Page 93 of Not a Word

“Just around. Is it any good?”

“Yeah, but it needs cleaning up. I think it can be salvaged. Leave it with me.”

Holden came back a week later.

“You’re lucky you didn’t kill yourself with this thing,” his friend said. “It was loaded and it’s got a kind of sensitive trigger. It’s a wonder you didn’t blow your head off. I cleaned it up, oiled it, checked it out all over, test-fired it. It’s now shipshape.”

“Is it loaded now?”

“Hell no.”

As Holden came to the end of his tale, gazing at the gun in the same shoebox where it had been stored for years—the trading cards long since gone—Alicia said, “That’s one batshit story.”

“Yeah.”

“I mean, this is it. This is the gun your mom used to shoot that woman.”

She shook her head in wonder.

The possibilities, she thought. In this box, right here, was more than just evidence the police could use to convict his mother. It was fucking karma. Meant to be.

To get even, with this gun. It was a thing of beauty.

Now, weeks later, one day after Holden’s father and mistress were found dead, scanning groceries over the barcode reader and listening to those incessant beeps at FreshCo, Alicia was thinking it hadn’t worked out quite the way she’d planned.

The wrong woman was dead.

But that didn’t have to mean the fun was over.

Thirty-Two

Reece

I left my mother’s house feeling enraged. No, more than that. Stunned and horrified. Baffled and betrayed. But more than anything else, plain old outraged.

She’d lied to us. Lied to me and lied to Holden. Was that too harsh? At the very least, she lied by omission. She allowed us to live a lie.

Holden was my half brother. His biological mother was Leah Kennard.

We’d both lost a father, but Holden had lost his true mother, as well.

And he didn’t know.

After I dropped off my father’s suit at the funeral home, I wanted to drive straight to Holden’s and tell him, but there was part of me that knew, despite my anger, that Mom was the one who would have to deliver that news. I would compel her to do it if I had to. Would this revelation damage Holden? Was there a risk this would send him into a downward spiral that could find him back in rehab? Very possibly. But we were so far past the point of covering things up. People were dead. This shit was real.

And while I believed I needed to hold off telling him the truth about his parentage, I didn’t see any reason why I couldn’t head to his place and ask him if he’d ever heard of Evelyn Corby and whether he had any memory of Dad owning a gun. Despite Mom’s denials, I was sure I recalled Dad and her having a discussion about getting one. Maybe Holden had heard something I hadn’t. I didn’t see a way not to tell him that the same gun Dad had used to kill Leah, and then himself, had been used in the murder of someone Dad would surely have known. Did he believe Dad might have killed her?

God, what a mess.

On the way to Holden’s, I phoned Diana, told her where I was headed, and gave her as tight a version of everything I’d learned as I could, like I was writing a newscast, starting with the ballistics revelation.

She said, “A situation where someone might shoot his lover and then himself, as awful as that is, it’s something I can almost get my head around. But that your dad would kill some woman and leave her body—no, I can’t believe it. I don’t believe it.”

I wanted to share her conviction. “Mom was totally blindsided. I’d never seen her look that stunned. But there’s more.”

Diana said, “Hit me.” She sounded numb.

“Holden is my half brother. Leah Kennard was a surrogate. Dad supplied the sperm—in a lab or whatever—and she got pregnant, and she had Holden. They hired her.”