Page 110 of Not a Word

“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.

Thirty-Eight

Alicia went to her apartment door but did not open it.

“Who is it?”

“Catherine Chartwell sent me.”

She put her eye to the peephole, saw a man standing there. Hard to get a good look at someone that way, but he was not that imposing a figure. Balding, glasses, no more than five six, probably late fifties.

Alicia felt a wave of fear coupled with anger. The fear was easy enough to explain. She’d been followed, found out. She hadn’t spotted anyone following her, and now she was kicking herself. And the anger? That box filled with magazines instead of cash was more than enough to raise her hackles.

“She fucked me over,” Alicia said through the door.

“I’m here to make that right,” the man said.

“Unless you’ve got the cash on you, forget it.”

“Did you really think she’d leave that kind of money in a dumpster? All it would take is one homeless guy to find it before you got there. Makes more sense to deliver it in person.”

Alicia wasn’t so sure. “I’m not buying it.”

“Very well,” he said and went quiet.

Alicia looked through the peephole again. He was gone.

Shit.

What if he had come with the cash? Was she going to let him walk away? No, it was a trick. Don’t take the bait. Let him go.

What should she do? Call Catherine, tell her all bets were off, she was calling the police, telling them everything? Scare the shit out of her, tell her if she didn’t come up with the money, right now, then—

Maybe that was why the guy’d been at her door. Catherine knew she had no choice but to pay up and had sent this shmuck to settle things.

Alicia unlocked it, slipped off the chain, and—

The door burst open, knocking her off her feet and sending her onto the floor on her ass. The man was in the room in less than a second, the door closed a second after that.

He loomed over her, looked down, and said, “We should talk.”