Page 96 of Not a Word

I couldn’t be angry. This wasn’t something that had happened recently. I couldn’t see the point of a lecture at this late date. And while I would have preferred that he’d called his mother or me, I understood why he’d called his grandfather. In the same situation, I might have done the same.

“I thought you should know,” Gage said. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.”

He was crying. Diana sat next to him, put his head on her shoulder.

“Why tell us now?” I asked.

Gage sniffed, hunted in his pocket for a tissue, and wiped his eyes and nose. “Because you need to know Grandpa was a good person. You need to know he would never mean to hurt anybody, not now, not in the past. And maybe he did some wrong things, like having an affair or whatever, but I don’t think he was happy, and you’d have to be blind not to see it.”

“I hear you,” I said. “I do. But—”

“I know what you’re going to say,” Gage said. “It’s all bullshit. He was the best person I’ve ever known and you should be ashamed for thinking any different.”

He got up and went into the house.

Thirty-Three

Crane answered his phone. “Yes.”

“It’s the same bloody gun!”

“Catherine, calmly please.”

She ignored him. “The gun they found yesterday, it’s the one I threw in the pond!”

Crane thought about that for a moment, wondering how that must have been determined. A ballistics test. They would have compared the bullets recovered from the previous day’s scene to the one recovered from Evelyn Corby’s body.

“It’s impossible,” she said. “Brent tried to find it. He raked the bottom of the pond. It had to have sunk into the muck.”’

“And yet,” Crane said, “here we are.”

“That detective, she thinks Brent killed that woman.”

Crane gave that a moment’s thought. “Let her.”

“What?”

“Let. Her.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s better than the alternative. I don’t know the nature of this detective’s questions, but if she seems to be zeroing in, you might lead her in a more advantageous direction. That you hate to think it, but perhaps it’s possible Brent killed that woman. After all, he’s gone and established a pattern. Dead men don’t generally have the opportunity to defend themselves. Has she been in touch?”

“The detective?”

“No. Your mystery caller.”

“Oh, no. No, she hasn’t.”

This was not good. They couldn’t sit around waiting for the phone to ring. They needed to be proactive.

“Has this detective spoken to your son?”

“Many times,” Catherine said. “Reece was here with me when she started asking about that gun, if Brent had it years ago, if he knew that woman.”

“Not that son. Your other son.”

Catherine went quiet.