The Accident (13 page)

“I’m sure they can afford them,” I said.

Fiona shook her head. “Money’s not a problem, Glen. I’ll look after any tuition-related expenses.”

I thought I glimpsed something in Marcus’s face at that moment. I told Fiona, “I think it would be a bit much for Kelly to commute from here to Darien every day for school.”

She smiled slyly at me. “Kelly would be with us through the week, of course, and back here with you on weekends. We’ve already been talking to a designer, someone Marcus knows, about making over the room Kelly stays in when she sleeps over now. She’d have a place for her computer, a desk where she could do her homework, and—”

“You’re not taking her away from me,” I said bluntly.

“Not at all,” Fiona said, feigning offense. “I can’t believe you’d think such a thing. I’m trying to help you, Glen. You and Kelly. Believe me, I know how hard it is to raise a child on your own. I’ve been there. I understand what it must be like for you, trying to juggle work and being a father. You’re probably only just getting back into the swing of things, but you wait and see. You’re on a job site, outside of town, you’re waiting for a delivery or an inspection or a client—I don’t know, I don’t pretend to understand what you do—and suddenly realize you have to be at the school to pick Kelly up.”

“I’ll have to roll with it,” I said.

Fiona reached out and touched one of my folded arms, quite a gesture for her. “Glen—I know you and I, we haven’t always seen eye to eye. But what I’m proposing here, it’s in Kelly’s best interest. Surely even you can see that. I’m trying to give her every possible opportunity.”

The thing was, it wasn’t an entirely terrible idea, if I could swallow my pride about who’d be paying for it—there was no way I could afford to send Kelly to a private school here or anywhere else. And if I believed Fiona’s motives were genuine, I might have been willing to entertain the proposal. But I couldn’t help but feel this was an attempt on her part to drive a wedge between my own daughter and me. With Sheila gone, Fiona wanted control over her granddaughter.

“I told you,” Marcus said to his wife. “I told you this would come across as too pushy.”

“This really doesn’t involve you, Marcus,” she said. “Kelly is my granddaughter, not yours. There’s no blood connection.”

He looked my way, as if to say,
I know what you’re going through, pal
.

“I am involved,” Marcus insisted. “Kelly would be coming to live with
us.
” He glanced at me again and clarified. “Through the week. And I’m
okay with that, but don’t say it doesn’t involve me, goddamn it. Don’t say that for one second.”

“Kelly’s staying with me,” I said.

“Well,” Fiona said, not accepting defeat, “clearly you need some time to think about it. And of course, we’ll want to see what Kelly has to say. She might like the idea very much.”

“It’s my call,” I reminded her.

“Of course it is.” She patted my arm again. “Where is the little princess, anyway? I was thinking we could at least take her on a little excursion for the afternoon—maybe to the Stamford mall. Get her a new winter coat or something.”

“I think Kelly should stay at home today,” I said. “The thing is, something’s happened, something I haven’t even had a chance to tell Kelly about yet, and I don’t know how she’s going to react, but I think she’s going to be very upset.”

“What?” Marcus was frowning. Probably anticipating his wife lighting into me again, whatever the problem.

“You know Sheila’s friend Ann? She has a daughter named Emily who’s friends with Kelly?”

Fiona nodded. To Marcus, she said, “You remember her. She had the purse party here.”

Marcus looked blank.

“I can’t believe you don’t remember. She was a real dish,” Fiona said with more than a hint of disapproval. To me, “What about her?”

“We saw her only last night. Kelly had gone over for a sleepover. But Kelly called me to pick her up early, she wasn’t having a good time, and sometime after that—”

“Daddy!”

The three of us turned our heads toward the stairs as Kelly screamed.

“
Daddy
, come here!
Quick!
”

I took the stairs two at a time and was in her bedroom a good ten seconds before either Fiona or Marcus could get there. Kelly was at her desk, still in her yellow pajamas, perched on the edge of her chair, one hand on the mouse, the other pointing at the screen. She was on one of the sites where she chats with her friends.

“Emily’s mom,” she said. “It’s about Emily’s mom—”

“I was going to tell you,” I said, getting my arm around her and giving Marcus and Fiona a look that said
Get out of here
. They retreated. “I just found out myself, honey—”

“What happened?” There were tears in Kelly’s eyes. “Did she just die?”

