Page 95 of Not a Word

“Holden!” Diana said.

He looked her way, then back at me. He stook a step back and said, “I just . . . just can’t handle any more of this. Go, okay? Just go.”

“I’m not going until you tell me—”

“Reece,” Diana said. She waved her phone at me. She’d had a text, but of course I couldn’t make it out from the other side of the car. “It’s Gage.”

He was waiting for us on the front step. His text to his mother had been simple enough:

Where is everybody?

Diana had written back, asking if he was okay. The three dots danced for a few seconds, but then stopped, like he had something he wanted to say but couldn’t get the words out.

“You okay?” Diana asked as we both got out of the car.

“I kind of freaked when there was no one here,” he said. “Where were you?”

I said, “There’s been a lot going on.” I told him the gun his grandfather had used was linked to the unsolved murder of someone who’d worked for Wiffel-Smith. A woman named Evelyn Corby.

“That’s crazy,” he said. “There’s no way. If they think Grandpa had anything to do with that, they’re nuts.”

I didn’t want to remind him what his grandfather had done the day before.

“We want to think that too,” Diana said. “Look, I’m with you. I don’t believe he could do that.”

Gage sat on the front step, looked down, and said, “There’s something I should tell you.”

I was so not in the mood for more surprises. But I said, “About?”

“It has to do with Grandpa.”

“Something about yesterday?”

“No. A while back.”

We waited.

He raised his head, looked at his mother, then me. “I stole something.”

Diana, calmly, asked, “Where was this? What did you steal?”

“Just don’t freak out. Let me tell the whole story.”

I nodded. “We’re listening.”

“It was like, a year, year and a half, something like that. But I was with my friends, at the store, and they kind of dared me to steal something. So I grabbed this bag of chips and tried to sneak out with it but got caught.”

“Go on,” Diana said.

“The manager, he called the cops, and they came, and they took me to the station, and I was really scared, and they told me to call my parents, but I didn’t. I called Grandpa instead.”

“Why would you—”

“Mom, just let me tell it. I was . . . I was afraid to call you guys because I knew you’d be mad and I couldn’t face that so Grandpa came down and he said he was my father and they bought it and he sat in with the cops and I can hardly remember what anybody said because I was so scared they’d send me to jail or something. But Grandpa saved me, said he would take me back to the store and make me apologize and that’s what we did.”

“He never said a word about it to me,” I said.

“That was the deal. He promised he wouldn’t, but he said it was my one chance. If I did anything like that again he wouldn’t bail me out or cover it up for me. But what he did, it was like the nicest thing he ever did for me, up to then.”