“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?”
“No, he didn’t do any of those things.”
I let out a long breath. “Then what, honey? What did he do?”
“He didn’t do anything, okay?” Kelly turned and looked at me directly, as though getting ready to accuse me of something. “It wasn’t him. It was her. ”
“Her? Who?”
“It was Emily’s mom.”
EIGHT
“Emily’s mom touched you?” I asked, bewildered. That seemed even more unthinkable.
“No, she didn’t touch me,” Kelly said. “She got mad at me.”
“Mad at you? Why would she get mad at you?”
“I was in their room.” Now she wouldn’t look at me.
“Their room? You mean, their bedroom?”
Kelly nodded. “We were just playing.”
“Playing in Emily’s parents’ bedroom?”
“I was only hiding. In the closet. I wasn’t doing anything bad. But she got all mad because she didn’t know I was there and she was on the phone.”
I was upset, but part of me was relieved, as well. The worst-case scenario appeared to be off the table. Kelly being where she wasn’t supposed to be, hiding in Ann and Darren Slocum’s bedroom-well, if I’d found Emily hanging out in my bedroom closet, I’d probably be pissed about it myself.
“Okay, so let me get this straight,” I said carefully. “You were hiding in Mr. and Mrs. Slocum’s bedroom and then Mrs. Slocum came in to use the phone?”
Kelly nodded. “She came in and sat on the bed right near the closet and phoned somebody and I was really scared she was going to see me because the door was open a little bit but I thought if I tried to close it, she’d see that, so I didn’t do anything.”
“Okay,” I said.
“So she was talking to one person and then she started talking to another person and-”
“She hung up and called someone else?”
“No, it was like another call came in while she was talking to the first person. And when she was talking to the second person, that’s when I guess she heard me breathing in the closet and she stopped talking and she opened the door and she got really mad and told me to come out.”
“You shouldn’t have gone into their room,” I said. “Especially their closet. It’s private in there.”
“So you’re mad, too.”
“No, I’m just saying. What did she say to you?”
“She asked me if I’d been listening.”
Before I knew it, we were all the way to Devon, so I hung a left on Naugatuck and started working our way back on Milford Point Road. “Mrs. Slocum probably wouldn’t have said what she was saying on the phone if she knew someone was in the room with her.”
“Yeah, that’s for sure,” Kelly muttered.
“What?” I asked. “What was she saying?”
She gave me a look. “You mean you want me to tell you? Even though I wasn’t supposed to hear? Doesn’t that mean you’re sort of listening in, too?”
I shook my head. “Okay, it’s none of my business what she said, just like it was none of yours. But I mean,
