The Secret Between Us (2 page)

“Cal?” she called futilely. “Cal? Can you hear me?”

“What was he doing out here?” the officer asked.

Deborah sat back on her heels. “I have no idea. Walking? Running?”

“In the rain? That’s strange.”

“Particularly here,” she said. “Do you know where he lives?” It certainly wasn’t nearby. There were four houses in the circle of a mile, and she knew the residents of each.

“He and his wife have a place over by the train station,” Brian replied. “That’s a few miles from here. I take it you don’t treat him?”

“No. Grace has him in school this year, so I heard him speak at the open house last fall. He’s a serious guy, a tough marker. That’s about all I know.” She was reaching for his pulse again when the road came alive with light. A second cruiser arrived, its roof bar thrumming a raucous blue and white. An ambulance was close behind.

Deborah didn’t immediately recognize the EMTs; they were young, likely new. But she did know the man who emerged from the second cruiser. John Colby was the police chief. In his late-fifties, he would have been retired had he been working anywhere else, but he had grown up in Leyland. It was understood that he would keep working as long as his health allowed. Deborah guessed that would be a while. He and his wife were patients of theirs. His wife had a problem with allergens—dander, pollen, dust—that had resulted in adult-onset asthma, but John’s greatest problem, beyond a pot belly, was insomnia. He worked days; he worked nights. He claimed that being active kept his blood pressure down, and since his blood pressure was chronically low, Deborah couldn’t argue.

While John held a floodlight, the EMTs immobilized Calvin. Deborah waited with her arms crossed, hands in the folds of her jacket. He made neither movement nor sound.

She followed them out of the woods and was watching them ease him into the ambulance, when Brian took her arm. “Let’s sit in the cruiser. This rain’s nasty.”

Once inside, she lowered her hood and opened her jacket. Her face was wet; she wiped it with her hands. Her hair, damp and curling, still felt strange to her short after a lifetime wearing it waist long and knotted at the nape. She was wearing a tank top and shorts, both relatively dry under her jacket, and flip-flops. Her legs were slick and smudged with dirt.

She
hated
rain. It came at the worst times, defied prediction, and made life messy.

Brian folded himself next to her behind the wheel, and shook his hat outside before closing the door. He took a notebook and pen from a tray between the seats. “I have to ask you a few questions—just a formality, Dr. Monroe.” He checked his watch. “Ten forty-three. And it’s D-E-B-O-R-A-H?”

“Yes. M-O-N-R-O-E.” She was often mistakenly thought to be Dr. Barr, which was her maiden name and the name of her father, who was something of a legend in town. She had used her married name since her final year of college.

“Can you tell me what happened?” the officer asked.

“We were driving along—”

“We?” He looked alarmed. “I thought you were alone.”

“I am now—Grace is home—but I had picked her up at a friend’s house—that’s Megan Stearns’s house—and we were on our way home, going really slowly, not more than twenty-five miles an hour, because the rain was so bad. And suddenly he was there.”

“Running along the side of the road?”

“I didn’t see him running. He just appeared in front of the car. There was no warning, no time to turn away, just this awful thud.”

“Had you drifted toward the shoulder of the road?”

“No. We were close to the center. I was watching the line. It was one of the few guidelines we had with visibility so low.”

“Did you brake?”

Deborah hadn’t braked. Grace had done it. Now was the time to clarify that. But it seemed irrelevant, a technicality.

“Too late,” she replied. “We skidded and spun around. You can see where my car is. That’s where we ended after the spin.”

“But if you drove Grace home—”

“I didn’t drive her. I made her run. It isn’t more than half a mile. She’s on the track team.” Deborah wrangled her phone from a soggy pocket. “I needed her to babysit Dylan, but she’ll want to know what’s happening. Is this okay?” When he nodded, she pressed the speed-dial button.

The phone had barely rung when Grace picked up. “Mom?”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m okay. How’s Mr. McKenna?”

“He’s on his way to the hospital.”

“Is he conscious?”

“Not yet. Is Dylan okay?”

“If being dead asleep on the sofa when I got here means okay, yes. He hasn’t moved.”

