Linwood Barclay - The Accident

“Yeah, well.” She looked away from me for a second. Then she said, “When I got admitted to the hospital, they went and got my husband, brought him down. You know what he did when he saw me?”

I shook my head.

“He said, ‘You okay?’ ”

It didn’t seem like much of a story to me, but it seemed like the most important thing in the world to her.

“I think I should take a cake,” Kelly said. “If Emily’s buying the pizza, I should bring dessert.”

“Okay.”

It was the next day, and I had talked to Janice on the phone to see whether it was really okay for Kelly to come over. Janice said Emily had done nothing all day but talk about her best friend coming for a visit.

I offered to stop at a traditional bakery on our way over, but Kelly insisted we go to the grocery store and get a frozen Sara Lee chocolate cake. “It’s Emily’s favorite. Why are you rubbing your head, Daddy?”

“I’ve been having a lot of headaches the last couple of days. I think it’s just stress, you know?”

“I get that.”

Emily had been watching for us and ran out of the house as we pulled in to the driveway. Janice followed her out. The girls threw their arms around each other and ran into the house.

Janice stayed outside to speak with me. “I want to thank you, for what you did, stopping that man who shot Darren.”

“I was kind of looking out for my own neck, too.”

“Still,” she said, touching my arm briefly.

“What’s going to happen to him?”

“He’s resigned from the force, and he’s got a good lawyer. He’s offered to tell everything he knows, about what Sommer did, about what he knows about the people he worked for. I’m hoping, if he still gets jail time, that it’ll only be a few months. After that, he can look after Emily. He loves her more than anything in the world.”

“Sure. Well. I hope it works out, for Emily’s sake. I’ll come back for Kelly in a couple of hours. That be okay?”

“That’d be fine.”

I got back in the truck, but I didn’t head home. There was one other stop I needed to make.

About five minutes later I was parked out front of a different house. I walked up to the door and rang the bell.

Sally Diehl opened the door a few seconds later. She was wearing rubber kitchen gloves, and was carrying a caulking gun.

“We need to talk,” I said.

“You have to come back,” I said. “I need you.”

“I told you, I quit,” Sally said.

“When I was in a jam, when I needed help the other day when I was going for Kelly, you were the one I called. You’re the one who always knows how to get things done. You’ve always been the go-to girl, Sally. I don’t want to lose you. Garber Contracting is falling apart and I need you to keep it together.”

She stood there, brushed back some hair that had fallen across her eyes.

I said, “What’s with the caulking gun?”

“I’m trying to finish up around the tub. Theo did this new bathroom but he never quite finished it.”

“Let me come in.”

Sally looked at me for another second, then opened the door wide. “Where’s Kelly?”

“She’s at Emily’s. They’re having some pizza.”

“That’s the kid whose dad got shot?”

“That’s the one.”

Sally asked what had actually happened at Fiona’s house and I filled her in, even though it wasn’t something I liked to talk about.

“Jesus,” she said. She’d gotten rid of the caulking gun, peeled off the gloves, and taken a seat at the kitchen table. I was leaning up against the counter.

“Yeah, no kidding,” I said. I rubbed my temples with my fingers. “God, I’m getting such a headache.”

“So Marcus killed Ann?” Sally asked.

“Yeah.”

“And Sheila, too?”

“I don’t know. Maybe, when he recovers enough that he can talk again, he’ll be willing to tell us everything, although I’m not counting on it. I’m starting to come around to the fact that, you know, maybe Sheila did it.”

Something seemed to soften in Sally’s face.

“I tried to tell you,” she said. “But you haven’t been in the right place.”

“I know.” I shook my head. It was still throbbing. “What about Theo?”

“Funeral was yesterday. It was horrible, Glen, honestly. Everybody crying. I thought his brother was going to throw himself on top of the casket when they lowered it into the ground.”

“I should have been there.”

“No,” she said firmly. “You shouldn’t have.”

“I regret the things I said, Sally. Maybe Theo meant exactly what he was saying when he was writing that note to me, that he was sorry. I turned it into something else.” I rubbed my head. “You got any Tylenols or anything? My head feels like it’s about ready to explode.”

“In the drawer right behind your butt,” she said.

I swiveled around, pulled out the drawer, and found a veritable pharmacy in there. Different pain remedies, bandages, syringes. “You got an entire Rite Aid in here,” I said.

“It’s a lot of stuff for my dad. I haven’t gotten around to clearing it out yet,” Sally said. “I’m going to have to do that.”

I found the Tylenols, closed the drawer, and got the cap off.

“Tell me you’ll at least think about coming back to work,” I said. “KF’s about to have a nervous breakdown.”

I shook two pills out onto the counter. When I’d get headaches on the road with Sheila, and didn’t have water to wash down the pills I kept in the glove box, she’d insist we stop somewhere so I could get a drink.

“You can’t take them dry,” Sheila’d say. “They’ll get stuck in your throat.”

So I said, “Glass?”

“In the drying rack,” Sally said.

I looked at the rack next to the sink. There were a couple of glasses there, a single plate, some cutlery. As I reached for the glass, I saw something I wasn’t expecting to see.

A baking dish.

The lasagna pan I hadn’t seen in over three weeks. Browny-orange in color.

What Sheila always called “persimmon.”

I carefully lifted the pan out of the rack and set it on the counter.

Sally laughed. “You gonna drink out of that?”

“What’s this doing here?” I asked slowly.

“What?”

“This lasagna pan. I recognize this. It’s Sheila’s. What’s it doing here?”

“Are you sure?” she said. “I’m pretty sure that’s mine.”

Sheila and I had a routine over the years. She cooked dinner, I cleaned up. You spend year after year cleaning the same dishes and bowls and glasses and baking dishes, you get to know them like the back of your hand. If this dish had come from our house, it would have a smudge on the bottom near one corner, where the residue from a price tag had never worn away.

I turned the dish over. The smudge was there, right where I expected it.

“No,” I said. “It’s ours. This is the dish Sheila always made lasagna in.”

Sally had gotten out of the chair and walked over to have a look. “Hand it over.” She examined it. She looked inside it, flipped it over, and checked the bottom. “I don’t know, Glen. If you say so, then I guess it is.”

“How’d it get here?” I asked.

“Jeez, I don’t know. I know it didn’t fly in through a window. I guess Sheila must have brought lasagna over sometime and I forgot to return it. So shoot me.”

“Sheila made up a lasagna the day of her accident. She left two plates of it for Kelly and me. But there wasn’t any more of it. I decided to try making lasagna the other day and I couldn’t find the pan.” I held it up. “Because it was here.”

“Glen, please. Is there a point to this?”