Then I drove to our closest job, the double garage in Devon. The client, a retired insurance agent in his mid- sixties, had two classic Corvettes-a 1959 and a 1963 Sting Ray with the split rear window-but no place to properly store them.
It was a simple job. No basement, no plumbing, other than a spigot for car washing. Just a solid structure with storage units and a workbench, good lighting and plenty of electrical outlets. The client had said no to powered doors. He didn’t want to risk them going haywire someday and coming down on one of his treasures.
As I got out of the truck, Ken Wang approached.
“Hey there, Mr. G, y’all lookin’ fine today.”
You never got used to it.
“Thanks, KF. How goes it here?”
“Excellent. I tell you, I’d give my left tit for one of these here ’Vettes.”
“Nice cars.”
“Some guy was sniffin’ around earlier lookin’ for ya.”
“He say what it was about?”
Ken shook his head. “No. Might be more work. So don’t go wanderin’ off or nuthin’.” He grinned at me.
I went into the new garage to see how it was coming. The interior walls were drywalled-I found a stamp on a drywall sheet to allay any fears that it might be that toxic stuff from China-and Stewart was getting ready to sand the seams. “Pretty good, eh?” he said.
After giving the two of them some guidance about where to put the shelving units, I walked back out to the truck to pour myself some coffee from my thermos and make a couple of school calls. A small blue car pulled up and a short man in a blue suit got out with an envelope in his hand. Maybe this was the guy Ken had seen earlier. As he approached the truck, I powered down the window.
“Glen Garber?” he said.
“That’s the name on the truck,” I quipped.
“But you are Mr. Garber?”
I nodded.
He handed the envelope to me through the window and said, “You’ve been served.” Then he turned and walked away.
I set my thermos cup on the dashboard and tore open the envelope, withdrew the papers from inside, and unfolded them. Some law firm letterhead. I scanned the paperwork. It was written in legalese I could barely understand, but I was able to get the gist of it.
The Wilkinson family was suing me for $15 million. Negligence. The crux of it was this: I had failed to identify my wife’s condition and intercede, which ultimately resulted in the death of Connor and Brandon Wilkinson.
I tried to read it more thoroughly but things seemed to go blurry. My eyes were tearing up. I closed them, leaned my head back against the headrest.
“Nice going, Sheila,” I said.
TWENTY
“It’s interesting, that’s for sure,” said Edwin Campbell, sitting in his legal office. He took off his wire-rimmed reading glasses and set them next to the papers I’d been delivered a couple of hours earlier. He shook his head. “A bit of a stretch, I think, but very interesting.”
“So you’re saying, what, I don’t have to worry about it?” I said, leaning forward in the leather padded chair. Edwin had been my father’s lawyer for years, and I’d kept going to him not only out of family tradition and loyalty, but because he knew his stuff. I’d called him about the lawsuit right after the papers had been served, and he’d agreed to get me in to his office right away.
“Well, now, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that,” Campbell replied. “There’s plenty of nuisance cases that have taken years to work their way through the system and needlessly cost people a considerable sum to defend themselves. So we’re going to have to respond to this. They’ll have to produce evidence you knew Sheila had a drinking problem and that it was very likely you knew she would get behind the wheel of a car in an inebriated condition.”
“I’ve told you I never noticed any-”
Edwin waved a hand at me. “I know what you’ve said. And I believe you. But I think-and I’m sure you’ve done this already-but I think you need to go over everything about Sheila in your head one more time. Is there something you’ve overlooked, something maybe you’ve ignored because you haven’t wanted to acknowledge it? Something you don’t want to admit to yourself? This is the time you need to be honest with yourself, painfully so, because if there’s something out there, some small shred of evidence that suggests you could have reasonably assumed that Sheila was capable of doing what she did, we need to confront that and deal with it.”
“I told you, there’s nothing.”
“You never saw your wife under the influence?”
“What, never?”
“That’s what I asked you.”
“Well, shit, of course, there were times when she’d had enough to feel it. Who hasn’t?”
“Describe these circumstances.”
“I don’t know-Christmas, family gatherings, an anniversary maybe, if we’d been out to dinner. Parties.”
“So Sheila had a habit of drinking too much at all those kinds of events?”
I blinked. “Jesus Christ, Edwin!”
“I’m just playing devil’s advocate, Glen. But you see how these things can turn bad in a hurry. I know and you know there’s a huge gulf between having a couple of drinks at Christmas and getting behind the wheel when you shouldn’t. But all Bonnie Wilkinson needs is a handful of witnesses from those types of occasions, where you might have been present, to start building a case.”
“Well, she’s going to have a hard time doing that,” I said.
“What about Belinda Morton?”
“Huh? Belinda was a friend of Sheila’s. What about her?”
“I made a couple of calls before you came over, one to Barnicke and Trundle, the firm that’s handling this for Mrs. Wilkinson, and they weren’t afraid to tip their hand to me, suggesting that we might want to settle this thing before we even get to court.”
“What are you talking about?”
“They already have a statement from Ms. Morton that when she and Sheila and another woman would go out for lunch, they’d get pretty looped.”
“So maybe they had a few drinks. Sheila always took a cab home from those. She usually took a cab to those, since she knew she might be having a few.”
“Really?” Edwin said. “So she’d go to lunch knowing full well she’d be having a lot to drink?”
“It’s not like they got drunk. They just had a good time at lunch. You’re making too much out of it.”
“It won’t be me who does it.” He paused. “There’s also this thing about marijuana.”
“About what?”
“Belinda has apparently said she and Sheila smoked it.”
“ Belinda said that?” This woman, who was supposedly my wife’s friend?
“So they say. They are, I understand, only alleging a single incident. A year ago, at the Morton home, in the backyard. Apparently the husband arrived and became quite perturbed.”
I was shaking my head in disbelief. “What’s she trying to do to us? To Kelly and me?”
“I don’t know. To give her the benefit of the doubt, she may not have appreciated the implications of her comments when she was making them. My understanding is it was her husband, George, who felt she had an obligation to be forthcoming.”
I slumped down in the chair. “That guy’s got a pole up his ass. Even if they could prove Sheila liked to have a glass of wine or a Cosmo at lunch, how do they go from there to proving that it’s my fault that she might have gotten behind the wheel drunk the night of the accident?”
