Forty-Two
“Impossible,” Holden said, taking the magazine from Gage and studying the address tag bearing his father’s name. “I don’t
get it. I don’t get how this could be here.”
Still in Alicia’s apartment, her body just steps away, Holden looked at the issue’s date. It was from more than two years
ago.
“Did Grandpa know Alicia?” Gage asked.
Holden slowly shook his head. “No, I mean, I don’t think so. How could he? And even if they’d met, even if they were friends,
why would one of his magazines be here?”
“He lent it to her? Gave it to her?”
Holden stared vacantly. “I mean, let’s say he knew her, which I don’t think he did, why would he give her this? Alicia wasn’t
even into cars.”
“He came by? Brought the magazine with him?”
Holden just looked at Gage.
Gage raised his arms. “You got a better explanation?”
“Sorry. No.” His eyes went back to the shreds of duct tape on the floor by the table, wondering if there could be a connection
and coming up with nothing. But he said, “She didn’t know my dad, but she knew who he was. I told her all about him, about Mom, about what happened. I told her about everything that went down that night.
So . . .”
“So maybe she talked to him?” Gage offered. “Before what happened yesterday? She went to the house?”
Holden wanted to sit down, puzzle this out, but he was still mindful about touching anything. “What about those?” he said, pointing to some other magazines on the coffee table in front of the couch.
Gage moved them around with his knuckles, careful not to let his fingertips touch any surface. “There’s a couple of Peoples and a Vanity Fair and Us. There’s no address on them.”
Holden moved nearer to the table, looked down at the magazines, needing to see for himself. He examined the car magazine again.
“This issue is two years old. I mean, if she’d stolen my parents’ mail or something crazy like that, it’d be a new issue,
right? But this is one that had been sitting around, in a pile. My parents, they let magazines pile up, they can be months
or years old before they toss them into the recycling.”
Gage remained as baffled as his uncle. Finally, he said, “I guess it’s a question for Grandma. Maybe she’ll know.”
“Yeah, maybe.” He grimaced, then nodded decisively. “We’re outta here. Bring that magazine.”
They navigated their way around Alicia and the blood to the door. Holden pulled the sleeve of his jacket forward over his
hand to turn the knob, peeked into the hallway to be sure no one was there, and stepped out, Gage following. Before heading
for the elevator, Holden used his sleeve to rub the exterior door handle.
They went swiftly down the hall, Gage hitting the elevator button with his knuckle.
“You’re learning,” Holden whispered.
Once the elevator arrived and they boarded, Holden lightly rubbed the button he had pressed to come to this floor originally,
but said to Gage, “A lot of people will have pushed these buttons before the cops get here.”
They got into the Honda.
“I’ll take you home,” Holden said as they buckled up.
“No,” Gage said.
Holden glanced over as he keyed the ignition. “You sure?”
Gage nodded. “I gotta know.”
As they drove off, Holden became quiet, thinking. “I’m starting to wonder.”
“Wonder what?”
“If Alicia . . . I really liked her, you know? Like, she was the best thing that had happened to me in a long time. We had
a lot in common. But she kind of . . . she kind of leaned on me.”
“Like, you mean . . .”
“Yeah. She could be, you know, manipulative.”
Gage said nothing. He was thinking about something he’d learned when he’d visited Moira.
“There’s shit I never would even have thought of if it wasn’t for her,” Holden said, more thinking out loud than actually
talking to Gage.
“There’s something I should tell you,” Gage said.
“Yeah?”
“What she said? About her aunt getting shot in the bank robbery and the cops coming and shooting the robbers? All that?”
“Yeah?”
“There’s nothing about it online.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“Right, I know. But there were still lots of other stories from around then. Like, some newspapers started putting all their
archived stuff online, articles that were only in print before there was the net. So it should have come up.”
“When did you do this?”
“Doesn’t matter. Just listen. There was nothing about a Mary Zane getting killed. Searched for it all sorts of different ways.”
“So maybe nobody covered it. There was no story.”
“Something like that, it would make the news. My dad worked in news before he got downsized. He’d tell you this is not the kind of story that would fall between the cracks.”
“You saying she made it all up?”
“Okay, so there’s more. I looked up some other things today, when I got home, on my phone.”
“Like?”
“Like Evelyn Corby.”
Holden had told Gage what he’d witnessed that night when he was a kid, but he’d never told his nephew the name of the woman his mother shot.
Holden himself had only learned it in the days following the murder, when his mother cautioned him that if anyone ever mentioned that name to him, he was to say he’d never heard of her.
But Gage had just heard it, from his parents. And that had prompted him, when he went up to his room, to do some quick online
searches.
“This was the same time period when Alicia said her aunt got killed, but there were lots of stories about Corby,” Gage said.
“Like how they never solved the murder. But there was one detail that kind of jumped out at me.”
Holden waited.
“Her niece was living with her at the time she got killed.” Gage paused, then added, “Her name was Alicia.”
Holden gripped the wheel a little tighter, pressed his lips into a thin line. “She had so many questions.” He thought some more. “After that session, where I first hinted about what had happened, without getting into
any real specifics, she was all, like, wanting to be friends, and gradually asking more and more questions, getting more details out of me about what Mom did that I was covering up for.”
Gage’s phone buzzed. He took it from his pocket. Another text from his mother, asking where he was. He put the phone away.
“We talked about it a lot. She was on my side. Agreeing with me that what mom put me through wasn’t right. That I had to do
something. Like she wanted me to get even with her for all that.”
“Like she was the one wanting to get even,” Gage said, “but wanted you to do it for her.”
Holden was trying to pull together the threads, put what he knew into some kind of order that would make sense.
“But who would kill Alicia?” he asked Gage. “Who would want to do that?”
Gage shook his head. “If I’d told you all this yesterday, I’d have said you.”