So it seemed there were two possibilities. Either Sheila had a drinking problem and was extremely good at hiding it, or Sheila had a drinking problem and I wasn’t good at picking up the signals.
I supposed there was a third possibility. Sheila did not have a drinking problem, and did not get behind the wheel drunk. For that possibility to be true, all the toxicology reports had to be wrong.
There wasn’t a shred of evidence to suggest they were.
In the days after Sheila’s death, as I struggled to make sense of something that made no sense at all, I tracked down students from the course she’d been taking. Turned out she never even went to class that evening, although she had shown up for all the other sessions. Her teacher, Allan Butterfield, said Sheila was the top student in the all-adult class.
“She had a real reason to be there,” he told me over a beer at a road-house down the street from the school. “She said to me, ‘I’m doing this for my family, for my husband and my daughter, to make our business stronger.’ ”
“When did she say that to you?” I’d asked.
He thought a moment. “A month ago?” He tapped the table with his index finger. “Right here. Over a couple of beers.”
“Sheila had a couple of beers here with you?” I asked.
“Well, I had a couple, maybe even three.” Allan’s face was flushed. “But Sheila, actually, I think she was having one. Just a glass.”
“You did this often with Sheila? Have a beer after class?”
“No, just the once,” he said. “She always wanted to get home in time to give her daughter a kiss good night.”
The way the police figured it, Sheila had skipped her class that night to drink away her evening somewhere. They never found out where she’d gone to do it. A check of area bars didn’t turn up any sightings of her, and no area liquor stores remembered selling her any booze that night. All of which meant, of course, nothing.
She could have sat in the car for hours drinking stuff she’d bought at another time, in another town.
I asked the police several times if there was any chance there’d been a mistake, and each time they told me toxicology reports didn’t lie. They provided copies. Sheila had a blood-alcohol level of 0.22. For a woman of Sheila’s size-about 140 pounds-that worked out to about eight drinks.
“I don’t just blame you for not picking up the signals,” Fiona fumed, at the funeral when Kelly was out of earshot. “I blame you for making her turn to drink. You swept her off her feet, no doubt about it, with your common touch, but over the years she was never able to stop thinking about the life she could have had. A better life, a richer life, the kind you’d never be able to give her. And it wore her down.”
“She told you this?” I said.
“She didn’t have to,” she snapped. “I just knew.”
“Fiona, honestly,” Marcus said, in a rare moment that made me quite like the guy. “Dial it down.”
“He needs to hear this, Marcus. And I may not have it in me to tell him later.”
“I doubt that,” I said.
“If you’d given her the kind of life she deserved, she’d never have had to drown her sorrows,” she said.
“I’m taking Kelly home,” I said. “Goodbye, Fiona.”
But like I said, she loved her granddaughter.
And Kelly loved her in return. And Marcus, too, to a degree. They doted on her. For Kelly’s sake, I tried to put aside my animosity toward Fiona. I was still reeling from the news that-evidently-Ann Slocum was dead, when I heard a car pull in to the driveway. I eased back the curtain and saw Marcus behind the wheel of his Cadillac. Fiona sat next to him.
“Shit,” I said. Before Sheila died, Kelly would stay at their town house one weekend out of six. If I’d been informed that this was one of those weekends, I’d certainly forgotten. I was confused. Neither Kelly nor I had seen Fiona or Marcus since the funeral. I had spoken to Fiona a few times on the phone, but only until Kelly had picked up the extension. Each time, Fiona made it clear she could barely be civil to me. Her contempt for me was like a buzz over the phone line.
I bounded up the stairs and poked my head into Kelly’s room. She was still asleep.
“Hey, kiddo,” I said.
She rolled over in bed and opened one eye, then the other. “What is it?”
“Grandmother alert. Fiona and Marcus are here.”
She sat bolt upright in bed. “They are? ”
“Did you know they were coming today?”
“Uhhh…”
“Because I sure didn’t know. You better get moving, kiddo.”
“I kind of forgot all about it.”
“Did you know?”
“I might, sort of.”
I gave her a look.
“I might have been talking to Grandma on Skype,” she confessed. “And I might have said it would be okay to come out and see me, but I didn’t say an actual day. I don’t think.”
“Like I said, you better get moving.”
Kelly slithered out from under the covers just as the doorbell rang. I left her to get herself dressed and went down to answer the door.
Fiona was up front, ramrod stiff and stone-faced. Marcus hovered just behind her, looking uncomfortable.
“Glen,” she said. Her voice could cut ice.
“Hey, Glen,” Marcus attempted. “How’s it going?”
“This is a surprise,” I said.
“We came to see Kelly,” Fiona said. “To see how she’s doing.” Her tone implied she doubted my daughter was doing well.
“Was this one of those weekends?”
“Do I need it to be one of ‘those weekends’ to see my granddaughter?”
“We might not have been home. And I’d hate for you to come for nothing.” This sounded reasonable to me, but Fiona flushed.
Marcus cleared his throat. “We thought we’d chance it.”
I stepped back to give them room to come inside. “You’ve been talking to Kelly over the Internet?” I asked Fiona.
“We’ve had some chats,” Fiona said. “I’m very worried about her. I can just imagine what she’s going through. When Sheila lost her father, she was older than Kelly, but she still took it so very hard.”
“The thruway was a son of a bitch,” Marcus said, still trying to cut through the tension. “Seems like they’re ripping up the roads all over the place.”
“Yeah,” I said. “They do that.”
“Look,” he said, “I told Fiona, you know, maybe this isn’t such a great idea, just showing up without calling or-”
“Marcus, do not apologize for me. There’s something I want to discuss with you, Glen,” Fiona said, in a tone MacArthur might have used when he got the Japanese to surrender.
“What’s that?”
“Kelly was telling me, during our Skype chat, that things aren’t going very well for her at school.”
“Kelly’s doing fine. Her grades are even a little better than last year.”
“I’m not talking about her grades. I’m talking about her social situation.”
“What about it?”
“I understand the other children are being horrible to her.”
“It hasn’t been an easy time for her.”
“Yes, well, I wouldn’t think so, considering that the boy who died in that accident was a student at Kelly’s school. She’s being tormented. That’s not a good environment for the child.”
“She told you about the kids calling her Boozer.”
