Shock Wave

over to your house?” she asked. Nearly a whimper. She was falling apart. “I sent the kids to my mom’s, until I could get the funeral stuff taken care of.”
    “I didn’t think . . . Never mind. Come over, please.” He got off the phone and groaned, and then half-laughed. He’d almost said, “I didn’t think there was enough left to bury.” Christ, that would have been sticking his foot into it. He had to be more careful. Thinking about it, he started laughing again.
    Boom!
     
     
    SHE WAS THERE in ten minutes. When she came through the door, he went for a little squeeze, a little hug, a quick kiss on the neck, but she fended him off and perched on his easy chair. She said, “John, my God, what am I going to do? I’ve got no money, I’ve got nothing, the funeral expenses . . . and now, maybe I need a lawyer. This Flowers, he kept asking about what I thought about PyeMart and if I’d noticed anything going on in Bill’s workshop. He thinks I was involved.”
    “I’ve talked to him,” Haden said. “He thinks he’s a pretty smart guy, but he’s not as smart as he thinks he is. What you do is, you’re just honest. You don’t know anything about anything. If they make an actual accusation, tell them you need a public defender. But, I really don’t think it’ll come to that. Bill was obviously unbalanced. It’s not something that two people would do.”
    “I can’t believe . . . I lived with Bill fourteen years. He could be a jerk, but I don’t see this. I’m, I’m . . .”
    “Well, you know . . . the prospect of that money,” Haden said.
    She looked away from him. “That’s something else that Flowers said. Virgil said. He tells me to call him Virgil, like he’s a friend of mine, but I can tell he isn’t. I can tell he’s up to something. . . .” She trailed off, put her face in her hands for a moment.
    He was sitting on the couch opposite her, and asked, “What was the other thing he said?”
    “He said that if the town development went back the way it was, I’d be rich,” she said. She wiped her eyes with the heels of her hands, one after the other. “He thought that might be a motive. He thought that was Bill’s motive, and he thought it might be mine.”
    “What’d you say?” Haden asked.
    “I told him that Bill didn’t care that much about money,” she said. “When the town changed direction, he just laughed it off. Said he didn’t need the money for another thirty years, and by then, it’d be even more valuable.”
    “And what’d he say?”
    “He said that was interesting,” she said.
     
     
    HADEN LOOKED AT HER for a moment, and then asked, “When did you send the kids away?”
    “Right after the bomb . . . right away. Oh my God, they’re going to be so messed up. Bill would come over every other day, take them out. He really was a good father. Good as he could be, anyway, you know . . . He never even said good-bye to them.”
    “Okay.” Haden got up. “You want a beer? Or a glass of wine?”
    “No . . . but I need to ask you something.”
    “Yeah?”
    “I just remembered, you asked a lot of questions about the farm,” she said. She twisted her hands together. “You know, that first night I came over. I just, I mean, you seem really interested. . . .”
    He frowned. “Sally, where are you going with this?”
    “Well, I don’t know.” Her hands flopped in her lap. “It just seemed you were always more interested in the money than Bill was, and you started talking about maybe us getting married, and I started to think . . . I mean, oh, God . . .”
    He laughed. “You think I’m the bomber?” This wasn’t good.
    “No. No, of course not. It’s just that you came on so hard with me. Nobody ever did that before. You’re so good-looking and the other women, you know, are always looking at you. I wondered why you . . . I mean, I know what I look like, I’m pretty average . . . I’m not that smart . . .”
    “Sally, for Christ’s sakes.” That ol’ sinking feeling.
    “And then . . .”
    There was more? “What, what?”
    “I remember last week, you were telling me how we’d slept together the night before that bomb went off at Pye’s building . . . but we didn’t. The bomb was on a Wednesday, and Billie has her dance line on Tuesday evening, and then her cello lesson, and we’re never home before ten o’clock. It was on Monday we slept together. And on the way over here, I wondered why you’d even bring it up—that we’d