So much for large eyes at the window, Deborah thought, and heard her ex-husband’s
You worry too much,
but how not to worry about a ten-year-old boy who had severe hyperopia and corneal dystrophy, which meant that he viewed much of his life through a haze. Deborah hadn’t planned on that, either.

“Well, I’m still glad you’re with him,” she said. “Grace, I’m talking with the police officer now. I may run over to the hospital once we’re done. You’d probably better go to bed. You have that exam tomorrow.”

“I’m going to be sick tomorrow.”

“Grace.”

“I am. I can’t think about biology right now. I mean, like, what a
nightmare.
If this is what happens when you drive, I’m not doing it. I keep asking myself where he came from. Did
you
see him on the side of the road?”

“No. Honey, the officer’s waiting.”

“Call me back.”

“Yup.” Deborah closed the phone.

The cruiser’s rear door opened and John Colby got into the backseat. “You’d think the rain’d take a break,” he said, adding, “Hard to see much on the road. I took pictures of everything I could, but the evidence won’t last long if it stays like this. I just called the state team. They’re on their way.”

“State team?” Deborah asked, frightened.

“The state police have an Accident Reconstruction Team,” John explained. “It’s headed by a credited reconstructionist. He knows what to look for more than we do.”

“What does he look for?”

“Points of impact, marks on the car. Where on the road the car hit the victim, where the victim landed. Skid marks. Burned rubber. He rebuilds the picture of what happened and how.”

It was only an accident,
she wanted to say. Bringing in a state team somehow made it more.

Dismay must have shown on her face, because Brian said, “It’s standard procedure when there’s personal injury. Had it been midday with the sun out, we might have been able to handle it ourselves, but in weather like this, it’s important to work quickly, and these guys can do that.” He glanced at his notes. “How fast did you say you were going?”

Again, Deborah might have easily said,
Oh, I wasn’t the one at the wheel. It was Grace, and she wasn’t speeding at all.
But that felt like she was trying to weasel out of something—to shift the blame—and besides, Grace was her firstborn, her alter ego, and already suffering from the divorce. Did the girl need more to trouble her? Calvin McKenna was hit either way. No laws had been broken either way.

“The limit here is forty-five,” she said. “We couldn’t have been going more than thirty.”

“Have you had any recent problems with the car?”

“No.”

“Brakes working?”

“Perfectly.”

“Were the high beams on?”

She frowned, struggling with that one. She remembered reminding Grace, but high beams, low beams—neither cut far in rain like this.

“They’re still on,” John confirmed from behind, “both working.” He put his hat back on his head. “I’m going out to tape off the lane. Last thing we need is someone driving by and fouling the scene.”

Deborah knew he meant
accident
scene, but with a state team coming, she kept thinking
crime
scene. She was feeling upset about the driver issue, but the questions went on. What time had she left her house to get Grace? What time had Grace and she left Megan’s house? How much time had passed between the accident and Deborah’s calling it in? What had she done during that time? Had Calvin McKenna regained consciousness at any point?

Deborah understood that this was all part of the investigation, but she wanted to be at the hospital or, if not there, at home with Grace and Dylan.

She glanced at her watch. It was past eleven. If Dylan woke up, he would be frightened to find her still gone; he had been clingy since the divorce, and Grace wouldn’t be much help. She would be watching for Deborah in the dark—not from the pantry, which she saw as Dylan’s turf, but from the window seat in the living room that they rarely used now. There were ghosts in that room, family pictures from a happier time, in a crowd of frames, an arrogant display of perfection. Grace would be feeling desolate.

A new explosion of light announced the arrival of the state team. As soon as Brian left the cruiser, Deborah opened her phone and called the hospital—not the general number, but one that went straight to the emergency room. She had admitting privileges and had accompanied patients often enough to know the night nurse. Unfortunately, all the nurse knew was that the ambulance had just arrived.

Deborah called Grace. The girl picked up instantly. “Where are you?”

“Still here. I’m sitting in the police car, while they check things outside.” She tried to sound casual. “They’re reconstructing the accident. It’s standard procedure.”

