The Secret Between Us (7 page)

Chapter 4

Deborah felt her heart stop. When she could finally speak, her voice held panic. “Died?
How?
”

“A cerebral hemorrhage,” the nurse reported.

“But he had a brain scan when he was admitted. Why wasn’t it seen?”

“He wasn’t hemorrhaging then. We’re guessing it started yesterday. By the time the vital signs tipped us off, it was too late.”

Deborah didn’t understand what could have happened. She had checked the man herself on the road—no vital injuries, solid pulse. He had sailed through an initial surgery and regained consciousness. Dead didn’t make sense.

Clutching the towel around her, she asked, “Are you sure it’s Calvin McKenna?”

“Yes. They’ll be doing an autopsy later.”

Deborah couldn’t wait. “Who was on duty when this happened?”

“Drs. Reid and McCall.”

“Can I talk with one of them?”

“They’ll have to call you back. A multiple-car accident just came in. Can I give them the message?”

“Yes. Please.” She thanked the woman and disconnected.

Grace was in tears. “You said he wouldn’t die.”

Bewildered, Deborah handed her the phone and, wanting to cry herself, said, “I don’t know what went wrong.”

“You said his injuries weren’t life threatening.”

“They
weren’t
. Grace, this is a mystery to me.” She was badly shaken, struggling to make sense of it. “He was in stable condition. They saw nothing on the tests. I have no idea how it happened.”

“I don’t
care
how it happened,” the girl sobbed. “It was bad enough when I thought about seeing him in class, knowing I was the one who hit him, but now there won’t
be
any class. I
killed
him.”

“You didn’t kill him. Killing implies intent. It was an
accident
.”

“He’s
still dead
,” Grace wailed.

Death was a sidebar to Deborah’s job. She saw it often—fought it often. Calvin McKenna’s death was different.

She couldn’t think of a single useful thing to say. For her own comfort as much as her daughter’s, she simply wrapped her arms around Grace.

Deborah didn’t have
the heart to make Grace go to school. The girl argued—rightly—that word would spread, and it seemed unfair to subject her to all that attention until they knew more. But neither of the doctors on call phoned back, which meant that there was little she could say to make Grace feel better.

There was no explanation for why the teacher had died—which was what she told Mara Walsh, the school psychologist, as soon as she came in. She and Mara often worked together with students struggling with anorexia or drug abuse, and, when a student had died of leukemia the year before, they jointly gathered a team of grief counselors.

Mara was shocked by today’s news. She asked questions Deborah couldn’t answer and shed little light on Calvin McKenna, other than to say that he had a Ph.D. in history—a surprise to Deborah, since he neither used the title nor listed the degree on the school website.

When Deborah hung up, she found Dylan listening. “Died?” he asked, his skin pale, eyes huge behind his glasses. Since his grandmother’s death three years before, he had known what death meant.

Deborah nodded. “I’m waiting for a call from his doctor to explain why.”

“Was he old?”

“Not very.”

“Older than Dad?”

She knew where he was headed. The divorce, coming only a year after Ruth Barr’s death, had compounded his sense of loss. “No. Not older than Dad.”

“But Dad’s older than you.”

“Some.”

“A
lot,
” the boy said, sounding nearly as upset as her parents when Deborah, at twenty-one, had married a man seventeen years her senior. But Deborah had never felt the difference in age. Greg had always been energetic and young. A free spirit through his teens and twenties, he hadn’t grown up until his thirties—this, by his own admission—which meant that he and Deborah felt much closer in age than they really were.

“Dad is fifty-five,” she said now, “which is
not
old, and he isn’t dying. Mr. McKenna was hit by a car. If that hadn’t happened, he’d be alive.”

“Are they gonna arrest you for killing him?”

“Absolutely not. It was a terrible accident in the pouring rain.”

“Like the night Nana Ruth died?”

