The Secret Between Us

by Barbara Delinsky

“Why?” Deborah asked, but she knew what was coming. Her gut had told her that this was the root of the problem.

  “He sleeps like a log. He never used to, Deborah. He used to be the one who was up a lot during the night. He said he was always thinking about work—just couldn’t turn it off. Is he suddenly not thinking about work? And it’s not like he’s exhausted from making love. We rarely do it. And today? I haven’t been able to reach him. Lately, I never can reach him. I’ve been testing him, calling for little reasons, just to see, and I leave messages. I don’t necessarily ask him to call me back—he hates nagging—but you’d think he’d feel that at least some things I’m asking deserve an answer. Either he’s legitimately busy, or he doesn’t want to talk to me.”

  Deborah wanted to say, fuck him, which was fine and dandy for her, but didn’t help Karen. So she said, “I don’t think you need to worry about a brain tumor. Your headache’s from tension.”

  “This isn’t a joke.”

  “Neither is cancer, and that’s always a concern, but I don’t think that is what’s causing your headache.”

  “You think it’s from Hal,” said Karen. “But I’m probably being ridiculous. You said it yourself—he’s a good-looking man. It’s just that I keep in shape and color my hair to hide the gray and spend a fortune on moisturizers to make my skin glow, and when he doesn’t seem to notice, I imagine something’s wrong. It’s not like there’ve been any more calls. I’m sure you were right about that, too—just some woman who wishes she could have him and, since she can’t, she wants to cause trouble.” Her voice changed. “I’m imagining this. Absolutely.” She sighed. “Okay, I feel better. Thanks, Deb.”

  Deborah felt slightly ill. She knew Hal was having an affair, knew it as much as she could without hard evidence, but she couldn’t say anything to Karen. What good would it do? And if she was wrong?

  Hal didn’t return her call, either.

  Greg did. His response to Dylan’s diagnosis was to repeatedly ask how Deborah could have missed the signs of trouble. He was upset. He needed someone to blame. But she was feeling guilty enough on her own. I asked; he denied it. I asked again; he denied it again. I kept a close eye on him, but at what point does my own concern cause his? And what harm was the small delay? Dylan’s glasses address his hyperopia. There is nothing to be done about corneal dystrophy until he’s old enough for a transplant.

  “All valid points,” Greg acknowledged, “except that if you’d told me sooner, I could have talked with him. You need to share these things, Deborah. I’m still his father.”

  “Well, now you know,” she said, frustrated. “By the way—not that you asked how I could talk so freely—Dylan and Grace are at Jill’s. I’m on my way to pick up Lívia’s dinner and bring it back there. Jill’s pregnant and has to be in bed.”

  “Jill’s pregnant?” he asked. “Good for Jill. Not getting married, I gather? She’s some free spirit. Maybe I married the wrong sister.”

  Deborah was tired enough to explode. “She was sixteen when we met, which means that you’d have been charged with statutory rape.” She couldn’t resist adding, “You’d have been labeled a dirty old man for life—and besides, you didn’t want a free spirit back then. You wanted a very stable woman, or so you told me, unless you were lying through your teeth. And what makes you think my sister would have even wanted you?”

  Deborah stopped herself, realizing that the anger was still there—that her divorce was yet another unresolved issue in her life—when she turned a corner and spotted a gray car parked in front of her house.

  “Can we discuss this another time?” she asked tensely. Before Greg could answer, she said, “Gotta run,” and ended the call. She studied the car as she cruised slowly down the street. There were two men in the front. She pulled into the driveway, but didn’t open the garage door. Cell phone in hand, she climbed out. She waited while the two men did the same.

  Both wore suits. The man in the lead was slightly older and heavier. “Dr. Monroe?” he asked in a pleasant enough voice.

  “Yes?”

  “My name’s Guy Fielding. My partner’s Joe McNair. We’re detectives with the D.A.’s office. Wonder if we could talk with you for a minute?”

