The Accident

by Linwood Barclay

  “Why would he do that? Because of the handcuffs?”

  “Look, I’m not expecting him to do anything, but just in case. And we’re not talking about the handcuffs anymore, and you’re not to tell any of your friends about them.”

  “Not even Emily?”

  “Especially not Emily. No one, you understand?”

  “Okay. But I can talk to Emily about other things, right?”

  “She won’t be at school today. She’ll go back in a few days, I’d guess.”

  “But I still talk to her online.”

  Of course. I was thinking like someone from another century.

  Kelly asked, “Are we going to the visitation?” A word she didn’t even know a month ago. “Emily said there’s a visiting today and she wants me to come.”

  I wasn’t so sure that was a good idea. First of all, I was worried it would be upsetting for Kelly. She’d just been to her mother’s funeral, and wept through most of it. I was worried about how she’d handle another one so soon. Second, I didn’t want her anywhere near Darren Slocum.

  “I don’t know, sweetheart.”

  “I have to go,” she said. “To the visiting.”

  “No, you don’t. People would understand if you didn’t go.”

  “You mean, they’d think I didn’t want to go? Because that’s not true. I don’t want people thinking I’m a chicken.”

  “You’re not—that’s not what they’d think.”

  “That’s what I’d think. I’d think I was a huge pussy for not going.”

  “A what?”

  She blushed. “A chicken. And besides, Emily and her parents came to Mom’s funeral.”

  Kelly was right about that. The Slocums had been there. But a lot had changed in the interim. And the situation between us and the Slocums was different.

  “If I don’t go, then Emily will hate me forever,” she said. “If that’s what you want, then I guess I won’t go.”

  I glanced over at her. “What time’s the visitation?”

  “It’s at three.”

  “Okay, I’ll pick you up at school at two. We go home and get changed, and we go to the visitation. But here’s the deal: You stay with me. You don’t wander out of my sight. Are we clear?”

  Kelly nodded. “Got it. And you won’t forget your promise, will you?”

  We had reached her school. I pulled over to the curb. “I won’t forget.”

  “You know which one I mean?”

  “I know which one you mean. About looking into another school for you.”

  “Okay, I was just checking.”

  From there, I went into work, and told Sally I’d left her some phone message details.

  “Done,” she said.

  “And there were some other voicemails—”

  “And done,” she said. “Okay, some of the places, they weren’t in yet, but I left messages.”

  “Anyone looking for estimates?” I asked.

  “Sorry, boss.”

  We did a quick review of what work we did have going on. Our three active job sites were a kitchen renovation in Derby, a double garage in Devon out back of someone’s house, and finishing off the basement of a five-year-old house in East Milford. For the first time in a couple of years, we weren’t building an actual house from the ground up.

  “Stewart and KF are at the garage,” she said. Stewart was our Canadian kid, and “KF” referred to Ken Wang, and was actually an abbreviated version of his nickname, which was Kentucky Fried Wang, or KFW, given that he hailed from the South. “Doug’s headed off to Derby, and there’s no one at the basement reno.”

  “Okay.”

  “Can we talk?” she asked, coming into my office. “I feel bad about Saturday,” she said, sitting down across from me.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “You and Theo okay?”

  “I kind of chewed him out a bit after. I understand it’s your company and you get to make the call about who works for you and who doesn’t.”

  “Yup,” I said.

  “Even though I think he’s a good electrician, you know? He’s doing some work now in my dad’s—in my house.” Sally had moved in to her father’s place as his health had declined. He’d been a crusty old bastard, but that had also been his charm. He’d been a Civil War fanatic, had a considerable gun collection, old and new, that he’d been very proud of—an enthusiasm I had not shared. I knew how to handle guns, but had never owned one. I hadn’t shared many of his political views, either. He’d liked to argue incessantly that Richard M. Nixon was the best president the United States ever had, so long as you looked past that stupid shit he did opening up relations with China.

  Sally quickly learned her father had no savings that would have allowed him to move in to a decent care facility, so she did the best she could, slipping out of the office at noon to make sure he’d eaten the lunch she’d left him, and that he’d taken his meds. The cost of prescriptions had been a killer. She’d spent what savings her father’d had on various drugs: insulin for diabetes, plus lisinopril, warfarin, and the heparin injections for his heart ailments. His Social Security didn’t come close to covering it, so Sally began dipping into her own savings. Pretty much all the money she saved on rent after moving in with her dad was going to drugs. If he’d lived much longer, Sally probably would have had to sell the house and find a small apartment for the two of them. But now the place had been left to her.

  “Theo replaced a lot of my old outlets and put a ceiling fixture in the front hall, and when he’s done the bathroom it’s going to have one of those heated floors. I can’t wait to feel a warm floor under my toes when I get up on a cold morning. The tiling, well, that’s another thing. He’s doing that this week, and tiling’s not really his area, you know, but I can get someone else to fix that up later. Maybe Doug, if he’d do it.”

  “Great,” I said, and thought about the words we’d had on Saturday.

  “All I’m saying is, I respect your decision, and I’ll do what I can to make him respect it, too.”