“Nana Ruth wasn’t in an accident, but yes, the weather was bad.” The rain had been driven by near-hurricane winds the night Ruth had died. Deborah would never forget the drive into town to be with her for those last hours.

“Are they gonna bury him?”

“I’m sure they will.” There would definitely be a funeral, plus headlines in the local paper. She could see it—a big front page piece, along with a description of the accident naming those in the car.

“Will they bury him near Nana Ruth?”

She pulled herself together. “That’s a good question. Mr. McKenna didn’t live here very long. He may be buried somewhere else.”

“Why isn’t Grace dressed?”

Grace was on a stool at the kitchen counter. Shoulders slouched, she wore the T-shirt and boxer shorts she had slept in. She was nibbling on her thumbnail.

“Grace?” Deborah begged and, when the thumb fell away, said to Dylan, “She’s not going to school. She’s staying home while we try to learn something more.” Deborah tapped her laptop. Patients would be e-mailing. Taking care of their problems would ground her.

“I want to stay here, too,” Dylan said.

Deborah typed in her password. “There’s no need for that.”

“But what if they arrest you?”

“They won’t arrest me,” she scolded gently.

“They could. Isn’t that what police do? What if I come home and find out you’re in jail. Who’ll take care of us then? Will Dad come back?”

Deborah grasped his shoulders and bent down so that their eyes were level. “Sweetie, I am not going to jail. Our
chief of police,
no less, said that there was no cause for worry.”

“That was before the guy died,” said the boy.

“But the facts of the accident haven’t changed. No one is going to jail, Dylan. You have my word on that.”

She had no sooner given her word, though, when she began to worry. She had to force herself to reply to her patients:
No need to be anxious, Kim, your daughter hasn’t even been on antibiotics for a full day; Yes, Joseph, we’ll call in a refill for the inhaler; Thanks for the update, Mrs. Warren, I’m pleased you’re feeling better.

The day before, when her father had suggested she call Hal Trutter, she resisted. Even now, she wasn’t sure if she needed legal advice, but she did need reassurance.

“Karen,” she said when her friend answered the phone. “It’s me.”

“Who’s me?” Karen replied in a hurt tone. “My friend Deborah, who didn’t bother to call yesterday, not even to say she wouldn’t be at the gym, and left me to hear about the accident from my daughter, who keeps trying to call Grace and can’t get through?”

Deborah was instantly contrite. She couldn’t answer for Grace, who loved Danielle like a sister, but Karen was her best friend. She would have called sooner had it not been for Hal, which was another thing to fault him on. But she couldn’t tell her friend about that. “I’m sorry. I didn’t phone anyone, Karen. It was a bad day. We were pretty upset.”

“Which was why you should have called. If I couldn’t make you feel better, Hal could have.”

Deborah cleared her throat. “That’s why I’m calling now. Calvin McKenna just died.”

Karen gasped. “Are you serious?”

“Yes. I don’t know the details. But I thought I’d run it past Hal. Has he left?”

“He’s on the other line. Hold on a sec, sweetie, and I’ll get him.”

Hal sounded nearly as hurt as his wife. “You took your time calling, Deborah. Any reason for that?”

Deborah might have said,
Because for starters, you’re apt to take it the wrong way,
but Grace had followed her into the den, and Deborah had no way of knowing if Karen was still on the line. So she said, “It was an accident. All I need is information. I don’t think I need a lawyer.”

“You need me,” he drawled, likely winking at his wife. Sadly, he meant what he said. He had loved Deborah for years, or so he professed shortly after Greg left, and no matter that she cut him off with,
No way. I don’t love you, and your wife is one of my closest friends,
he hadn’t taken back the words. School meetings, sports events, birthday parties—he took every opportunity to remind her. He never touched her. But his eyes said he would in a heartbeat.

It had put her in an untenable position. She and Karen had shared pregnancies, kid problems, Karen’s breast cancer, and Deborah’s divorce. Now Deborah knew something about Hal that Karen didn’t. Keeping the secret was nearly as painful as the thought of what might happen if she divulged it.