  Deborah swore silently. She didn’t want to talk with them. Grace would absolutely lose it when she found out. But her options were few. She could refuse to talk, but that would be a sign of guilt. She could get back in her car and lock the doors, but that was childish. She could try to drive off, but then they might follow her.

  “Do you have ID?” she finally asked.

  Both reached into their jackets and produced badges. The pictures matched the faces.

  Politely, she asked, “Could you tell me what this is about?”

  “There was an accident last week. We have a few questions.”

  “I believe I answered everything that the police asked me at the time.”

  “That’s correct. We’ve read the report you filed. We just have a few more.”

  She nodded. Without asking permission, she opened her phone and tried calling Hal. His office was closed, and he didn’t answer his cell. She ended the call without leaving a message, and tried John. Carla patched her through to him at home.

  “Hey, it’s Deborah. I have two men here at my place. They say they’re with the D.A.’s office.”

  “State police detectives assigned to the D.A.’s office,” Guy Fielding put in.

  Deborah repeated it for John. “Do I have to talk with them?”

  “No, but you probably should,” John said. “I checked with the D.A. after you called me before. You can be honest with them. There’s nothing to hide.”

  If only he knew. The thought of talking with the state police was frightening.

  Raising a hand to keep the detectives where they were, she went to the far side of the driveway and said quietly into the phone, “I don’t understand why they’re here. I thought the accident report cleared me.”

  “The widow went to the D.A. and made a complaint.”

  A civil suit. Deborah hadn’t wanted to think about it when her father mentioned their call. “A complaint about what?”

  “She’s upset the local police haven’t filed charges, so she went to the D.A. She was waiting at his office when it opened this morning. He told her he was familiar with the case since it involved a death, but that the decision to charge anyone is made at the local level. She’s claiming a cover-up. No surprise there.”

  “There was no cover-up.”

  “We know that,” John said, sounding uncharacteristically perturbed, but how often had he been at the wrong end of an investigation, Deborah wondered? “It was the state team that cleared you.”

  “Yet on her say-so alone the D.A. can file charges?”

  “No. That’s getting ahead of things. He won’t do anything unless there’s cause. His job is to take a fresh look at the case. If we had found you negligent, she’d likely have been satisfied. With the recon team just now clearing you, the timing is pretty coincidental.”

  There was another coincidence Deborah didn’t want to think about. She had talked with Tom last night, and the widow had run to the D.A. this morning. “What about her husband’s bizarre behavior?” Deborah asked John. “The D.A. should be wondering about him.”

  “He is. But talking with you is part of the process. His men’ll be talking with me and will probably want to talk with Grace.”

  Dread settled in the pit of her stomach. “Why?”

  “She was in the car. We didn’t interview her, so this is probably good.”

  Deborah didn’t think it was good at all. Grace was shaky enough without official questions.

  “Do I need Hal here?” she asked. For all his faults, Hal did know the law.

  “Can you reach him?” John asked.

  “No.”

  “Then talk with the men now. You can be honest.”

  Deborah nodded. “Okay.” She would gladly talk with them if they would spare Grace.<
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  Ending the call, she walked back to the men.

  Guy Fielding gestured toward the house. “Would you like to go inside?”

  Absolutely not, Deborah thought. She wasn’t opening her home to men who were looking to prolong an agony that was very personal in so many ways.

  “This is fine,” she said and, pushing her hair off her face, leaned against the car. “It’s a nice night.” And while the sun had dropped low enough to silhouette the trees, there was still a lingering warmth.

  “I take it that was John Colby,” the lead detective said.

  Too late, she realized that she had spoken his name into the phone, not a wise move if the charge was a cover-up. That said, she hadn’t done anything wrong, not where John was concerned.

  “He’s our police chief,” she explained. “He’s been in charge of the investigation here. He verified that you are who you say.”

  “Do you talk with him often?”

  “No more so than anyone else in a town this small.”

  “But you have talked with him about the accident.”