“I don’t know. I mean, yeah, I guess she did. When I called their house this morning—”

Kelly squirmed in my arms. “I told you not to call!”

“It’s okay, honey. It doesn’t matter. I thought it was Emily’s mom who answered, but it was her aunt, her mother’s sister. She told me that Mrs. Slocum had died.”

“But I
saw
her. Last night. She wasn’t dead then!”

“I know, sweetheart. It’s a shock.”

Kelly thought a moment. “What should I do? Should I call Emily?”

“Maybe later, okay? Emily and her dad, they need some time alone.”

“I feel all weird.”

“Yeah.”

We sat there for what seemed a very long time. I held on to her, cradling her in my arms as she cried.

“My mom, and now Emily’s mom,” she said softly. “Maybe I’m, like, a bad luck charm or something.”

“Don’t say that, sweetheart. Never say that. It isn’t true.”

When she stopped sobbing, I knew I needed to broach the subject of our visitors. “Your grandmother and Marcus want to take you out for the afternoon.”

Kelly sniffed. “Oh.”

“And I think your grandmother wants you to go to school in Darien. Any idea why she might want that?”

She nodded. She didn’t look very surprised. “I guess I might have told her I hate my school.”

“Online,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Well, now your grandmother wants you to live with her through the week and go to school in Darien, come back here to me on weekends.”

She slipped her arms tight around me. “I don’t think I want to do that.” A pause. “But at least, if I did, the kids there wouldn’t know anything about me, they wouldn’t know what Mom had done.”

We held each other for another minute.

“If Emily’s mom had a disease or something, like Evian flu, will I catch it? Because I was in her bedroom?”

“I don’t think someone could come down with the flu and die from it in just a few hours,” I said. “A heart attack, maybe. Something like that. But not something you could catch. And it’s
avian
flu, by the way.”

“You can’t catch a heart attack?”

“No.” I looked her in the eye.

“She doesn’t look even a little bit sick in the video.”

That stopped me. “What?”

“On my phone. She looks fine.”

“What are you talking about?”

“When I was in the closet, I had my phone ready to take video of Emily when she opened the door. I
told
you that, Daddy.”

“You didn’t tell me you shot video of her mother. I thought when Mrs. Slocum came in you put your phone away.”

“Like, pretty soon after.”

“You still have it?” I asked.

Kelly nodded.

“Show me.”

TWELVE

“Darren, I need to ask you some questions.”

He was sitting in the front passenger seat of a car parked in his driveway. Behind the wheel was Rona Wedmore. She was a short, stocky black woman in her mid-forties. She had on a tan leather jacket and jeans, and there was a gun holstered to her belt. Her short hair was sensibly styled, although lately she had been streaking just a few strands, so there was this pencil-thin line of silver-gray that swept across the top of her head. The sort of thing that said she was her own person, without shouting it from the rooftops.

They were sitting in an unmarked police car. Darren Slocum had his hand on his forehead, shielding his eyes. “I just can’t believe it,” he groaned. “I just can’t. I can’t believe Ann’s gone.”

“I know this is a tough time. But I need to go over a few things with you again.”

Rona Wedmore knew Darren. Not well, but they did have the same employer, after all. He was a Milford street cop and she was a police detective. They’d worked several crime scenes together, knew each other well enough to say hello, but they were not friends. Wedmore was aware of Slocum’s reputation. At least two complaints of excessive force. Rumors, never proven, that he’d helped himself to some cash at a drug bust. And everyone knew about Ann’s purse parties. Darren had once asked Wedmore if she’d consider hosting one, and she had declined.

“Go ahead,” he said now.

“What time did Ann go out last night?”

“It would have been nine-thirty, quarter to ten, around then.”

“And did she say why she was going out?”

“She got a phone call.”

“Who called her?” Wedmore asked.

“Belinda Morton. They’re friends.”

Darren Slocum knew that wasn’t the only call. He knew there had been one before that. Ann had spoken to someone else. He’d seen the light on the extension come on. And he knew, from talking to Emily later, that the Garber kid had her own cell phone. That she hadn’t, as Ann had suggested, used their landline to call her father to pick her up.

