The Accident

SIXTY-ONE

It would be wrong to say that things got back to normal. I had my doubts that our lives would ever really return to that. But over the next couple of days, some routine started to return.

But not the first night.

Kelly, after witnessing the horrors that had happened in Fiona’s home, did not sleep well. She tossed and turned and, at one point, began to scream. I ran into her room, sat her up in bed, and she looked right at me, eyes open, but there was a vacant glaze to them I’d never seen before. As she shouted “No! No!” I realized she was still asleep. I said her name over and over again until she blinked and came out of it.

I found a sleeping bag in the basement, rolled it out on the floor next to her bed, and slept there the rest of the night. I rested my hand on her mattress and she held on to it till morning.

I made eggs for breakfast. We talked about school, and movies, and Kelly had some interesting things to say about how singer Miley Cyrus had turned from a girl she would have liked to hang out with into some kind of skank.

“You don’t have to go to school today,” I said. “You can go back when you want to.”

“Maybe when I’m twelve,” she said.

“Dream on, pardner.”

And she smiled.

I took her to work with me that day. She accompanied me to a couple of job sites and played on my computer when we got back to the office. It was nothing short of a shambles. Dozens of unreturned voicemails. Invoices that had not been paid.

Ken Wang said he’d done his best to hold things together, but without Doug and Sally around, he was barely treading water.

“What’s happening with Doug?” he wanted to know. “We need him.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “He’s still in custody.”

“You want my opinion? If he did kill Theo, it was totally justifiable. I thought about doing it myself a couple of times. And where the hell is Sally?”

“She doesn’t work here anymore.”

“Don’t say that.”

“That’s what she told me.”

“Let me give y’all a bit of friendly advice. If you have to get down on your knees and beg, you get that woman back in here. You might think you run this outfit, and if it makes you happy to live with that delusion, that’s fine with me, but she’s the one makes this place work.”

I sighed. “She’s not coming back.”

“I hope you don’t mind my saying, you being the boss and all, but you must have fucked up big-oops, sorry, Kelly.”

“It’s okay,” she said, swinging around in my chair. “I’ve seen and heard worse lately.”

Kelly had been talking online, and on the phone, with Emily. Her aunt Janice continued to care for her while Darren Slocum’s stay in the hospital continued. He was likely to be there another week or so, and even after he returned home he was going to need some help.

“Emily says her dad isn’t going to be a policeman anymore,” Kelly said.

“That so.”

“She says he’s going to do something different. And they might move. I don’t want her to move.”

I touched the top of her head. “I know. She’s a good friend, and you guys need each other.”

“She wants me to come over tomorrow night. Maybe for pizza. But not a sleepover. I’m never going on another sleepover for the rest of my life.”

“Good plan,” I said. “I guess you could go over for a visit. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”

“What job sites are we hitting tomorrow?”

Rona Wedmore dropped by the office to see me. She had her arm in a sling.

“I thought it was your shoulder,” I said.

“They say it’ll heal better if I don’t keep moving my arm around. I saw you on the news, yelling at that news lady as you came out of your house. That was smooth.”

I smiled.

“My department’s going to give you some kind of award,” she said. “I tried to talk them out of it, told them you were some kind of nut, but they’re insisting.”

“I really don’t want anything,” I said. “I’d like to forget about all of it. I just want to move on.”

“And what about your wife? Are you able to move on there?”

I leaned up against a filing cabinet and folded my arms across my chest. “I don’t know that I have much choice. All I can figure is, she got into something so deep, she went off the deep end that night. She acted in a way she never had before because she was in a mess like she’d never been in before. But she should have talked to me about it. We could have worked things out.”

Wedmore nodded sympathetically.

“Do you believe things happen for a reason?” she asked.

“Sheila did. I’ve never really subscribed to that.”

“Yeah, I’m like you. At least, I used to be. Now, I’m not so sure. I think I got shot for a reason.”

I unfolded my arms, slid my hands down into my pockets. “I can’t think of any good reason to get shot, unless it’s going to get you off work for the next six months at full pay.”

“Yeah, well.” She looked away from me for a second. Then she said, “When I got admitted to the hospital, they went and got my husband, brought him down. You know what he did when he saw me?”

I shook my head.

“He said, ‘You okay?’ ”

It didn’t seem like much of a story to me, but it seemed like the most important thing in the world to her.

“I think I should take a cake,” Kelly said. “If Emily’s buying the pizza, I should bring dessert.”

“Okay.”

It was the next day, and I had talked to Janice on the phone to see whether it was really okay for Kelly to come over. Janice said Emily had done nothing all day but talk about her best friend coming for a visit.

I offered to stop at a traditional bakery on our way over, but Kelly insisted we go to the grocery store and get a frozen Sara Lee chocolate cake. “It’s Emily’s favorite. Why are you rubbing your head, Daddy?”

“I’ve been having a lot of headaches the last couple of days. I think it’s just stress, you know?”

“I get that.”

Emily had been watching for us and ran out of the house as we pulled in to the driveway. Janice followed her out. The girls threw their arms around each other and ran into the house.

Janice stayed outside to speak with me. “I want to thank you, for what you did, stopping that man who shot Darren.”

“I was kind of looking out for my own neck, too.”

“Still,” she said, touching my arm briefly.

“What’s going to happen to him?”

“He’s resigned from the force, and he’s got a good lawyer. He’s offered to tell everything he knows, about what Sommer did, about what he knows about the people he worked for. I’m hoping, if he still gets jail time, that it’ll only be a few months. After that, he can look after Emily. He loves her more than anything in the world.”

“Sure. Well. I hope it works out, for Emily’s sake. I’ll come back for Kelly in a couple of hours. That be okay?”

“That’d be fine.”

I got back in the truck, but I didn’t head home. There was one other stop I needed to make.

About five minutes later I was parked out front of a different house. I walked up to the door and rang the bell.

Sally Diehl opened the door a few seconds later. She was wearing rubber kitchen gloves, and was carrying a caulking gun.

“We need to talk,” I said.