The Accident (19 page)

“And she let you?” I asked.

He nodded, acknowledging that it was quite a triumph. “I think she was feeling a bit off, to tell you the truth.”

Kelly asked, “What smells?”

“That’s lasagna.”

“You bought some lasagna?”

“I
made
some lasagna.”

Kelly’s look bordered on outright fear. “We had chicken fingers on the way back.”

“It’s true,” Marcus said. “Glen, I wonder if you might have a moment …”

“Yeah, sure,” I said. “Kelly, honey, why don’t you head up to your room and unpack?”

“I didn’t pack anything when I left, remember?”

“Then just scoot.”

She gave me a hug and did, and Marcus came into the kitchen, pulled
out a chair, and made himself comfortable at the table. Although, to be honest, he didn’t look all that comfortable.

“So how are you doing?” he asked. “I mean,
really
?”

I shrugged. “Like my dad used to say, you play the hand you’re dealt.”

“Know what my dad used to say?” Marcus countered.

“I give up.”

“ ‘That lady over there’s got a nice ass.’ ” He lightly slapped his palm on the table. “I thought that was funny.”

“Sorry, Marcus. I’m not much for laughs these days.”

“I know. Forgive me. You just made me think of my old man. He was a son of a bitch.” He smiled wistfully. “And yet, my mom, she always took him back. I guess because deep down, no matter what he did that might make you think otherwise, he loved us.” His smile seemed to wash away, and he looked a little lost.

When he didn’t speak for a moment, I said, “I’m guessing something’s on your mind.”

“Yeah, I guess there is.”

“Something you don’t want to talk about with Fiona here.” A nod. “Does that mean it’s about Fiona?”

“I’m worried about her,” he said. “She’s taking all of this very hard. Losing a daughter and all.”

“Luckily, she has me to blame. That must help.”

Marcus shook his head. “She’d never show it in front of you, but I think she blames herself as much as she does you. Maybe more.”

I got out the bottle of scotch and two tumblers. I poured us each two fingers and handed him his glass. He knocked it all back at once. I didn’t take all that much longer.

“Go on,” I told him.

“She goes into the bedroom and closes the door and I can hear her crying in there. One time I heard her saying, between sobs, that it was her fault. I asked her about it later and she denied even saying it. But I think she’s been asking herself what she’s been asking you—why didn’t she see the signs? Why didn’t she notice that there was something wrong with Sheila?”

“She’s never indicated to me she’d like to shoulder any of this guilt I’m carrying around.”

“Fiona can be a difficult woman,” Marcus said. “I know that, Glen. But beneath that tough exterior, there is a heart.”

“She probably ripped it out of someone else’s chest and put it there,” I said.

He grimaced. “Yeah, well.” He shook his head. “There’s something else.”

“About Fiona?”

“About Fiona.” He paused. “And Kelly.”

“What?”

“A couple of things, actually. First, this idea of Fiona’s to have Kelly come live with us and go to school in Darien, I’m okay with it but—”

“It’s not going to happen,” I said. “I don’t want her gone from me five days out of every seven. That’s just not on.”

“Well, I kind of agree with you, but for a different reason.”

“What reason?”

“Fiona’s got money problems.”

I poured myself another scotch. Marcus held out his tumbler and I obliged. “What’s going on, Marcus?”

“I guess you’ve heard about this Karnofsky guy.”

The Wall Street investment genius who turned out to be running a massive Ponzi scheme. Countless people had lost millions of dollars and were never going to get a cent of it back. “I watch the news,” I said.

“Fiona had a lot of her money invested with his company.”

“How much?”

“About eighty percent of it.”

I felt my eyebrows soar. “How much is gone?”

“She doesn’t share all her financial details with me, but from what I can tell, we’re talking about two million, give or take.”

“Holy shit,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“What’s she going to do?”

“Even if she loses the two mil, she won’t starve. But she’s going to have to cut back quite a bit. She’ll still have some of her nest egg, but she knows it still has to last a few years. And when she started talking about sending Kelly to school—Glen, you got any idea how much those schools cost?”

“More for a semester than I charge to build a house.”

