“We’re here with the drywall, Glen. Where the hell are you guys? Nobody working today? Was there a holiday no one told me about?”
“I called last week? You put a Florida room on the back of our house last summer? And we’re getting bees in the room, we think they’re getting in someplace and wonder if you could come out and have a look?”
“My name’s Ryan and I wondered if I could drop off a resume? My mom says if I don’t get a job she’s going to kick me out.”
They went on from there. I noticed, just as Sally had the other day, that none of them were prospects for future jobs. Everything really was turning to shit.
Once I’d made a note of all seventeen, I started calling people back. I was there until nearly five, dealing with subcontractors, suppliers, past customers. It didn’t make me forget my litany of problems, but it at least distracted me from them for a period of time and let me focus on something I was good at.
When I’d dealt with as many calls as I could, I sat back in the chair and let out a long, exhausted sigh.
I looked at the picture of Sheila on my desk and said, “What the hell am I doing?”
My mind went back to the day I was supposed to clean out my father’s garage after he’d passed away. I suddenly found a number of projects that had to be done around my own house. I’d nailed down some loose shingles, fixed a broken screen, replaced a porch step that was starting to rot.
Sheila’d stood there, watching me cut the board to size. When the saw stopped its buzzing, she said, “If you run out of projects here to keep you from dealing with your dad’s stuff, you could try the neighbors. The Jacksons’ chimney’s kind of crumbling.”
She always knew when I was avoiding something. And that’s what I was doing now. I was doing more than avoiding an unpleasant task.
I was avoiding the truth.
The time I’d spent here, catching up on work, writing down phone messages-there was a much bigger problem I wasn’t addressing. I was sweeping leaves off the driveway when the funnel cloud was only a block away.
I’d had no trouble harping at anyone who’d listen that Sheila wasn’t the type to drink and drive. But once I’d gotten the notion that Sheila’d been forced to do what she did, all these horrific images starting coming into my head. Images as bad as those in my nightmare. Flashing before my eyes during every waking moment.
I believed someone had done something horrible to Sheila.
Someone was behind her death. Set it up somehow.
“Someone murdered her,” I said.
Out loud.
“Someone killed Sheila.”
I had nothing concrete. I had no evidence. What I had was a gut feeling born out of the swirling vortex that involved Ann Slocum, her husband, this thug Sommer, Belinda and that sixty-two thousand dollars she wanted Sheila to deliver for her.
It all added up to something.
I believed it added up to murder. Someone put my wife into that car, drunk, and let her die.
And killed two other people at the same time.
I was as sure of it as I’d ever been of anything.
I picked up the phone, called the Milford police, and asked for Detective Rona Wedmore.
“Your wife’s accident didn’t happen in my jurisdiction,” Wedmore reminded me over coffee. She’d agreed to meet me at the McDonald’s out on Bridgeport Avenue an hour after I put the call in to her. She thought I’d called wanting to know whether the police had learned who’d shot at my house. I’d said if she knew, I’d like to know, but if she didn’t, I wanted to talk about something else.
“You don’t strike me as the kind of person who’d use that as an excuse not to look into something,” I said.
“It’s not an excuse,” she said. “It’s a reality. I start sniffing around in another department’s case, they don’t take kindly to that.”
“What if it’s related to a case that’s local?”
“Like?”
“Ann Slocum.”
“Go on.”
“I don’t think my wife’s death was an accident. Which has got me wondering if maybe Ann’s death isn’t exactly what it seems. They were friends, our daughters played together, they were both involved in the same sideline, although to varying degrees. There are just a hell of a lot of coincidences here. And you know Darren’s been on edge about that call Kelly heard. I’m no cop, okay, but it’s kind of like houses. You walk into a place, it might look okay to most people, but I go in, I see things other people don’t see. Maybe the plaster’s wavy in one place, like it’s been patched over in a hurry to cover up where water’s getting in, or you feel the way the boards move beneath your work boots, and you know there’s no subflooring. You just know something’s not right. That’s how I feel about my wife’s accident. And Ann’s, too.”
“Do you have any evidence, Mr. Garber, that Ann Slocum’s death was not an accident?” she asked.
“Like what?”
“Something you’ve seen, or heard? Anything definitive that supports what you have to say?”
“Definitive?” I repeated. “I’m telling you what I believe. I’m telling you what I believe to be the truth. ”
“I need more than that,” Wedmore insisted.
“You don’t ever go on hunches?” I asked her.
“When they’re mine,” she said, and half smiled.
“Come on, are you telling me you don’t believe it, too? Ann Slocum goes out in the middle of the night after that crazy phone call and ends up falling into the harbor? And her husband accepts the whole thing without question?”
“He’s a Milford police officer,” Wedmore said. Was she really standing up for him, or playing devil’s advocate?
“Please,” I said. “I’ve heard about the allegations against him. And you must know he and his wife, they were running this knockoff purse business on the side. You don’t buy that stuff wholesale from Walmart, and you don’t get your start-up money from Citibank. You have to deal with some very shady people. The Slocums had other people involved in selling knockoff stuff, and not just purses. Prescription drugs, for one thing. And stuff for construction.”
It occurred to me then, for the first time, that the Slocums could easily have been the suppliers of the breaker panel parts that burned down that house of mine. I vaguely recalled Sally saying Theo had done some work for the Slocums once. And if the parts had actually come through Doug, there was a connection there, too. Betsy had met Ann at the purse party she’d thrown at our house. And it was likely they’d known each other before that.
“The day Sheila died,” I said, “she was doing a favor for Belinda. She was delivering cash for her to a man named Sommer. The money was to pay for all these goods. But it never got delivered. Sheila had her accident. And this Sommer guy, he’s a menacing son of a bitch. He came to see me the other day, and Arthur Twain says he’s a suspect in a triple homicide in New York.”
“What?” Wedmore had taken her notepad out and was scribbling away, but had looked up when I got to Twain and the triple homicide. “Who the hell is Arthur Twain and what triple homicide?”
I told her about my visit from the detective and what he’d told me.
“And then Sommer came to see you? Did he threaten you?”
“He thought I might have the money. That maybe it didn’t burn up in the accident.”
“Did it burn up in the accident?”
“No. I found it. In the house. Sheila’d never taken it with her.”
“Christ,” she breathed. “How much money are we talking here?” I told her. Her eyes widened. “And you gave it to him?”
“Belinda had already called me, hinting around, asking if there was a package with some cash in it, because I think Sommer had been leaning on her pretty hard to make good on the payment. So when I found the money, I gave it to Belinda to pay the guy off. I didn’t want any part of that money.”
Wedmore put down her pen. “Maybe that’s what the call was about.”
