Page 119 of Not a Word

“I don’t know!” Holden shouted, then looked panicked, as though someone in a neighboring apartment might hear him. He dropped his voice low and said, “I don’t know what kind of shit she could be into that would get her killed. I mean, okay, like, she probably knows a few dealers—so do I—but I can’t think why any of them would want to hurt her. She wasn’t even using.”

Something suddenly occurred to him. “You touch anything?”

Gage thought, You kidding? He’d had his hands all over the toilet, his puke was everywhere. There was enough Gage Chartwell DNA in this bathroom to make a new him.

“I was sick,” he said.

Holden extended a hand to help Gage to his feet. “Shit, I’m sorry, man, I’m sorry you had to see this. But we have to be smart now. Clean up in here. Get a bunch of toilet paper and wipe down everything you touched and any barf that missed the target and flush it away.”

Gage nodded and went to work, pulling yards of toilet paper from the roll, balling it up and wiping the handle, the rim of the bowl and the floor. He threw the wad into the toilet, got some more paper and did it again and flushed. He rejoined Holden in the kitchen area.

“Don’t think I touched much,” Holden said.

“The door,” Gage reminded him.

“On the way out.”

Holden was examining the room from where he stood, careful not to move even his feet without thinking first. He noticed some shreds of duct tape on the floor and a knife and scissors on the table, as though someone had used them to open a package. But there was no empty package to be seen.

Gage spotted something over on the couch. He walked over, examined it without picking it up, then asked, “Was she into cars?”

Holden turned. “What?”

“Did Alicia like old cars?”

He shrugged. “No idea. Who cares? Hey, don’t touch that—”

Too late. Gage had already picked up a magazine off the couch. He held it up for Holden to see.

It was an issue of Collectible Automobile, a magazine for classic car enthusiasts. On the cover was a picture of the green Mustang Steve McQueen had driven in the movie Bullitt.

Gage pointed to a sticker on the cover’s bottom right-hand corner.

“It’s addressed to Grandpa,” Gage said. “It was mailed to Brent Chartwell.”

Forty-One

Reece

Diana was still trying to raise either Gage or Holden as we got closer to my brother’s house.

“Still nothing,” she said. “Why the hell won’t Gage respond?”

The answer seemed obvious. He didn’t want to talk to us. He was still too upset about his grandfather to discuss his feelings at length. Maybe he was angry with us for even considering the possibility my father had killed Leah Kennard or that other woman years ago. I envied Gage’s faith in his grandfather. Diana’s too. I desperately wanted to be able to share it, but I had little faith in anything at that moment. Maybe that was what writing news copy did to you. It made you a slave to facts, and the facts weren’t in my father’s favor.

Everything was unraveling. I had a strong sense of foreboding, that the events of the last couple of days were moving quickly toward some kind of resolution, one that would bring no sense of closure, but open even more wounds.

I kept those thoughts to myself. Diana was already on edge.

“You texting or calling?” I asked.

“Both,” she snapped, annoyed I would even have to ask. “And I’ve left him two voicemails.”

“No car,” I said, referring to Holden’s Honda. His house was just up ahead, and there was no car in the driveway. There was one car parked on the street, a black Mercedes sedan, but it was four or five houses past Holden’s.

“Where to now?” I asked, having brought the car to a stop out front, engine on, my foot on the brake.

Diana impulsively opened the door and said, “I’ll see if he’s home.”