Page 122 of Not a Word

“There’s something I should tell you,” Gage said.

“Yeah?”

“What she said? About her aunt getting shot in the bank robbery and the cops coming and shooting the robbers? All that?”

“Yeah?”

“There’s nothing about it online.”

“It was a long time ago.”

“Right, I know. But there were still lots of other stories from around then. Like, some newspapers started putting all their archived stuff online, articles that were only in print before there was the net. So it should have come up.”

“When did you do this?”

“Doesn’t matter. Just listen. There was nothing about a Mary Zane getting killed. Searched for it all sorts of different ways.”

“So maybe nobody covered it. There was no story.”

“Something like that, it would make the news. My dad worked in news before he got downsized. He’d tell you this is not the kind of story that would fall between the cracks.”

“You saying she made it all up?”

“Okay, so there’s more. I looked up some other things today, when I got home, on my phone.”

“Like?”

“Like Evelyn Corby.”

Holden had told Gage what he’d witnessed that night when he was a kid, but he’d never told his nephew the name of the woman his mother shot. Holden himself had only learned it in the days following the murder, when his mother cautioned him that if anyone ever mentioned that name to him, he was to say he’d never heard of her.

But Gage had just heard it, from his parents. And that had prompted him, when he went up to his room, to do some quick online searches.

“This was the same time period when Alicia said her aunt got killed, but there were lots of stories about Corby,” Gage said. “Like how they never solved the murder. But there was one detail that kind of jumped out at me.”

Holden waited.

“Her niece was living with her at the time she got killed.” Gage paused, then added, “Her name was Alicia.”

Holden gripped the wheel a little tighter, pressed his lips into a thin line. “She had so many questions.” He thought some more. “After that session, where I first hinted about what had happened, without getting into any real specifics, she was all, like, wanting to be friends, and gradually asking more and more questions, getting more details out of me about what Mom did that I was covering up for.”

Gage’s phone buzzed. He took it from his pocket. Another text from his mother, asking where he was. He put the phone away.

“We talked about it a lot. She was on my side. Agreeing with me that what mom put me through wasn’t right. That I had to do something. Like she wanted me to get even with her for all that.”

“Like she was the one wanting to get even,” Gage said, “but wanted you to do it for her.”

Holden was trying to pull together the threads, put what he knew into some kind of order that would make sense.

“But who would kill Alicia?” he asked Gage. “Who would want to do that?”

Gage shook his head. “If I’d told you all this yesterday, I’d have said you.”

Forty-Three

Crane left Alicia’s apartment building and headed for his car. He popped the trunk with his remote, the lid yawning open as he approached. He dumped the box of magazines in there and vowed to get rid of them as soon as he saw a suitable spot. Got behind the wheel, brought out his phone, and did some basic research. It didn’t take much time to come up with an address for Holden.

There was one hell of a mess to deal with. It was Cleanup on Aisles Four, Five, Six, and Seven.