Page 27 of Not a Word

Diana wasn’t done. “From now on you’ll do what we say and you’ll be home when we say you’re to be home and—”

“Jesus!” Gage said. “What’s this got to do with Grandpa—”

“Hang on,” I said.

But now Gage and Diana were talking over each other, no one actually listening.

“Hey,” I said. “Hey!”

They both stopped and looked at me. I raised my palms as I tried to bring the tone down a notch. I had a vague sense what was happening here. Something unthinkable had happened, we were overwhelmed, feeling powerless. And Diana had channeled all that frustration and anxiety into trying to control something, anything. At this moment, it was Gage.

“Look, we’re all on edge, and right now, we need to lean on each other, not start tearing each other apart.”

Diana turned and walked out of the room.

Gage and I looked at each other, neither of us knowing what to say. I broke the silence. “I’ve got people to call, I guess. Arrangements to make.”

Some of those arrangements might be more my mother’s responsibility than mine, but would she be in any shape to make them once she knew the details of what had happened? Would she even want a funeral for my father? How obliged would she feel to give my father a proper send-off when his final act was one of betrayal and jaw-dropping scandal?

“You okay?” I said to Gage.

“No.”

I nodded. “Me neither.” I sighed. “I’ll talk to your mom. She’s just stressed. It’ll be okay.” I didn’t know whether I believed that, but I couldn’t think of anything better to say.

“Are the police all done with this?” he asked.

“No. They’ve got to do a full investigation.”

“Why?”

I thought, Seriously?

“It’s . . . a murder, Gage. Due diligence and all that.”

“But they found a note. Grandpa said he did it. It’s obvious.” He shook his head, then asked, “And where is Grandma, anyway?”

Good question.

And at that moment, as if on cue, my cell phone rang. I pulled it from my pocket, saw that it was my mother. I answered.

“Take me home,” she said.

Eleven

Catherine had known she couldn’t sit in the coffee shop forever. Eventually, she’d have to return home. Her phone kept buzzing. Reece, of course. And another persistent caller, the ID blocked. Catherine assumed that would be the police. Messages had been left but she did not check them.

Catherine had always put off getting bad news as long as she could, even when it came to small things. When the monthly Visa bill arrived in the mail, she wouldn’t take it out of the envelope for a couple of days, fearful of how much she might have spent and forgotten about. So when it came to family crises, the longer you avoided the truth, the longer you deluded yourself into believing things couldn’t be better. The whole Schrödinger’s cat thing.

She’d finished her tea in the coffee shop across from Benjamin’s. While drinking it, she had shredded her paper napkin into a hundred tiny pieces. She swept them into the empty paper cup and snapped the plastic lid back on. Don’t like to leave a mess, she said to herself, and then laughed quietly.

Catherine reached into her purse for her wallet, set it on the table, and opened it up. She removed a department store points card from one of the sleeves, then dug her finger in, looking for something.

She withdrew a yellow Post-it note, no bigger than a pack of matches before it had been folded over once. The note was worn and dirty, as though it had been hidden in that sleeve for a very long time.

Catherine managed to unfold the note, its one sticky edge adhering to itself. Written on it in faded ink was a phone number.

She punched the number into her phone, put it to her ear, and waited.