The Accident (46 page)

I wondered how Marcus could possibly know that, unless he’d set things up to look that way.

Fiona, standing next to the coffee table, said, “Marcus, this can’t be true.”

“It’s over, Marcus,” I said. “I’ve emailed that video, where Ann says
your name, to everyone on my mailing list. Everyone’s going to know, Marcus. Let Kelly go.”

But he hung on to her.

“Please,” I said. “She’s just a little girl.”

“I want a head start,” he said. “I take her with me, you give me half an hour, I’ll drop her off somewhere.”

“No,” I said. “But I’ll give you a head start if you let Kelly go. And if you answer one question for me.”

“What?”

“Sheila,” I said.

“What about her?”

“Why Sheila?”

Marcus screwed up his face. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I don’t know how you did it, exactly, but I need to know why. Did she know? Did she know you were having an affair with Ann? Did she threaten to tell her mother? Is that why you did it?”

Fiona’s mouth opened. She was too stunned to speak at first, but finally, in a whisper, she said, “No.”

His eyes met hers. “Fiona, it’s all bullshit. Glen’s lying, that’s—”

“You killed Sheila? You killed my daughter?”

Marcus tightened his arm around Kelly’s neck. She coughed, put her hands on Marcus’s arm and tried to free herself, but she was no match for the strength in a grown man’s arm.

“Stand aside and let me leave,” he said.

“You can’t run,” I said. “The police will find you. Hurt Kelly and it’s only going to be worse for you. You’re not leaving here with her. It’s not happening.”

Kelly struggled some more, kept pulling on Marcus’s arm. I glanced again at Fiona. She was a lit firecracker with an inch of fuse left.

Marcus nodded. “Yes, yes I am. If you take even a step toward me, I’ll twist her head right off. I swear—
Jesus!
”

Kelly had brought up her right leg, then driven her heel down into the top of Marcus’s foot with everything she had. When he screamed, his grip on Kelly slackened.

In that same moment, Fiona grabbed the wineglass on the coffee table and swung it against the table’s edge. She held on to the base of the glass, which was now a mass of glistening, jagged edges.

Kelly squirmed free and ran toward me.

Fiona lunged, thrusting the glass forward, a primal scream escaping from her throat. Even before she reached Marcus, there was blood spilling from her fingers where the broken glass had cut her. But she was oblivious to any pain of her own. She had only one thing on her mind, and that was to kill her husband.

I would have moved to intervene, but Kelly had thrown herself around me.

Marcus raised his arms to deflect Fiona, but she was possessed of a strength that was not her own. She kept coming at him, thrusting the shards of glass toward his neck.

Caught him, too. Blood began to spurt from his throat in several places. He made anguished gagging noises and clutched his hands to his throat. Blood dribbled through his fingers.

I screamed, “Fiona!” and pulled Kelly off me. I grabbed Fiona from behind as she continued to wave the broken glass in the air.

Marcus dropped to the carpet.

I looked at Kelly and said, firmly and without panic, “Hit the police button on the security system.”

She ran.

As Marcus continued to clutch his neck, trying to stanch the flow of blood, I said to Fiona, “It’s okay, it’s okay. You did it. You did it. You got him.”

Fiona began to weep, to wail, as I held her. She dropped the glass to the floor, turned, and wrapped her bloody arms around me.

“What have I done?” she wept. “What have I done?”

I knew she wasn’t talking about what she’d just done to Marcus. She was talking about having brought this man into her life and unleashing him on her family.

SIXTY

Seconds after Kelly hit the emergency button on the security system, their monitoring people phoned. I took the call and told them to send an ambulance as well as the police.

I’d barely hung up and the police were there. But they’d been dispatched as a result of Sally’s call to the police in Milford, who in turn got in touch with their counterparts in Darien.

The paramedics went to work quickly on Marcus and, to my amazement, managed to stabilize him. I figured he was a goner. The ambulance wailed as it tore out of the driveway.

Even while Marcus was still gurgling and writhing on the floor, I got Kelly out of the house. I didn’t want her to see any more of this than she already had. I picked her up and she wrapped her arms around my neck as I took her out the front door. I kept patting her back softly, moving slightly from side to side to soothe her. “It’s over,” I said to her.

Her mouth pressed close to my ear, she said, “He killed Emily’s mom.”

“That’s right,” I said.

“And Mom?”

“I don’t know, sweetheart, but it kind of looks like it.”

“Was he going to kill me?”

I wrapped my arms around her more tightly. “I would never have let him hurt you,” I said. Not mentioning that if I’d gotten there five minutes later, things might have worked out very differently.

In the minutes before the paramedics arrived, Fiona stayed in the house with Marcus. I caught a glimpse of her at one point, perched on the edge of the coffee table, just looking down at him, waiting, presumably, for him to die. I was worried she might do something rash—not to Marcus, but to herself. She was in a highly agitated state for a while there, screaming about what she had done, what she had allowed to happen, and it would have been good if I could have stayed with her. But I had only one priority, and that was to get Kelly out of the house.

When the police cars started showing up, I told them the woman in there was probably traumatized—hell, I think we all were—and within a minute or two they had brought Fiona out front, too.

She seemed almost catatonic.

She took a seat on a small bench she’d installed by the front gardens and sat there, saying nothing.

“Fiona,” I said gently. She seemed not to hear me. “Fiona.”

Slowly, she turned her head. She was looking in my direction, but I wasn’t sure she was seeing me. Finally, she said, “How are you doing, sweetheart?”

Kelly twisted her head around on my shoulder to look at her. “I’m okay, Grandma,” she said.

“That’s good,” Fiona said. “I’m sorry you haven’t had a very nice visit this time.”

In talking to the police, I tried to cast Fiona in the best possible light.

Marcus was holding on to her grandchild, threatening to break her neck. He had pretty much admitted killing Ann Slocum. His intention was to use Kelly as a hostage as he made his getaway. When Kelly stomped on his foot, it was Fiona’s one chance to stop him before he did anything else.

On top of all that, she attacked him believing that he had killed her daughter.

My wife.

Marcus hadn’t admitted any responsibility for Sheila’s death. I didn’t think that would hurt Fiona where her actions were concerned, but it was troubling to me.

Not overly. But troubling.

Why would he acknowledge a role in Ann’s death but not Sheila’s? It
was possible, of course, that even having confessed to all his other crimes, he couldn’t admit, in front of Fiona, that he’d murdered her daughter. Maybe it was one crime too many to cop to.

I didn’t really know what to think. Maybe Marcus had murdered Sheila, and maybe he hadn’t. Maybe someone else had.

And there was always the other possibility. The one Rona Wedmore had alluded to.

No one had killed Sheila. She had done it to herself. She’d gotten drunk, gotten in her car, and caused the accident. I’d been fighting that version of events for so long. With all the things that had been swirling around Sheila—thousands of dollars in cash that were to be delivered to a hit man, counterfeit goods, blackmailing wives—it seemed inevitable her death was connected. Could there be this much mayhem going on in Milford and then, on top of all of it, Sheila has an accident that’s totally unrelated?

At first, I was furious with Sheila, that she would do something so stupid. Then, as I began to believe she was blameless, I felt guilt over the way I’d felt, the things I’d shouted to her in my head.

Now, I had no idea what to feel.

After all I’d been through these last few days, I had my suspicions, but I didn’t really know any more now than I had before.

Maybe there are some things we’re better off never knowing.

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?”