Cast into Doubt (20 page)

‘I called earlier. His condition is stable.’

‘The church managed to contact his parents last night. They’re in some tiny village in Indonesia. It’s going to take them a while to get to a flight. They’ll be back in a couple of days.’

‘I’m just glad they got a hold of them,’ said Shelby. ‘Rob needs them here right now.’

‘I agree.’

‘I’ve never met his parents,’ said Shelby. ‘Rob and Chloe had a very small wedding, and they couldn’t get here for it. They came once to see Jeremy, but I was in Paris while they were here.’

‘They’re very nice people,’ said Darcie. ‘Always cheerful. I remember them from when I was a little girl. They’re very tough. They’ve lived in all kinds of conditions.’

‘You’ve known Rob’s family that long?’ Shelby asked.

‘All my life.’

‘Rob must be kind of like a big brother to you,’ she said.

Darcie watched Jeremy playing. ‘Jeremy wants to go and see his dad.’

Shelby shook her head. ‘Not yet. Not while Rob’s unconscious, certainly. That will only scare Jeremy. He’s just lost his mother. If he sees his father so messed up, it will give him nightmares.’

Darcie turned and looked at Shelby with wide, blue eyes. ‘So you’re not going up there tonight?’

‘I’ll run up in the morning,’ said Shelby.

Darcie turned and looked back at her charges. ‘I’ll go tonight,’ she said.

Shelby heard a note in Darcie’s voice that took her by surprise, but she did not mention it.

‘Time to get Jeremy home,’ Shelby said.

Shelby’s phone rang as she was beginning to usher Jeremy off to the bathtub. It was Elliott Markson’s secretary calling. Mr Markson wanted to see her in his office the next morning at ten o’clock. Shelby said that she would be there. She had an idea of what this summons was about. At best, Elliott Markson was probably going to confront her about all the work she was missing, and he would surely dress her down for enlisting the help of Perry Wilcox. At worst . . .

Now that she knew that Rob’s parents were arriving and would certainly move in here with Jeremy for the length of their stay, she would be free to return to her job, if she still had one. Perhaps it was time to think about working again. All her efforts to make sense of Chloe’s accident were running into nothing but dead ends. The question was, would she have a job to go to? She had a feeling that she would know the answer tomorrow.

The evening routine with Jeremy proved difficult. It took all her wiles to convince the child that his father was still too sleepy for visitors, and that he was really going to be fine and they would see him soon. His usual storybook turned into three, and he wailed each time she tried to leave him alone in his room. By the time she had gotten Jeremy in bed, Shelby was almost ready to crawl into bed herself.

The doorbell rang at eight thirty, and she rushed to answer it, not wanting its peal in the night to wake Jeremy from his restless slumber. Detective Camillo, whom she had met at the hospital, was standing on the doorstep with a uniformed officer.

‘Detective,’ said Shelby, frowning.

‘May we come in?’ he asked.

‘Of course,’ said Shelby.

She stood aside as the two men entered the house and stood in the living room. Shelby invited them to sit and offered them a drink. Both men declined the drink but sat down in the living room, perched on the edge of their seats. Detective Camillo leaned forward in the chair, and rested his elbows on his knees.

‘I want to thank you for your phone call earlier today, Mrs Sloan. Once we knew where your son-in-law had been last night, it made our job a lot easier.’

‘I’m glad I could help,’ Shelby said.

‘So, since I spoke to you, there have been a few developments in your son-in-law’s case that I thought you would want to know about,’ he said.

Shelby nodded. ‘OK.’

‘I wanted to talk to you before you heard about this on the eleven o’clock news.’

Shelby was instantly alarmed. ‘Heard what? Is Rob all right? I called the hospital before dinner. They said he’s still stable.’

‘Yeah. I spoke to the doc about an hour ago. Apparently, he’ll be all right. But, we still want to charge these guys with attempted murder.’

Shelby’s eyes widened. ‘Guys? You found out who did this?’

The detective’s weary eyes glinted with satisfaction. ‘It looks that way. Actually,’ he said, ‘we caught a few breaks on this one. Which is not to minimize the excellent legwork by my squad.’

‘So what happened?’

