Cast into Doubt

TWENTY

Shelby walked up to where Darcie stood, guarding her small charges as they clambered on the jungle gym and flew skyward on the swings. Jeremy was in the thick of it, whooping that he had a sword and he was ready to use it.

‘He seems to be doing OK,’ said Shelby hopefully.

Darcie nodded without looking at her. ‘Everything considered,’ she said. ‘How is Rob doing?’

‘I called earlier. His condition is stable.’

‘The church managed to contact his parents last night. They’re in some tiny village in Indonesia. It’s going to take them a while to get to a flight. They’ll be back in a couple of days.’

‘I’m just glad they got a hold of them,’ said Shelby. ‘Rob needs them here right now.’

‘I agree.’

‘I’ve never met his parents,’ said Shelby. ‘Rob and Chloe had a very small wedding, and they couldn’t get here for it. They came once to see Jeremy, but I was in Paris while they were here.’

‘They’re very nice people,’ said Darcie. ‘Always cheerful. I remember them from when I was a little girl. They’re very tough. They’ve lived in all kinds of conditions.’

‘You’ve known Rob’s family that long?’ Shelby asked.

‘All my life.’

‘Rob must be kind of like a big brother to you,’ she said.

Darcie watched Jeremy playing. ‘Jeremy wants to go and see his dad.’

Shelby shook her head. ‘Not yet. Not while Rob’s unconscious, certainly. That will only scare Jeremy. He’s just lost his mother. If he sees his father so messed up, it will give him nightmares.’

Darcie turned and looked at Shelby with wide, blue eyes. ‘So you’re not going up there tonight?’

‘I’ll run up in the morning,’ said Shelby.

Darcie turned and looked back at her charges. ‘I’ll go tonight,’ she said.

Shelby heard a note in Darcie’s voice that took her by surprise, but she did not mention it.

‘Time to get Jeremy home,’ Shelby said.

Shelby’s phone rang as she was beginning to usher Jeremy off to the bathtub. It was Elliott Markson’s secretary calling. Mr Markson wanted to see her in his office the next morning at ten o’clock. Shelby said that she would be there. She had an idea of what this summons was about. At best, Elliott Markson was probably going to confront her about all the work she was missing, and he would surely dress her down for enlisting the help of Perry Wilcox. At worst . . .

Now that she knew that Rob’s parents were arriving and would certainly move in here with Jeremy for the length of their stay, she would be free to return to her job, if she still had one. Perhaps it was time to think about working again. All her efforts to make sense of Chloe’s accident were running into nothing but dead ends. The question was, would she have a job to go to? She had a feeling that she would know the answer tomorrow.

The evening routine with Jeremy proved difficult. It took all her wiles to convince the child that his father was still too sleepy for visitors, and that he was really going to be fine and they would see him soon. His usual storybook turned into three, and he wailed each time she tried to leave him alone in his room. By the time she had gotten Jeremy in bed, Shelby was almost ready to crawl into bed herself.

The doorbell rang at eight thirty, and she rushed to answer it, not wanting its peal in the night to wake Jeremy from his restless slumber. Detective Camillo, whom she had met at the hospital, was standing on the doorstep with a uniformed officer.

‘Detective,’ said Shelby, frowning.

‘May we come in?’ he asked.

‘Of course,’ said Shelby.

She stood aside as the two men entered the house and stood in the living room. Shelby invited them to sit and offered them a drink. Both men declined the drink but sat down in the living room, perched on the edge of their seats. Detective Camillo leaned forward in the chair, and rested his elbows on his knees.

‘I want to thank you for your phone call earlier today, Mrs Sloan. Once we knew where your son-in-law had been last night, it made our job a lot easier.’

‘I’m glad I could help,’ Shelby said.

‘So, since I spoke to you, there have been a few developments in your son-in-law’s case that I thought you would want to know about,’ he said.

Shelby nodded. ‘OK.’

‘I wanted to talk to you before you heard about this on the eleven o’clock news.’

Shelby was instantly alarmed. ‘Heard what? Is Rob all right? I called the hospital before dinner. They said he’s still stable.’

‘Yeah. I spoke to the doc about an hour ago. Apparently, he’ll be all right. But, we still want to charge these guys with attempted murder.’

Shelby’s eyes widened. ‘Guys? You found out who did this?’

