The Accident (8 page)

She was careful going down the cellar steps in her heels. It was cool down here, and she was losing the light as the door from the kitchen slowly started to swing shut. She reached, in time, the pull chain in the middle of the room that turned on the bare overhead bulb, but the corners of the room remained cast in shadow.

The basement wasn’t much of a selling point for prospective buyers. Cinder-block walls, open stud ceiling. At least the floor was concrete and not dirt. A washer and dryer and a workbench were down here but not much else, except the furnace. It was behind there that Belinda headed.

She lowered her head to clear a heating duct, then squeezed into the three-foot space between the furnace and the wall. There was a gap at the top of the cinder blocks where the wooden beams rested. She stuck her hand up and reached in. She kept the jars just out of sight. There were fifteen of them in here, just the most popular stuff. Heart medications, drugs for acid reflux, diabetes, hard-ons. There was so little light back here she had to bring out the jars and set them on the worktable to sort out just what she needed.

She realized she was shaking. She knew that, even with a few sales tonight, she’d probably only make five hundred or so. She was going to have to come up with a better plan.

Maybe, she thought, she could talk the Torkins into some repairs.
Send them an email in Arizona, tell them she thought she could sell their house if they did a few minor upgrades. A bit of paint, replace the rotten boards on the front porch, get someone in to clear out the junk in the far corner of the property.

Tell them she could get it all done for a couple of thousand. Keep the money herself. What were they going to do? Hop a plane and come back to Milford to see if the work got done? Not likely.

She had two other out-of-town clients she might be able to talk into some repairs. Once she got out from under her debt, if she had to, she’d find a way to get the actual work done. If she got wind the owners were going to be back in the neighborhood, she’d have to move on it. Truth was, Belinda would rather explain to those people why the work wasn’t done than have to explain to those other people why she didn’t have their money.

She held the first jar up to the light so she could read the label. Those magical blue pills. George had tried them, once. Not these ones, not the knockoff variety. He’d gotten a prescription from his doctor, wanted to see what they’d do. What they did was give him one hell of a headache. The whole time he was on her he griped that he needed some Tylenols before his head exploded.

Belinda was unscrewing the lid when she heard the floor creak above her head.

She froze. There was nothing for a moment. She told herself she’d imagined it.

But then it happened again.

Someone was walking around in the kitchen.

She was sure she’d locked the front door when she’d come in. She didn’t want anyone walking in on her while she conducted her dispensing duties. But maybe, somehow, she’d forgotten. Someone had seen the For Sale sign out front, her Acura parked at the curb, noticed the business card she kept on the dash, and decided this was an open house.

“Hello?” she called out tentatively. “Is there someone there?”

No one answered.

Belinda called out again. “Did you see the sign? Are you here about the house?”

If whoever it was upstairs was here for some other reason, like looking for a place to crash, or make out, or vandalize, they’d know now that
someone was already here. And if they had half a brain in their head, they’d take off.

But Belinda hadn’t heard anyone running for the front door.

Her mouth was dry and she tried to swallow. She needed to get out of here. But there was only one way out, and it was up those stairs, and the kitchen was at the top of those stairs.

She decided to call the police. She’d whisper into her cell phone, tell them to get here fast, that someone was in the house, someone was—

Her cell phone was in her purse. A fake Chanel bag she’d bought at one of Ann’s purse parties. And it was sitting upstairs, on the kitchen counter.

The door at the top of the stairs opened.

Belinda considered hiding, but where would she go? Behind the furnace? How long would it take someone to find her there? Five seconds?

“You’re trespassing!” she said. “Unless you’re interested in buying this house, you’ve got no business being here.”

A man’s silhouette filled the doorway. He said, “You’re Belinda.”

She nodded. “That’s—that’s right. I’m the agent for this house. And you are?”

“I’m not here about the house.”

With the kitchen lights illuminating him from behind, his face was difficult to see. But Belinda determined he was a good six feet tall, thin, with short dark hair, and wearing a dark tailored suit and white shirt, but no tie.

