The Accident

“It’s my call,” I reminded her.

“Of course it is.” She patted my arm again. “Where is the little princess, anyway? I was thinking we could at least take her on a little excursion for the afternoon-maybe to the Stamford mall. Get her a new winter coat or something.”

“I think Kelly should stay at home today,” I said. “The thing is, something’s happened, something I haven’t even had a chance to tell Kelly about yet, and I don’t know how she’s going to react, but I think she’s going to be very upset.”

“What?” Marcus was frowning. Probably anticipating his wife lighting into me again, whatever the problem.

“You know Sheila’s friend Ann? She has a daughter named Emily who’s friends with Kelly?”

Fiona nodded. To Marcus, she said, “You remember her. She had the purse party here.”

Marcus looked blank.

“I can’t believe you don’t remember. She was a real dish,” Fiona said with more than a hint of disapproval. To me, “What about her?”

“We saw her only last night. Kelly had gone over for a sleepover. But Kelly called me to pick her up early, she wasn’t having a good time, and sometime after that-”

“Daddy!”

The three of us turned our heads toward the stairs as Kelly screamed.

“ Daddy, come here! Quick! ”

I took the stairs two at a time and was in her bedroom a good ten seconds before either Fiona or Marcus could get there. Kelly was at her desk, still in her yellow pajamas, perched on the edge of her chair, one hand on the mouse, the other pointing at the screen. She was on one of the sites where she chats with her friends.

“Emily’s mom,” she said. “It’s about Emily’s mom-”

“I was going to tell you,” I said, getting my arm around her and giving Marcus and Fiona a look that said Get out of here. They retreated. “I just found out myself, honey-”

“What happened?” There were tears in Kelly’s eyes. “Did she just die?”

“I don’t know. I mean, yeah, I guess she did. When I called their house this morning-”

Kelly squirmed in my arms. “I told you not to call!”

“It’s okay, honey. It doesn’t matter. I thought it was Emily’s mom who answered, but it was her aunt, her mother’s sister. She told me that Mrs. Slocum had died.”

“But I saw her. Last night. She wasn’t dead then!”

“I know, sweetheart. It’s a shock.”

Kelly thought a moment. “What should I do? Should I call Emily?”

“Maybe later, okay? Emily and her dad, they need some time alone.”

“I feel all weird.”

“Yeah.”

We sat there for what seemed a very long time. I held on to her, cradling her in my arms as she cried.

“My mom, and now Emily’s mom,” she said softly. “Maybe I’m, like, a bad luck charm or something.”

“Don’t say that, sweetheart. Never say that. It isn’t true.”

When she stopped sobbing, I knew I needed to broach the subject of our visitors. “Your grandmother and Marcus want to take you out for the afternoon.”

Kelly sniffed. “Oh.”

“And I think your grandmother wants you to go to school in Darien. Any idea why she might want that?”

She nodded. She didn’t look very surprised. “I guess I might have told her I hate my school.”

“Online,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Well, now your grandmother wants you to live with her through the week and go to school in Darien, come back here to me on weekends.”

She slipped her arms tight around me. “I don’t think I want to do that.” A pause. “But at least, if I did, the kids there wouldn’t know anything about me, they wouldn’t know what Mom had done.”

We held each other for another minute.

“If Emily’s mom had a disease or something, like Evian flu, will I catch it? Because I was in her bedroom?”

“I don’t think someone could come down with the flu and die from it in just a few hours,” I said. “A heart attack, maybe. Something like that. But not something you could catch. And it’s avian flu, by the way.”

“You can’t catch a heart attack?”

“No.” I looked her in the eye.

“She doesn’t look even a little bit sick in the video.”

That stopped me. “What?”

“On my phone. She looks fine.”

“What are you talking about?”

“When I was in the closet, I had my phone ready to take video of Emily when she opened the door. I told you that, Daddy.”

“You didn’t tell me you shot video of her mother. I thought when Mrs. Slocum came in you put your phone away.”

“Like, pretty soon after.”

“You still have it?” I asked.

Kelly nodded.

“Show me.”

TWELVE

“Darren, I need to ask you some questions.”

He was sitting in the front passenger seat of a car parked in his driveway. Behind the wheel was Rona Wedmore. She was a short, stocky black woman in her mid-forties. She had on a tan leather jacket and jeans, and there was a gun holstered to her belt. Her short hair was sensibly styled, although lately she had been streaking just a few strands, so there was this pencil-thin line of silver-gray that swept across the top of her head. The sort of thing that said she was her own person, without shouting it from the rooftops.

They were sitting in an unmarked police car. Darren Slocum had his hand on his forehead, shielding his eyes. “I just can’t believe it,” he groaned. “I just can’t. I can’t believe Ann’s gone.”