“Not today,” Trenton said. He wasn’t sure if he was making a joke or not.
“I might shoot Mom,” Minna said matter-of-factly. Some of her hair had fallen out of her ponytail and she brushed it back with a wrist. “We haven’t even made a dent in this room, have we?”
In one of the lower desk drawers, Trenton found a half-dozen cards, stuffed haphazardly on top of some ink cartridges. He opened one and jerked back in his chair. “Ew.”
“Ew what?”
“Hair.” He held up a small brown curl, held together by a faded blue elastic. There was no signature on the card. No message, either. Just the words that had been printed: Thinking of you.
Minna stood up quickly, snatched the card and the lock of hair from him, and tossed it back in the drawer. “Don’t touch Dad’s stuff,” she said.
“I thought I was supposed to be helping,” he said.
“Well, you’re not.” She slammed the drawer closed with a shin. She stood for a minute, massaging her temples, and Trenton thought viciously that she would probably look just like his mom in a few years.
“I’m getting old,” she said, as if she knew what he’d been thinking. Then Trenton felt guilty.
“You’re twenty-seven.”
“Twenty-eight next month.” She moved another box—this one full of books—from the chair opposite the desk onto the floor and sat down with a small groan and closed her eyes. She said, “Someone died in here, you know.”
Trenton felt the tiniest flicker of interest. “What do you mean?”
“Someone was shot. In here. Years ago, before Dad bought the house. There were brains splattered all over the wall.” She opened her eyes. “I remember Mom and Dad talking about it when we first moved in.”
It was the first interesting thing Trenton had ever heard about the house. “How come you didn’t tell me before?”
Minna shrugged. “You were so little. And then I must have forgot.”
Trenton turned this piece of information over in his mind and found that it gave him a little bit of pleasure. “Like . . . a murder?” That word, too, was pleasurable: a distraction, a temporary lifting away from the everyday. Like being just a little drunk.
“I don’t know the whole story,” Minna said. She seemed to lose interest in the conversation. She started picking out dirt from underneath her nails.
In the quiet, Trenton heard it again. A voice. Not quite a voice, though. More like a shape: a solidity and pattern to the normal creakings and stirrings of the house. It was the way he’d felt as a kid listening to the wind through the trees, thinking he could make sense out of it. But this wasn’t just his imagination.
There were words there, he was sure of it.
“Do you . . . do you hear that?” he ventured to Minna.
“Hear what?” Minna looked up. “Did Amy shout?”
Trenton shook his head.
Minna tilted her head, listening. She shrugged again. “Nada.”
Trenton swallowed. His throat felt dry. Maybe something had gone haywire in his head after the accident. Like a popped fuse or something. Because directly after Minna had spoken, he heard the word, uttered clearly in the silence.
The word was: Idiot.