“About that. So if you’re against the idea, I think you just have to put your foot down. In a way, it’ll be a relief to her. She’ll have made the offer, and felt good about doing it, but she’ll have to defer to you.”

“You said there were a couple of things.”

“Yeah, well, Fiona started pushing Kelly pretty hard about this sleepover thing and what happened there.”

“She did? Why?”

“I don’t know. Kelly was getting really upset. I really had to get tough with Fiona, tell her to lay off. The kid’s been through a lot, and Fiona wasn’t making things any better, putting Kelly through a goddamn cross-examination.”

“Why would she do that?” I asked.

Marcus threw back his second scotch, and said, “You know Fiona. She’s always got some kind of hidden agenda.”

Kelly came downstairs and didn’t make much of the fact that Marcus had left without saying goodbye. “He seemed tired,” she told me. “He said we’d do lots of talking but he hardly said a thing.”

“Maybe he’s got a lot on his mind,” I said.

I’d taken the lasagna out of the oven and it was cooling atop the stove. Kelly inspected it, gave it a sniff.

“It’s supposed to have sauce on the top,” she said.

“Well, I put cheese there instead.”

She took a fork from the cutlery drawer and dug into the middle of it. “Where’s the ricotta? Is there ricotta?”

“Ricotta?” I said.

“And you used the wrong dish to make it in,” she said. “It’ll taste funny if you make it in a different dish.”

“It was the only one I could find. Look, do you want to eat it or not?”

“I’m not hungry.”

“I’m going to try it.” I shoveled some onto a plate and grabbed a fork from the drawer. Kelly took a seat to watch me, like I was a science experiment or something.

“Something happened that’ll make you mad,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“Grandma took me around to a couple of the schools I could go to. But I only got to see them from the outside because it was the weekend.”

“I’m not mad.”

“If I did go to school there, would you come and live with me at Grandma and Marcus’s? My room there is really big. They could put another bed in there. But you wouldn’t be allowed to snore.”

“You won’t be going to school in Darien,” I said. “I’m going to see if there’s another school here in town, if you still want to switch.”

Kelly thought about that a moment. Then she said, “So, Emily’s dad came over here yesterday?”

“That’s right.”

“Did he come by to give us an invitation to the funeral?”

“No. And that’s not exactly how it works. People don’t go around inviting—let’s not worry about that now.”

“So why did he come over?”

“He wanted to be sure you were okay, you being Emily’s best friend and all.”

She digested that, but she still looked worried. “There was nothing else?”

“Like what?” I asked.

“He didn’t want anything back?”

I focused in on her. “Like what?”

Kelly was suddenly looking very anxious. “I don’t know.”

“Kelly, what would he want back?” I asked.

“I already got in trouble for being in their bedroom. I don’t want to get into any more trouble.”

“You’re not in trouble.”

“But I’m gonna be,” she said, starting to tear up.

“Kelly, did you take something from the Slocums’ bedroom?”

“I didn’t mean to,” she said.

“How could you not mean to take something?”

“When I was in the closet, there was a purse bumping up against my foot, so I reached down to move it, and there was something clinking inside it, so I took it out, but it was too dark to see what it was, so I put it in my pocket.”

“Kelly, for God’s sake.”

“I just wanted to see what it was, and when Emily found me and I could see, I’d look at what it was. But then Emily didn’t come in, her mom did, so I just left it in my pocket. It kind of made my pocket stick out, so I
sort of held my hand over it when Mrs. Slocum made me stand in the middle of the room.”

Wearily, I closed my eyes. “What was it? Jewelry? A watch?” She shook her head. “Do you still have it? Is it here?”

“I hid it in my shoe bag.” Her eyes were large and moist.

“Go get it.”

She ran to her bedroom and was back in under a minute, carrying by its drawstring a blue gingham bag with a sailboat on the side.

She handed it to me. Whatever was inside was heavier than I expected. I felt the item through the fabric before opening the bag, and my guess was that Kelly had left the Slocum house with a pair of bracelets.

I reached into the bag and took out the item. Heavy, bright and shiny, with a nickel finish.

“It’s handcuffs,” Kelly informed me.

“Yeah,” I said. “So they are.”

NINETEEN

“You think Mr. Slocum came over because he wanted these back?” Kelly asked. “You’re sure he didn’t ask for them?”

