The Secret Between Us Read Free Page B

time to time to carefully pick up and bag what they found. A photographer was taking pictures of Deborah’s car, both its general position on the road and the dent in the front. The dent wasn’t large. More noticeable was the shattered headlight.
    “Oh my,” Deborah said, seeing that for the first time.
    John joined her, bending over to study what remained of the glass. “This looks to be the only damage,” he said and shot her a quick glance. “Think you can dig out your registration so I can record it?”
    She slipped behind the wheel, adjusted the seat, opened the glove box, and handed him the registration, which he carefully recorded. Restowing it, she joined him outside.
    “I didn’t think of damage,” she said, pulling her hood forward again. “I was only concerned with what we’d hit. We thought it was an animal.” She peered up at him. “I’d really like to drive to the hospital, John. How long will these fellows take?”
    “Another hour or two,” he said, watching the men work. “This is their only shot. Rain continues like this and come morning, everything’ll be washed out. But anyway, you can’t take your car. We have to tow it.”
    “Tow it? It’s perfectly driveable.”
    “Not until our mechanic checks it out. He has to make sure nothing was wrong that might have caused the accident—brake malfunction, defective wipers, worn tires.” He looked at her then. “Don’t worry. We’ll drive you home tonight. You have another car there, don’t you?”
    She did. It was Greg’s BMW, the one he had driven to the office, parked in the Reserved for President spot, and kept diligently waxed. He had loved that car, but it, too, was abandoned. When he left for Vermont, he had been in the old Volkswagen Beetle that had sat under a tarp in the garage all these years.
    Deborah didn’t like the BMW. Greg had bought it at the height of his success. In hindsight, that was the beginning of the end.
    Folding her arms over her chest, she watched the men work. They covered every inch of the road, the roadside, and the edge of the forest beyond where Calvin McKenna had landed. More than once, feeling useless and
despising
the rain, she wondered why she was there and not at the hospital helping out.
    The answer, of course, was that she was a family practitioner, not a trauma specialist. And it was her car that had caused harm.
    The reality of that loomed larger by the minute. She was responsible—
she
was reponsible—for the car, for Grace, for the accident, for Calvin McKenna. If she could do nothing for him and nothing for the car, she needed to be home with her children.
             
    Grace huddled in
the dark. Each time her cell phone rang, she jumped, held it up, studied the panel. She answered if her mother was calling, but she couldn’t talk to anyone else. Megan had already tried. Twice. Same with Stephie. Now they were texting.
    WER R U ? TM ME !
    R U THER ? HELLO ??
    When Grace didn’t reply, the focus changed.
    DUZ YR MM NO ABT TH BR? DD SHE SMLL IT ?
    R U IN TRBL ? U ONLY HD 1 .
    But Grace hadn’t had only one beer, she had
two,
and even though they were spaced three hours apart, and she hadn’t felt high and probably wouldn’t even have blown a .01 if she had been breathalyzed, she shouldn’t have driven.
    She didn’t know why she had. She didn’t know why these so-called friends of hers—
alleged
friends, as in provable but not proved—were even
mentioning
beer in a TM. Didn’t they
know
everything could be traced?
    UOK ? Y WONT U TALK ?
    She wouldn’t talk, because her mother was still with the police and Mr. McKenna was at the hospital and it was
all her fault
—and nothing her friends could say would make it better.

Chapter 2

    It was another hour before the state agents dismantled their lights, and a few minutes more before a tow truck arrived. Deborah knew the driver. He worked at the service station in the center of town and was a frequent customer at her sister’s