Thirty-Three
Crane answered his phone. “Yes.”
“It’s the same bloody gun!”
“Catherine, calmly please.”
She ignored him. “The gun they found yesterday, it’s the one I threw in the pond!”
Crane thought about that for a moment, wondering how that must have been determined. A ballistics test. They would have compared
the bullets recovered from the previous day’s scene to the one recovered from Evelyn Corby’s body.
“It’s impossible,” she said. “Brent tried to find it. He raked the bottom of the pond. It had to have sunk into the muck.”’
“And yet,” Crane said, “here we are.”
“That detective, she thinks Brent killed that woman.”
Crane gave that a moment’s thought. “Let her.”
“What?”
“Let. Her.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s better than the alternative. I don’t know the nature of this detective’s questions, but if she seems to be zeroing in,
you might lead her in a more advantageous direction. That you hate to think it, but perhaps it’s possible Brent killed that
woman. After all, he’s gone and established a pattern. Dead men don’t generally have the opportunity to defend themselves.
Has she been in touch?”
“The detective?”
“No. Your mystery caller.”
“Oh, no. No, she hasn’t.”
This was not good. They couldn’t sit around waiting for the phone to ring. They needed to be proactive.
“Has this detective spoken to your son?”
“Many times,” Catherine said. “Reece was here with me when she started asking about that gun, if Brent had it years ago, if
he knew that woman.”
“Not that son. Your other son.”
Catherine went quiet.
“Has she talked to him?” Crane asked, pressing.
“I don’t think so. There’s . . . there really isn’t any reason for her to.”
“You’re being naive. With this development, she’ll want to talk to everyone.”
“He was a child! There’d be no reason for her to talk to him!”
“But if she does—”
“He’s kept it a secret this long.”
“But has he?”
“You don’t have to worry about him.”
“Of course. A mother should know.”
“He won’t— Hang on, I’m getting another call.”
Alicia was on a break. There was a staff room at the back of the grocery store where employees had their lunch or sat and
scrolled their phones or read a book or just sat on the old, vinyl couch and closed their eyes for a few minutes, taking a
nap.
She could use one. Working the checkout, scanning groceries, bagging them, dealing with people who were dumber than shoes, might look easy but standing there, hour after hour, was murder on your back and your feet.
She’d been ready to throttle the last customer before she put up the “Sorry Closed Use Next Checkout” sign on the conveyor belt.
He’d waited until the last item had been scanned and bagged before he started searching all his pockets for his wallet to bring out some cash, like it hadn’t occurred to him until that moment that he was going to have to pay for all this shit.
When Alicia came into the break room, one of the young kids who stocked shelves was sitting at the lunch table, playing a
game on his phone. Everyone called him Corky, although Alicia thought the C would be better replaced with a D.
“Hey,” Alicia said.
The boy didn’t so much as grunt, transfixed as he was by what was happening on the screen. Alicia went over to the coffee
machine, poured herself a cup, then sat down opposite him.
“I think Wilkins was looking for you,” she said. The store manager.
The boy glanced up. “Huh?”
“You piss him off somehow?”
He paused the game and pushed back his chair. “That asshole,” he said as he shuffled out of the room. He’d be gone a few minutes,
she hoped, trying to track down the boss, whom Alicia knew wasn’t even in today.
Long enough to make a phone call.
She didn’t really have a plan as she brought out the burner phone from her purse. Nothing more than keeping Catherine Chartwell
off-balance.
Holden’s account of her visit to his place on Friday made it clear she was pretty shaken up. Who wouldn’t be, after learning
your husband was found dead in bed with his whore. Holden had gone a little manic, too, so relieved his mother was alive that
he tried to talk her into a cruise.
All of which confounded Alicia. Hadn’t he wanted her dead in the first place? Hadn’t Alicia persuaded him he’d never be free until the witch was toast? They’d come so close,
and when things took a turn, he couldn’t have been happier. All that guilt, lifted.
And she’d done such a good job of getting him to that place. Bit by bit, little by little. Planting the seeds.
Talking him into doing a line here and there. Softening up the old brain, making him susceptible to her suggestions.
And finally the kicker: “I mean, you’ve got the gun right there.”
