Linwood Barclay: The Accident

I tried her cell for the second time in ten minutes. After six rings it went to voicemail. “Hi. This is Sheila. I’m either on the phone, away from it, or too scared to answer because I’m in traffic, so please leave a message.” Then the beep.

“Hey, me again,” I said. “You’re freaking me out. Call me.”

I put the cordless receiver back onto its stand and leaned up against the kitchen counter, folded my arms. As she’d promised, Sheila had left two servings of lasagna in the fridge, for Kelly and me, each hermetically sealed under plastic wrap. I’d heated Kelly’s in the microwave when we got home, and she’d come back looking for seconds, but I couldn’t find a baking dish with any more in it. I might as well have offered her mine, which a few hours later still sat on the counter. I wasn’t hungry.

I was rattled. Running out of work. The fire. Sally’s dad.

And even if I’d managed to recover my appetite late in the evening, the fact that Sheila still wasn’t home had put me on edge.

Her class, which was held at the Bridgeport Business College, had ended more than an hour and a half ago, and it was only a thirty-minute drive home. Which made her an hour late. Not that long, really. There were any number of explanations.

She could have stayed after class to have a coffee with someone. That had happened a couple of times. Maybe the traffic was bad on the turnpike. All you needed was someone with a flat tire on the shoulder to slow everything down. An accident would stop everything dead.

That didn’t explain her not answering her cell, though. She’d been known to forget to turn it back on after class was over, but when that happened it went to voicemail right away. But the phone was ringing. Maybe it was tucked so far down in her purse she couldn’t hear it.

I wondered whether she’d decided to go to Darien to see her mother and not made it back out to Bridgeport in time for her class. Reluctantly, I made the call.

“Hello?”

“Fiona, it’s Glen.”

In the background, I heard someone whisper, “Who is it, love?” Fiona’s husband, Marcus. Technically speaking, Sheila’s stepfather, but Fiona had remarried long after Sheila had left home and settled into a life with me.

“Yes?” she said.

I told her Sheila was late getting back from Bridgeport, and I wondered if maybe her daughter had gotten held up at her place.

“Sheila didn’t come see me today,” Fiona said. “I certainly wasn’t expecting her. She never said anything about coming over.”

That struck me as odd. When Sheila mentioned maybe going to see Fiona, I’d figured she’d already bounced the idea off her.

“Is there a problem, Glen?” Fiona asked icily. There wasn’t worry in her voice so much as suspicion. As if Sheila’s staying out late had more to do with me than it did with her.

“No, everything’s fine,” I said. “Go back to bed.”

I heard soft steps coming down from the second floor. Kelly, not yet in her pajamas, wandered into the kitchen. She looked at the still-wrapped lasagna on the counter and asked, “Aren’t you going to eat that?”

“Hands off,” I said, thinking maybe I’d get my appetite back once Sheila was home. I glanced at the wall clock. Quarter past ten. “Why aren’t you in bed?”

“Because you haven’t told me to go yet,” she said.

“What have you been doing?”

“Computer.”

“Go to bed,” I said.

“It was homework,” she said.

“Look at me.”

“In the beginning it was,” she said defensively. “And when I got it done, I was talking to my friends.” She stuck out her lower lip and blew away some blonde curls that were falling over her eyes. “Why isn’t Mom home?”

“Her thing must have run late,” I said. “I’ll send her up to give you a kiss when she gets home.”

“If I’m asleep, how will I know if I get it?”

“She’ll tell you in the morning.”

Kelly eyed me with suspicion. “So I might never get a kiss, but you guys would say I did.”

“You figured it out,” I said. “It’s a scam we’ve been running.”

“Whatever.” She turned, shuffled out of the kitchen, and padded back upstairs.

I picked up the receiver and tried Sheila’s cell again. When her greeting cut in, I muttered “Shit” before it started recording and hit the off button.

I went down the stairs to my basement office. The walls were wood-paneled, giving the place a dark, oppressive feel. And the mountains of paper on the desk only added to the gloominess. For years I’d been intending to either redo this room-get rid of the paneling and go for drywall painted off-white so it wouldn’t feel so small, for starters-or put an addition onto the back of the house with lots of windows and a skylight. But as is often the case with people whose work is building and renovating houses, it’s your own place that never gets done.

I dropped myself into the chair behind the desk and shuffled some papers around. Bills from various suppliers, plans for the new kitchen we were doing in a house up in Derby, some notes about a freestanding double garage we were building for a guy in Devon who wanted a place to park his two vintage Corvettes.

There was also a very preliminary report from the Milford Fire Department about what may have caused the house we’d been building for Arnett and Leanne Wilson on Shelter Cove Road to burn down a week ago. I scanned down to the end and read, for possibly the hundredth time, Indications are fire originated in area of electrical panel.

It was a two-story, three-bedroom, built on the site of a postwar bungalow that a strong easterly wind could have knocked down if we hadn’t taken a wrecking ball to it first. The fire had started just before one p.m. The house had been framed and sided, the roof was up, electrical was done, and the plumbing was getting roughed in. Doug Pinder, my assistant manager, and I were using the recently installed outlets to run a couple of table saws. Ken Wang, our Chinese guy with the Southern accent-his parents emigrated from Beijing to Kentucky when he was an infant, and we still cracked up whenever he said “y’all”-and Stewart Minden, our newbie from Ottawa who was living with relatives in Stratford for a few months, were upstairs sorting out where fixtures were going to go in the main bathroom.

Doug smelled the smoke first. Then we saw it, drifting up from the basement.

I shouted upstairs to Ken and Stewart to get the hell out. They came bounding down the carpetless stairs and flew out the front door with Doug.

Then I did something very, very stupid.

I ran out to my truck, grabbed a fire extinguisher from behind the driver’s seat, and ran back into the house. Halfway down the steps to the basement, the smoke became so thick I couldn’t see. I got to the bottom step, running my hand along the makeshift two-by-four banister to guide me there, and thought if I started spraying blindly from the extinguisher, I’d hit the source of the fire and save the place.

Really dumb.

I immediately started to cough and my eyes began to sting. When I turned to retreat back up the stairs, I couldn’t find them. I stuck out my free hand and swept it from side to side, looking for the railing.

I hit something softer than wood. An arm.

“Come on, you stupid son of a bitch,” Doug growled, grabbing hold of me. He was on the bottom step, and pulled me toward it.

We came out the front door together, coughing and hacking, as the first fire truck was coming around the corner. Minutes after that, the place was fully engulfed.

“Don’t tell Sheila I went in,” I said to Doug, still wheezing. “She’d kill me.”

“And so she should, Glenny,” Doug said.

Other than the foundation, there wasn’t much left of the place once the fire was out. Everything was with the insurance company now, and if they didn’t come through, the thousands it would cost to rebuild would be coming out of my pocket. Little wonder I’d been staring at the ceiling for hours in the dead of night.