The Secret Between Us

by Barbara Delinsky

  “But if you drove Grace home—”

  “I didn’t drive her. I made her run. It isn’t more than half a mile. She’s on the track team.” Deborah wrangled her phone from a soggy pocket. “I needed her to babysit Dylan, but she’ll want to know what’s happening. Is this okay?” When he nodded, she pressed the speed-dial button.

  The phone had barely rung when Grace picked up. “Mom?”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m okay. How’s Mr. McKenna?”

  “He’s on his way to the hospital.”

  “Is he conscious?”

  “Not yet. Is Dylan okay?”

  “If being dead asleep on the sofa when I got here means okay, yes. He hasn’t moved.”

  So much for large eyes at the window, Deborah thought, and heard her ex-husband’s You worry too much, but how not to worry about a ten-year-old boy who had severe hyperopia and corneal dystrophy, which meant that he viewed much of his life through a haze. Deborah hadn’t planned on that, either.

  “Well, I’m still glad you’re with him,” she said. “Grace, I’m talking with the police officer now. I may run over to the hospital once we’re done. You’d probably better go to bed. You have that exam tomorrow.”

  “I’m going to be sick tomorrow.”

  “Grace.”

  “I am. I can’t think about biology right now. I mean, like, what a nightmare. If this is what happens when you drive, I’m not doing it. I keep asking myself where he came from. Did you see him on the side of the road?”

  “No. Honey, the officer’s waiting.”

  “Call me back.”

  “Yup.” Deborah closed the phone.

  The cruiser’s rear door opened and John Colby got into the backseat. “You’d think the rain’d take a break,” he said, adding, “Hard to see much on the road. I took pictures of everything I could, but the evidence won’t last long if it stays like this. I just called the state team. They’re on their way.”

  “State team?” Deborah asked, frightened.

  “The state police have an Accident Reconstruction Team,” John explained. “It’s headed by a credited reconstructionist. He knows what to look for more than we do.”

  “What does he look for?”

  “Points of impact, marks on the car. Where on the road the car hit the victim, where the victim landed. Skid marks. Burned rubber. He rebuilds the picture of what happened and how.”

  It was only an accident, she wanted to say. Bringing in a state team somehow made it more.

  Dismay must have shown on her face, because Brian said, “It’s standard procedure when there’s personal injury. Had it been midday with the sun out, we might have been able to handle it ourselves, but in weather like this, it’s important to work quickly, and these guys can do that.” He glanced at his notes. “How fast did you say you were going?”

  Again, Deborah might have easily said, Oh, I wasn’t the one at the wheel. It was Grace, and she wasn’t speeding at all. But that felt like she was trying to weasel out of something—to shift the blame—and besides, Grace was her firstborn, her alter ego, and already suffering from the divorce. Did the girl need more to trouble her? Calvin McKenna was hit either way. No laws had been broken either way.

  “The limit here is forty-five,” she said. “We couldn’t have been going more than thirty.”

  “Have you had any recent problems with the car?”

  “No.”

  “Brakes working?”

  “Perfectly.”

  “Were the high beams on?”

  She frowned, struggling with that one. She remembered reminding Grace, but high beams, low beams—neither cut far in rain like this.

  “They’re still on,” John confirmed from behind, “both working.” He put his hat back on his head. “I’m going out to tape off the lane. Last thing we need is someone driving by and fouling the scene.”

  Deborah knew he meant accident scene, but with a state team coming, she kept thinking crime scene. She was feeling upset about the driver issue, but the questions went on. What time had she left her house to get Grace? What time had Grace and she left Megan’s house? How much time had passed between the accident and Deborah’s calling it in? What had she done during that time? Had Calvin McKenna regained consciousness at any point?

  Deborah understood that this was all part of the investigation, but she wanted to be at the hospital or, if not there, at home with Grace and Dylan.

  She glanced at her watch. It was past eleven. If Dylan woke up, he would be frightened to find her still gone; he had been clingy since the divorce, and Grace wouldn’t be much help. She would be watching for Deborah in the dark—not from the pantry, which she saw as Dylan’s turf, but from the window seat in the living room that they rarely used now. There were ghosts in that room, family pictures from a happier time, in a crowd of frames, an arrogant display of perfection. Grace would be feeling desolate.

