Thirty-Seven
Reece
I went into the house, called out, “Diana!”
“Up here!” she called back, sounding like she was up in our bedroom, or Gage’s. I met her at the bottom of the stairs as she
was coming down.
Before I could tell her about my mother’s call, that Holden had somehow learned about his parentage, most likely from McCabe,
Diana said, “Gage isn’t here.”
“I was out front all this time. I didn’t see him.”
“Then I guess he went out the back way.”
“Did you call him?”
She held her phone up so I could see she had tried to text him. “He’s not answering.”
I wasn’t yet convinced this was a crisis. Gage had come, said what he had to say to us about his faith in his grandfather,
and then taken off.
“Has something happened?” she asked.
“Mom called. Frantic. And maybe a little paranoid.”
“Start with frantic.”
“She says Holden knows. About Leah being his biological mother.”
“So she told him.”
“No. She accused me of doing it. But then we figured it must have been the police.”
“Do we know how he is?” she asked.
I shook my head. “I can only imagine. How would you handle it, suddenly learning something like that?”
She had no answer.
I took a breath and then hit her with the next thing. “Mom says Dad didn’t kill himself.”
Diana wasn’t sure how to take that at first. “She thinks . . . he’s alive? Has she lost touch with reality?”
“No. And maybe. She’s saying he was murdered, and maybe that is evidence that she’s lost touch with reality.”
Diana used the banister to support herself. “I can see it.”
“That he was murdered?”
“No, not that. But look, if he’s committed suicide, she’s going to feel like it’s on her somehow. That she wasn’t worth sticking
around for. Or she didn’t see it coming. She didn’t get help for him. But if someone came in and shot him, it’s not her fault,
right?”
“Unless the reason someone shot him is on Mom too.”
I had that fleeting thought again about packing everyone into the car and heading for the hills. But Mom’s request, that I
go check on my brother, explain things, was wearing on me. When I told Diana, she wasn’t thrilled with the idea.
“He wasn’t exactly receptive when we were over there earlier.”
I hadn’t forgotten.
She added, “Right now, I’m more worried about Gage.”
“Let’s start with him,” I said, turning to head for the front door.
That was when something caught my eye. On the mat where we leave our shoes if they’re wet, was Gage’s skateboard.
“He can’t have gone far,” Diana said.
Gage didn’t go anywhere without the skateboard. The thing was practically welded to his shoes when he wasn’t home.
“You think he went for a walk?” I asked.
Diana gave me a look. “Have you met Gage?”
She was right. Gage would no more go for a walk than I would take the Space Shuttle to go into town.
Gage did have an Uber app on his phone, but we’d almost never known him to use it.
It was intended for emergencies. And given that most of his friends were his age, none of them even had driver’s licenses yet.
The only person Gage knew who had wheels that I could think of was Holden. Diana came to the same idea about the same time
I did.
“You think they’re together?” she asked.
“I don’t know why they would be.”
“You said they seemed to have some kind of connection.”
I thought back to the previous night, when Gage and I had found Holden and his friend, Alicia, at the coffee place. How they’d
exchanged glances, like sharing a private joke or something.
“I think they’ve spent more time together than they’ve let on,” I said.
If they had, it would make sense that Gage kept it a secret. He knew we had reservations about him hanging out with his uncle,
for obvious reasons. But Gage was fourteen, and you really couldn’t control who your kid hung out with at that age no matter
how hard you tried. And to his credit, Gage saw the best in his uncle.
I had my phone out and called my brother.
It rang several times before it went to voicemail. “Hey, it’s me,” I said. “Give me a call when you have a sec. We’re looking
for Gage, wondered if he’d been in touch.”
I put the phone away.
“I can’t believe I’m saying this,” Diana said, “but maybe we should do your mother a solid and head over to Holden’s again.”
As I nodded my agreement and started heading for the door, she put a hand on my arm to stop me.
“What?” I asked.
“Could she be right?” She maintained her grip, sensing that I was ready to pull away, leaning toward the door.
“Could who be right about what?”
“Your mother. Could she be right, thinking that it wasn’t a murder-suicide? That your father didn’t kill himself? That he
didn’t shoot Leah Kennard?”
“Come on, Diana. My mother’s not being rational right now.”
“Maybe not, but I think Gage is.”
I stopped my lean, and she let her hand fall from my arm. “What do you mean?” I asked.
“When Gage told that story, about stealing the chips, your father going to the police station, rescuing him, he was offering
that up as proof that your dad was at his core a decent man. That was proof enough for him that Brent couldn’t have shot Leah,
or that other woman he used to work with.”
“I know, but—”
“I have a story like that too,” Diana said.
I said nothing for a moment, holding my breath. I didn’t know whether I was ready for another revelation. Finally, I said,
half-joking, “Are you a shoplifter, too.”
“No,” she said. “It was bigger than that.”
I waited.
“I wrecked his Barracuda.”
“I’m sorry, you what?”
My father’s beloved 1972 Plymouth Barracuda? He’d bought it a year or two before Gage was born. A recapturing-his-youth moment.
There were times I believed he loved that car as much as he loved any of us.
“Gage was four months old,” Diana said. “I didn’t even have a job yet. We were fresh out of school. I had that old Volvo that
had been my mom’s, and she gave it to me because we were pretty desperate at the time. It was a tank, that car. Your dad was
still doing his consulting work then, working from home, and as much as your parents were not thrilled with our situation,
he adored Gage and invited us to drop by after I’d done the groceries. And so we did.”
I listened. This was all new to me. I remembered, around that time, I was working at a small community newspaper, making a
miserable wage. We were just getting by. Tough times.
“Your mom was in the city—I don’t know what she was doing—so it was just your father.
We came in, your dad gave Gage a bottle, played with him.
Gage was so happy he didn’t want to leave and when I got him back in his car seat he was crying and I was frazzled and as I was backing out of the driveway I hit a car parked on the opposite side of the street.
It was your dad’s Barracuda. He’d had it out earlier and hadn’t put it back in the garage. ”
“Oh god,” I said.
“I got out, saw what I’d done. I’d totally bashed in the driver’s door. The mirror’d fallen off, the glass was shattered.
I burst into tears. Your father heard the crash, came running out. And he did the most amazing thing.”
I waited.
“He laughed. He looked at what I’d done and he laughed. Just kind of lost it. And then he put his arms around me because I
was pretty hysterical by that point and he said it was just a car. Metal and plastic and paint and it could all be fixed.
I offered to pay, but it was an empty gesture because it was going to cost thousands and we had like three hundred dollars
in the bank. And the Volvo, of course, didn’t have a scratch on it.” She smiled at the recollection. “You could drive that
car into battle.”
“You’ve never told me any of this.”
“Your father swore me to secrecy. I wasn’t to tell you, or your mother. He said he’d send it to the body shop, but tell Catherine
he was getting it tuned up at some mechanic’s. It would all be like it never happened. He said to me, ‘you take care of your
little boy, you take care of my son, and I’ll take care of this.’”
I didn’t know what to say.
“I always loved your father,” Diana said. “Your mother, okay, she’s an acquired taste. But Gage is right. Your father was
a good man. Gage believes that. So do I.” She squeezed my arm. “You need to too.”
“I hear what you’re saying. I do. But if you and Gage believe, in your gut, that Dad wasn’t capable of this, then who shot
him and Leah?”
Diana didn’t have an answer for that.
We left for Holden’s.