I touched the top of her head. “I know. She’s a good friend, and you guys need each other.”
“She wants me to come over tomorrow night. Maybe for pizza. But not a sleepover. I’m never going on another sleepover for the rest of my life.”
“Good plan,” I said. “I guess you could go over for a visit. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”
“What job sites are we hitting tomorrow?”
Rona Wedmore dropped by the office to see me. She had her arm in a sling.
“I thought it was your shoulder,” I said.
“They say it’ll heal better if I don’t keep moving my arm around. I saw you on the news, yelling at that news lady as you came out of your house. That was smooth.”
I smiled.
“My department’s going to give you some kind of award,” she said. “I tried to talk them out of it, told them you were some kind of nut, but they’re insisting.”
“I really don’t want anything,” I said. “I’d like to forget about all of it. I just want to move on.”
“And what about your wife? Are you able to move on there?”
I leaned up against a filing cabinet and folded my arms across my chest. “I don’t know that I have much choice. All I can figure is, she got into something so deep, she went off the deep end that night. She acted in a way she never had before because she was in a mess like she’d never been in before. But she should have talked to me about it. We could have worked things out.”
Wedmore nodded sympathetically.
“Do you believe things happen for a reason?” she asked.
“Sheila did. I’ve never really subscribed to that.”
“Yeah, I’m like you. At least, I used to be. Now, I’m not so sure. I think I got shot for a reason.”
I unfolded my arms, slid my hands down into my pockets. “I can’t think of any good reason to get shot, unless it’s going to get you off work for the next six months at full pay.”
“Yeah, well.” She looked away from me for a second. Then she said, “When I got admitted to the hospital, they went and got my husband, brought him down. You know what he did when he saw me?”
I shook my head.
“He said, ‘You okay?’ ”
It didn’t seem like much of a story to me, but it seemed like the most important thing in the world to her.
“I think I should take a cake,” Kelly said. “If Emily’s buying the pizza, I should bring dessert.”
“Okay.”
It was the next day, and I had talked to Janice on the phone to see whether it was really okay for Kelly to come over. Janice said Emily had done nothing all day but talk about her best friend coming for a visit.
I offered to stop at a traditional bakery on our way over, but Kelly insisted we go to the grocery store and get a frozen Sara Lee chocolate cake. “It’s Emily’s favorite. Why are you rubbing your head, Daddy?”
“I’ve been having a lot of headaches the last couple of days. I think it’s just stress, you know?”
“I get that.”
Emily had been watching for us and ran out of the house as we pulled in to the driveway. Janice followed her out. The girls threw their arms around each other and ran into the house.
Janice stayed outside to speak with me. “I want to thank you, for what you did, stopping that man who shot Darren.”
“I was kind of looking out for my own neck, too.”
“Still,” she said, touching my arm briefly.
“What’s going to happen to him?”
“He’s resigned from the force, and he’s got a good lawyer. He’s offered to tell everything he knows, about what Sommer did, about what he knows about the people he worked for. I’m hoping, if he still gets jail time, that it’ll only be a few months. After that, he can look after Emily. He loves her more than anything in the world.”
“Sure. Well. I hope it works out, for Emily’s sake. I’ll come back for Kelly in a couple of hours. That be okay?”
“That’d be fine.”
I got back in the truck, but I didn’t head home. There was one other stop I needed to make.
About five minutes later I was parked out front of a different house. I walked up to the door and rang the bell.
Sally Diehl opened the door a few seconds later. She was wearing rubber kitchen gloves, and was carrying a caulking gun.
“We need to talk,” I said.
SIXTY-TWO
“You have to come back,” I said. “I need you.”
“I told you, I quit,” Sally said.
“When I was in a jam, when I needed help the other day when I was going for Kelly, you were the one I called. You’re the one who always knows how to get things done. You’ve always been the go-to girl, Sally. I don’t want to lose you. Garber Contracting is falling apart and I need you to keep it together.”
She stood there, brushed back some hair that had fallen across her eyes.
I said, “What’s with the caulking gun?”
“I’m trying to finish up around the tub. Theo did this new bathroom but he never quite finished it.”
“Let me come in.”
Sally looked at me for another second, then opened the door wide. “Where’s Kelly?”
“She’s at Emily’s. They’re having some pizza.”
“That’s the kid whose dad got shot?”
“That’s the one.”
Sally asked what had actually happened at Fiona’s house and I filled her in, even though it wasn’t something I liked to talk about.
“Jesus,” she said. She’d gotten rid of the caulking gun, peeled off the gloves, and taken a seat at the kitchen table. I was leaning up against the counter.
“Yeah, no kidding,” I said. I rubbed my temples with my fingers. “God, I’m getting such a headache.”
“So Marcus killed Ann?” Sally asked.
“Yeah.”
“And Sheila, too?”
“I don’t know. Maybe, when he recovers enough that he can talk again, he’ll be willing to tell us everything, although I’m not counting on it. I’m starting to come around to the fact that, you know, maybe Sheila did it.”
Something seemed to soften in Sally’s face.
“I tried to tell you,” she said. “But you haven’t been in the right place.”
“I know.” I shook my head. It was still throbbing. “What about Theo?”
“Funeral was yesterday. It was horrible, Glen, honestly. Everybody crying. I thought his brother was going to throw himself on top of the casket when they lowered it into the ground.”
“I should have been there.”
“No,” she said firmly. “You shouldn’t have.”
“I regret the things I said, Sally. Maybe Theo meant exactly what he was saying when he was writing that note to me, that he was sorry. I turned it into something else.” I rubbed my head. “You got any Tylenols or anything? My head feels like it’s about ready to explode.”
“In the drawer right behind your butt,” she said.
I swiveled around, pulled out the drawer, and found a veritable pharmacy in there. Different pain remedies, bandages, syringes. “You got an entire Rite Aid in here,” I said.
“It’s a lot of stuff for my dad. I haven’t gotten around to clearing it out yet,” Sally said. “I’m going to have to
