Linwood Barclay - The Accident

When the police cars started showing up, I told them the woman in there was probably traumatized-hell, I think we all were-and within a minute or two they had brought Fiona out front, too.

She seemed almost catatonic.

She took a seat on a small bench she’d installed by the front gardens and sat there, saying nothing.

“Fiona,” I said gently. She seemed not to hear me. “Fiona.”

Slowly, she turned her head. She was looking in my direction, but I wasn’t sure she was seeing me. Finally, she said, “How are you doing, sweetheart?”

Kelly twisted her head around on my shoulder to look at her. “I’m okay, Grandma,” she said.

“That’s good,” Fiona said. “I’m sorry you haven’t had a very nice visit this time.”

In talking to the police, I tried to cast Fiona in the best possible light.

Marcus was holding on to her grandchild, threatening to break her neck. He had pretty much admitted killing Ann Slocum. His intention was to use Kelly as a hostage as he made his getaway. When Kelly stomped on his foot, it was Fiona’s one chance to stop him before he did anything else.

On top of all that, she attacked him believing that he had killed her daughter.

My wife.

Marcus hadn’t admitted any responsibility for Sheila’s death. I didn’t think that would hurt Fiona where her actions were concerned, but it was troubling to me.

Not overly. But troubling.

Why would he acknowledge a role in Ann’s death but not Sheila’s? It was possible, of course, that even having confessed to all his other crimes, he couldn’t admit, in front of Fiona, that he’d murdered her daughter. Maybe it was one crime too many to cop to.

I didn’t really know what to think. Maybe Marcus had murdered Sheila, and maybe he hadn’t. Maybe someone else had.

And there was always the other possibility. The one Rona Wedmore had alluded to.

No one had killed Sheila. She had done it to herself. She’d gotten drunk, gotten in her car, and caused the accident. I’d been fighting that version of events for so long. With all the things that had been swirling around Sheila-thousands of dollars in cash that were to be delivered to a hit man, counterfeit goods, blackmailing wives-it seemed inevitable her death was connected. Could there be this much mayhem going on in Milford and then, on top of all of it, Sheila has an accident that’s totally unrelated?

At first, I was furious with Sheila, that she would do something so stupid. Then, as I began to believe she was blameless, I felt guilt over the way I’d felt, the things I’d shouted to her in my head.

Now, I had no idea what to feel.

After all I’d been through these last few days, I had my suspicions, but I didn’t really know any more now than I had before.

Maybe there are some things we’re better off never knowing.

It would be wrong to say that things got back to normal. I had my doubts that our lives would ever really return to that. But over the next couple of days, some routine started to return.

But not the first night.

Kelly, after witnessing the horrors that had happened in Fiona’s home, did not sleep well. She tossed and turned and, at one point, began to scream. I ran into her room, sat her up in bed, and she looked right at me, eyes open, but there was a vacant glaze to them I’d never seen before. As she shouted “No! No!” I realized she was still asleep. I said her name over and over again until she blinked and came out of it.

I found a sleeping bag in the basement, rolled it out on the floor next to her bed, and slept there the rest of the night. I rested my hand on her mattress and she held on to it till morning.

I made eggs for breakfast. We talked about school, and movies, and Kelly had some interesting things to say about how singer Miley Cyrus had turned from a girl she would have liked to hang out with into some kind of skank.

“You don’t have to go to school today,” I said. “You can go back when you want to.”

“Maybe when I’m twelve,” she said.

“Dream on, pardner.”

And she smiled.

I took her to work with me that day. She accompanied me to a couple of job sites and played on my computer when we got back to the office. It was nothing short of a shambles. Dozens of unreturned voicemails. Invoices that had not been paid.

Ken Wang said he’d done his best to hold things together, but without Doug and Sally around, he was barely treading water.

“What’s happening with Doug?” he wanted to know. “We need him.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “He’s still in custody.”

“You want my opinion? If he did kill Theo, it was totally justifiable. I thought about doing it myself a couple of times. And where the hell is Sally?”

“She doesn’t work here anymore.”

“Don’t say that.”

“That’s what she told me.”

“Let me give y’all a bit of friendly advice. If you have to get down on your knees and beg, you get that woman back in here. You might think you run this outfit, and if it makes you happy to live with that delusion, that’s fine with me, but she’s the one makes this place work.”

I sighed. “She’s not coming back.”

“I hope you don’t mind my saying, you being the boss and all, but you must have fucked up big-oops, sorry, Kelly.”

“It’s okay,” she said, swinging around in my chair. “I’ve seen and heard worse lately.”

Kelly had been talking online, and on the phone, with Emily. Her aunt Janice continued to care for her while Darren Slocum’s stay in the hospital continued. He was likely to be there another week or so, and even after he returned home he was going to need some help.

“Emily says her dad isn’t going to be a policeman anymore,” Kelly said.

“That so.”

“She says he’s going to do something different. And they might move. I don’t want her to move.”

I touched the top of her head. “I know. She’s a good friend, and you guys need each other.”

“She wants me to come over tomorrow night. Maybe for pizza. But not a sleepover. I’m never going on another sleepover for the rest of my life.”

“Good plan,” I said. “I guess you could go over for a visit. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”

“What job sites are we hitting tomorrow?”

Rona Wedmore dropped by the office to see me. She had her arm in a sling.

“I thought it was your shoulder,” I said.

“They say it’ll heal better if I don’t keep moving my arm around. I saw you on the news, yelling at that news lady as you came out of your house. That was smooth.”

I smiled.

“My department’s going to give you some kind of award,” she said. “I tried to talk them out of it, told them you were some kind of nut, but they’re insisting.”

“I really don’t want anything,” I said. “I’d like to forget about all of it. I just want to move on.”

“And what about your wife? Are you able to move on there?”

I leaned up against a filing cabinet and folded my arms across my chest. “I don’t know that I have much choice. All I can figure is, she got into something so deep, she went off the deep end that night. She acted in a way she never had before because she was in a mess like she’d never been in before. But she should have talked to me about it. We could have worked things out.”

Wedmore nodded sympathetically.

“Do you believe things happen for a reason?” she asked.

“Sheila did. I’ve never really subscribed to that.”

“Yeah, I’m like you. At least, I used to be. Now, I’m not so sure. I think I got shot for a reason.”

I unfolded my arms, slid my hands down into my pockets. “I can’t think of any good reason to get shot, unless it’s going to get you off work for the next six months at full pay.”