The Accident (24 page)

Her accident went against character.

Sheila would never have gotten drunk enough to do what they claimed she did. Deep in my heart, I was certain of that.

Was it possible? Was it conceivable Sheila’s death wasn’t what it appeared to be? That while it seemed to be an accident, it was actually—

“Mr. Garber?”

“I’m sorry?”

Arthur Twain said, “You were going to let me have a look at some of those purses your wife had?”

I’d forgotten. “Wait here.”

I went upstairs, passing by Kelly’s room. She had left her door open and was sitting at her desk, on the computer. I stepped in. “Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” she replied, her eyes on the screen. “What does that man want?”

“He wants to see some of your mom’s purses.”

She looked at me, alarm flashing across her face. “Why does a
man
want to see Mom’s purses? Does he want one for his wife? You’re not giving them away, are you?”

“Of course not.”

“Are you selling them?” Her tone was accusing.

“No. He just wants to see them. He tries to find out who makes fake designer purses and put them out of business.”

“Why?”

“Because the people who make them are copying the originals.”

“Is that bad?”

“Yeah,” I said. Here I was, making Arthur’s arguments when moments earlier I’d been trying to knock them down. “It’s like, if you copy off another kid’s work at school. It’s not your work.”

“So it’s cheating,” Kelly said.

“Yeah.”

“So Mom was a cheater because she had some?”

“No, your mother was not a cheater. But the people who make those bags are.”

Kelly was struggling with a decision. I was guessing it was whether to like me again. “I’m still mad at you.”

“I understand.”

“But can I help you?”

“With?”

“The purses?”

I motioned for her to follow me to Sheila’s closet. There were about a dozen bags on the shelf above the hangers, and as I handed them down to Kelly she ran the straps up her arms. She looked pretty adorable, lugging them all down that way to the living room, struggling to keep her balance as she did so.

“Well, look at you,” Arthur said as Kelly nearly stumbled into him. She dropped her arms and let the bags fall into two heaps on either side of her.

“Sorry,” she said. “They’re heavy.”

“You’re a pretty strong girl to carry those all the way downstairs.”

“I have big arm muscles,” Kelly said. She demonstrated, adopting a muscleman pose.

“Wow,” he said.

“You can feel,” she offered.

“That’s okay,” he said, keeping his hands to himself. “Your mother had a lot of purses.”

“This isn’t all of them,” Kelly told him. “Just the ones she liked. Sometimes, if she had a purse she never used, she would donate it to the poor people.”

Arthur looked up at me and flashed a brief smile. “These bags here, are they ones that your mom would have bought in the last couple of years?”

I was about to say I wasn’t sure, but Kelly spoke up first. “Yes. This one,” and she picked up a black one with an oversized black leather flower on it that was labeled
Valentino
, “she got when she went into the city with her friend Mrs. Morton.”

Some friend.

“You can tell it’s not real,” Kelly said, opening the bag, “because there’s no label inside telling you where it was made, and the lining isn’t as nice, and if you try real hard you can peel the sticker off on the outside.”

“You’re good at this,” Arthur said.

I said, “I’m raising Nancy Drew.”

“And this one Mom got after the party Emily’s mom had at the house,” Kelly said.

Arthur made a close inspection. “A pretty good Marc Jacobs copy.”

Kelly nodded in astonishment. “My dad would never be able to tell something like that.” She glanced up at me.

“And this one,” Twain said, “is an excellent Valentino knockoff.”

“Oh my God,” Kelly said. “You’re like the only dad in the world who would know that!
Are
you a dad?”

“Yes, I am. I have two little boys. Well, not so little anymore.”

She held up one of the purses. “Mom also really liked this one.”

It was a tan fabric bag with leather trim, a slender strap, a mosaic of “F” symbols all over it.

“A Fendi,” Arthur said, holding the bag to inspect it. “Nice.”

“A good copy?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “Not a copy at all. It’s the real deal. Made in Italy.”

“Are you sure?” I asked.

Arthur nodded. “Your wife might have found it on sale, but if you were to buy this on Fifth Avenue it would run you two thousand dollars.”

