“More for a semester than I charge to build a house.”
“About that. So if you’re against the idea, I think you just have to put your foot down. In a way, it’ll be a relief to her. She’ll have made the offer, and felt good about doing it, but she’ll have to defer to you.”
“You said there were a couple of things.”
“Yeah, well, Fiona started pushing Kelly pretty hard about this sleepover thing and what happened there.”
“She did? Why?”
“I don’t know. Kelly was getting really upset. I really had to get tough with Fiona, tell her to lay off. The kid’s been through a lot, and Fiona wasn’t making things any better, putting Kelly through a goddamn cross-examination.”
“Why would she do that?” I asked.
Marcus threw back his second scotch, and said, “You know Fiona. She’s always got some kind of hidden agenda.”
Kelly came downstairs and didn’t make much of the fact that Marcus had left without saying goodbye. “He seemed tired,” she told me. “He said we’d do lots of talking but he hardly said a thing.”
“Maybe he’s got a lot on his mind,” I said.
I’d taken the lasagna out of the oven and it was cooling atop the stove. Kelly inspected it, gave it a sniff.
“It’s supposed to have sauce on the top,” she said.
“Well, I put cheese there instead.”
She took a fork from the cutlery drawer and dug into the middle of it. “Where’s the ricotta? Is there ricotta?”
“Ricotta?” I said.
“And you used the wrong dish to make it in,” she said. “It’ll taste funny if you make it in a different dish.”
“It was the only one I could find. Look, do you want to eat it or not?”
“I’m not hungry.”
“I’m going to try it.” I shoveled some onto a plate and grabbed a fork from the drawer. Kelly took a seat to watch me, like I was a science experiment or something.
“Something happened that’ll make you mad,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“Grandma took me around to a couple of the schools I could go to. But I only got to see them from the outside because it was the weekend.”
“I’m not mad.”
“If I did go to school there, would you come and live with me at Grandma and Marcus’s? My room there is really big. They could put another bed in there. But you wouldn’t be allowed to snore.”
“You won’t be going to school in Darien,” I said. “I’m going to see if there’s another school here in town, if you still want to switch.”
Kelly thought about that a moment. Then she said, “So, Emily’s dad came over here yesterday?”
“That’s right.”
“Did he come by to give us an invitation to the funeral?”
“No. And that’s not exactly how it works. People don’t go around inviting-let’s not worry about that now.”
“So why did he come over?”
“He wanted to be sure you were okay, you being Emily’s best friend and all.”
She digested that, but she still looked worried. “There was nothing else?”
“Like what?” I asked.
“He didn’t want anything back?”
I focused in on her. “Like what?”
Kelly was suddenly looking very anxious. “I don’t know.”
“Kelly, what would he want back?” I asked.
“I already got in trouble for being in their bedroom. I don’t want to get into any more trouble.”
“You’re not in trouble.”
“But I’m gonna be,” she said, starting to tear up.
“Kelly, did you take something from the Slocums’ bedroom?”
“I didn’t mean to,” she said.
“How could you not mean to take something?”
“When I was in the closet, there was a purse bumping up against my foot, so I reached down to move it, and there was something clinking inside it, so I took it out, but it was too dark to see what it was, so I put it in my pocket.”
“Kelly, for God’s sake.”
“I just wanted to see what it was, and when Emily found me and I could see, I’d look at what it was. But then Emily didn’t come in, her mom did, so I just left it in my pocket. It kind of made my pocket stick out, so I sort of held my hand over it when Mrs. Slocum made me stand in the middle of the room.”
Wearily, I closed my eyes. “What was it? Jewelry? A watch?” She shook her head. “Do you still have it? Is it here?”
“I hid it in my shoe bag.” Her eyes were large and moist.
“Go get it.”
She ran to her bedroom and was back in under a minute, carrying by its drawstring a blue gingham bag with a sailboat on the side.
She handed it to me. Whatever was inside was heavier than I expected. I felt the item through the fabric before opening the bag, and my guess was that Kelly had left the Slocum house with a pair of bracelets.
I reached into the bag and took out the item. Heavy, bright and shiny, with a nickel finish.
“It’s handcuffs,” Kelly informed me.
“Yeah,” I said. “So they are.”
“You think Mr. Slocum came over because he wanted these back?” Kelly asked. “You’re sure he didn’t ask for them?”
“He definitely did not.” I was examining the cuffs, which had a tiny key stuck to them with a piece of clear tape. I returned Kelly’s empty shoe bag to her. “If these were in his wife’s purse, he might not even know about them.”
“She’s not a police lady.”
“I know.”
“But maybe sometimes she helped Mr. Slocum when he was being a policeman.”
“I suppose that’s possible.”