  I didn’t much care whether he respected it or not, just so long as he stayed away from any of my projects, but kept the thought to myself. “I appreciate that, Sally.”

  She gnawed her lip, like she was working up to something. “Glen …”

  “What’s on your mind?”

  “What do you think of him? I mean, as a guy. A guy for me.”

  “Sally, I’ve known you a long time, even before you started babysitting for Kelly. And I’ve got no problem telling you what to do around the office, but your private life is none of my business.”

  “Okay, let’s say you knew Theo and I hadn’t met him yet, is he the kind of guy you’d set me up with?”

  “I don’t set people up.”

  Sally rolled her eyes. “God, you’re impossible. Let’s say I’d never met him, but saw him on the site, and I said to you, ‘Hey, that guy, he’s cute, should I let him ask me out?’ What would you say?”

  “He’s … a good-looking guy. Handsome. I can see that. And it looks like he cares about you. And he can be polite, until he’s … pushed.”

  She studied me. “There’s a ‘but’ coming. I can tell.”

  For a moment, I considered dodging, but Sally deserved the truth from me. “I would say maybe you can do better.”

  “Well,” Sally said. “So.”

  “You asked.”

  “And you delivered.” She forced a grin and slapped her thighs. “Was that so hard?”

  “Kinda.”

  “I mean, I know what you’re saying. But what if I can’t do better?”

  “Don’t sell yourself short, Sal.”

  “Come on, look at me,” she said. “I’m, like, seven feet tall. I’m a circus freak.”

  “Stop it. You’re gorgeous.”

  “And you’re a skilled liar.” She got up and lingered a minute at the door. “Thanks, Glen.”

  I smiled, then I fired up the computer and googled “Milford schools.” First,
I looked to see what might be the next-closest public elementary school, jotted down a couple of possibilities, then looked at the private schools. There were several Catholic ones, but I didn’t know what the chances were of getting into one of those, considering we were not Catholic. We weren’t much of anything, when you got right down to it. Sheila and I were never churchgoers, and had never had Kelly baptized, much to Fiona’s horror.

  I wrote down a few more school names and phone numbers, figuring I could make calls throughout the day when I had a minute. Plus, I left a message for Kelly’s principal. Not to rat out the kids who’d called her Boozer, but to sound him out about moving her to another school, given the awkwardness of her situation.

  Then I drove to our closest job, the double garage in Devon. The client, a retired insurance agent in his mid-sixties, had two classic Corvettes—a 1959 and a 1963 Sting Ray with the split rear window—but no place to properly store them.

  It was a simple job. No basement, no plumbing, other than a spigot for car washing. Just a solid structure with storage units and a workbench, good lighting and plenty of electrical outlets. The client had said no to powered doors. He didn’t want to risk them going haywire someday and coming down on one of his treasures.

  As I got out of the truck, Ken Wang approached.

  “Hey there, Mr. G, y’all lookin’ fine today.”

  You never got used to it.

  “Thanks, KF. How goes it here?”

  “Excellent. I tell you, I’d give my left tit for one of these here ’Vettes.”

  “Nice cars.”

  “Some guy was sniffin’ around earlier lookin’ for ya.”

  “He say what it was about?”

  Ken shook his head. “No. Might be more work. So don’t go wanderin’ off or nuthin’.” He grinned at me.

  I went into the new garage to see how it was coming. The interior walls were drywalled—I found a stamp on a drywall sheet to allay any fears that it might be that toxic stuff from China—and Stewart was getting ready to sand the seams. “Pretty good, eh?” he said.

  After giving the two of them some guidance about where to put the shelving units, I walked back out to the truck to pour myself some coffee from my thermos and make a couple of school calls. A small blue car pulled up and a short man in a blue suit got out with an envelope in his hand. Maybe this was the guy Ken had seen earlier. As he approached the truck, I powered down the window.

  “Glen Garber?” he said.

  “That’s the name on the truck,” I quipped.

  “But you are Mr. Garber?”

  I nodded.

  He handed the envelope to me through the window and said, “You’ve been served.” Then he turned and walked away.

  I set my thermos cup on the dashboard and tore open the envelope, withdrew the papers from inside, and unfolded them. Some law firm letterhead. I scanned the paperwork. It was written in legalese I could barely understand, but I was able to get the gist of it.

  The Wilkinson family was suing me for $15 million. Negligence. The crux of it was this: I had failed to identify my wife’s condition and intercede, which ultimately resulted in the death of Connor and Brandon Wilkinson.

  I tried to read it more thoroughly but things seemed to go blurry. My eyes were tearing up. I closed them, leaned my head back against the headrest.

  “Nice going, Sheila,” I said.

  TWENTY

  “It’s interesting, that’s for sure,” said Edwin Campbell, sitting in his legal office. He took off his wire-rimmed reading glasses and set them next to the papers I’d been delivered a couple of hours earlier. He shook his head. “A bit of a stretch, I think, but very interesting.”

  “So you’re saying, what, I don’t have to worry about it?” I said, leaning forward in the leather padded chair. Edwin had been my father’s lawyer for years, and I’d kept going to him not only out of family tradition and loyalty, but because he knew his stuff. I’d called him about the lawsuit right after the papers had been served, and he’d agreed to get me in to his office right away.

