d probably freak out. And why wouldn’t he? He’d have set his mom up
to be arrested. All Alicia had to do was make one phone call and the police would be at Catherine’s door before dinner.
But there was a slight chance that Holden would want to make amends somehow. Be an ally in getting justice for her aunt, even if it meant betraying his mother.
Too risky, Alicia figured.
That was when she started thinking about doing it herself. If you wanted something done right, as the saying goes. Kill the
bitch and be done with it. But did she have it in her? She believed she did, but the larger question was whether she could
get away with it. She wanted justice for her aunt Evelyn, but she didn’t want to spend the next twenty years in a penitentiary
either.
And then she hit on another plan. Something far more poetic. Persuade Holden to get justice for himself.
She would work on him slowly.
The local Tims became a regular spot for them. Coffee, a couple of Boston creams. Talk for hours.
“It’s just so unfair,” she said.
“What?”
“What your mom put you through. You’ve had to carry her guilt.”
She’d struck on something that had occurred to him many times over the years. “Go on,” he said.
“She gets away with murder, she’s in the clear, gets to go on and live her life, not a care in the world. But you, you’re
the one holding that big secret, letting it eat away at you. Year after year. Like a cancer. And it just keeps growing and
growing inside of you. It’s metastasizing.”
That seemed like enough for their first meeting. Plant the seed. Over their next coffee, she’d ramp it up a bit.
“How could any mother do that to a kid?” Alicia said, as though thinking out loud, shaking her head. “Tell them they wouldn’t
love them anymore.”
“I don’t know,” Holden said.
“I’ll bet you Jeffrey Dahmer’s mother still loved him. The guy that ate people?”
“Was his mother still alive when he did that?”
“Okay, I don’t know,” Alicia said. “It’s a for instance. Like the BTK killer, or Lee Harvey Oswald, or even Hannibal Lecter. If their mothers were alive, I’ll bet they still loved them, even though they did bad things.”
“Lecter’s not a real person.”
Alicia rolled her eyes. “You’re missing my point.”
“But they were the ones that did the bad things. They killed and ate people but at least they weren’t ratting out their mothers.
She said if I ever told, the family would get torn apart. She’d go to jail, my dad would go to jail, they’d split me and Reece
up and put us in different foster homes or something like that.”
Alicia shrugged. “And she put all that on you. Like you were the one responsible for keeping the family together when the real person at fault was her for killing somebody. You don’t see that? How she manipulated you? Dumped her guilt onto you? Jesus.”
She sprung for another round of coffees, figuring they’d get kicked out if they didn’t keep buying something. But she got
herself a decaf. Didn’t want to be up half the night.
“You need to be free,” she said. “Liberated.”
“How would I do that?”
She shrugged. Thought, save that one for next time they got together.
That turned out to be a movie. Some big noisy thing where massive robots were fighting monstrous sea creatures. Totally dumb,
but fun. When they came out, Holden said, “I liked the part where the robot punched the monster,” and Alicia couldn’t stop
laughing because there’d only been two straight hours of that.
She said, “Take me to your place and fuck my brains out.”
Holden nodded. “I can do that.”
The closer she drew him to her, she figured, the better chance she had of getting him to do what she wanted. And again, she
did kind of like him. But if he hadn’t had the potential to be her instrument, would she have stayed with him?
Not a chance, Charlie.
When she saw his place, her resolve hardened.
She wanted Holden to kill his mother not just for her.
He needed to do it for himself. How could his family let him live here?
Okay, sure, they’d dropped a bundle on his treatment, but couldn’t they spend a few extra bucks and maybe send in a cleaning lady once a week?
Fuck it, she’d do it herself. Manipulating Holden—God, was she no better than his mother?—meant putting in the time here, and she couldn’t live in this mess. When she wasn’t on the stuff, she was something of a
neat freak. Holden, on the other hand, was oblivious to the mess around him, straight or high.
She put in an afternoon once, when he was doing his drywalling gig, tackling the mess in the kitchen. Took care of the dirty
dishes in the sink, scrubbed the countertops, then went into the fridge, a black hole of expiration dates. She still had some
energy left, so she started on his bedroom, hanging up clothes that didn’t need to be laundered, vacuuming, rearranging the
top shelf of his closet so stuff wouldn’t fall out on somebody’s head.
Moved a shoebox that felt too heavy to just have shoes in it. Brought the box down, put it on the bed, took off the lid.
“What the,” she said.
A gun.
Worried that it might be loaded, that she might discharge it by accident, she made no attempt to pick it up. But she wasn’t
going to put it back either. When Holden returned, she brought him into the bedroom and pointed.
“Explain that,” she said. “And don’t get all why-you-messing-with-my-stuff. The box nearly fell on my head.”
“You kind of already know,” he said, but there was still a story to tell.
Holden and Reece had loved that pond in their backyard.
Donning tall rubber boots, they’d try to catch tadpoles with little nets.
When they got to be frogs, it was even more challenging.
Those dudes could jump. One time, their dad bought them two remote control boats so they could have races.
That fun ended when the boats crashed into each other and sank to the mucky bottom.
Brent did them better with the real thing. A small, wooden rowboat and two paddles. They’d pretend to be pirates, and when
they reached land, otherwise known as their backyard, they’d imagine it to be an island where buried treasure might be found.
Brent later bought them fishing poles, but the novelty of dropping a line in the water wore off soon because the pond had
no fish.