‘Well, it was much as I originally suspected. Because Rob’s car had nearly a full tank of gas, we proceeded on the assumption that he had filled up on his way home. When you told us that he had been out in Gladwyne, we were able to determine his route. After that, it was easy to narrow down the possibilities. We checked the surveillance videos for everywhere you could buy gas along the route. We found him on the third try. Your son-in-law stopped for gas and got into an altercation with some kids who were hanging around just looking for trouble.’

‘An altercation? About what?’ Shelby asked.

‘We don’t know. All we have is the video – no sound. Anyway, when he drove away, they followed him. They followed him on to the Schuylkill and forced his car off the road. They had a gun. He was lucky he wasn’t killed.’

‘Oh my God,’ Shelby said. She exhaled and sat back in her seat. ‘I can’t believe it.’

Camillo shook his head. ‘Even the most minor argument turns lethal these days. They’re not happy just insulting you. They gotta kill you now.’

Shelby shook her head. ‘Don’t they even think about the consequences?’

‘They don’t think about anything. Believe me,’ he said.

‘I’m just really amazed that you found them so quickly.’

‘Well, like I say, we were lucky. The surveillance camera at the pumps gave us their license plate. From that, it was easy to track them down.’

‘I see.’

‘I don’t mean that there’s anything lucky about this,’ Camillo demurred.

‘I understand,’ said Shelby.

Camillo frowned. ‘There’s just one more thing. From what we saw on the video, your son-in-law really got up in their faces. Is he normally kind of a hot-tempered guy?’

Shelby shook her head sadly. ‘No. Usually he’s pretty mild-mannered.’

‘Any particular reason why he would have been edgy last night?’

Shelby was silent. She felt extremely grateful to the police for finding the people who had forced Rob off the road, but she didn’t really relish the idea of divulging the reason Rob had been in a belligerent mood. What if it ended up on the news? Molly would be humiliated at school and everywhere else. She was a teenager, awkward and self-conscious like most teenagers, and she didn’t deserve that. She was the innocent victim in this whole thing. Shelby suddenly understood exactly why Lianna had not offered this information up to the police.

‘Did something happen last night?’ asked Detective Camillo.

Shelby shook her head. ‘No. Not really. There was a family argument. You know. Between exes. Normal stuff.’

‘I’m not asking to be nosy ma’am. Your son-in-law’s state of mind is going to make a difference if this thing gets to trial.’

Shelby frowned. ‘Why?’

‘Well, the defense might try to say that he provoked these guys. Challenged them maybe.’

‘You don’t believe that, do you?’ she asked.

‘What I believe is not important. It’ll be what the jury believes.’

‘That is horrible. A man is minding his own business and he’s dragged into this situation. He’s pursued and run off the road by criminals. And now you’re saying they might blame it on Rob?’

‘I’m saying that it’s important to know what kind of a person he is. Is he prone to violent outbursts?’

‘No. I mean, not normally. Last night, he’d had a bit of a shock. He was probably not completely himself,’ said Shelby carefully.

‘No criminal convictions. No . . . domestic violence. Nothing like that.’

Instantly, Shelby thought about Chloe and the cruise. Wasn’t this what she had secretly wondered and feared? How could you ever really know a person from the outside? To the world Rob was a churchgoer, a social worker, a kindly father, a good husband. But people like that had been known to snap. Isn’t this exactly what she had suspected? That there was a hidden side of Rob that was capable of violence? Of murder?

The thought of it filled her with despair. She realized that she had just about gotten to the point of acceptance. For a while she had suspected Rob, and then, everything she learned had made her see him as nothing more than a grieving husband. He had been honest about Chloe’s alcoholism, and passed a lie detector test. Even Perry Wilcox, an experienced detective, had judged that Rob was being truthful, and that Chloe’s death was probably an accident.

Now, with his question, Detective Camillo had set her brain ricocheting in her skull again, like that of a shaken baby. Was there no respite from this doubt, she wondered? She didn’t know how she could go on living with it. She had to resolve this in her mind. She had to learn how to accept it and move on. For her sanity.

‘Mrs Sloan?’ Detective Camillo asked worriedly.

‘What?’ she asked.