Wouldn’t it be fitting? That Catherine Chartwell be shot with the same gun she’d used to kill Alicia’s aunt? Balance in the
universe, that’s what it was.
Holden would be her instrument. That had been the plan. Get him to do her bidding. It wasn’t like she was too chickenshit to do it herself, to kill this woman she’d never actually met,
never actually seen, but there was something poetic about having her son take her out.
One day, she had pocketed the gun without Holden’s knowledge, found a guy who could supply the right ammunition. Brought the
gun and bullets home, loaded it just the way the guy had showed her. “Be very, very careful,” he’d advised her. “That thing’s
got a light trigger.”
That night, when she and Holden were in bed, she said, “Got a surprise for you.” He thought it was going to be some kind of
sex toy when she opened the drawer of the bedside table. But what she brought out was his gun.
“What’s that doing there?” Holden asked.
“Not much good to you up in your closet,” she said. “I want you to feel safe. Don’t you want to feel safe? It’s a crazy world
out there.”
“I . . . guess.”
“And even if you keep it someplace where you can get your hands on it right away, it’s pretty useless if it’s not loaded.”
He sat up in bed. “What did you do?”
She brought out the box of ammunition, which had also been in the drawer. “You are good to go.”
“It’s loaded?”
Alicia smiled and nodded. She set it back in the drawer and closed it slowly. “There when you need it.”
“Nobody’s gonna break in here.”
“You never know.”
He looked unconvinced. “Makes me nervous.”
“Come on. You’ve kept that gun in your place for years. And you were a kid. You kept it with your baseball cards. That was irresponsible. This is different.”
Alicia won him over. The loaded gun stayed in the drawer. She was getting there. Now to get him to use it.
One evening, a breakthrough.
She’d got him wound up about how differently his life might have gone if his mother hadn’t screwed him up. He had all this
natural talent. He could have become a comedian, maybe, he was such a good mimic. Or an environmentalist, a champion of causes.
But that fear of losing his mother’s love, it gnawed away at him, made him feel worthless. He paced the living room, shaking
his head, agreeing with her, saying he’d always had this dream of being a mountain climber.
Alicia thought, Seriously?
But he lacked the ambition, he said. Not just to climb mountains, but to accomplish anything of note. Alicia had come to the
conclusion that Holden was, at his very core, an underachiever, and that his mother didn’t have all that much to do with it,
but that didn’t mean she wasn’t happy to feed his need to blame her.
As he ranted, she went into the bedroom, returned with the gun, and put it in his hand.
“If she were here right now, what would you do?”
He looked at the gun, as if appreciating its real power—its potential to change his life—for the first time. He raised the
gun, pointed at the door, as if someone were standing on the other side of it.
“I’d shoot her in the fucking head,” he said.
The following morning, he’d expressed regret for his behavior. Took the gun from the drawer, put it back in the shoebox, and
placed it back on the closet shelf, as though afraid of what he might do with it if it were too close at hand.
She was starting to doubt whether he had it in him to get the job done. Sometimes, if you wanted something done right, you
had to do it yourself.
And then yesterday happened.
Talk about your clusterfuck.
Okay, so maybe things didn’t go off the way she’d hoped. That didn’t mean you let up the pressure. You didn’t give the enemy time to recover. You kept the heat on.
With Corky out of the room now, Alicia entered a number on her phone.
One ring. Two rings. Three rings. Four.
Was she not going to accept her call? Maybe the cops were there. Or she was in the—
“Hello?”
Catherine sounded frazzled. Let’s turn that screw down a little tighter.
Alicia said, “Think you’re in the clear? Not a chance. We missed you yesterday but—”
“I’ll pay!”
Alicia said, “What?”
“I have money. Name your price. I’ll pay you to leave me alone.”
“You think this is about money?”
“It’s always about money,” Catherine said. “If it’s enough.”
Alicia reflected on where she was, sitting in the break room of a discount Yorkton Hill FreshCo, wearing her “Hi! I’m Alicia!”
button, waiting for that pimply-faced dweeb to come back in here and play games on his dumb phone, and wondered whether a
change in strategy was in order.
After all, she couldn’t do anything to change what happened to Aunt Evelyn now. But she’d be a fool to throw away a chance
to make things better for herself.
“Throw out a number,” Catherine said.
Alicia threw out a number.