Brent tried to rectify that. A couple of weeks after the incident (as Holden had come to think of it) he went on a four-day fishing trip with some Wiffel-Smith colleagues. It was designed
as a bonding exercise, and Brent was happy to take part. More and more, he accepted opportunities that put distance between
himself and Catherine. He returned with several perch that he’d kept alive in a covered bucket. He dumped them into the pond,
hoping the boys might later catch them. The perch didn’t survive their relocation, unfortunately, and floated to the surface
in no time.
Holden, however, had faith.
A few days later, when Holden was home alone—Reece was at an after-school soccer practice, Brent at work, Catherine in downtown
Toronto checking out the shops in high-end Yorkville—he took the boat out on his own. That was against the rules. A parent
was always supposed to be home when the boys played in the boat.
Holden didn’t care.
He was already channeling his mother’s threat into antisocial behavior. Downing the last few drops of his parents’ drinks
when they weren’t looking. Sniffing glue he used for his model kits. Pitching a rock through the odd window.
This particular day, he decided to give the pond one last chance to offer up a real, live fish. He attached part of a Kraft
cheese slice to the hook of his fishing pole. Did fish like cheese? Who knew? But mice supposedly did, so why not give it
a go?
He reached the center of the pond and brought in the paddle.
(There was only one by this time.) The boat might drift, but there was no wind that day, and there certainly weren’t currents.
Holden picked up the pole and cast out, slowly reeling the line back in, then casting out again.
He did this over and over again. Frequently, the hook would catch something in the mucky bottom.
A twig or branch that had fallen from an overhanging tree.
A long weed that hung on to the hook like a strand of spaghetti.
“Shit,” Holden said aloud, because when you were all alone on the pond you could say whatever you pleased.
He’d long since lost that piece of cheese on the hook and had no more. He’d eaten the rest of the slice. Anyway, it didn’t
seem to be working. Fish, if there were any in this small body of water, clearly didn’t care for cheese.
He decided to cast out one last time with an unbaited hook, and damned if he didn’t land something. Reeling in, he thought,
if this was a fish, it was a heavy one. But it wasn’t putting up much of a fight. It was like dead weight. He brought his
catch in close to the boat, gripped the line and lifted it out of the water.
“Fuck,” he said, once again demonstrating that out on the pond you could say anything and get away with it.
The hook, miraculously, had snagged the trigger guard of a gun. And not just any gun, Holden knew immediately.
Still dangling the gun, he lowered it gently to the bottom of the boat. Gently worked the hook from the trigger guard, careful
not to touch the trigger itself. Delicately, he wrapped his hand around the grip.
Was it still loaded? He wasn’t about to stare down the barrel for a look-see. Nor was he going to fire it to find out. He
was smart enough to know there might be bullets in it, so he would have to be very careful.
He considered what to do with his find.
The sensible course of action would be to present it to his parents. They’d want to dispose of it, and they would know how
to do it. He could recall, in the days after the incident, his father out in the boat, trying to see to the bottom of the
pond, poking about with a paddle.
Holden and Reece had been inside, having breakfast, and a curious Reece went outside to the pond’s edge and asked his father what he was looking for. Back in the kitchen, Catherine had given Holden a sharp look. He was not to say a word.
Brent told Reece that he had lost a credit card. Thought it had slipped out of his wallet the last time he’d been out there.
Reece found that answer puzzling, given that their father never took the boat out. It was just for the boys.
“Go finish your breakfast,” Brent had said.
And then his father, in frustration, swung one of the two paddles down onto the side of the boat, snapping it in two, the
broad end falling into the water. He tossed the splintered end still in his hand into the bottom of the boat.
So yeah, Holden’s parents would want to know what he’d found. But Holden wasn’t sure he wanted to tell them.
He had to move quickly, before anyone got home. He paddled back to the pond’s edge, pulled the boat a few feet up onto the
yard, gingerly took the gun into the house and up to his room, placing it on his bed. In the hall linen closet he found an
old hand towel, one his mother would never notice was missing. After rinsing the gun off and taking a hair dryer to it, he
wrapped it up. He emptied a shoebox filled with Toronto Blue Jays and Toronto Maple Leafs trading cards and put the gun in
it. He dumped the cards back on top, covering any trace of the towel, and put the box on the top shelf of his closet.
And there it stayed.
For years.
Occasionally, when no one was home, he would take down the box, bring out the gun, hold it, feel it in his hand, still not
knowing whether it was loaded, whether it would even work. When he got older and it was time for him to live on his own, the
box was the first thing he packed. Eventually, he took it to a friend who knew a lot about guns.
“Where’d you find this?” his friend asked.
“Just around. Is it any good?”
“Yeah, but it needs cleaning up. I think it can be salvaged. Leave it with me.”
Holden came back a week later.
“You’re lucky you didn’t kill yourself with this thing,” his friend said. “It was loaded and it’s got a kind of sensitive
trigger. It’s a wonder you didn’t blow your head off. I cleaned it up, oiled it, checked it out all over, test-fired it. It’s
now shipshape.”
“Is it loaded now?”
“Hell no.”
As Holden came to the end of his tale, gazing at the gun in the same shoebox where it had been stored for years—the trading
cards long since gone—Alicia said, “That’s one batshit story.”
“Yeah.”
“I mean, this is it. This is the gun your mom used to shoot that woman.”
She shook her head in wonder.
The possibilities, she thought. In this box, right here, was more than just evidence the police could use to convict his mother. It was fucking
karma. Meant to be.
To get even, with this gun. It was a thing of beauty.
Now, weeks later, one day after Holden’s father and mistress were found dead, scanning groceries over the barcode reader and
listening to those incessant beeps at FreshCo, Alicia was thinking it hadn’t worked out quite the way she’d planned.
The wrong woman was dead.
But that didn’t have to mean the fun was over.