The Accident Read Free Page B

more in it. I might as well have offered her mine, which a few hours later still sat on the counter. I wasn’t hungry.
    I was rattled. Running out of work. The fire. Sally’s dad.
    And even if I’d managed to recover my appetite late in the evening, the fact that Sheila still wasn’t home had put me on edge.
    Her class, which was held at the Bridgeport Business College, had ended more than an hour and a half ago, and it was only a thirty-minute drive home. Which made her an hour late. Not that long, really. There were any number of explanations.
    She could have stayed after class to have a coffee with someone. That had happened a couple of times. Maybe the traffic was bad on the turnpike. All you needed was someone with a flat tire on the shoulder to slow everything down. An accident would stop everything dead.
    That didn’t explain her not answering her cell, though. She’d been known to forget to turn it back on after class was over, but when that happened it went to voicemail right away. But the phone was ringing. Maybe it was tucked so far down in her purse she couldn’t hear it.
    I wondered whether she’d decided to go to Darien to see her mother and not made it back out to Bridgeport in time for her class. Reluctantly, I made the call.
    “Hello?”
    “Fiona, it’s Glen.”
    In the background, I heard someone whisper, “Who is it, love?” Fiona’s husband, Marcus. Technically speaking, Sheila’s stepfather, but Fiona had remarried long after Sheila had left home and settled into a life with me.
    “Yes?” she said.
    I told her Sheila was late getting back from Bridgeport, and I wondered if maybe her daughter had gotten held up at her place.
    “Sheila didn’t come see me today,” Fiona said. “I certainly wasn’t expecting her. She never said anything about coming over.”
    That struck me as odd. When Sheila mentioned maybe going to see Fiona, I’d figured she’d already bounced the idea off her.
    “Is there a problem, Glen?” Fiona asked icily. There wasn’t worry in her voice so much as suspicion. As if Sheila’s staying out late had more to do with me than it did with her.
    “No, everything’s fine,” I said. “Go back to bed.”
    I heard soft steps coming down from the second floor. Kelly, not yet in her pajamas, wandered into the kitchen. She looked at the still-wrapped lasagna on the counter and asked, “Aren’t you going to eat that?”
    “Hands off,” I said, thinking maybe I’d get my appetite back once Sheila was home. I glanced at the wall clock. Quarter past ten. “Why aren’t you in bed?”
    “Because you haven’t told me to go yet,” she said.
    “What have you been doing?”
    “Computer.”
    “Go to bed,” I said.
    “It was homework,” she said.
    “Look at me.”
    “In the beginning it was,” she said defensively. “And when I got it done, I was talking to my friends.” She stuck out her lower lip and blew away some blonde curls that were falling over her eyes. “Why isn’t Mom home?”
    “Her thing must have run late,” I said. “I’ll send her up to give you a kiss when she gets home.”
    “If I’m asleep, how will I know if I get it?”
    “She’ll tell you in the morning.”
    Kelly eyed me with suspicion. “So I might never get a kiss, but you guys would say I did.”
    “You figured it out,” I said. “It’s a scam we’ve been running.”
    “Whatever.” She turned, shuffled out of the kitchen, and padded back upstairs.
    I picked up the receiver and tried Sheila’s cell again. When her greeting cut in, I muttered “Shit” before it started recording and hit the off button.
    I went down the stairs to my basement office. The walls were wood-paneled, giving the place a dark, oppressive feel. And the mountains of paper on the desk only added to the gloominess. For years I’d been intending to either redo this room—get rid of the paneling and go for drywall painted off-white so it wouldn’t feel so small, for starters—or put