The Accident

TWENTY-SIX

I returned the containers to the purse and shoved it into one of the overhead cupboards. When I returned to the living room, Twain was looking at me expectantly. But when I offered no details of what I’d found, he said, “Well, thank you for your time.”

He left me his card, encouraged me to get in touch if I remembered anything that might be helpful, and left.

“He seemed nice,” Kelly said. “What was in Mom’s purse?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“It had to be something. It was all noisy.”

“It was nothing.”

She knew I was lying, but she also knew I wasn’t going to say anything more.

“Fine,” she said. “I think I’ll just go back to being mad at you.” She stomped up the stairs and returned to her room, slamming the door behind her.

I took the drug-filled purse from the cupboard and went to my downstairs office. I emptied the bag onto my desk and watched the containers roll out.

“Son of a bitch,” I said to the empty room. “What the hell is all this, Sheila? What in the hell is this?”

I picked up each of the small plastic jars, unscrewed the caps, peered inside. Hundreds of little yellow pills, white pills, the world-famous blue pills. “God, how many of these did you want me to take?”

I remembered what Twain had said, that there was a huge market not only in such things as knockoff purses and DVDs and construction supplies, but prescription drugs, too.

What had Sheila said to me that last morning we had together?

“I have ideas. Ideas to help us. To get us through the rough patches. I’ve made some money.”

“Not like this,” I said. “Not like this.”

Now that I’d seen what was in this purse, I wondered what the hell might be in all her others. I checked the ones still in the living room, then went back upstairs-Kelly remained behind the closed door of her room-and looked through the remaining bags in Sheila’s closet. I found old lipsticks, shopping lists, some change. No more drugs.

I returned to the basement. The purse Sheila had with her at the time of the accident had-as I’d told Belinda-survived, but not in good shape. It had been lightly scorched, then drenched after the fire department arrived. I’d thrown out the bag-I didn’t want Kelly to see it-but saved everything that had been in it. I felt the need, now, to take a look at all those items.

Everything was stored in a shoebox that a pair of Rockports had come in. The shoes had already been worn out and tossed, but the box would probably last for years to come. I put it on my desk, gingerly, as if it were loaded with explosives. Then, with some hesitation, I removed the lid.

“Hey, babe,” I said.

It struck me as a stupid thing to say. But looking at this collection of Sheila’s effects, it seemed perfectly natural. In their own way, these mementos were close to Sheila in a way I never was. They were with her in her final moments.

A pair of stud earrings, with blood-red flecks on them. A necklace-an aluminum pendant on a leather string-that was even darker with Sheila’s blood. I took it in my hand and brought it up to my face, touched it to my cheek. I laid it gently back into the box and examined the items from her purse that were not bloodied. Dental floss; a pair of reading glasses in a slender metal case; two metal hair clips, each with a strand of Sheila’s hair still caught in them; one of those things from Tide that looked like a Magic Marker that’s supposed to remove stains instantly. Sheila was always ready for any fast-food catastrophe. Tissue. A small package of Band-Aids. Half a pack of Dentyne Blast Cool Lime gum. When we would head out to see friends, or visit her parents, she’d tell me to lean close in the car and catch a whiff of me. “Chew one of these,” she’d say. “Fast. You’ve got breath like a dead moose.” There were three ATM receipts, other receipts from drug and grocery stores, a handful of business cards, one from a department store cosmetics counter, a couple from New York shopping excursions. There was a tiny container of hand sanitizer, some small hair elastics she kept in her purse for Kelly, a Bobbi Brown lipstick, eyedrops, a makeup mirror, four emery boards, a set of headphones she’d bought on the plane when we had gone to Toronto for a long weekend more than a year ago. A longtime hockey fan, she wanted to eat at Wayne Gretzky’s restaurant. “Where the hell is he?” she asked. “In the kitchen,” I told her. “Making your sandwich.”

A memory attached to nearly every item. And not a single liquor store receipt to be found anywhere. And no pills, either.

I lingered over many of these things, but there was one thing in particular I wanted to have a look at.

Sheila’s cell phone.

I took it out of the box, flipped it open, and hit the button to turn it on. Nothing happened. The phone was dead.

I opened my top desk drawer, where I kept the charger for my own phone-a duplicate of Sheila’s-and inserted one end into the phone and shoved the plug into the wall outlet. The phone tinkled to life.

I had not yet gotten around to canceling it. It was part of a package deal with mine, and now Kelly’s. When I’d gotten her phone, I could have canceled Sheila’s, but found I didn’t have it in me to do it.