“Grandma bought that one for Mom,” Kelly said. “For her birthday. Remember?”

I didn’t, but that explained it. Fiona wasn’t the type to buy anything but the real deal. She’d be as likely to buy her daughter a knockoff bag as take her to lunch at Wendy’s.

As Twain dropped the bag on the floor, it made a sound. Like something rattling around inside it.

Jesus
, I thought. Not another pair of handcuffs. I wouldn’t know what to make of that kind of discovery. But the rattle had not sounded metallic.

“There’s something in here,” he said, grabbing it by the strap.

I reached over and took it from him. “Whatever’s in there was Sheila’s,” I told him. “The bags may be your business, but what’s in them isn’t.”

I left Kelly and Arthur Twain in the living room. I went into the kitchen, undid the clasp on the top of the purse, and opened it wide.

Inside, there were four plastic containers, each one about the size of a jar of olives.

Each one carried a different label. Lisinopril. Vicodin. Viagra. Omeprazole.

Altogether, hundreds and hundreds of pills.

TWENTY-SIX

I returned the containers to the purse and shoved it into one of the overhead cupboards. When I returned to the living room, Twain was looking at me expectantly. But when I offered no details of what I’d found, he said, “Well, thank you for your time.”

He left me his card, encouraged me to get in touch if I remembered anything that might be helpful, and left.

“He seemed nice,” Kelly said. “What was in Mom’s purse?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“It had to be
something
. It was all noisy.”

“It was nothing.”

She knew I was lying, but she also knew I wasn’t going to say anything more.

“Fine,” she said. “I think I’ll just go back to being mad at you.” She stomped up the stairs and returned to her room, slamming the door behind her.

I took the drug-filled purse from the cupboard and went to my downstairs office. I emptied the bag onto my desk and watched the containers roll out.

“Son of a bitch,” I said to the empty room. “What the hell is all this, Sheila? What in the hell is this?”

I picked up each of the small plastic jars, unscrewed the caps, peered
inside. Hundreds of little yellow pills, white pills, the world-famous blue pills. “God, how many of these did you want me to take?”

I remembered what Twain had said, that there was a huge market not only in such things as knockoff purses and DVDs and construction supplies, but prescription drugs, too.

What had Sheila said to me that last morning we had together?

“I have ideas. Ideas to help us. To get us through the rough patches. I’ve made some money.”

“Not like this,” I said. “Not like this.”

Now that I’d seen what was in this purse, I wondered what the hell might be in all her others. I checked the ones still in the living room, then went back upstairs—Kelly remained behind the closed door of her room—and looked through the remaining bags in Sheila’s closet. I found old lipsticks, shopping lists, some change. No more drugs.

I returned to the basement. The purse Sheila had with her at the time of the accident had—as I’d told Belinda—survived, but not in good shape. It had been lightly scorched, then drenched after the fire department arrived. I’d thrown out the bag—I didn’t want Kelly to see it—but saved everything that had been in it. I felt the need, now, to take a look at all those items.

Everything was stored in a shoebox that a pair of Rockports had come in. The shoes had already been worn out and tossed, but the box would probably last for years to come. I put it on my desk, gingerly, as if it were loaded with explosives. Then, with some hesitation, I removed the lid.

“Hey, babe,” I said.

It struck me as a stupid thing to say. But looking at this collection of Sheila’s effects, it seemed perfectly natural. In their own way, these mementos were close to Sheila in a way I never was. They were with her in her final moments.

A pair of stud earrings, with blood-red flecks on them. A necklace—an aluminum pendant on a leather string—that was even darker with Sheila’s blood. I took it in my hand and brought it up to my face, touched it to my cheek. I laid it gently back into the box and examined the items from her purse that were not bloodied. Dental floss; a pair of reading glasses in a slender metal case; two metal hair clips, each with a strand of Sheila’s hair still caught in them; one of those things from Tide that
looked like a Magic Marker that’s supposed to remove stains instantly. Sheila was always ready for any fast-food catastrophe. Tissue. A small package of Band-Aids. Half a pack of Dentyne Blast Cool Lime gum. When we would head out to see friends, or visit her parents, she’d tell me to lean close in the car and catch a whiff of me. “Chew one of these,” she’d say. “Fast. You’ve got breath like a dead moose.” There were three ATM receipts, other receipts from drug and grocery stores, a handful of business cards, one from a department store cosmetics counter, a couple from New York shopping excursions. There was a tiny container of hand sanitizer, some small hair elastics she kept in her purse for Kelly, a Bobbi Brown lipstick, eyedrops, a makeup mirror, four emery boards, a set of headphones she’d bought on the plane when we had gone to Toronto for a long weekend more than a year ago. A longtime hockey fan, she wanted to eat at Wayne Gretzky’s restaurant. “Where the hell is he?” she asked. “In the kitchen,” I told her. “Making your sandwich.”