  “Well, now, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that,” Campbell replied. “There’s plenty of nuisance cases that have taken years to work their way through the system and needlessly cost people a considerable sum to defend themselves. So we’re going to have to respond to this. They’ll have to produce evidence you knew Sheila had a drinking problem and that it was very likely you knew she would get behind the wheel of a car in an inebriated condition.”

  “I’ve told you I never noticed any—”

  Edwin waved a hand at me. “I know what you’ve said. And I believe you. But I think—and I’m sure you’ve done this already—but I think you need to go over everything about Sheila in your head one more time. Is there something you’ve overlooked, something maybe you’ve ignored because you haven’t wanted to acknowledge it? Something you don’t want to admit to yourself? This is the time you need to be honest with yourself, painfully so, because if there’s something out there, some small shred of evidence that suggests you could have reasonably assumed that Sheila was capable of doing what she did, we need to confront that and deal with it.”

  “I told you, there’s nothing.”

  “You never saw your wife under the influence?”

  “What, never?”

  “That’s what I asked you.”

  “Well, shit, of course, there were times when she’d had enough to feel it. Who hasn’t?”

  “Describe these circumstances.”

  “I don’t know—Christmas, family gatherings, an anniversary maybe, if we’d been out to dinner. Parties.”

  “So Sheila had a habit of drinking too much at all those kinds of events?”

  I blinked. “Jesus Christ, Edwin!”

  “I’m just playing devil’s advocate, Glen. But you see how these things can turn bad in a hurry. I know and you know there’s a huge gulf between having a couple of drinks at Christmas and getting behind the wheel when you shouldn’t. But all Bonnie Wilkinson needs is a handful of witnesses from those types of occasions, where you might have been present, to start building a case.”

  “Well, she’s going to have a hard time doing that,” I said.

  “What about Belinda Morton?”

  “Huh? Belinda was a friend of Sheila’s. What about her?”

  “I made a couple of calls before you came over, one to Barnicke and Trundle, the firm that’s handling this for Mrs. Wilkinson, and they weren’t afraid to tip their hand to me, suggesting that we might want to settle this thing before we even get to court.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “They already have a statement from Ms. Morton that when she and Sheila and another woman would go out for lunch, they’d get pretty looped.”

  “So maybe they had a few drinks. Sheila always took a cab home from those. She usually took a cab to those, since she knew she might be having a few.”

  “Really?” Edwin said. “So she’d go to lunch knowing full well she’d be having a lot to drink?”

  “It’s not like they got drunk. They just had a good time at lunch. You’re making too much out of it.”

  “It won’t be me who does it.” He paused. “There’s also this thing about marijuana.”

  “About what?”

  “Belinda has apparently said she and Sheila smoked it.”

  “Belinda said that?” This woman, who was supposedly my wife’s friend?

  “So they say. They are, I understand, only alleging a single incident. A year ago, at the Morton home, in the backyard. Apparently the husband arrived and became quite perturbed.”

  I was shaking my head in disbelief. “What’s she trying to do to us? To Kelly and me?”

  “I don’t know. To give her the benefit of the doubt, she may not have appreciated the implications of her comments when she was making them. My understanding is it was her husband, George, who felt she had an obligation to be forthcoming.”

  I slumped down in the chair. “That g
uy’s got a pole up his ass. Even if they could prove Sheila liked to have a glass of wine or a Cosmo at lunch, how do they go from there to proving that it’s my fault that she might have gotten behind the wheel drunk the night of the accident?”

  “Like I said, it’s a stretch. But anything can happen where a case like this is concerned, so we have to take this seriously. Leave it with me for now. I’ll draft a response and run it by you.”

  I felt my world unraveling. Just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse. “God, what a week.”

  Edwin looked up from the note he was making. “What?”

  “I still don’t know what’s going to happen with the insurance on that house that burned down. I got a guy working for me who’s going into financial ruin and keeps hitting me up for pay advances. Kids are calling my daughter Boozer at school because of Sheila’s accident, plus her friend’s mother died in an accident a couple of nights ago, and the woman’s husband is bugging me because of some phone call Kelly heard when she was over there for a sleepover. On top of all that, the Wilkinsons want to sue my ass off.”

  “Whoa,” said Edwin.

  “Yeah, no shit.”

  “No, go back a bit.”

  “Which thing?”

  “Your daughter’s friend’s mother died and what?”

  I told him about Ann Slocum’s death, and how Darren Slocum had come over demanding to know what Kelly had heard at the sleepover.

  “Ann would have been that other woman at the lunches,” I added glumly.

  “Well, this is interesting,” Edwin said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you say Darren Slocum?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Milford cop?”

  “Right again. You know him?”

  “I know of him.”

  “That sounds ominous,” I said.

  “There’ve been at least two internal investigations concerning him, that I know of. Broke one guy’s arm during an arrest following a bar fight. In the other incident, he was being looked into for some missing drug money, but I’m pretty sure that one was dismissed. There were half a dozen cops who had access to the evidence, so there was no way they could pin it on him.”