He opens the front door, looks out, then closes it and returns to the kitchen. On his heels, we follow him through the mudroom, but when he lets himself out and, leaning crookedly on the railing, starts down the steps, Margo catches my arm to hold me back.

“Give him time,” she whispers.

“How much?” I ask as he plods unsteadily over the grass.

“I don’t know. But he’s talking with her. It’s all she ever wanted.”

We watch him open the door of the potting shed as he has apparently done many times these last twenty years. We can’t see him once he’s inside.

“What if he tries something?” I whisper, afraid to say it louder.

“Like what?” she whispers back. “We found the gun. It’s gone.”

The words are barely out of her mouth when we hear a sound that can’t be anything but.

Chapter 22

I tear free of Margo’s hold. Yes, we took the gun, but that sharp crack suggests there’s another. What had he said—that any fool can get a gun?

My father is no fool. I race across the grass thinking that if he bought a new one each time he forgot where the old one was, he might own three or four or five. And how many more hidden panels are there?

Always that little bit faster, Margo reaches the door first and screams. Tom is on the floor in a crumple of pajamaed arms and legs, skin white, eyes open and unseeing. Falling to her knees, she shakes his shoulder gently at first, then less so. “Dad? Dad?”

He doesn’t blink or twitch. There is an utter stillness to him. The only sounds in the shed are frightened ones coming from Margo and me.

Having raised a child on my own, I know the drill, but reality is something else. What to do first? I manage to cry, “911.” Then, “CPR!”

Dead weight is all I can I think as we roll him to his back. While Margo starts chest compression, I race back to the house for a phone. After calling 911 from the kitchen, I tear upstairs for my cell, run back to the shed, and crouch on Dad’s opposite side. Margo’s body jolts with each push of her arms, and my own heart is pounding, but he doesn’t move.

“Anything?” I ask.

She shakes her head no without breaking the rhythm of her palms on his chest.

Anne. I call her, but she doesn’t pick up. I try a second and third time in quick succession, prepared to keep at it—when she clicks in with an annoyed, “I’m working.”

“Dad shot himself,” I shout before she can hang up. “He’s on the floor of the potting shed, and he isn’t breathing. You have to come home.”