“Why were they getting together, Belinda and Ann?”

Darren shook his head. “I don’t know. They’re friends. They talk to each other all the time, cry on each other’s shoulders. I figured they were going to grab a drink somewhere.”

“But Ann never met up with her?”

“Belinda called back here around eleven, asking for Ann. Said she’d tried to raise her on her cell but she wasn’t picking up. Wondered what had happened to her. That was when I started to get worried.”

“What did you do then?”

“I tried her cell, too. No luck. I thought about driving around, trying to find her, look for her car at places where she might have gone, but Emily was asleep, and I didn’t want to leave her in the house alone.”

“Okay,” Wedmore said, taking down some notes. “So what time did you call it in?”

“I guess, around one?”

Wedmore already knew the answer. Slocum had called his department at 12:58 a.m.

“I didn’t want to call 911. I mean, I work there, I know all the numbers, so I called in on the nonemergency line, got hold of Dispatch, asked, kind of unofficially, you know? Asked if everyone could kind of keep an eye out for Ann’s car, that I was worried about her, that I was afraid maybe she’d had an accident or something.”

“And you heard back when?”

Slocum ran his hands over his cheeks, smearing tears. “Uh, let me think. I think it was around two. Rigby called me.”

Officer Ken Rigby.
Good man
, Wedmore thought. “Okay. I’m just trying to get a sense of the timeline, you understand.”

“Did anyone see anything?” Darren Slocum asked. “Down by the harbor? Did anyone see what happened?”

“We’re canvassing for witnesses now, but this time of year, there’s hardly anyone down there. There are some nearby houses, so maybe we’ll get lucky. You never know.”

“Yeah,” Slocum said. “Let’s hope someone saw something. But, what do you think happened?”

“It’s early, Darren. But what Officer Rigby found was, the car was running, the driver’s door was open, and the right rear tire was flat.”

“Okay,” Slocum said. Rona wasn’t sure he was listening. The guy seemed dazed.

“The passenger side of the car was pulled up right next to the edge of the pier. We’re just guessing so far, but it’s possible that she went around to see what was wrong, and when she bent over to check the tire, she lost her footing.”

“And that’s when she fell into the water.”

“Possibly. The water’s not that deep there and there’s not much current. When Rigby was shining his light around, he spotted her. It looks like an accident. There’s nothing to suggest it was a robbery. Her purse was sitting on the passenger seat. Doesn’t look like it was touched. Her wallet and credit cards were all still there.”

Darren shook his head stubbornly. “Why didn’t she just call me? Or a tow truck? Something? I mean, what was she thinking? That she was going to change a tire by herself down there in the middle of the night?”

“I’m sure we’ll know more as the investigation continues,” Wedmore told him. “Do you have any idea why Ann would be driving down around the harbor? Is that where she was going to meet Belinda?”

“Maybe. I mean, maybe instead of going for a drink, they were just going to take a walk.”

“But if that’s where they’d planned to meet, Belinda wouldn’t have called you to ask where she was,” Wedmore pointed out. “She’d have called to say she’d found her car, but that Ann wasn’t anywhere around.”

“Yeah, yeah, that makes sense,” Darren agreed.

“So that brings me back to my question. What would Ann have been
doing down at the harbor? Is it possible she was going to meet someone else before she was going to meet up with Belinda?”

“I … I can’t think of anyone.” Darren Slocum was crying again. “Rona, look, I don’t think I can do any more … I’ve, I’ve got a lot to do …”

She looked out her windshield at Darren’s pickup, noticed the For Sale sign in the window. Looking out, from between the living room drapes, was Emily.

“This must be a terrible thing for your daughter,” Detective Wedmore said.

“Ann’s sister, she lives in New Haven, came over around five in the morning,” he said. “She’s helping pull things together.”

Wedmore reached out and patted Slocum on the arm. “You know we’re going to do everything we can.”

Slocum looked at her with bloodshot eyes. “I know. I know you are.”

He watched Wedmore drive away and once she had turned the corner he got out his cell and punched in a number.

“Hello?”

“Belinda?”

“Oh my God, Darren, I still can’t—”