Edwin’s lips puckered. “The force might take a dim view of a cop and his wife selling knockoff merchandise. It’s illegal. Not owning a knockoff bag, but making them and selling them.”
“When Slocum came to see me, Saturday morning, he was pretty rattled. There seemed to be, in his mind, some connection between the phone call his wife took and the accident that killed her.”
“Explain.”
“I guess if she hadn’t been going out to meet whoever called her, she might have had that flat tire some other time, in a safer place, and never would have fallen into the water and died.”
Edwin’s lips did some more puckering.
“What are you thinking?” I asked.
“Do you know whether the police are treating Ann Slocum’s death as suspicious?”
“I have no idea.”
Edwin moved his tongue across the front of his teeth. I’d seen him do this before when he was deep in thought.
“Glen,” he said tentatively.
“I’m right here.”
“Do you believe in coincidences?”
“Not so much,” I said. I had a pretty good idea where he was going.
“Your wife loses her life in an accident that is, I think we would concur, difficult to reconcile. About two weeks later, her friend is killed in another accident, the circumstances of which are curious, if not equally so. I’m sure this has not escaped your attention.”
“No,” I said, and felt myself roiling inside. “It hasn’t. But, Edwin, beyond that observation, I don’t know what to make of it. Look, you know that trying to make sense of what Sheila did, how she died-it’s all I’ve been thinking about. What did I miss? How could I not have known she had some kind of problem? Christ, Edwin, she didn’t even like vodka, so far as I knew, and yet there was an empty bottle of it in her car.”
Edwin strummed the fingers of his left hand on his desk. He cast an eye toward his bookshelf. “You know I’ve always been an Arthur Conan Doyle admirer. A fan, I suppose.”
I followed his eye. I stood, took a step closer to the shelves, and tilted my head slightly to read the words on the spines. A Study in Scarlet. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. The Sign of the Four.
“They look really old,” I said. “May I?”
Edwin nodded and I pulled out one of the books, opened it delicately. “Are these all first editions?”
“No. Although I do have some, sealed and safely put away. One that’s actually signed by the author. Are you familiar with the works?”
“I can’t say that I-maybe the one about the hound. The Baskervilles, isn’t it? When I was a kid. And Sheila and I saw that movie, the one with the guy who also played Iron Man.”
Edwin closed his eyes briefly. “An abomination,” he said. “Not Iron Man. I liked that.” He looked disappointed, possibly at the gaps in my literary education. There were many.
“Glen, let me ask you this, a straightforward question. Do you believe it is at all possible-even remotely so-that Sheila would willfully consume a bottle of vodka and bring about the accident that took her life and the lives of two others? Knowing what you do about her?”
I swallowed. “No. It’s impossible. But yet-”
“In The Sign of the Four, Holmes says, and I think I have this right, ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ You know the phrase?”
“I think I’ve heard it. So you’re saying, if it’s impossible that Sheila would do such a thing, then there must be some other explanation for what happened, even if it seems… really out there.”
Edwin nodded. “In a nutshell.”
“What other explanations could there be?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. But in light of these recent developments, I really think you need to be considering them.”
I was driving away from Edwin’s office when my cell rang. It was one of the private schools I’d called. The woman answered my questions about tuition fees (higher than I expected), whether Kelly would be allowed to switch in the middle of the school year (she would), and whether her academic record qualified her for admission (maybe).
“And of course you know we are a residential school,” she told me. “Our students live here.”
“But we already live in Milford,” I explained. “Kelly would be able to live at home with me.”
“That’s not the way we do it,” the woman stated. “We believe in a more immersive educational experience.”
“Thanks anyway,” I said. That was just dumb. If Kelly was going to be right in town with me, she was going to live with me. Maybe some parents were happy to farm their kids off to a school 24/7, but I wasn’t one of them.
I phoned Sally to remind her that I was going to the visitation for Ann Slocum and likely wouldn’t be at the office or at any of our job sites the rest of the day. When I got to Kelly’s school I parked and went into the office to tell them I was taking her out of school for the afternoon. The woman in the office said a couple of other kids, as well as Kelly and Emily’s teacher, planned to attend.
