“Maybe you should call the police,” I said coldly.
“No! No, listen, if I can get the money to them, it’ll all be over. I don’t want the police involved. George, he doesn’t even know I’ve been doing this. He’d go crazy if he knew I’d gotten involved in all this.”
“So what the hell happened?” I said, as much to myself as Belinda. “She didn’t make the trip into Manhattan, or if she did, she went without the money. And she didn’t make it to her class or-”
“That class,” Belinda said. “She was liking it so much at first, but that instructor-she was getting kind of fed up with him.”
“You talking about Allan Butterfield? Was he calling her a lot?”
“Yeah. I don’t think it was about homework. Sheila would look at her phone, see it was him, and ignore it.”
All those missed calls on Sheila’s cell. The ones she either didn’t hear or chose not to pick up. “Maybe that’s why she didn’t go to the class,” I said. “But where did she go instead?”
“I guess… I guess she went somewhere to drink,” Belinda said, gently. “I mean, that is kind of what happened. Maybe everything that was going on, she was so stressed out, she just needed to take the edge off, you know? God, I feel like I’m there.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Glen, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry about everything that’s happened. I’m sorry I involved her in any of this. But we don’t know that it has anything to do with what happened later. Maybe… maybe she got scared. She had second thoughts about selling the prescriptions and maybe she went to a bar and-”
“Shut up, Belinda. I’ve heard all I want to hear. You’re a hell of a friend. First you get Sheila involved in this, and then you help the Wilkinsons. You’re the best.”
“Glen,” she whimpered. “I answered your questions. I’ve told you everything I know. I… I have to get that money.”
“I’ll pop it in the mail for you,” I said, and ended the call.
THIRTY-THREE
I drove past Belinda’s house on the way to the thruway. There was no one home, so I stuffed the envelope through the mail slot in the door and heard it drop on the other side. I’d considered, briefly, slapping some stamps on it and letting Belinda take her chances on the U.S. postal system to get her money back. I was pissed off enough with her to do it, but in the end, common sense prevailed.
Maybe, considering my circumstances, and a pending lawsuit that could wipe me out financially, I should have kept the cash and said nothing. Every little bit helps. But it wasn’t mine, and I believed Belinda when she said Sheila had been delivering it for her. The cash was tainted. I didn’t want it, and I didn’t want any more visits from Sommer.
In one way, the cash had served its purpose. It had leveraged information out of Belinda.
I now knew what Sheila had been up to, what her plan had been to make some extra cash. Whatever Sheila was starting to get mixed up in, she’d been in way over her head. She wouldn’t knowingly have gotten involved with someone like Sommer. She’d probably never even met him. She’d had good instincts, and if she’d met this guy, she’d have had nothing further to do with him.
I believed that in my heart.
The more I learned about Sheila’s last day, the more convinced I was becoming that she had not gone somewhere to drown her sorrows, then gotten in her car and killed two people and herself, despite how things looked.
There had to be more to it than that. And I was wondering who knew what that was. Sommer? Slocum?
I had more than a few things to talk about with Detective Wedmore next time I saw her.
On the way to Darien, Kelly asked, “How long do I have to go away for?”
“Not long, I hope.”
“What about school? Am I going to be in trouble missing school?”
“If you end up being away more than a few days, I’ll get some work from your teacher.”
She frowned. “What’s the point of being away if you have to do work?”
I let that one go. “Look, there’s something very serious I have to discuss with you.” She studied my face carefully. I felt a pang of guilt. There’d been so many serious things to discuss the last few weeks that she must have wondered how many more there could be. “You need to be really, really careful.”
“I’m always careful. Like when I cross the street and stuff?”
“That, sure. But you can’t go off doing stuff on your own. You always stay with Grandma or Marcus. No wandering off. No riding your bike or-”
“My bike’s at home.”
“I’m just saying, you have to stick close to Grandma and Marcus. All the time.”
“Fine. This doesn’t sound like it’s going to be much fun.”
As we were coming off the thruway into Darien, there was a woman standing at the bottom of the ramp. She was probably only in her thirties, but looked twice that. By her feet were a ratty-looking backpack and a red plastic basket, the kind the supermarkets have if you’re only getting half a dozen items. It had a few water bottles in it and what looked like half a loaf of Wonder Bread and a jar of peanut butter.
She was holding a sign that read, NEED CLOTHES JOB.
“Jeez,” I said.
“She was there the other day,” Kelly said. “I asked Grandma if we could give her some clothes but she said it’s not our responsibility to solve everybody’s problems.”
That sounded like Fiona. But there was some truth to it. “It’s hard to make things right for everyone.”
“But if everybody helped just one person, lots of people would get helped. Mom used to say that. Grandma has lots of clothes she doesn’t even wear anymore.”
“A couple of walk-in closets’ worth,” I said.
We were stopped at the light and the woman eyed me through the windshield.
“Can I give her something?” Kelly asked.
“Don’t put your window down.” The woman’s eyes seemed dead. She wasn’t expecting me to give her anything. Out of every hundred cars that got stopped at this light, how many offered her anything? Two? One? None? What had brought her to this point? Had her life always been this way? Or had she, at one time, had one like ours? A house, a family, a regular job. A husband, maybe. Kids. And if she had known a life like that, was there one event that started the unraveling? Did she lose her job? Did her husband lose his? Did their car die and they had no money to fix it, and couldn’t get to work? Did they fall behind on their mortgage and lose their house? And once, having lost it, were they so far behind the eight ball that they could never recover? And it had come to this? Standing at the end of the off-ramp, begging for help?
Couldn’t any of us end up this way when one part of our life went horribly wrong, and then the dominoes started to fall?
I fished a five-dollar bill out of my pocket and powered down my window. The woman came around the front of the car, took the bill from my hand without saying a word, and went back to her station.
Kelly said, “You can’t get anything for five bucks.”
“Tell me what’s going on.” Fiona stood in her oversized kitchen, with its skylights and marble countertops and Sub-Zero appliances, as Kelly and Marcus talked in the living room.
I told her about the bullet that had gone through Kelly’s window. “Between that, and this thing with Darren Slocum pestering Kelly, it made sense to get her out of town. Just take her somewhere fun, that’s all I ask.”
“My God, Glen, this is all horrible! And why is Ann’s husband bugging Kelly?”