Thirty-Two
Reece
I left my mother’s house feeling enraged. No, more than that. Stunned and horrified. Baffled and betrayed. But more than anything
else, plain old outraged.
She’d lied to us. Lied to me and lied to Holden. Was that too harsh? At the very least, she lied by omission. She allowed
us to live a lie.
Holden was my half brother. His biological mother was Leah Kennard.
We’d both lost a father, but Holden had lost his true mother, as well.
And he didn’t know.
After I dropped off my father’s suit at the funeral home, I wanted to drive straight to Holden’s and tell him, but there was
part of me that knew, despite my anger, that Mom was the one who would have to deliver that news. I would compel her to do
it if I had to. Would this revelation damage Holden? Was there a risk this would send him into a downward spiral that could
find him back in rehab? Very possibly. But we were so far past the point of covering things up. People were dead. This shit
was real.
And while I believed I needed to hold off telling him the truth about his parentage, I didn’t see any reason why I couldn’t head to his place and ask him if he’d ever heard of Evelyn Corby and whether he had any memory of Dad owning a gun.
Despite Mom’s denials, I was sure I recalled Dad and her having a discussion about getting one.
Maybe Holden had heard something I hadn’t.
I didn’t see a way not to tell him that the same gun Dad had used to kill Leah, and then himself, had been used in the murder of someone Dad would surely have known.
Did he believe Dad might have killed her?
God, what a mess.
On the way to Holden’s, I phoned Diana, told her where I was headed, and gave her as tight a version of everything I’d learned
as I could, like I was writing a newscast, starting with the ballistics revelation.
She said, “A situation where someone might shoot his lover and then himself, as awful as that is, it’s something I can almost
get my head around. But that your dad would kill some woman and leave her body—no, I can’t believe it. I don’t believe it.”
I wanted to share her conviction. “Mom was totally blindsided. I’d never seen her look that stunned. But there’s more.”
Diana said, “Hit me.” She sounded numb.
“Holden is my half brother. Leah Kennard was a surrogate. Dad supplied the sperm—in a lab or whatever—and she got pregnant,
and she had Holden. They hired her.”
Nothing on the other end of the line.
“You there?”
“I’m here.” Like I said, numb.
“Mom couldn’t get pregnant, they went the surrogacy route, and then miracle of miracles, a year later I came along.”
Any other time, Diana would have had some kind of crack about me being a miracle, but my news had put her off her game. She
did have a question, though: “And your dad was having an affair with the surrogate, with Leah, all these years?”
“I don’t think so. Mom made it sound like it was the last couple. I feel like my parents had been going through the motions
for a long time. Looking back, it started when I was a kid, maybe ten or eleven. Something happened. One day we were a more
or less happy family, and the next everyone was walking on eggshells. Hang on, I’m at the funeral home.”
I tossed the phone onto the passenger seat and kept the car running while I grabbed the suit off the back seat hanger, ran it in, and handed it to the first person I saw. I was back in the car in under a minute and picked up the phone.
“Still there?”
“Still here. You going to Holden’s now?”
“Yeah.”
“You can’t tell him the stuff about who his real mother is. That’s got to come from your mom, whether she wants to do it or
not. It’s not just about finding out who his mother is. It’s finding out who she isn’t.”
Diana had a way of putting things. Before I could respond to that, she said, “Swing by. You need me there when you see Holden.”
I didn’t have to think about that. “Five minutes,” I said.
Holden’s car was in the driveway. As I pulled up in front of the house, I had to admit part of me was hoping he wouldn’t be
home. I was all fired up about coming here, and now that I was, I was worried about whether I was going to be laying too much
on him.
Diana, sensing my apprehension, said, “We’ll take it slow.”
He must have spotted us through the window, because he was already coming out the front door to greet us. He approached Diana
first as she got out the passenger side.
“Hey, sis.” His pet name for Diana since we’d gotten married. He threw his arms around her, catching her off guard at how
pleased he seemed to see her.
“Hey,” Diana said.
Holden came around the car and gave me a hug as well. “’Sup?” He had a smile on his face that looked genuine enough.
I glanced across the hood of the BMW at Diana, who gave me a look that seemed to say, Let’s do this.
“Listen,” I said gently, “there’ve been some developments and I wanted to bounce a couple things off you. . . . Going way
back, you ever remember Mom and Dad talking about getting a gun?”
The smile evaporated. “What?”