  “Yes,” she said. “He was at the scene right after it happened. He asked questions. I answered them. I saw him again the next day when I went to the police station to file an accident report.”

  “And you talked then?”

  “About filing the report. He gave me the form and told me how many copies I needed to file.”

  “Has he been here at your house since the accident?”

  “We’re not social friends.”

  “No, but has he been here?”

  She tried to think back. The days since the accident were starting to blur. “He came here on the day of Calvin McKenna’s funeral. There had been an…incident at the cemetery. He wanted to know what happened.”

  “Your presence upset the widow,” the second detective put in.

  Deborah guessed that Mrs. McKenna had given them quite an account. “The funeral was open to the town. I wanted to go.”

  “So John Colby came here afterward,” Fielding went on. “How did he find out what happened?”

  “This is a small town. And anyway, one of his men was at the service.”

  “You didn’t call him yourself?”

  “Absolutely not. It was a humiliating experience. I didn’t want to talk about it. All I wanted to do was climb in a hole.” Tom’s visit had helped. Then, and in every subsequent talk, he had been reasonable. But he had been asking about John last night. More than simple curiosity?

  “Were you angry?” the second detective asked.

  She returned to the day of the funeral. “At John?”

  “At the McKennas.”

  “No. I was embarrassed and hurt. They were grieving. I could understand what they were feeling.” She frowned. “Excuse me, but I’m confused. Where are you headed with these questions?” John had told her. She wanted them to confirm it.

  But the first detective simply asked, “Were there other times you talked with John since the accident?”

  “Yes. I was anxious about the reconstruction team’s report. I called him several times to see if it was in.”

  “Couldn’t your lawyer have done that?” asked the second detective.

  “My lawyer?”

  “Hal Trutter. Did he call John, too?”

  “You’ll have to ask him that,” Deborah said. She wasn’t speaking for Hal. “And he is a personal friend,” she specified to differentiate their relationship from the one she had with John. “I haven’t hired a lawyer.”

  “He’s also a friend of John Colby’s.”

  “They play poker together.”

  The lead detective said, “Let’s get back to the chief of police. I understand he’s a patient of yours.”

  “Yes. He and his wife. My dad’s been practicing in Leyland for more than thirty-five years. I don’t know exactly when John and Ellen signed on, but they go back a ways. John sees my dad, I see Ellen.”

  “Why’s that?” asked the second detective, the bad cop of the pair.

  Deborah looked at him. “Men are often more comfortable being examined by a man, women by a woman.”

  “Then you’ve never examined John?”

  Again she frowned. “What does this have to do with the accident?” She relented, but not to the point of discussing medical issues. “I understand that the widow is upset. She wants to blame someone for her husband’s death.”

  “Did Colby tell you that?”

  He had. But so had Tom—Tom, whom she had told about the poker connection; Tom, whom she had told about begging John for the accident report; Tom, whom she’d thought she could trust.

  “John didn’t have to tell me,” she said. “I’m good at connecting the dots. Calvin McKenna’s brother was the one who led me away from the funeral. He accused me of hoping for a free pass.”

  “Have you gotten one?” asked the second detective.

  Deborah’s patience was wearing thin. She was disappointed in Tom, frightened by a civil suit, terrified for Grace. She only wanted to get Lívia’s dinner and head back to Jill’s. “You wouldn’t be asking that if you’d seen the state police team at the accident scene that night. They looked at everything. They photographed everything. Don’t you trust their report?”

  “Their report wouldn’t reflect possible collusion between you and the police chief.”

  “And is that your conclusion?” she asked. When Guy Fielding raised a mediating hand between them, she moderated her voice, but only slightly. She was furious. “The state team found no wrongdoing on my part. The report also states that the quote unquote victim wasn’t running on the road before my car came along. He came straight out of the woods and into the path of my car. Are you investigating that? Frankly, I’m starting to wonder who the victim is. My daughter and I have been through hell—because a man ran irresponsibly on a night when visibility was nil. My opinion,” she said and looked from one to the other, “is that you’re barking up the wrong tree.”