“He definitely did not.” I was examining the cuffs, which had a tiny key stuck to them with a piece of clear tape. I returned Kelly’s empty shoe bag to her. “If these were in his wife’s purse, he might not even know about them.”

“She’s not a police lady.”

“I know.”

“But maybe sometimes she helped Mr. Slocum when he was being a policeman.”

“I suppose that’s possible.”

“Are you going to give them back?” she asked. She sounded frightened.

I took a long breath. “No,” I said. “I think we’ll just forget about this.”

“But I did the wrong thing,” Kelly said. “I kind of stole them. But not really. I just didn’t want Emily’s mom to know I’d taken them from her purse.”

“Why didn’t you put them back when Mrs. Slocum left you in the room?”

“I was scared. She made me stand in the middle of the room, and if I was in the closet when she came back I thought I’d get in even more trouble.”

I gave Kelly a hug. “It’s okay.”

“What if we put them in a box and mailed them to Mr. Slocum but you didn’t write on the box who it was from?”

I shook my head. “Sometimes people just lose things. If he even knows about these, he probably won’t be looking for them for a very long time.”

“But what if a bad guy breaks in to their house at night and Mr. Slocum goes to get the handcuffs from the purse to keep him there until other police come?”

It was a relief I didn’t have to explain what, exactly, I thought they might have been used for. “I’m sure that won’t happen,” I told my daughter. “And we’re not going to talk about this again.”

I shooed Kelly off and put the cuffs in the drawer of my bedside table. Maybe, when it was trash day, I’d drop these into a garbage bag and send them off on their way. My guess was, if these cuffs were in Ann Slocum’s purse, not only did her husband not have a clue about them, they weren’t being used in the Slocum house at all. No wonder she didn’t want Kelly telling her husband about the call.

I wondered whose wrists had been of such concern to her.

I drove Kelly to school in the morning. “And I’ll be picking you up, too,” I said.

“Okay.” That had been our routine for the last week, ever since Kelly had gone back to school since Sheila’s death. “How long are you going to do this for?”

“For a while,” I said.

“I think I can start riding my bike again soon.”

“Probably. But we’ll do this for a little longer, if that’s okay with you.”

“Okay,” she said, with some dejection in her voice.

“And if Mr. Slocum shows up at the school, wanting to see you, you’re not to talk to him. Go find a teacher if he does.”

“Why would he do that? Because of the handcuffs?”

“Look, I’m not expecting him to do anything, but just in case. And we’re not talking about the handcuffs anymore, and you’re not to tell any of your friends about them.”

“Not even Emily?”

“Especially not Emily. No one, you understand?”

“Okay. But I can talk to Emily about other things, right?”

“She won’t be at school today. She’ll go back in a few days, I’d guess.”

“But I still talk to her online.”

Of course. I was thinking like someone from another century.

Kelly asked, “Are we going to the visitation?” A word she didn’t even know a month ago. “Emily said there’s a visiting today and she wants me to come.”

I wasn’t so sure that was a good idea. First of all, I was worried it would be upsetting for Kelly. She’d just been to her mother’s funeral, and wept through most of it. I was worried about how she’d handle another one so soon. Second, I didn’t want her anywhere near Darren Slocum.

“I don’t know, sweetheart.”

“I have to go,” she said. “To the visiting.”

“No, you don’t. People would understand if you didn’t go.”

“You mean, they’d think I didn’t want to go? Because that’s not true. I don’t want people thinking I’m a chicken.”

“You’re not—that’s not what they’d think.”

“That’s what I’d think. I’d think I was a huge pussy for not going.”

“A what?”

She blushed. “A chicken. And besides, Emily and her parents came to Mom’s funeral.”

Kelly was right about that. The Slocums had been there. But a lot had changed in the interim. And the situation between us and the Slocums was different.

“If I don’t go, then Emily will hate me forever,” she said. “If that’s what you want, then I guess I won’t go.”

I glanced over at her. “What time’s the visitation?”

“It’s at three.”

“Okay, I’ll pick you up at school at two. We go home and get changed, and we go to the visitation. But here’s the deal: You stay with me. You don’t wander out of my sight. Are we clear?”