The Accident

If there were things Ann didn’t want him to know when she was alive, wasn’t it conceivable that he was entitled to know them now that she was dead?

And yet, I didn’t want to get dragged into this mess. I certainly knew I didn’t want Kelly getting dragged into it.

“Look…,” I started to say. But before I could decide what, exactly, I was going to tell him, he cut me off.

“Why’d you call my house this morning?”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me. You called and got my sister-in-law. You said you wanted to talk to Ann. Why?”

“Just…” I wasn’t ready to be straight with him yet. “I was going to ask her if she’d seen Kelly’s stuffed bunny. Hoppy. But then she found it.”

“Bullshit. You think you can be a cop as long as I have and not tell when people are lying to you? Why were you calling? Did Kelly tell you what happened? And you wanted to talk it over with Ann?”

I shook my head. “For Christ’s sake, Darren, if that damn phone call is so important to you, why don’t you just check your phone’s history?”

He smiled sourly. “I thought of that. And guess what? Ann cleared the incoming and outgoing call list. What d’ya make of that? That’s why I want to talk to Kelly.”

“Look.” I tried to adopt a conciliatory tone. “I don’t know what kind of problems you and Ann were having, and I’m sorry, whatever they might have been, but I’m not getting dragged into them. My daughter’s been through enough these last few weeks. She’s lost her mother. The other kids-not your daughter, and thank you for that-have been hateful to her, because Sheila, what she did, it left one of the kids from that school dead. Now, Kelly’s friend’s mother dies. She’s going to need a lot of time to get through this. I won’t have you interrogating her. Not you, not anybody. ”

Slocum’s body sagged. A moment ago, he looked ready to slug me. Now, not so much.

“Help me out here, man,” he said.

A few seconds of silence passed between us. I knew what he was feeling, how desperate he was for answers. “Okay,” I said. “Kelly and I talked, after I picked her up.”

“Yeah?”

“Here’s the deal. I’ll tell you what she told me, and we’re done. You don’t talk to her.” I paused, then added, “Ever.”

Slocum only had to think a second. “Okay.”

“Kelly was hiding in the closet, waiting to surprise Emily, when Ann came into the bedroom to use the phone.”

He nodded. “I thought it was something like that.”

“Kelly said the first person your wife talked to was-”

“Wait a minute. First person? There was more than one call?”

“Kelly had the idea there were two. The first person your wife talked to must have been a friend or something. Someone who’d hurt their wrist. Ann was calling to see if this person was okay. Then the line beeped and Ann took another call.”

“So the first call, she placed that one herself,” Slocum said, more to himself than me. Then, “So this first call, she was asking somebody how they were? They got hurt?”

“Something like that. But then the other call came in. Kelly said at first she thought it was a telemarketer or something, because Ann said there was some talk about a deal. And then she got a little angry.”

“Angry how?”

“Ann said something like, don’t be stupid or you’ll end up shot in the head. Something like that.”

Slocum tried to process it. “Shot in the head?”

“Yeah.”

“What else?”

“That’s really it.”

“What about a name? Ann must have said someone’s name?”

“No, there were no names.”

He looked like he’d come to a fork in the road and didn’t know which way to turn. This new information only seemed to frustrate him more. It was my turn for a question.

“What the hell’s going on, Darren?”

“Nothing.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “You’re in some kind of mess, and you’re in over your head.”

He shot me a sly grin. “I might not be the only one.”

“Excuse me?”

“The way I figure it, you may have come into a little windfall lately. Like, within the last few weeks.”

“I’m not following you, Darren.”

His grin shifted into something menacing. “I’m just giving you a heads-up. That windfall, it’s not yours. And hanging on to it, that’s a real risky thing to do. You take a day or two to think it over and do the right thing, because after that, you’ll be running out of options.”

“I don’t have a goddamn clue what you’re getting at, and now it’s my turn to tell you something: threatening me, that’s a risky thing, too. I don’t care what you do for a living.”

“Couple of days,” he repeated, as if I hadn’t spoken. “After that, I won’t be able to help you.”

“Go home, Darren. Your family needs you.”

He started walking back to his truck, then stopped. “I gotta say, it’s a hell of a thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Your wife, my wife, both friends, both with little girls that play together-both dying in accidents within a couple of weeks. What are the odds of that?”

FIFTEEN