Linwood Barclay - The Accident

“She called me,” I said. “She asked me to come pick her up.”

“I didn’t know that,” Ann said. “What’s wrong? Did she say what was wrong?”

“She just said to come and pick her up.” I could think of any number of reasons why Kelly might have decided to bail on her sleepover. Maybe she wasn’t ready to be away from home this soon after her mother’s death. She and Emily could have had a fight. Maybe she’d had too much pizza and felt sick to her stomach.

“She never asked to use the phone,” Ann said.

“She has her own.” Ann was starting to irritate me. I just wanted to get Kelly and go.

“Yes, well,” Ann said, and seemed momentarily distracted. “Eight-year-old girls with their own phones! It wasn’t like that when we were kids, was it?”

“No,” I agreed.

“I hope the girls didn’t have an argument or anything. You know how they can be. Best of friends one minute, mortal enemies the-”

“Kelly!” I shouted into the house. “Daddy’s here!”

Ann raised her hands as if to shush me. “I’m sure she’s coming. I think they were watching a movie in Emily’s room, on the computer, for a while. We told her she couldn’t have a TV in there, but when you have a computer, who needs a TV, you know? You can watch all the TV shows online now anyway. And I think they were writing a story, making up some sort of adventure or something like-”

“Where’s Emily’s room?” I asked, starting for the dining room, figuring I could find my way through the house faster than the Slocums could get Kelly to the door.

But then, suddenly, she appeared, coming from the living room, with Darren trailing after her. Kelly seemed to be making an effort to stay ahead of him.

“Found her,” he said.

“Hey, Dad,” she said sullenly.

She had her jacket on, backpack in hand, and stopped at my side, pressing into me. The backpack hadn’t been fully zipped, and one of Hoppy’s ears was sticking out.

“You okay, sweetheart?” I asked.

She nodded.

“You sick?”

She hesitated a second, then nodded. “I want to go home,” she insisted.

“I don’t know what her problem is,” Darren said to me, like Kelly wasn’t even there. “I asked her and she wouldn’t say a thing.”

Kelly wouldn’t look at him. I mumbled a thank-you and guided her out to the front step. Ann and Darren muttered something in return before closing the door behind us. I stopped Kelly and leaned over to zip up her jacket. Inside the house, I could hear voices being raised.

Once I had Kelly buckled in and was pulling away from the Slocum house, I asked, “So what happened?”

“I don’t feel good.”

“What is it? Stomach?”

“I feel weird.”

“Pizza? Too much soda?”

Kelly shrugged.

“Did something happen? Did something happen with Emily?”

“No.”

“No, nothing happened? Or no, nothing happened with Emily?”

“I just want to go home.”

“Did Emily or somebody say something? About your mother?”

“No.”

“You looked like you didn’t even want to talk to Mr. Slocum. Did something happen with him?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?” The hairs were standing up on the back of my neck again. I was getting a bad vibe off him there. I didn’t know what it was. But there was something I didn’t like. “Did he… did he make you feel uncomfortable?”

“Everything’s fine,” Kelly said, but she wouldn’t look at me.

My mind was taking me places I didn’t want to go. There were questions I felt I needed to ask, but it wasn’t going to be easy to ask them.

“Look, honey, if something happened, you need to tell me about it.”

“I can’t.”

I glanced over at her, but she was still looking straight ahead. “You can’t?”

Kelly didn’t say anything.

“Something happened, but you can’t talk about it, is that what you’re saying?”

Kelly’s lips tightened. I felt a spike of anxiety.

“Did someone make you promise not to say anything?”

After a moment, she said, “I don’t want to get in trouble.”

I kept my voice as even as possible. “You’re not going to get in trouble. Sometimes, grown-ups, they’ll make kids promise not to tell something, but that’s wrong. Any time a grown-up does that, it’s to cover up something that they’ve done. It’s not because of anything bad you’ve done. And even if they say you’re going to get in trouble if you tell, you won’t.”

Kelly’s head went up and down a fraction of an inch.

“This thing… that happened,” I said, tentatively. “Was Emily there? Did she see it?”

“No.”

“Where was Emily?”

“I don’t know. She hadn’t found me yet.”

“Found you?”

“I was hiding, and then she was going to hide.”

“From her father?”

“No,” she said impatiently. “We were hiding from each other. In different parts of the house, but then we were trying to sneak up on each other.”

“Okay,” I said, starting to clue in. “Did she come in later? Did she find you?”

A shake of the head.

We were by the hospital, the point where we’d normally turn down Seaside Avenue to our place, which was neither by the sea nor within view of it. But I felt, now that Kelly was talking, pulling in to the driveway might shut her down. So I went past our street and wandered down Bridgeport Avenue. If Kelly noticed we were missing the turn to our place, she didn’t mention it.

Okay, no more stalling. This was my life- our life-now. Dad and daughter had to talk about things that Dad would have been very happy to hand over to Mom.

“Sweetheart, this is really difficult for me to ask, but I have to, okay?”

She looked me in the eye, then turned away.

“Did Mr. Slocum do something to you? Did he touch you? Did he do something that you didn’t want him to do? Because if he did, that’s wrong, and we need to talk about it.” It seemed unthinkable. The guy was a cop, for crying out loud. But I didn’t care if he was the goddamn head of the FBI. If he touched my kid, I was going to beat the living shit out of him.

“He didn’t touch me,” she said.

“Okay.” I started to imagine different scenarios. “Did he say something to you? Show something to you?”

“No, he didn’t do any of those things.”

I let out a long breath. “Then what, honey? What did he do?”

“He didn’t do anything, okay?” Kelly turned and looked at me directly, as though getting ready to accuse me of something. “It wasn’t him. It was her. ”

“Her? Who?”

“It was Emily’s mom.”

“Emily’s mom touched you?” I asked, bewildered. That seemed even more unthinkable.

“No, she didn’t touch me,” Kelly said. “She got mad at me.”

“Mad at you? Why would she get mad at you?”

“I was in their room.” Now she wouldn’t look at me.

“Their room? You mean, their bedroom?”

Kelly nodded. “We were just playing.”

“Playing in Emily’s parents’ bedroom?”

“I was only hiding. In the closet. I wasn’t doing anything bad. But she got all mad because she didn’t know I was there and she was on the phone.”

I was upset, but part of me was relieved, as well. The worst-case scenario appeared to be off the table. Kelly being where she wasn’t supposed to be, hiding in Ann and Darren Slocum’s bedroom-well, if I’d found Emily hanging out in my bedroom closet, I’d probably be pissed about it myself.

“Okay, so let me get this straight,” I said carefully. “You were hiding in Mr. and Mrs. Slocum’s bedroom and then Mrs. Slocum came in to use the phone?”