  “And where should we look?” the lead detective asked with what Deborah chose to think was respect.

  “The widow. Ask her what her husband was doing there that night. Ask her why he wasn’t wearing reflective gear, and why he wasn’t carrying ID saying he was on a drug that could cause lethal bleeding. Ask her why she’s so desperate to pin his death on someone else.”

  The gray car had barely turned the corner when Deborah called Karen. “Is Hal home?”

  “Not yet, but he did call. One of his clients is being indicted. He’s been working with the prosecutors for months to avoid this, but now the client has panicked. Hal’s with him.” She paused. “When I hear stories like this, I feel so guilty imagining the things I did. Tell me I’m stupid, Deborah.”

  “You are not stupid,” Deborah said. “You’re human.”

  Her voice must have held more urgency than the words warranted, because Karen asked, “Is something wrong?”

  All Deborah could say was, “Cal McKenna’s widow went to the D.A. Will you have Hal call when he gets in?”

  “Oh, sweetie, I’m sorry. I will.”

  “On my cell.”

  “Definitely,” Karen said.

  Hal’s excuse to Karen might be totally valid, Deborah realized, but she wasn’t in the mood for excuses. She phoned his cell again. This time, she left a message. “I don’t know where in the hell you are, Hal, or who you’re with, but if I don’t hear back from you within an hour, I’m getting another lawyer.”

  With her anger focused on Hal, she went inside, grabbed Lívia’s pot of chicken stew, carried it to the car, and put it on the floor. She drove back to Jill’s with an eye on the clock, determined not to say anything to Grace until she’d spoken to Hal. One hour. That was all she would give him.

  He took forty minutes, and the timing couldn’t have been worse. Deborah was reheating the stew in Jill’s kitchen, distracted enough to have asked Dylan three times how he was feeling. Grace happened to be nearest the phone when it rang. She saw H
al’s name.

  “What’s he want?” she asked, passing Deborah the phone.

  Deborah couldn’t lie. She had done that once, and it had become a wedge between Grace and her. “The widow is making trouble,” she told the girl, then asked Hal, “Where’ve you been?” She sounded bitchy and didn’t care.

  “Client emergency. What’s up?”

  Walking into the living room, she told him about the detectives. In response to his prodding, she related as much of the conversation as she could.

  “They’re fishing,” he said.

  “For what? The accident team report clears me, doesn’t it? What more could they possibly find?”

  “The widow claims the local police monkeyed with the evidence.”

  “But John didn’t collect it. The state team did.”

  “Cool it, Deborah,” Hal said. “A man died. They need to reassure themselves that the investigation was conducted properly. They’re only doing their job.”

  “They’re wasting my time!”

  He sighed. “Don’t tell them that. You don’t want to rile them up. Obstruction of justice is a felony.”

  “A felony?”

  “But hey, it doesn’t sound like you told the detectives anything you shouldn’t. I just wish you’d called me.”

  A felony? She swallowed a moment’s panic. “I did call you. You weren’t there. You never are.” A felony charge was bad. “Where’ve you been?”

  “You sound like my wife.”

  “Maybe she has a point. What’s up, Hal? People need you, and you’re not around. You’re playing an awful lot of racquetball these days.”

  There was a pause, then a cautious, “Are you suggesting something, Deborah?”

  “That depends. Are you guilty?”

  “Me, no. Let’s talk about you. A felony conviction is serious. Hell, if the D.A. files charges, you could be prevented from practicing pending the outcome of a trial. Is that what you want?”

  “No. I don’t want any of this,” Deborah cried.

  “Then you don’t want to rile me, either. I know the D.A. I can negotiate. I may just be your best bet at putting this case to bed.”

  She might have lashed back, arguing that there was no cover-up and that he was changing the subject, but she saw Grace watching her from the kitchen. She forced herself to calm down. Hal was right. She didn’t want to rile him. “Okay,” she said. “Thanks for calling. Can we talk tomorrow?”