  A new explosion of light announced the arrival of the state team. As soon as Brian left the cruiser, Deborah opened her phone and called the hospital—not the general number, but one that went straight to the emergency room. She had admitting privileges and had accompanied patients often enough to know the night nurse. Unfortunately, all the nurse knew was that the ambulance had just arrived.

  Deborah called Grace. The girl picked up instantly. “Where are you?”

  “Still here. I’m sitting in the police car, while they check things outside.” She tried to sound casual. “They’re reconstructing the accident. It’s standard procedure.”

  “What are they looking for?”

  “Whatever they can find to explain why Mr. McKenna was where he was. How’s Dylan?”

  “Still sleeping. How’s Mr. McKenna?”

  “Just got to the hospital. They’ll be examining him now. Have you talked with Megan or any of the others?” There was the issue of Grace climbing into the car on the driver’s side, which might have been seen by her friends, reason to level with the police now.

  “They’re texting me,” Grace said in a shaky voice. “Stephie tried to call, but I didn’t answer. What if he dies, Mom?”

  “He won’t die. He wasn’t hit that hard. It’s late, Grace. You ought to go to bed.”

  “When will you be home?”

  “Soon, I hope. I’ll find out.”

  Closing the phone, Deborah tucked it in her pocket, pulled up her hood, and went out into the rain. She pulled the hood closer around her face and held it there with a dripping hand.

  A good part of the road had been sealed off with yellow tape, made all the more harsh now by floodlights. Two latex-gloved men were combing the pavement, stopping from 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, defe
ctive 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 bakery. That meant Jill would hear about the accident soon after she opened at six.

  Brian drove her home, pulling into the circular drive and, at her direction, past the fieldstone house to the shingled garage. She was exhausted and thoroughly wet, but as soon as she had closed the cruiser door and was sprinting forward hugging her medical bag and Grace’s books, she opened her phone and called the hospital. While she waited for an answer, she punched in the code for the garage. The door rumbled up as the call went through. “Joyce? It’s Deborah Monroe again. Any word on Calvin McKenna?”

  “Hold on, Dr. Monroe. Let me check.”

  Deborah dropped her armload and hung her slicker on a hook not far from the bay where her car should have stood. Leaving her flip-flops on the landing, she hurried inside, through the kitchen to the laundry room.

  “Dr. Monroe? He’s in stable condition. They’re running tests now, but the neurologist doesn’t see any evidence of vertebral fracture or paralysis. He has a broken hip. They’ll deal with that in the operating room once this last scan is done.”

  “Is he conscious?” Deborah asked, back in the kitchen, drying her arms with a towel.

  “Yes, but not communicating.”

  “He can’t speak?”

  “They suspect he can but won’t. They can’t find a physical explanation.”

  Deborah had run the towel over her face and was lowering it when she spotted Grace in the corner. “Trauma, maybe?” she speculated. “Thanks, Joyce. Would you do me a favor? Let me know if there’s any change?”

  Still dressed, Grace was hunched over, biting her nail. Deborah pulled the hand away and drew her close.

  “Where were you?” the girl asked meekly.

  “Same place.”

  “All this time?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Why did the police drive you home?”

  “Because they don’t want me driving my car until they’ve examined it in daylight.”

  “Isn’t the cop who drove you home coming in?”

  Deborah drew back to study her face. They weren’t quite the same height, but almost. “No. They’re done for the night.”

  Grace’s voice went up a notch. “How can they be done?”

  “They’ve asked their questions.”

  “Asked you, not me. What did you tell them?”

  “I said we were driving home in the rain, visibility was terrible, and Mr. McKenna ran out from nowhere. They’ll have to go back along the road in the morning to see if there’s anything they missed that the rain didn’t get. I’ll file a report at the station tomorrow and get the car. Where’s Dylan?”

  “He went to bed. He must have thought you were home. What do we tell him, Mom? I mean, he’ll know something happened when he sees your car missing, and besides, it was Mr. McKenna. This is such my luck that it was my teacher. I mean, like, I’m so bad at American history, people will think it was deliberate. What do I tell my friends?”