Hal had made her his partner in crime. She
hated
him for that.

“I don’t think there’s any problem,” she told him now, “but I want to be sure. I went down to the station yesterday.”

“I know. I talked with John. He doesn’t see any cause for concern.”

Deborah might have been irked that he had taken it upon himself to talk to the police, but she knew her father was right; Hal was the best defense lawyer around. And Hal regularly played poker with Colby, so his assurance carried more weight. Of course, things had changed since yesterday.

“Calvin McKenna just died,” Deborah said, “and don’t ask how, because I’m waiting to learn myself. Do you think this alters the picture?”

There was a pause—to his credit, the lawyer at work—then a prudent, “That depends. Is there anything you were doing at the time of the crash to suggest you were at fault?”

There it was, a golden opportunity to set the record straight about who was driving. She knew it was wrong to lie. But the accident report was filled out, and the fact of a fatality made it even more important to protect Grace. Besides, Deborah had repeated the line often enough that it rolled off her tongue. “My car was just at the wrong place at the wrong time. If they weren’t going to charge me with operating to endanger before, will a death change that?”

“It depends on what the reconstruction team finds,” Hal replied, less comforting than she had hoped. “It also depends on the D.A.”

“What D.A.?” Deborah asked nervously.

“
Our
D.A. A death might bring him into the picture.”

She had called for
reassurance
. “What does ‘might’ mean?”

“You’re starting to panic. Do not do that, sweetheart. I can get you out of whatever it is.”

“But what
is
it?” she asked, needing to know the worst.

“When a death is involved,” he said in a measured tone, “every side is examined. An accidental death can be termed vehicular homicide or even negligent homicide. It depends on what the state team finds.”

Deborah took a shaky breath. “They won’t find much,” she managed to say. Of course, she hadn’t imagined Calvin McKenna would die.

“Then you’ll be clear on the criminal side,” Hal added, “but a plaintiff doesn’t need much to file a civil suit. The standard of proof is looser. John tells me he got a call from the wife. He says she’s looking for someone to blame. And that was before her husband died.”

“We weren’t even going
thirty
in a forty-five-mile-per-hour zone.”

“You could have been going twenty, and if she hires a hotshot lawyer who convinces the jury that you should’ve been going fifteen in that storm, she could recover something. But hey,” Deborah heard a smile, “you’ll have a hotshot lawyer on your own side. I’m giving John a call. I want to know what tests were done to register the guy’s blood alcohol or the presence of drugs. John said you took the crash report home with you. Did you fill it out?”

“Last night.”

“I’d like to see it before you file. One wrong word could suggest culpability. Are you going to be home for a little while?”

“Actually, no.” She was grateful for a legitimate excuse to see him away from the house. “I have to take Dylan to school and, since the police are done examining my car, I want to drop it at the body shop. Can you meet me at Jill’s in, say, twenty minutes?”

Jill Barr’s bakery,
Sugar-On-Main, was a cheery storefront in the center of town. After leaving her car at the garage for repair, Deborah approached it on foot, her medical bag slung over her shoulder. Keeping her eyes on the sidewalk with its faux brickwork, she tried not to think of Cal McKenna’s wife. She tried not to think of vehicular homicide. She tried not to think that people seeing her walking along Main Street might view her now in a different light.

The sweet scent of the bakery reached her seconds before she came to the small iron tables outside. Three of the four were taken. She nodded at several of the regulars as the familiar aroma took the edge off her fear.

The inside of the bakery was gold, orange, and red—walls, café tables, easy chairs, love seats. Deborah had a favorite grouping among the upholstered pieces, which was where she would have normally headed. But people often approached her there. She even got the occasional medical question—
Does this look like poison ivy?
It was the downside of having a local practice. Usually she didn’t mind, but today she didn’t want an audience.