“Okay, I’m just gonna lay it all out here,” I said. “The police say—”
Diana raised a cautious hand. “Holden, Reece found out some troubling things today and you’re entitled to know about them.” She paused, then said, “The gun your father used yesterday . . . was used years ago to shoot someone your dad would have known.”
“The hell are you talking about?” He looked at me. “How come she gets to know stuff first?”
“I told her,” I said, not liking the tone he was taking with my wife. “I was at Mom’s when the detective came by.”
“I’ve never even met this detective,” Holden said, as if that somehow discounted anything she might have told us.
“The thing is,” I said, controlling my voice, “maybe Dad had this gun all these years and we never knew about it. Look, I’m
surprised, because I remember Dad hating guns, but how else do you explain what—”
Holden made a sudden, sweeping gesture, first crossing his wrists and then extending this arms, putting a stop to all this.
“I don’t want to hear it.”
And then he did something I wasn’t expecting. He put his palms on my shoulders and pushed. Hard. I stumbled back, catching
myself just before I might have lost my balance and hit the ground.
“Holden!” Diana said.
He looked her way, then back at me. He stook a step back and said, “I just . . . just can’t handle any more of this. Go, okay?
Just go.”
“I’m not going until you tell me—”
“Reece,” Diana said. She waved her phone at me. She’d had a text, but of course I couldn’t make it out from the other side
of the car. “It’s Gage.”
He was waiting for us on the front step. His text to his mother had been simple enough:
Where is everybody?
Diana had written back, asking if he was okay. The three dots danced for a few seconds, but then stopped, like he had something
he wanted to say but couldn’t get the words out.
“You okay?” Diana asked as we both got out of the car.
“I kind of freaked when there was no one here,” he said. “Where were you?”
I said, “There’s been a lot going on.” I told him the gun his grandfather had used was linked to the unsolved murder of someone
who’d worked for Wiffel-Smith. A woman named Evelyn Corby.
“That’s crazy,” he said. “There’s no way. If they think Grandpa had anything to do with that, they’re nuts.”
I didn’t want to remind him what his grandfather had done the day before.
“We want to think that too,” Diana said. “Look, I’m with you. I don’t believe he could do that.”
Gage sat on the front step, looked down, and said, “There’s something I should tell you.”
I was so not in the mood for more surprises. But I said, “About?”
“It has to do with Grandpa.”
“Something about yesterday?”
“No. A while back.”
We waited.
He raised his head, looked at his mother, then me. “I stole something.”
Diana, calmly, asked, “Where was this? What did you steal?”
“Just don’t freak out. Let me tell the whole story.”
I nodded. “We’re listening.”
“It was like, a year, year and a half, something like that. But I was with my friends, at the store, and they kind of dared
me to steal something. So I grabbed this bag of chips and tried to sneak out with it but got caught.”
“Go on,” Diana said.
“The manager, he called the cops, and they came, and they took me to the station, and I was really scared, and they told me
to call my parents, but I didn’t. I called Grandpa instead.”
“Why would you—”
“Mom, just let me tell it. I was . . . I was afraid to call you guys because I knew you’d be mad and I couldn’t face that so Grandpa came down and he said he was my father and they bought it and he sat in with the cops and I can hardly remember what anybody said because I was so scared they’d send me to jail or something.
But Grandpa saved me, said he would take me back to the store and make me apologize and that’s what we did. ”
“He never said a word about it to me,” I said.
“That was the deal. He promised he wouldn’t, but he said it was my one chance. If I did anything like that again he wouldn’t
bail me out or cover it up for me. But what he did, it was like the nicest thing he ever did for me, up to then.”
I couldn’t be angry. This wasn’t something that had happened recently. I couldn’t see the point of a lecture at this late
date. And while I would have preferred that he’d called his mother or me, I understood why he’d called his grandfather. In
the same situation, I might have done the same.
“I thought you should know,” Gage said. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.”
He was crying. Diana sat next to him, put his head on her shoulder.
“Why tell us now?” I asked.
Gage sniffed, hunted in his pocket for a tissue, and wiped his eyes and nose. “Because you need to know Grandpa was a good
person. You need to know he would never mean to hurt anybody, not now, not in the past. And maybe he did some wrong things,
like having an affair or whatever, but I don’t think he was happy, and you’d have to be blind not to see it.”
“I hear you,” I said. “I do. But—”
“I know what you’re going to say,” Gage said. “It’s all bullshit. He was the best person I’ve ever known and you should be
ashamed for thinking any different.”
He got up and went into the house.