A memory attached to nearly every item. And not a single liquor store receipt to be found anywhere. And no pills, either.

I lingered over many of these things, but there was one thing in particular I wanted to have a look at.

Sheila’s cell phone.

I took it out of the box, flipped it open, and hit the button to turn it on. Nothing happened. The phone was dead.

I opened my top desk drawer, where I kept the charger for my own phone—a duplicate of Sheila’s—and inserted one end into the phone and shoved the plug into the wall outlet. The phone tinkled to life.

I had not yet gotten around to canceling it. It was part of a package deal with mine, and now Kelly’s. When I’d gotten her phone, I could have canceled Sheila’s, but found I didn’t have it in me to do it.

Once the phone appeared to be working, and charging, the first thing that occurred to me was to call it from my desk phone.

I dialed the number I still knew by heart, heard it ring in my ear and watched as the phone rang and vibrated in front of me. I waited for the end of the seventh ring, at which point I knew it would go to voicemail, and I would get to hear my dead wife’s voice.

“Hi. This is Sheila. I’m either on the phone, away from it, or too scared to answer because I’m in traffic, so please leave a message.”

And then the beep.

I started to speak. “I … I just …”

I hung up, my hand trembling.

I needed a minute to pull myself together.

“I just wanted to say,” I said, standing there in the room alone, “that I’ve said some things, since you’ve been gone, that now … I’ve been so angry with you. So goddamn angry. That you’d have done this, that you’d … do something so stupid. But in the last day or so, I don’t know … Things made no sense before, and they’re making even less sense now, but the less sense they make, the more I’m starting to wonder … to wonder whether there’s more to this, that maybe … that maybe I haven’t been fair, that maybe I’m not seeing …”

I sat in the chair and let the feelings wash over me, just let it happen. Allowed myself a minute or so to let it out. Like releasing pressure on a valve. You have to let it off, even just a little, so you don’t get an explosion.

And when I finished sobbing, I grabbed a couple of tissues, wiped my eyes, blew my nose, took a few deep breaths.

And got back to it.

I went into Sheila’s phone’s call history. Arthur Twain said Sheila had called this guy Sommer the day of her accident, just after one.

I found a number in the history of outgoing calls. There it was, at 1:02 p.m. A New York area code.

I snatched up the receiver from my desk phone and dialed it. There was half a ring, and then a recording telling me the number was no longer in service. I hung up. Arthur Twain had said Sommer was no longer using that phone.

I got out a pen and a piece of paper and started writing down all the other numbers Sheila had called the day of, and the days leading up to, her accident. There were five calls to my cell, three to my office, three to the house. I recognized Belinda’s number. There was the Darien number I knew to be Fiona’s place, and another one I recognized as Fiona’s cell.

Then, as an afterthought, I checked the list of incoming calls on Sheila’s phone. There were the ones I would have expected. Nine from me—from the home phone, work phone, and cell. Calls from Fiona. Belinda.

And seventeen from a number I did not recognize. Not the number I
believed belonged to Sommer. Not a New York number. All the calls from that number were listed as “missed.” Which meant Sheila either didn’t hear the ring, or chose not to answer.

I wrote down that number, too.

She’d been called by that number once on the day she died, twice the day before, and at least twice a day, every day, in the seven days leading up to her death.

I had to know.

Again, I dialed out from the house phone. It rang three times before going to voicemail.

“Hi, you’ve reached Allan Butterfield. Leave a message.”