Page 108 of Not a Word

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.