Odom leaned against the edge of the workbench.<\/p>\n
He looked at Reed for a moment, then at me.<\/p>\n
I could tell he was still thinking about Brix's account.<\/p>\n
I was too.<\/p>\n
Neither of us had found a way to make it clearer.<\/p>\n
"Do you think we should ask him anything else?" Odom said.<\/p>\n
I looked toward Brix.<\/p>\n
He was close enough to hear the question.<\/p>\n
For a moment, I considered what we might ask.<\/p>\n
Had the diner man sounded angry?<\/p>\n
Had the other man sounded afraid?<\/p>\n
Had Brix recognized the second man's voice?<\/p>\n
But those questions would only help if Brix remembered something useful that he had not already shared.<\/p>\n
We had no reason to believe he did.<\/p>\n
"I don't know what else we'd ask," I said.<\/p>\n
Odom nodded slowly.<\/p>\n
"That's where I am."<\/p>\n
He didn't sound pleased about it.<\/p>\n
Neither did I.<\/p>\n
We had reached the limit of what another round of questions could give us.<\/p>\n
That was difficult to accept because asking questions felt like taking action.<\/p>\n
Standing still felt like doing nothing.<\/p>\n
But repeating a question was not the same as making progress.<\/p>\n
If Brix had already told us what he heard, asking him to say it again would not make the missing pieces appear.<\/p>\n
I didn't want to confuse activity with usefulness.<\/p>\n
"Did I miss anything?" Odom asked.<\/p>\n
I thought about it carefully.<\/p>\n
"No. Not that I heard."<\/p>\n
He looked down at the workbench.<\/p>\n
"Then we know what we know."<\/p>\n
It was a plain statement.<\/p>\n
For once, I didn't try to add anything to it.<\/p>\n
Brix shifted his grip on the canvas bag.<\/p>\n
I looked at him.<\/p>\n
"You haven't left anything out on purpose, have you?"<\/p>\n
The question came out more directly than I intended.<\/p>\n
Brix looked at me.<\/p>\n
"No."<\/p>\n
He didn't sound offended.<\/p>\n
He sounded certain about that much, at least.<\/p>\n
"I told you what I heard."<\/p>\n
"I believe you," I said.<\/p>\n
And I did.<\/p>\n
I had no reason to treat his uncertainty as dishonesty.<\/p>\n
He had been open about what he knew and what he didn't.<\/p>\n
If I wanted more information than he possessed, that was my problem.<\/p>\n
It wasn't a reason to doubt him.<\/p>\n
"All right," I said.<\/p>\n
Brix nodded once.<\/p>\n
The conversation ended there.<\/p>\n
I was grateful for that.<\/p>\n
There was no need to make him defend himself against questions that came from our discomfort rather than from anything he had done.<\/p>\n
Reed continued working beside the Shovelhead.<\/p>\n
I watched him for a moment, then looked toward Odom.<\/p>\n
"We still need to get this done," I said.<\/p>\n
"Yes."<\/p>\n
Neither of us had to explain what we meant.<\/p>\n
The memorial ride was approaching.<\/p>\n
The motorcycle was running, but that did not mean every part of the work was finished.<\/p>\n
We had been trying to prepare for Saturday before Brix brought us the warning.<\/p>\n
That responsibility remained.<\/p>\n
I had worried that returning to the motorcycle would mean ignoring what Brix had told us.<\/p>\n
Now I understood that it didn't have to mean that.<\/p>\n
We could keep his words in mind without letting them become the only thing we did.<\/p>\n
We could be alert without inventing a threat.<\/p>\n
We could be cautious without acting as if we knew the identity of the problem.<\/p>\n
Those were not perfect answers.<\/p>\n
They were the only honest choices I could see.<\/p>\n
I looked at Odom's phone.<\/p>\n
He had not picked it up.<\/p>\n
I wondered if I would have felt better if he had.<\/p>\n
Perhaps I wanted the appearance of a response, something that would suggest we had moved from listening to doing.<\/p>\n
But I couldn't name a useful call he needed to make.<\/p>\n
I couldn't say who he should contact or what he should tell them beyond the account Brix had already given us.<\/p>\n
A call made only because we were uncomfortable might create more confusion instead of less.<\/p>\n
Odom seemed to understand that too.<\/p>\n
He left the phone where it was.<\/p>\n
The small decision reassured me.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
I was learning to appreciate that kind of restraint.<\/p>\n
It was easy to talk about being careful.<\/p>\n
It was harder to accept that careful thinking sometimes meant refusing to act on a guess.<\/p>\n
The diner man might have had a reason to ask about Reed.<\/p>\n
He might have had a reason to ask about the motorcycle.<\/p>\n
The argument behind the kitchen might have been connected to those questions.<\/p>\n
But we could not establish any of that from what we had heard.<\/p>\n
I kept returning to the same facts, not because I expected them to change, but because I wanted to remember where the limits were.<\/p>\n
Brix had heard the men argue.<\/p>\n
He had heard them mention something being found before Saturday.<\/p>\n
The diner man had asked him what he had seen.<\/p>\n
That was the information.<\/p>\n
Everything beyond it remained uncertain.<\/p>\n
I looked at Reed again.<\/p>\n
He had not stopped working.<\/p>\n
I didn't interrupt him with another question.<\/p>\n
I didn't need him to tell me that he was worried.<\/p>\n
I didn't need Odom to offer a new explanation.<\/p>\n
I didn't need Brix to remember something he had never known.<\/p>\n
For a little while, the room settled into the rhythm of the work.<\/p>\n
The sound of the engine no longer seemed to demand that I interpret it.<\/p>\n
It was simply the sound of the motorcycle we had been trying to get running.<\/p>\n
I could hear it and still remember the warning.<\/p>\n
Both things could be true.<\/p>\n
I let myself accept that.<\/p>\n
The uncertainty had not become smaller.<\/p>\n
My need to solve it immediately had.<\/p>\n
That was not much, but it was something I could hold on to.<\/p>\n
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 … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":40041,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40059","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-insightdrama"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40059"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40059\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40079,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40059\/revisions\/40079"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/40041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}