“What do you want?” she asked. “Is there something I can help you with?”

“You’re running out of time.” His voice was even, almost no inflection at all.

“The money,” she said, her voice a whisper. “You’re here about the money.”

The man said nothing.

“I’m working on it,” she said, struggling to make herself sound enthusiastic. “I really, really am. But just so you understand the situation. About the accident. There was a fire. So if the envelope was in the car—”

“That’s not my problem.” He descended a step.

“I’m just saying, that’s why this is taking some time. I mean, if you
folks took checks,” and here she tried a nervous laugh, “I could write you one on my line of credit. Maybe not for all of it, not today, but—”

“Two days,” he said. “Talk to your friends. They know how to reach me.”

He turned, went back up the one step to the kitchen, and disappeared.

Belinda’s heart fluttered. She wondered whether she was going to faint. She felt herself starting to shake again.

Just before she dissolved into tears, she realized that she’d just said something that had never occurred to her before.

So if the envelope was in the car
—

If.

She’d always assumed it was. Everyone had. This was the first time she’d even considered it might not have been. Was there a chance in a million it still existed? And even if it had been in the car, was there the same chance it didn’t go up in smoke? The car had burned, but from what Belinda knew, the fire had been extinguished before it was completely destroyed. Belinda’d heard the casket was closed more out of concern for the little girl than because the body had been consumed by flames.

There were questions she’d have to ask.

Hard questions.

SEVEN

I was back at the Slocum house in five minutes.

I thought Kelly would be waiting at the front door, watching for me, but I had to ring the bell. When no one showed up after ten seconds, I leaned on it again.

Darren Slocum, opening the door, looked surprised to see me. “Hey, Glen,” he said, his eyebrows slanted down quizzically.

“Hi,” I said.

“What’s up?”

I’d assumed he’d know why I was there. “I’m picking up Kelly.”

“You are?”

“Yeah. She called me. Can you get her?”

Hesitant. “Yeah, sure thing, Glen. Wait here a second and I’ll go see what’s going on.”

I stepped into the foyer without being asked as he headed off through the dining room to the left. I stood there, looking around. To the right, a living room with a big-screen TV, a couple of leather couches. Half a dozen remotes lined up on the coffee table like prone soldiers.

I heard someone coming, but it was Ann, not Kelly.

“Hello?” she said. She looked as surprised to see me as Glen had. I didn’t know whether I was reading her right, but she seemed troubled, too. She had a black cordless phone in her hand. “Is everything okay?”

“Darren’s gone to find Kelly,” I said.

Was it alarm that flashed across her face? Just for second?

“Is something wrong?”

“She called me,” I said. “She asked me to come pick her up.”

“I didn’t know that,” Ann said. “What’s wrong? Did she say what was wrong?”

“She just said to come and pick her up.” I could think of any number of reasons why Kelly might have decided to bail on her sleepover. Maybe she wasn’t ready to be away from home this soon after her mother’s death. She and Emily could have had a fight. Maybe she’d had too much pizza and felt sick to her stomach.

“She never asked to use the phone,” Ann said.

“She has her own.” Ann was starting to irritate me. I just wanted to get Kelly and go.

“Yes, well,” Ann said, and seemed momentarily distracted. “Eight-year-old girls with their own phones! It wasn’t like that when we were kids, was it?”

“No,” I agreed.

“I hope the girls didn’t have an argument or anything. You know how they can be. Best of friends one minute, mortal enemies the—”

“Kelly!” I shouted into the house. “Daddy’s here!”

Ann raised her hands as if to shush me. “I’m sure she’s coming. I think they were watching a movie in Emily’s room, on the computer, for a while. We told her she couldn’t have a TV in there, but when you have a computer, who needs a TV, you know? You can watch all the TV shows online now anyway. And I think they were writing a story, making up some sort of adventure or something like—”

“Where’s Emily’s room?” I asked, starting for the dining room, figuring I could find my way through the house faster than the Slocums could get Kelly to the door.

But then, suddenly, she appeared, coming from the living room, with Darren trailing after her. Kelly seemed to be making an effort to stay ahead of him.

