It certainly wasn’t nearby. There were four houses in the circle of a mile, and she knew the residents of each.
“He and his wife have a place over by the train station,” Brian replied. “That’s a few miles from here. I take it you don’t treat him?”
“No. Grace has him in school this year, so I heard him speak at the open house last fall. He’s a serious guy, a tough marker. That’s about all I know.” She was reaching for his pulse again when the road came alive with light. A second cruiser arrived, its roof bar thrumming a raucous blue and white. An ambulance was close behind.
Deborah didn’t immediately recognize the EMTs; they were young, likely new. But she did know the man who emerged from the second cruiser. John Colby was the police chief. In his late-fifties, he would have been retired had he been working anywhere else, but he had grown up in Leyland. It was understood that he would keep working as long as his health allowed. Deborah guessed that would be a while. He and his wife were patients of theirs. His wife had a problem with allergens—dander, pollen, dust—that had resulted in adult-onset asthma, but John’s greatest problem, beyond a pot belly, was insomnia. He worked days; he worked nights. He claimed that being active kept his blood pressure down, and since his blood pressure was chronically low, Deborah couldn’t argue.
While John held a floodlight, the EMTs immobilized Calvin. Deborah waited with her arms crossed, hands in the folds of her jacket. He made neither movement nor sound.
She followed them out of the woods and was watching them ease him into the ambulance, when Brian took her arm. “Let’s sit in the cruiser. This rain’s nasty.”
Once inside, she lowered her hood and opened her jacket. Her face was wet; she wiped it with her hands. Her hair, damp and curling, still felt strange to her short after a lifetime wearing it waist long and knotted at the nape. She was wearing a tank top and shorts, both relatively dry under her jacket, and flip-flops. Her legs were slick and smudged with dirt.
She hated rain. It came at the worst times, defied prediction, and made life messy.
Brian folded himself next to her behind the wheel, and shook his hat outside before closing the door. He took a notebook and pen from a tray between the seats. “I have to ask you a few questions—just a formality, Dr. Monroe.” He checked his watch. “Ten forty-three. And it’s D-E-B-O-R-A-H?”
“Yes. M-O-N-R-O-E.” She was often mistakenly thought to be Dr. Barr, which was her maiden name and the name of her father, who was something of a legend in town. She had used her married name since her final year of college.
“Can you tell me what happened?” the officer asked.
“We were driving along—”
“We?” He looked alarmed. “I thought you were alone.”
“I am now—Grace is home—but I had picked her up at a friend’s house—that’s Megan Stearns’s house—and we were on our way home, going really slowly, not more than twenty-five miles an hour, because the rain was so bad. And suddenly he was there.”
“Running along the side of the road?”
“I didn’t see him running. He just appeared in front of the car. There was no warning, no time to turn away, just this awful thud.”
“Had you drifted toward the shoulder of the road?”
“No. We were close to the center. I was watching the line. It was one of the few guidelines we had with visibility so low.”
“Did you brake?”
Deborah hadn’t braked. Grace had done it. Now was the time to clarify that. But it seemed irrelevant, a technicality.
“Too late,” she replied. “We skidded and spun around. You can see where my car is. That’s where we ended after the spin.”
“But if you drove Grace home—”
“I didn’t drive her. I made her run. It isn’t more than half a mile. She’s on the track team.” Deborah wrangled her phone from a soggy pocket. “I needed her to babysit Dylan, but she’ll want to know what’s happening. Is this okay?” When he nodded, she pressed the speed-dial button.
The phone had barely rung when Grace picked up. “Mom?”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m okay. How’s Mr. McKenna?”
“He’s on his way to the hospital.”
“Is he conscious?”
“Not yet. Is Dylan okay?”
“If being dead asleep on the sofa when I got here means okay, yes. He hasn’t moved.”
So much for large eyes at the window, Deborah thought, and heard her ex-husband’s You worry too much, but how not to worry about a ten-year-old boy who had severe hyper-opia and corneal dystrophy, which meant that he viewed much of his life through a haze. Deborah hadn’t planned on that, either.
“Well, I’m still glad you’re with him,” she said. “Grace, I’m talking with the police officer now. I may run over to the hospital once we’re done. You’d probably better go to bed. You have that exam tomorrow.”
“I’m going to be sick tomorrow.”
“Grace.”
“I am. I can’t think about biology right now. I mean, like, what a nightmare. If this is what happens when you drive, I’m not doing it. I keep asking myself where he came from. Did you see him on the side of the road?”
“No. Honey, the officer’s waiting.”
“Call me back.”
“Yup.” Deborah closed the phone.
The cruiser’s rear door opened and John Colby got into the backseat. “You’d think the rain’d take a break,” he said, adding, “Hard to see much on the road. I took pictures of everything I could, but the evidence won’t last long if it stays like this. I just called the state team. They’re on their way.”
“State team?” Deborah asked, frightened.
“The state police have an Accident Reconstruction Team,” John explained. “It’s headed by a credited reconstructionist. He knows what to look for more than we do.”
“What does he look for?”
“Points of impact, marks on the car. Where on the road the car hit the victim, where the victim landed. Skid marks. Burned rubber. He rebuilds the picture of what happened and how.”
It was only an accident, she wanted to say. Bringing in a state team somehow made it more.
Dismay must have shown on her face, because Brian said, “It’s standard procedure when there’s personal injury. Had it been midday with the sun out, we might have been able to handle it ourselves, but in weather like this, it’s important to work quickly, and these guys can do that.” He glanced at his notes. “How fast did you say you were going?”
Again,
