So would Darren and Belinda, for that matter. If they knew what had been going on.
I was so bone-tired I didn’t have the energy to think about these new revelations. I went home, and to bed.
Sleep came pretty quickly this time. That might have been a blessing, if it hadn’t been for the nightmare.
Sheila was in a chair, a kind of dentist’s chair, with gleaming chrome and red padding and straps and belts that secured her into it. And forced into her mouth was a funnel, jammed in so far it had to be pushing up against the back of her throat. Tipping into the funnel, supported from brackets bolted to the ceiling, a bottle the size of a refrigerator. A vodka bottle. Vodka was spilling out, overflowing the funnel, splashing onto the floor. It was like some alcoholic form of waterboarding. Sheila was struggling, trying to turn her head, and somehow I was in the room with her, screaming, telling them to stop, whoever it was that was doing this, screaming at the top of my lungs.
I woke up, tangled in the sheets, soaked through with perspiration.
I was pretty sure what had triggered the nightmare. It was those kids at the other table. Chugging beers. My mind kept coming back to the moment when three of the guys pinned their friend’s arms and started forcing him to drink even more alcohol.
They poured the beer down his throat.
The kid was going to get drunk on his own, anyway, that was pretty clear. But what if that hadn’t been his intention? What if he hadn’t wanted to get drunk? There wouldn’t have been a damn thing he could do about it.
You could make someone drink too much. You could force them to get drunk. It wasn’t all that complicated.
And then I thought, What if they’d put that kid in a car? What if they’d put him behind the wheel?
Jesus.
I sat up in bed.
Was it possible? Could it have happened that way?
What if Sheila had been compelled to drink too much? So much that she lost all sense of judgment and got into her car. Or what if someone put her in the car, after making her consume a large quantity of alcohol?
Was that so crazy? In a word, probably yes.
But the more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that it was at least possible. I thought, again, of the Sherlock Holmes line Edwin had quoted me. As far-fetched as this scenario was, it made more sense to me than the one I’d been led to believe, that Sheila had willfully gotten drunk and driven her car.
The trouble was, if I started to buy into a theory as wild as this, it raised a couple of very huge questions.
Who would force her to drink so much?
And why?
When the phone rang, I jumped. The digital clock read 2:03 a.m., for Christ’s sake. I had a feeling that it would be Joan. I wasn’t up for any more of her problems.
“Hello?” I said.
“Glen, it’s Sally.” She sounded frantic. “I’m so sorry to call you so late, but I don’t know what to do, I didn’t know who else to call or-”
“Sally, Sally, just hold on,” I said. I picked at my shirtfront, feeling how wet it was. “Just slow down and tell me what’s happened. Are you okay? What’s wrong?”
“It’s Theo.” She was crying. “I’m at his place and he isn’t here. I think something may have happened to him.”
FORTY-TWO
Sally gave me directions. My hand shook slightly as I wrote them down.
Theo lived in a trailer on an empty lot out in the countryside west of Trumbull. I took the Milford Parkway up to the Merritt and headed west. Once I was past Trumbull, I got off and went north on Sport Hill Road, then hung a left onto Delaware, at which point I phoned Sally’s cell. She’d warned me that the driveway into the property wasn’t easy to spot, especially at night, so if I called her then she’d be sure to be down by the side of the road so I’d see her.
It took me the better part of an hour to get up there. When I pulled over to the shoulder, it was coming up on 3:30 a.m. Sally was leaning against the back of her Chevy Tahoe, and when she saw headlights moving over off the road, she took a few steps, checking that it was me. I hit the inside light a second and waved so she didn’t have to worry that I was a stranger.
This really was the middle of nowhere. I didn’t see any other houses along this stretch of road.
She ran up to the truck and I gave her a reassuring hug as she fell into my arms. “There’s no one inside, but Theo’s truck is here,” she said.
Theo had left it at the bottom of the driveway, which explained why Sheila hadn’t pulled her Tahoe off the road. As I walked past I noticed Theo had not yet replaced the decoration I’d removed from below the rear bumper.
We walked up the two ruts that constituted Theo Stamos’s driveway. It was about a hundred feet up to the trailer, a fifty- or sixty-foot rust-streaked mobile home that had probably been manufactured in the seventies. It was set on an angle, the side with the two doors-one forward and one aft-facing northwest. There were lights on inside, providing enough illumination so we could see where we were walking.
“How long’s he lived here?” I asked.
“Long as I’ve known him,” Sally said. “That’s a couple of years. I don’t get where he would be. I talked to him on the phone a couple of hours ago.”
“At one in the morning?”
“Around then.”
“Kind of late for a phone call?”
“Okay, so, we kind of had a fight, you know?” She sighed. “Because of you.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I mean, Theo was pretty pissed at you, and he was going on about it to me, like it’s my fault or something because I work for you.”
“I’m sorry, Sally,” I said. I meant it.
“And then I find out that something has happened since then, with Doug.” Even in the darkness, I could make out her accusing look. “Something that might get Theo off the hook.”
I hadn’t gotten around to telling her about finding the bogus electrical parts in Doug’s truck. “I was going to fill you in on that,” I said.
“Doug had those fake parts? Boxes of them?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“Did it occur to you then that maybe it wasn’t Theo’s fault? I mean, if Doug had those parts now, couldn’t he have had them when the Wilson house burned down?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But regardless, Theo installed them, and he should have been able to spot the difference.”
“You’re impossible.”
“How did you hear about Doug?” I asked.
“He called me. He was so upset. Especially after you’ve been friends for so long, how he saved your life and everything.”
I winced mentally.
“And I told Theo,” Sally continued. “And he was super mad, he kept calling me about it, the last time around one, I guess. So I thought, I better come over here and try to calm him down.”
“And he wasn’t home?”
We’d arrived at the steps that led up to the trailer door.
“No,” Sally said. “But if he’s not here, why’s his truck here?”
“You’ve been inside?”
She nodded.
“You’ve got a key?”
Another nod. “But it was open when I got here.”
“He’s not in there passed out or anything?” She shook her head. “Let’s have a look just the same.”
I swung open the metal door and stepped inside the trailer. It was pretty spacious, as trailers go. I stepped into a living room, about ten by twelve. There was a couch and a couple of cushy chairs, a big-screen TV sitting atop a stereo unit, a scattering of DVDs and video games. There were half a dozen empty beer bottles around the room, but it wasn’t quite a frat house in here.
The kitchen, to the left of the partition as you walked in, was another story. The sink was overflowing with dirty dishes. There were several empty takeout containers littering the countertop, a couple of empty pizza boxes. Theo’s truck keys were on the kitchen table, next to a stack of invoices and other work-related papers. While the place was a mess, nothing looked particularly out of order. It wasn’t like there were upturned chairs and blood on the walls.