Chapter 25
Chapter
Twenty-Five
Wren swallowed hard and focused on Paige. “Did you have any guesses as to what the fight was about?”
“I assumed it was money.” Paige’s mouth tightened. “But I have no good reason to think that. It’s just a guess. But isn’t that what everything boils down to? Money, love, or power? I’m pretty sure it wasn’t love.”
Wren looked at the carnations instead of at Paige.
They were dyed a blue that never grew naturally on anything.
Roy would have laughed at them. Then he’d have carried them into the sales office and set them on the counter where everybody had to walk past, and told everyone that Wren Loveless brought him flowers.
Roy had a larger-than-life personality.
She looked back at Paige. “I still have the bracelets you made me.”
Paige’s hands went still. “You do not.”
“They’re in a jewelry box in my closet.” Wren turned her wrist over, like they might be there. “Purple and green. I told you they were my favorite colors, and you never made me another bracelet that wasn’t those colors after that.”
“Well.” Paige’s eyes filled with tears. “That’s about all I was good for at those concerts. I had to do something to feel useful.”
“You watched us. Nora says you’re the whole reason none of us ended up under a church van.”
“My uncle paid me five dollars a night to help out.” Paige laughed, but the sound came apart halfway through. “Five dollars. I thought I was rich.”
The phone started buzzing again, but Paige made no move to answer.
“My uncle loved your family, Wren,” Paige said. “Whatever went wrong between him and your daddy, his affection for you and your sisters never faded. He kept up with y’all. He knew Nora went into nursing. He knew you had a little boy. He even mentioned something about Marlowe having a motorcycle.”
Something turned over in Wren’s chest, and it took her a second to recognize it as anger. Sometimes it felt like every adult in her life had let her down after Christian disappeared. She and her sisters had to forge their own way. Thankfully, they’d had each other to depend on.
“He never called,” Wren murmured. “Not one time in ten years, Paige. Not at Christmas. Not when Mason was born.”
“No.” Paige frowned. “He got it in his head he wasn’t owed a place at that table anymore.”
“Why?”
“Because of your brother.”
Wren went still, not sure exactly what Paige meant.
“My uncle quit working the whole Southern Gospel scene after Christian disappeared,” Paige said.
“People called him for years, and he wouldn’t even sit down with anyone to discuss the possibility of going back into that line of work.
So he sold cars instead. He was good at it, and every single time I asked him why he gave up the music, he told me the same thing. ”
“What was that?” Wren held her breath as she waited for the answer.
“He said he’s the one who talked your daddy into that life. Said your family never asked for any of it. Four kids in a van a hundred nights a year, and he’s the one who made the case for it. If you hadn’t been so popular, maybe Christian would have never gone missing.”
“It wasn’t his fault.” Wren’s voice sounded lame, even to her own ears.
“That’s what I told him too. He wouldn’t listen.”
Wren cleared her throat. She needed to change the subject. “When’s the funeral?”
“Thursday. Ten o’clock at Second Baptist. His own church isn’t big enough.” Paige blinked away a tear.
“How was he?” Wren leaned closer. “These last few weeks. Was he all right?”
“He was tired.” Paige said the words fast. “So tired, honey. I kept after him that it was his sugar, and he wouldn’t hear about a doctor.”
“He always was stubborn.”
“Yes, he was.” Paige’s eyes went up toward the ceiling. “And he loved complaining about the cost of gas. He’d carry on about it like somebody else was spending his money. I finally said, ‘Uncle Roy, you’re driving to Kingsport and back for a sandwich, what do you expect?’”
Wren kept her face where it was. “Was he? Driving to Kingsport?”
“Goodness, I have no idea where he was driving. I only said Kingsport to get a rise out of him.” Paige’s mouth tightened. “He’d say he was going out. That’s the only thing I ever got out of him. Out.”
“I guess that was unusual?” Nash spoke for the first time. “For him to drive so much?”
“It seems unusual to me.” She shrugged before continuing.
“You know, until I moved in with him, he picked me up for church every Sunday of my life. For forty years, that man had the radio on before I ever got the door shut. Gospel station out of Newport, loud enough you couldn’t talk over it.
These last few months when we drove to church, the radio would be off.
Every time. And I’d say something about it, and he’d turn it on. ”
“What does that mean?” Wren wasn’t sure she was following Paige’s reasoning.
“Over the years, I came to learn one thing,” Paige said. “My uncle turned the radio off when he was stressed.”
“So he’d been stressed lately . . .” Wren murmured.
The phone buzzed again. This time Paige pushed herself up out of the chair, one hand braced on the table, breathing harder than standing up called for.
“I guess I should double-check that. Excuse me a minute.”
Nash waited until Paige came back into the kitchen and got herself seated before he said anything.
He’d been thinking about the silent radio and the gas money for ten minutes. Something about it made him pause. People didn’t break their routines like that for no reason.
So what was Roy’s reason?
He shifted in his seat before asking, “Paige, can I ask you something?”
“Go ahead.” She stared back at him, waiting for him to continue.
“What did your uncle drive?”
“That’s easy. It was a maroon and white eighty-seven Silverado. He bought it off the lot in ninety-four, and he’s never let a soul lay a finger on it but himself.”
“Two-tone?” He raised his eyebrows. This was his opening.
“Two-tone.” Paige nodded. “He was proud of that.”
“Huh.” Nash sat back. “My granddad had a Silverado also. Same body, blue over white. He’d let me steer it down the driveway sitting on his lap when I was about five, and I’ve wanted one every day since.”
Paige laughed. “You’d have got along with Roy then.”
“If you don’t mind me asking, where’s his truck now?”
“The garage, of course. That’s where he always left it.”
“Any chance I could see it? I’m a huge fan.”
“Why not?” She grabbed a key off a hook by the back door and pressed it into his palm. “Side door sticks. You have to lift it and pull.”
“Got it.” He headed toward the door, which was just off the kitchen.
“Paige,” Wren said behind him.
He glanced back in time to see her reach for one of the casseroles on the counter.
“Let me put a couple of these in the freezer for you,” Wren continued. “They’re going to go bad if they sit out any longer, and you’re not going to eat four casseroles by Thursday.”
“Honey, I’m going to have trouble eating just one of them.”
“Then maybe we should freeze them all. That way you can eat them later. I can help you. I want to do something.”
“Of course. I appreciate that. I can’t even think straight right now.”
“Is there a freezer in the garage?”
“There sure is.”
Nash stepped into the garage. The space was cold and smelled like cut grass and gasoline. A push mower sat against the wall, a chest freezer hummed in the corner, and steel shelving was stacked with paint cans and a coffee can of various-sized screws.
In the middle of the bay stood the truck.
The vehicle had been kept clean. The chrome was dull but even, and there was no rust breaking through anywhere. It was a nice-looking truck.
A moment later, the door scraped, and Wren stepped inside behind him with a foil pan in each hand.
He knew she just wanted an excuse to come out here too.
He went to the freezer, opened it for her, and then took a casserole from her.
Once the food was settled, she stood at the front fender with her arms crossed. “Where was Roy going?”
“That’s what we need to find out.” Nash pulled a folded shop rag off the shelf and opened it over his palm. “Don’t touch anything. Not the tailgate, not the glass, not the handle. If this turns into something, I don’t want to explain why a dead man’s truck has your prints on it.”
Wren’s hands came off her elbows and went behind her.
Nash fit the key into the lock, lifted the handle using the rag, and opened the door.