The detective’s weary eyes glinted with satisfaction. ‘It looks that way. Actually,’ he said, ‘we caught a few breaks on this one. Which is not to minimize the excellent legwork by my squad.’

‘So what happened?’

‘Well, it was much as I originally suspected. Because Rob’s car had nearly a full tank of gas, we proceeded on the assumption that he had filled up on his way home. When you told us that he had been out in Gladwyne, we were able to determine his route. After that, it was easy to narrow down the possibilities. We checked the surveillance videos for everywhere you could buy gas along the route. We found him on the third try. Your son-in-law stopped for gas and got into an altercation with some kids who were hanging around just looking for trouble.’

‘An altercation? About what?’ Shelby asked.

‘We don’t know. All we have is the video – no sound. Anyway, when he drove away, they followed him. They followed him on to the Schuylkill and forced his car off the road. They had a gun. He was lucky he wasn’t killed.’

‘Oh my God,’ Shelby said. She exhaled and sat back in her seat. ‘I can’t believe it.’

Camillo shook his head. ‘Even the most minor argument turns lethal these days. They’re not happy just insulting you. They gotta kill you now.’

Shelby shook her head. ‘Don’t they even think about the consequences?’

‘They don’t think about anything. Believe me,’ he said.

‘I’m just really amazed that you found them so quickly.’

‘Well, like I say, we were lucky. The surveillance camera at the pumps gave us their license plate. From that, it was easy to track them down.’

‘I see.’

‘I don’t mean that there’s anything lucky about this,’ Camillo demurred.

‘I understand,’ said Shelby.

Camillo frowned. ‘There’s just one more thing. From what we saw on the video, your son-in-law really got up in their faces. Is he normally kind of a hot-tempered guy?’

Shelby shook her head sadly. ‘No. Usually he’s pretty mild-mannered.’

‘Any particular reason why he would have been edgy last night?’

Shelby was silent. She felt extremely grateful to the police for finding the people who had forced Rob off the road, but she didn’t really relish the idea of divulging the reason Rob had been in a belligerent mood. What if it ended up on the news? Molly would be humiliated at school and everywhere else. She was a teenager, awkward and self-conscious like most teenagers, and she didn’t deserve that. She was the innocent victim in this whole thing. Shelby suddenly understood exactly why Lianna had not offered this information up to the police.

‘Did something happen last night?’ asked Detective Camillo.

Shelby shook her head. ‘No. Not really. There was a family argument. You know. Between exes. Normal stuff.’

‘I’m not asking to be nosy ma’am. Your son-in-law’s state of mind is going to make a difference if this thing gets to trial.’

Shelby frowned. ‘Why?’

‘Well, the defense might try to say that he provoked these guys. Challenged them maybe.’

‘You don’t believe that, do you?’ she asked.

‘What I believe is not important. It’ll be what the jury believes.’

‘That is horrible. A man is minding his own business and he’s dragged into this situation. He’s pursued and run off the road by criminals. And now you’re saying they might blame it on Rob?’

‘I’m saying that it’s important to know what kind of a person he is. Is he prone to violent outbursts?’

‘No. I mean, not normally. Last night, he’d had a bit of a shock. He was probably not completely himself,’ said Shelby carefully.

‘No criminal convictions. No . . . domestic violence. Nothing like that.’

Instantly, Shelby thought about Chloe and the cruise. Wasn’t this what she had secretly wondered and feared? How could you ever really know a person from the outside? To the world Rob was a churchgoer, a social worker, a kindly father, a good husband. But people like that had been known to snap. Isn’t this exactly what she had suspected? That there was a hidden side of Rob that was capable of violence? Of murder?

The thought of it filled her with despair. She realized that she had just about gotten to the point of acceptance. For a while she had suspected Rob, and then, everything she learned had made her see him as nothing more than a grieving husband. He had been honest about Chloe’s alcoholism, and passed a lie detector test. Even Perry Wilcox, an experienced detective, had judged that Rob was being truthful, and that Chloe’s death was probably an accident.

Now, with his question, Detective Camillo had set her brain ricocheting in her skull again, like that of a shaken baby. Was there no respite from this doubt, she wondered? She didn’t know how she could go on living with it. She had to resolve this in her mind. She had to learn how to accept it and move on. For her sanity.

‘Mrs Sloan?’ Detective Camillo asked worriedly.

‘What?’ she asked.

‘Anything you want to tell us?’ he asked.

Shelby stared straight at him. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Nothing.’