Thirty-Five
Reece
Diana followed Gage into the house, but I stayed on the front step a moment, gathering my thoughts, wondering what to do next.
What I really wanted to do was tell Diana and Gage to each pack a bag, load up the car, and just drive. Head to Montreal or
keep on going to the east coast. Diana had family in Halifax. I wanted to put some distance between ourselves and Yorkton
Hill and all that had happened here.
In short, I wanted to run away.
I didn’t get to consider the idea for long. My phone rang.
Mom.
I picked up. “Yeah.”
“You told him,” she said accusingly.
“Told who what?”
“Holden. He knows. You were going to let me tell him. How could you do that?”
“Mom, I swear, I didn’t—”
“He had a photo album. Pictures of him, but calling him Tom. Where’d you find that? Why would you give him—”
“Mom!” I shouted. “I didn’t tell him.”
A moment’s quiet. Then Mom said, “That policewoman. It had to be her. Oh god. That means she knows too.”
I thought back to something she’d said seconds earlier. “Who’s Tom?”
“Tom is Holden.”
Christ, I thought, feeling almost lightheaded. What new bombshell was she about to drop?
Mom explained. “Back when we got Leah to be our surrogate, she said if Holden had been her child, she’d have named him Thomas.
She wanted us to name him Thomas, but the name had no special meaning to your father or me. I think it was Leah’s dad’s name, but Holden
was named after your father’s favorite uncle.”
“How could he have found some photo album?”
Mom was thinking. “He had the phone on speaker. She must have been there. She must have found the album in Leah’s house.”
“McCabe?”
“God, what must he have told her?”
I didn’t know that Holden had anything of note to tell McCabe. It struck me Holden was the one who’d been in the dark, who’d
been deprived of information, so what could he possibly tell McCabe that the rest of us, or at least my mother, didn’t already
know?
“I need to talk to him, explain,” she said. “It wasn’t an affair. Not back then. We hired her. But I can’t, not right now. I need you to go talk to Holden. Explain things.”
What could she have to do that was more pressing than helping my brother deal with a revelation that was nothing short of
an emotional earthquake?
“What?” I asked. “Is there another arts council luncheon?”
“Go to hell,” she said.
I felt that as sharply as when she’d actually slapped my face.
“Look, Mom, I don’t know what kind of mess you’re in, I don’t know what might have happened years ago, between you and Dad,
with this Corby woman, with Leah Kennard, with all this shit. I hardly know who you are right now.”
“That’s hateful.”
“I don’t mean it to be. But I can’t help you if you’re not honest with me.”
“You don’t understand.”
“So help me understand.”
“Your father didn’t kill himself.”
It was my turn for a moment of silence. “I don’t think so, Mom.”
“He didn’t. I’m sure of it.”
“What are you saying? There was someone else in the house? Someone else came in and shot Leah and shot Dad and made it look
like suicide?”
“That’s right.”
Three words went unsaid in my mind: Was it you? I was ready at this point to consider just about anything. After all, if you were looking for someone with a motive, Mom
fit the bill. Finding her husband in bed with another woman? What was the saying? A story as old as time?
But what I said was, “I saw the note. Dad wrote it. It was his handwriting.”
“He could have been forced.”
“By who?”
“We’re going to find out, and then everything will be fine,” Mom said.
We? Was she enlisting me in this?
“I don’t know how to help you with this,” I said.
“Oh, honey, not you,” she said, ending the call.
If not me, who? And then something occurred to me. She was talking about the man I’d seen her talking to in the hotel parking
lot.