The Accident

“Did Mr. Slocum do something to you? Did he touch you? Did he do something that you didn’t want him to do? Because if he did, that’s wrong, and we need to talk about it.” It seemed unthinkable. The guy was a cop, for crying out loud. But I didn’t care if he was the goddamn head of the FBI. If he touched my kid, I was going to beat the living shit out of him.

“He didn’t touch me,” she said.

“Okay.” I started to imagine different scenarios. “Did he say something to you? Show something to you?”

“No, he didn’t do any of those things.”

I let out a long breath. “Then what, honey? What did he do?”

“He didn’t do anything, okay?” Kelly turned and looked at me directly, as though getting ready to accuse me of something. “It wasn’t him. It was her. ”

“Her? Who?”

“It was Emily’s mom.”

EIGHT

“Emily’s mom touched you?” I asked, bewildered. That seemed even more unthinkable.

“No, she didn’t touch me,” Kelly said. “She got mad at me.”

“Mad at you? Why would she get mad at you?”

“I was in their room.” Now she wouldn’t look at me.

“Their room? You mean, their bedroom?”

Kelly nodded. “We were just playing.”

“Playing in Emily’s parents’ bedroom?”

“I was only hiding. In the closet. I wasn’t doing anything bad. But she got all mad because she didn’t know I was there and she was on the phone.”

I was upset, but part of me was relieved, as well. The worst-case scenario appeared to be off the table. Kelly being where she wasn’t supposed to be, hiding in Ann and Darren Slocum’s bedroom-well, if I’d found Emily hanging out in my bedroom closet, I’d probably be pissed about it myself.

“Okay, so let me get this straight,” I said carefully. “You were hiding in Mr. and Mrs. Slocum’s bedroom and then Mrs. Slocum came in to use the phone?”

Kelly nodded. “She came in and sat on the bed right near the closet and phoned somebody and I was really scared she was going to see me because the door was open a little bit but I thought if I tried to close it, she’d see that, so I didn’t do anything.”

“Okay,” I said.

“So she was talking to one person and then she started talking to another person and-”

“She hung up and called someone else?”

“No, it was like another call came in while she was talking to the first person. And when she was talking to the second person, that’s when I guess she heard me breathing in the closet and she stopped talking and she opened the door and she got really mad and told me to come out.”

“You shouldn’t have gone into their room,” I said. “Especially their closet. It’s private in there.”

“So you’re mad, too.”

“No, I’m just saying. What did she say to you?”

“She asked me if I’d been listening.”

Before I knew it, we were all the way to Devon, so I hung a left on Naugatuck and started working our way back on Milford Point Road. “Mrs. Slocum probably wouldn’t have said what she was saying on the phone if she knew someone was in the room with her.”

“Yeah, that’s for sure,” Kelly muttered.

“What?” I asked. “What was she saying?”

She gave me a look. “You mean you want me to tell you? Even though I wasn’t supposed to hear? Doesn’t that mean you’re sort of listening in, too?”

I shook my head. “Okay, it’s none of my business what she said, just like it was none of yours. But I mean, generally, what was it about? Why was she so upset you heard her?”

“The first person or the second?”

“Both, I guess.”

“Because she wasn’t mad at the first person. She was mad at the second person.”

“The second caller? She was mad at that person?”

A nod.

“Do you know who it was?”

A head shake.

“So what was she saying?”

“I can’t talk about it,” Kelly said. “Mrs. Slocum said I wasn’t supposed to.”

I weighed that. Kelly had eavesdropped on a conversation she wasn’t supposed to hear. What Ann Slocum had to say on the phone wasn’t my business, either. But at the same time, I needed to get to the bottom of this. I needed to know whether Ann’s response was within reason, or if she’d crossed a line.

“Okay, let’s not worry about what exactly she said on the phone, but what did she say to you after?”

“She asked me how long I’d been hiding there, and then she asked me if I heard what she was saying on the phone and I said no, not really, which wasn’t exactly true, and then she said I shouldn’t have done that and she said I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone what she was talking about.”

“Like me,” I said.

“Not, like, anybody. She said I wasn’t supposed to tell Emily and I wasn’t supposed to tell Mr. Slocum, either.”

That was interesting. It was one thing, Kelly overhearing something that was Slocum family business, that shouldn’t be discussed outside their home. But now it seemed what my daughter had heard was a little more specific than that. “Did she say why?”

Kelly fingered her backpack. “Nope. She just said not to tell. She said if I ever told anyone, she wouldn’t let me and Emily be friends anymore.” Her voice wobbled. “I don’t have very many friends and I don’t want Emily not to be my friend.”