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.”
Allan who? Sheila didn’t know anyone named-
Wait. Allan Butterfield. Sheila’s accounting teacher. Why would he have been calling her so frequently? And why would she have been refusing to take his calls?
I tossed the phone onto the desk, wondering what else there was to do. So many questions, so few answers.
I kept looking at the pills. Where would Sheila have gotten prescription drugs? How would she have paid for them? What was she planning to do with-
The money.
The money I socked away.
The only people who knew about the cash I had hidden in the wall were Sheila and myself. Had she gone into that? Had she used that money to buy these drugs with the idea of reselling them?
I opened my desk drawer and grabbed a letter opener. Then I went around the desk to the opposite corner of the room. I worked the opener into a seam in the wood paneling, and in a couple of seconds had a rectangular opening seventeen inches wide and a foot tall and about three inches deep.