Once the phone appeared to be working, and charging, the first thing that occurred to me was to call it from my desk phone.

I dialed the number I still knew by heart, heard it ring in my ear and watched as the phone rang and vibrated in front of me. I waited for the end of the seventh ring, at which point I knew it would go to voicemail, and I would get to hear my dead wife’s voice.

“Hi. This is Sheila. I’m either on the phone, away from it, or too scared to answer because I’m in traffic, so please leave a message.”

And then the beep.

I started to speak. “I… I just…”

I hung up, my hand trembling.

I needed a minute to pull myself together.

“I just wanted to say,” I said, standing there in the room alone, “that I’ve said some things, since you’ve been gone, that now… I’ve been so angry with you. So goddamn angry. That you’d have done this, that you’d… do something so stupid. But in the last day or so, I don’t know… Things made no sense before, and they’re making even less sense now, but the less sense they make, the more I’m starting to wonder… to wonder whether there’s more to this, that maybe… that maybe I haven’t been fair, that maybe I’m not seeing…”

I sat in the chair and let the feelings wash over me, just let it happen. Allowed myself a minute or so to let it out. Like releasing pressure on a valve. You have to let it off, even just a little, so you don’t get an explosion.

And when I finished sobbing, I grabbed a couple of tissues, wiped my eyes, blew my nose, took a few deep breaths.

And got back to it.

I went into Sheila’s phone’s call history. Arthur Twain said Sheila had called this guy Sommer the day of her accident, just after one.

I found a number in the history of outgoing calls. There it was, at 1:02 p.m. A New York area code.

I snatched up the receiver from my desk phone and dialed it. There was half a ring, and then a recording telling me the number was no longer in service. I hung up. Arthur Twain had said Sommer was no longer using that phone.

I got out a pen and a piece of paper and started writing down all the other numbers Sheila had called the day of, and the days leading up to, her accident. There were five calls to my cell, three to my office, three to the house. I recognized Belinda’s number. There was the Darien number I knew to be Fiona’s place, and another one I recognized as Fiona’s cell.

Then, as an afterthought, I checked the list of incoming calls on Sheila’s phone. There were the ones I would have expected. Nine from me-from the home phone, work phone, and cell. Calls from Fiona. Belinda.

And seventeen from a number I did not recognize. Not the number I believed belonged to Sommer. Not a New York number. All the calls from that number were listed as “missed.” Which meant Sheila either didn’t hear the ring, or chose not to answer.

I wrote down that number, too.

She’d been called by that number once on the day she died, twice the day before, and at least twice a day, every day, in the seven days leading up to her death.

I had to know.

Again, I dialed out from the house phone. It rang three times before going to voicemail.

“Hi, you’ve reached Allan Butterfield. Leave a message.”

Allan who? Sheila didn’t know anyone named-

Wait. Allan Butterfield. Sheila’s accounting teacher. Why would he have been calling her so frequently? And why would she have been refusing to take his calls?

I tossed the phone onto the desk, wondering what else there was to do. So many questions, so few answers.

I kept looking at the pills. Where would Sheila have gotten prescription drugs? How would she have paid for them? What was she planning to do with-

The money.

The money I socked away.

The only people who knew about the cash I had hidden in the wall were Sheila and myself. Had she gone into that? Had she used that money to buy these drugs with the idea of reselling them?

I opened my desk drawer and grabbed a letter opener. Then I went around the desk to the opposite corner of the room. I worked the opener into a seam in the wood paneling, and in a couple of seconds had a rectangular opening seventeen inches wide and a foot tall and about three inches deep.

I could tell, very quickly, whether the money stored between the studs was all there. I kept it in $500 bundles. I quickly counted, and found thirty-four of them.

The money I’d saved from years of under-the-table jobs was all there.

And so was something else.

A brown business envelope. It was tucked in behind the cash. I pulled it out, felt how thickly it was stuffed.

In the upper left corner, some writing: From Belinda Morton. And then, scribbled under that, a phone number.

I recognized it right away. I’d only seen it a couple of minutes ago.

It was the number Sheila had dialed at 1:02 p.m. the day she died. The number Arthur Twain said belonged to Madden Sommer.

The envelope was sealed. I worked the letter opener under the flap and made a nice clean cut, then stepped over to my desk and dumped out the contents.

Cash. Lots and lots of cash.

Thousands of dollars in cash.

“Holy Mother of God,” I said.

Then I heard the shot.

A shattering of glass.

Kelly screaming.