Page 80 of Not a Word

“But are you suggesting my father killed this Evelyn Corby? I mean, I have to agree with my mother. There’s no way. My father wasn’t capable of something like that.”

“It would appear he was yesterday,” McCabe countered.

I had no comeback for that.

Mom whispered, “Maybe it isn’t impossible.”

“Mom,” I said imploringly. “Come on. Shooting some woman and leaving her body at the side of the road? That’s not Dad. I don’t believe that. I won’t believe that.” To McCabe, I said, “Just because that same gun was used in both cases doesn’t mean my father pulled the trigger.”

“That’s true.”

“Dad didn’t even like guns,” I said. “Didn’t want them in the house. I still can’t believe he had one. It doesn’t add up.”

Now I was thinking back, way back. To a vague recollection of my parents having an argument. They were in the kitchen and I was in the adjoining TV room.

“I remember,” I said, slowly, “a fight—maybe not a fight, but a discussion—where you and Dad were talking about getting a gun because of Dad’s job, in case some crazy addict thought he had samples at home. In case we were a target.”

“Then your father was thinking about it,” McCabe said.

I hesitated. “It might have been the other way around.”

The detective turned to my mother. “Is that how you remember it?”

Mom blinked. “I have no memory of a conversation like that.”

“No, wait,” I said, things becoming clearer. “Because I can sort of recall, I was watching Beavis and Butt-Head, but I had the volume turned way down because you hated that show, and that’s how I was able to hear what—”

“You’re wrong,” Mom snapped. “We never discussed it. You imagined it.”

She turned on McCabe. “Even if I were to say to you, right now, gosh, maybe Brent did kill that woman years ago, it wouldn’t be proof, would it?”

“No.”

“After all this time, there’s really nothing that can be proved, one way or another. You might have a suspicion, you might think you have an idea of what happened, but you’re never going to know for certain.”

“True,” McCabe said.

“Then I don’t know why we’re having this conversation,” Mom said abruptly. “As you can see,” and she pointed to the suit and other items we had collected from the upstairs closet, “we have to make a trip to the funeral home.”

The detective nodded, got to her feet, and showed herself out.

“Mom,” I said, “what in god’s name was that all about?”

She ignored me, got up, walked through the kitchen, opened the sliding glass door, and stepped out onto the deck. Stood there a moment, then went down the two steps to the yard and walked toward the pond.

She stopped ten feet short of the edge, not far from the old, rotting rowboat that wouldn’t have stayed afloat five seconds on that smooth, murky water. She stared out over the pond and waited, as if she expected the Loch Ness monster to raise its head and say hello.

Twenty-Eight

Gage found Moira sitting on a front porch step, like she’d been waiting for him. He hopped off his skateboard, tucked it under his arm, and walked up to her. They had some of the same classes together, had made out a couple of times, and had been hanging out two nights earlier. Not together, exactly. They’d both just wound up at the same place at the same time with the same people.

“Sorry about your gramps,” she said.

“So it’s on the news.”

Moira shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“How’d you know?”