  “You are not bad at U.S. history.”

  “I shouldn’t be in the AP section. I don’t have a prayer of placing out when I take the test in June. I suck.”

  If she did, it was news to Deborah. “You tell them that we couldn’t see Mr. McKenna in the rain, and that we weren’t going very fast.”

  “You keep saying we.”

  Yes. Deborah realized that. “I was the licensed driver in the car. I was the one responsible.”

  “But I was the one at the wheel.”

  “You were my responsibility.”

  “If you’d been driving, the accident wouldn’t have happened.”

  “Not true, Grace. I didn’t see Mr. McKenna, and I was watching the road as closely as if my own foot was on the gas.”

  “But it wasn’t your foot on the gas.”

  Deborah paused, but only for a minute. Slowly, she said, “The police assume it was.”

  “And you’re not telling them the truth? Mom, that’s lying.”

  “No,” she said, sorting it out even as she spoke. “They drew their own conclusion. I just haven’t corrected them.”

  “Mom.”

  “You’re a juvenile, Grace,” Deborah reasoned. “You were only driving on a permit, which means that you were driving on my license, which makes me responsible. I’ve been driving for twenty-two years and have a spotless record. I can weather this better than you can.” When Grace opened her mouth to protest again, Deborah pressed a hand to her lips. “This is right, sweetie. I know it is. We can’t control the weather, and we can’t control what other people do. We were compliant with every law in the book and did our very best to stop. There was no negligence involved on our part.”

  “What if he dies?”

  “He won’t.”

  “But what if he does? That’s murder.”

  “No,” Deborah argued, though the word murder gave her a chill, “it would be vehicular homicide, but since we did absolutely nothing wrong, there won’t be any charges.”

  “Is that what Uncle Hal said?”

  Hal Trutter was the husband of Deborah’s friend Karen, and while neither he nor Karen were actually related to the Monroes, they had known the children since birth. Their daughter, Danielle, was a year ahead of Grace.

  Deborah saw Karen often. Lately, she had felt more awkward with Hal, but that was a whole other story.

  “I haven’t talked with him yet,” she told Grace, “but I know he’d agree. And
anyway, Mr. McKenna is not going to die.”

  “What if he’s crippled for life?”

  “You’re getting carried away with this, Grace,” Deborah warned, though she harbored the same fears. The difference was that she was the mother. She couldn’t panic.

  “I saw his leg,” the girl wailed. “It was sticking out all wrong, like he fell from the top of a building.”

  “But he didn’t fall from the top of a building. He is definitely alive, the nurse just told me so, and broken bones can be fixed.”

  Grace’s face crumbled. “It was awful. I will never forget that sound.”

  Nor would Deborah. She could still hear it—that thud—hours after the fact. Seeking purchase, she clutched Grace’s shoulders. “I need a shower, sweetie. I’m chilled, and my legs are filthy.” Keeping an arm around the girl, she walked her up the stairs and down the hall. In addition to the three children’s rooms, the third for a last child that Deborah and Greg might have had, there was a family room that had built-in desks, a sofa, matching armchairs, and a flat-screen TV. After Greg left, Deborah had spent so many nights here with the kids that she finally just moved into the third bedroom.

  Grace was biting her nails again by the time they reached her door. Taking the hand from her mouth, Deborah looked at her daughter for a long, silent moment. “Everything will be fine,” she whispered before letting her go.

  The texting had stopped before her mother got home, for which Grace was grateful. What could she tell Megan? Or Stephie? Or Becca? My mom is taking the blame for something I did? My mom is lying so I won’t be arrested? My mom could go to jail if Mr. McKenna dies?

  Grace had thought the divorce was bad. This was worse.

  Deborah had hoped that the shower would calm her, but warm, clean, and finally dry, she could think more clearly, and a clearer mind simply magnified what had happened. The sound of the rain didn’t help. It pounded the roof much as it had the car, and she remembered another night, the one when her mother had died. It had been pouring then, too.

  Creeping into Dylan’s room, she knelt by the bed. His eyes were closed, dark lashes lying on cheeks that wouldn’t be smooth much longer. He was a gentle child with more than his share of worry, and while she knew that there were cures for his vision problems, her heart ached.