“What are they looking for?”

“Whatever they can find to explain why Mr. McKenna was where he was. How’s Dylan?”

“Still sleeping. How’s Mr. McKenna?”

“Just got to the hospital. They’ll be examining him now. Have you talked with Megan or any of the others?” There was the issue of Grace climbing into the car on the driver’s side, which might have been seen by her friends, reason to level with the police now.

“They’re texting me,” Grace said in a shaky voice. “Stephie tried to call, but I didn’t answer. What if he dies, Mom?”

“He won’t die. He wasn’t hit that hard. It’s late, Grace. You ought to go to bed.”

“When will you be home?”

“Soon, I hope. I’ll find out.”

Closing the phone, Deborah tucked it in her pocket, pulled up her hood, and went out into the rain. She pulled the hood closer around her face and held it there with a dripping hand.

A good part of the road had been sealed off with yellow tape, made all the more harsh now by floodlights. Two latex-gloved men were combing the pavement, stopping from time to time to carefully pick up and bag what they found. A photographer was taking pictures of Deborah’s car, both its general position on the road and the dent in the front. The dent wasn’t large. More noticeable was the shattered headlight.

“Oh my,” Deborah said, seeing that for the first time.

John joined her, bending over to study what remained of the glass. “This looks to be the only damage,” he said and shot her a quick glance. “Think you can dig out your registration so I can record it?”

She slipped behind the wheel, adjusted the seat, opened the glove box, and handed him the registration, which he carefully recorded. Restowing it, she joined him outside.

“I didn’t think of damage,” she said, pulling her hood forward again. “I was only concerned with what we’d hit. We thought it was an animal.” She peered up at him. “I’d really like to drive to the hospital, John. How long will these fellows take?”

“Another hour or two,” he said, watching the men work. “This is their only shot. Rain continues like this and come morning, everything’ll be washed out. But anyway, you can’t take your car. We have to tow it.”

“Tow it? It’s perfectly driveable.”

“Not until our mechanic checks it out. He has to make sure nothing was wrong that might have caused the accident—brake malfunction, defective wipers, worn tires.” He looked at her then. “Don’t worry. We’ll drive you home tonight. You have another car there, don’t you?”

She did. It was Greg’s BMW, the one he had driven to the office, parked in the Reserved for President spot, and kept diligently waxed. He had loved that car, but it, too, was abandoned. When he left for Vermont, he had been in the old Volkswagen Beetle that had sat under a tarp in the garage all these years.

Deborah didn’t like the BMW. Greg had bought it at the height of his success. In hindsight, that was the beginning of the end.

Folding her arms over her chest, she watched the men work. They covered every inch of the road, the roadside, and the edge of the forest beyond where Calvin McKenna had landed. More than once, feeling useless and
despising
the rain, she wondered why she was there and not at the hospital helping out.

The answer, of course, was that she was a family practitioner, not a trauma specialist. And it was her car that had caused harm.

The reality of that loomed larger by the minute. She was responsible—
she
was reponsible—for the car, for Grace, for the accident, for Calvin McKenna. If she could do nothing for him and nothing for the car, she needed to be home with her children.

Grace huddled in
the dark. Each time her cell phone rang, she jumped, held it up, studied the panel. She answered if her mother was calling, but she couldn’t talk to anyone else. Megan had already tried. Twice. Same with Stephie. Now they were texting.

WER R U
?
TM ME
!

R U THER
?
HELLO
??

When Grace didn’t reply, the focus changed.

DUZ YR MM NO ABT TH BR? DD SHE SMLL IT
?

R U IN TRBL
?
U ONLY HD 1
.

But Grace hadn’t had only one beer, she had
two,
and even though they were spaced three hours apart, and she hadn’t felt high and probably wouldn’t even have blown a .01 if she had been breathalyzed, she shouldn’t have driven.

She didn’t know why she had. She didn’t know why these so-called friends of hers—
alleged
friends, as in provable but not proved—were even
mentioning
beer in a TM. Didn’t they
know
everything could be traced?

UOK
?
Y WONT U TALK
?