Odom leaned against the edge of the workbench.
He looked at Reed for a moment, then at me.
I could tell he was still thinking about Brix's account.
I was too.
Neither of us had found a way to make it clearer.
"Do you think we should ask him anything else?" Odom said.
I looked toward Brix.
He was close enough to hear the question.
For a moment, I considered what we might ask.
Had the diner man sounded angry?
Had the other man sounded afraid?
Had Brix recognized the second man's voice?
But those questions would only help if Brix remembered something useful that he had not already shared.
We had no reason to believe he did.
"I don't know what else we'd ask," I said.
Odom nodded slowly.
"That's where I am."
He didn't sound pleased about it.
Neither did I.
We had reached the limit of what another round of questions could give us.
That was difficult to accept because asking questions felt like taking action.
Standing still felt like doing nothing.
But repeating a question was not the same as making progress.
If Brix had already told us what he heard, asking him to say it again would not make the missing pieces appear.
I didn't want to confuse activity with usefulness.
"Did I miss anything?" Odom asked.
I thought about it carefully.
"No. Not that I heard."
He looked down at the workbench.
"Then we know what we know."
It was a plain statement.
For once, I didn't try to add anything to it.
Brix shifted his grip on the canvas bag.
I looked at him.
"You haven't left anything out on purpose, have you?"
The question came out more directly than I intended.
Brix looked at me.
"No."
He didn't sound offended.
He sounded certain about that much, at least.
"I told you what I heard."
"I believe you," I said.
And I did.
I had no reason to treat his uncertainty as dishonesty.
He had been open about what he knew and what he didn't.
If I wanted more information than he possessed, that was my problem.
It wasn't a reason to doubt him.
"All right," I said.
Brix nodded once.
The conversation ended there.
I was grateful for that.
There was no need to make him defend himself against questions that came from our discomfort rather than from anything he had done.
Reed continued working beside the Shovelhead.
I watched him for a moment, then looked toward Odom.
"We still need to get this done," I said.
"Yes."
Neither of us had to explain what we meant.
The memorial ride was approaching.
The motorcycle was running, but that did not mean every part of the work was finished.
We had been trying to prepare for Saturday before Brix brought us the warning.
That responsibility remained.
I had worried that returning to the motorcycle would mean ignoring what Brix had told us.
Now I understood that it didn't have to mean that.
We could keep his words in mind without letting them become the only thing we did.
We could be alert without inventing a threat.
We could be cautious without acting as if we knew the identity of the problem.
Those were not perfect answers.
They were the only honest choices I could see.
I looked at Odom's phone.
He had not picked it up.
I wondered if I would have felt better if he had.
Perhaps I wanted the appearance of a response, something that would suggest we had moved from listening to doing.
But I couldn't name a useful call he needed to make.
I couldn't say who he should contact or what he should tell them beyond the account Brix had already given us.
A call made only because we were uncomfortable might create more confusion instead of less.
Odom seemed to understand that too.
He left the phone where it was.
The small decision reassured me.
Not because it proved that doing nothing was the right choice, but because it showed that he wasn't going to manufacture an action just to make the room feel different.
I was learning to appreciate that kind of restraint.
It was easy to talk about being careful.
It was harder to accept that careful thinking sometimes meant refusing to act on a guess.
The diner man might have had a reason to ask about Reed.
He might have had a reason to ask about the motorcycle.
The argument behind the kitchen might have been connected to those questions.
But we could not establish any of that from what we had heard.
I kept returning to the same facts, not because I expected them to change, but because I wanted to remember where the limits were.
Brix had heard the men argue.
He had heard them mention something being found before Saturday.
The diner man had asked him what he had seen.
That was the information.
Everything beyond it remained uncertain.
I looked at Reed again.
He had not stopped working.
I didn't interrupt him with another question.
I didn't need him to tell me that he was worried.
I didn't need Odom to offer a new explanation.
I didn't need Brix to remember something he had never known.
For a little while, the room settled into the rhythm of the work.
The sound of the engine no longer seemed to demand that I interpret it.
It was simply the sound of the motorcycle we had been trying to get running.
I could hear it and still remember the warning.
Both things could be true.
I let myself accept that.
The uncertainty had not become smaller.
My need to solve it immediately had.
That was not much, but it was something I could hold on to.
Click here to continue reading: PART 19: Saturday Was Getting Closer, and I Had to Accept That We Might Reach It Without Understanding the Diner Man
I Thought Getting One Old Motorcycle Running Would Solve Everything, Until a Hurt Boy Told Us What He Heard
Part 18 of 20