“Found her,” he said.

“Hey, Dad,” she said sullenly.

She had her jacket on, backpack in hand, and stopped at my side, pressing into me. The backpack hadn’t been fully zipped, and one of Hoppy’s ears was sticking out.

“You okay, sweetheart?” I asked.

She nodded.

“You sick?”

She hesitated a second, then nodded. “I want to go home,” she insisted.

“I don’t know what her problem is,” Darren said to me, like Kelly wasn’t even there. “I asked her and she wouldn’t say a thing.”

Kelly wouldn’t look at him. I mumbled a thank-you and guided her out to the front step. Ann and Darren muttered something in return before closing the door behind us. I stopped Kelly and leaned over to zip up her jacket. Inside the house, I could hear voices being raised.

Once I had Kelly buckled in and was pulling away from the Slocum house, I asked, “So what happened?”

“I don’t feel good.”

“What is it? Stomach?”

“I feel weird.”

“Pizza? Too much soda?”

Kelly shrugged.

“Did something happen? Did something happen with Emily?”

“No.”

“No, nothing happened? Or no, nothing happened with Emily?”

“I just want to go home.”

“Did Emily or somebody say something? About your mother?”

“No.”

“You looked like you didn’t even want to talk to Mr. Slocum. Did something happen with him?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?” The hairs were standing up on the back of my neck again. I was getting a bad vibe off him there. I didn’t know what it was. But there was something I didn’t like. “Did he … did he make you feel uncomfortable?”

“Everything’s
fine
,” Kelly said, but she wouldn’t look at me.

My mind was taking me places I didn’t want to go. There were questions I felt I needed to ask, but it wasn’t going to be easy to ask them.

“Look, honey, if something happened, you need to tell me about it.”

“I can’t.”

I glanced over at her, but she was still looking straight ahead. “You can’t?”

Kelly didn’t say anything.

“Something happened, but you can’t talk about it, is that what you’re saying?”

Kelly’s lips tightened. I felt a spike of anxiety.

“Did someone make you promise not to say anything?”

After a moment, she said, “I don’t want to get in trouble.”

I kept my voice as even as possible. “You’re not going to get in trouble. Sometimes, grown-ups, they’ll make kids promise not to tell something, but that’s wrong. Any time a grown-up does that, it’s to cover up something that they’ve done. It’s not because of anything bad you’ve done. And even if they say you’re going to get in trouble if you tell, you won’t.”

Kelly’s head went up and down a fraction of an inch.

“This thing … that happened,” I said, tentatively. “Was Emily there? Did she see it?”

“No.”

“Where was Emily?”

“I don’t know. She hadn’t found me yet.”

“Found you?”

“I was hiding, and then she was going to hide.”

“From her father?”

“No,”
she said impatiently. “We were hiding from each other. In different parts of the house, but then we were trying to sneak up on each other.”

“Okay,” I said, starting to clue in. “Did she come in later? Did she find you?”

A shake of the head.

We were by the hospital, the point where we’d normally turn down Seaside Avenue to our place, which was neither by the sea nor within view of it. But I felt, now that Kelly was talking, pulling in to the driveway might shut her down. So I went past our street and wandered down Bridgeport Avenue. If Kelly noticed we were missing the turn to our place, she didn’t mention it.

Okay, no more stalling. This was my life—
our
life—now. Dad and daughter had to talk about things that Dad would have been very happy to hand over to Mom.

“Sweetheart, this is really difficult for me to ask, but I have to, okay?”

She looked me in the eye, then turned away.

“Did Mr. Slocum do something to you? Did he touch you? Did he do something that you didn’t want him to do? Because if he did, that’s wrong, and we need to talk about it.” It seemed unthinkable. The guy was a
cop
, for crying out loud. But I didn’t care if he was the goddamn head of the FBI. If he touched my kid, I was going to beat the living shit out of him.

“He didn’t touch me,” she said.

“Okay.” I started to imagine different scenarios. “Did he
say
something to you?
Show
something to you?”