‘Anything you want to tell us?’ he asked.

Shelby stared straight at him. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Nothing.’

TWENTY-ONE

S
helby sat calmly in the waiting area outside of Elliott Markson’s office. She had stopped by her apartment, and she was properly dressed for her own termination. A well-known designer had once told her that navy blue was the color of power, and she had taken that suggestion to heart. She had on one of her very favorite suits, a Ralph Lauren, with the faintest pinstripe, and some heels that were rather higher than she might normally wear. They would at least put her at Elliott Markson’s eye level. She tapped one foot idly, and pretended not to notice the delay. Finally, the intercom on his secretary’s desk buzzed.

The secretary turned to Shelby. ‘You can go in now,’ she said.

Shelby went to the office door, took a deep breath, turned the knob and strode in. She knew he would be seated, watching her, and she met his gaze without flinching as she crossed the large, paneled office and put a hand on the chair in front of his desk. The desktop was virtually empty, with no photos, awards, or even art objects to give any clues about the man behind the desk.

‘May I?’ she asked.

‘Please,’ he said.

Now that she sat and really looked at him up close, she realized that Elliott Markson was not as young as she had previously thought. He was probably about her age. He had gray at his temples, and she noticed reading glasses sitting on his desktop.

‘You wanted to see me,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he said. He placed his elbows on the desktop, and steepled his hands in front of his face. Automatically, Shelby noticed the excellent quality of his suit and shirt. ‘First of all,’ he said, ‘how are you doing?’

Shelby was briefly taken aback. For a moment she thought he wanted her to let her guard down. She wasn’t about to. ‘Fine,’ she said.

‘How about your grandson?’ he asked.

This question surprised her. But she was not unnerved. ‘He’s doing well. Thank you for asking.’

Elliott Markson waved a hand as if to dispense with the platitudes. ‘Now, Ms Sloan, I know that you’ve been under a lot of stress lately. But it came to my attention recently that you engaged our head of security to investigate your daughter’s death. This was, essentially, a private matter.’

Shelby was not about to start making excuses, or protest that Perry had insisted on using company time for the job. She waited.

‘And this is the sort of misappropriation of company time and funds which is no longer going to be tolerated here at Markson’s. The culture at Markson’s has to change in order for the business to survive. My uncle, before he died, had lost all perspective. He let his employees take their birthdays off and bought all their kids presents at Christmas. He would have approved of Mr Wilcox acting as your personal gumshoe. I am not that kind of employer. I am not Santa Claus.’

‘I understand,’ said Shelby. Part of her wanted to just stand up and announce that she was leaving, before he had a chance to fire her.

Elliott Markson held his hands open wide. ‘No . . . protestations? Explanations?’

Shelby shook her head. ‘It’s terrible to me to think that Perry’s job was jeopardized because he tried to help me. It was completely my fault.’

‘So it seems. But Mr Wilcox has not lost his job.’

‘I’m grateful for that,’ said Shelby.

Markson nodded. ‘Ms Sloan, you’ve missed a lot of work lately, and have given us no indication of when you plan to return.’

Here it comes, Shelby thought. She took a deep breath, and thought that there were a million things she could do with her experience and her qualifications. Sometimes it was best to make a change, and sometimes the only way to make a change was to be forced into it. Shelby raised her chin and waited for the blow.

‘That being said, I realize that you have been thrown into some extraordinary circumstances lately.’ Elliott Markson frowned slightly. ‘Your grandson is suffering a terrible loss. It’s very difficult to lose your mother at such a young age,’ he said. ‘Very difficult.’

Shelby felt truly nonplussed. She had expected hostility. ‘Yes, it is,’ she said.

‘I do realize how important it is for you to help him through this. There are times in life when one’s career has to take a back seat,’ he said.

Shelby stared at him.

Elliott Markson met her gaze. ‘You seem surprised.’

‘I . . . I was expecting . . .’ she said.

‘To be fired?’ he asked.

Shelby hesitated. ‘Frankly, yes. It crossed my mind.’

‘Should you be fired?’ he asked coolly.

Shelby remained calm. ‘No. I’m good at my job. I will get back to it as soon as . . . as possible,’ she said.