Page 120 of Not a Word

“The car’s not here so—”

“Maybe he sold it for drugs. Or crashed it someplace and came back.”

It was a cruel, uncharitable thing to say, but also within the realm of the possible, so I didn’t chastise her for it. I put the car in park, killed the engine, and caught up with her as she reached the front door and started knocking.

“Holden!” she shouted. “It’s Diana!”

We stood there a moment, waiting to sense some motion within the house but heard nothing.

“Let’s go,” I said. “Let’s take a drive by—”

“Hang on,” Diana said, grabbing my sleeve. “I heard something.”

“I didn’t hear—”

“Shhh!”

She had her ear to the door. “I heard someone bumping into something.”

I took a turn listening, turning my head and getting it within an inch of the door. “I don’t hear anything.”

“I’m telling you I heard something. He might not want to talk to us but I want to talk to him.”

She tried the door and found it unlocked. She opened it about a foot and called out my brother’s name again, but there was still no response.

“Hey,” she said. “Check it out.”

The wood in the doorjamb was splintered around the lock, as though the door had been forced open, maybe kicked in and reclosed.

I shook my head, not sure what to make of it. Had someone broken in? Or maybe Holden misplaced his keys at one point and had to bust his way in?

Whatever the answer, it was concerning, and more than enough reason to enter. Diana had been here before, although not in some time, so she wasn’t taken aback by Holden’s housekeeping regimen.

“Holden?” she said again, and then, “Gage?”

“Let’s look around,” I said.

I walked through the combined living room/kitchen and down the short hallway to Holden’s bedroom while Diana checked the bathroom and the second bedroom, where Holden kept just about anything one could think of, except an actual bed. It was filled with cardboard and Rubbermaid containers packed with god knows what.

As I came up behind her, Diana called out, “Holden?”

If she was thinking there was enough mess in there for him to hide in, she wasn’t wrong. She took two steps in, peered over a stack of business boxes, found no one lurking there, and came back into the hall.

She stepped into Holden’s bedroom.

“Already been in here,” I said. “Even looked under the bed. Not that anyone could hide under there, it’s so jammed with stuff.”

Diana moved across the room, stood in front of the closet, the louvered doors folded shut.

“They’re not here. Let’s go,” I said.

But Diana didn’t move. She stood there, frozen, like she was picking up something that wasn’t on my radar.

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.