The Accidental Detective

the
Times,
dated the day before his fall, is on his nightstand—the Wednesday crossword puzzle, filled out in ink, without a single error. The puzzle, the tidy house, it all indicates he’s of sound mind and should back up his version of events. So why does she keep thinking of it that way, as a
version
? She’s still troubled about that chicken.
    Glancing out the narrow casement window toward the street, Gwen sees a black-haired man walking two dogs as black as his hair. She knows him instantly by the part in his hair, impossibly straight and perfect, visible even from this distance.
    “Sean,” Gwen calls out through the window. Seconds later, she is running heedlessly down the stone steps that undid her father.
    “Gwennie,” he says. Then: “I’m sorry. Old habits.
Gwen
.”
    “What are you doing here?”
    “Well—my brother, of course.”
    “Tim? Or Go-Go?”
    “Gordon,” he says. Perhaps Sean has sworn off nicknames. Funny, Gwen liked hearing Gwennie, even if it always carries the reminder that she was once fat. Gwennie the Whale. She was only fat until age thirteen. They say people are forever fat inside, but Gwen’s not. Inside, she’s the sylph she became. If anything, she has trouble remembering that she’s growing older, that she can no longer rely on being the prettiest girl in the room.
    “What’s the incorrigible Go-Go—excuse me,
Gordon—
done now?”
    Sean looks offended, then confused. “I’m sorry, I assumed you knew.”
    “My father fell three days ago, broke his hip. I don’t know much of anything.”
    “Three days ago?”
    “In the morning. Coming down the steps to fetch his paper.”
    “Three days ago—that’s when Go-Go ...” His voice catches. Sean is the middle brother, the handsomest, the smartest, the best all-around. Gwen’s mother used to say that Tim was the practice son, Sean the platonic ideal, and Go-Go a bridge too far. Gwen’s mother could be cutting in her observations, yet there was no real meanness in her. And her voice was so delicate, her manner so light, that no one took offense.
    “What, Sean?”
    “He crashed his car into the concrete barrier where the highway ends. Probably going eighty, ninety miles per hour. We think the accelerator got stuck, or he miscalculated where it ended. I mean, we’ve all played with our speedometers up there.”
    Yes, when they were teenagers, learning to drive. But Go-Go was—she calculates, subtracting four, no, five years from her age—forty, much too old to be testing his car’s power.
    “He’s—”
    “Dead, Gwen. At the scene, instantly.”
    “I’m so sorry, Sean.”
    Go-Go, dead. Although she has seen him periodically over the years, he remained forever eight or nine in her mind, wild and uninhibited. The risk taker in the group, although it was possible that Go-Go simply didn’t understand the concept of danger, didn’t know he was taking risks. She flashes back to an image of him on this very street, dashing across the road in pursuit of a ball, indifferent to the large truck bearing down on him, the others screaming for him to stop.
    “Thank you.”
    “How’s your mom holding up?” She remembers that Mr. Halloran died years ago, although she didn’t go to the funeral, just wrote proper notes to the boys and their mother. It was a busy time in her life, as she recalls.
    “Not well. I came home for the funeral—I live in St. Petersburg now.”
    “Russia?”
    A tight smile. “Florida.”
    Gwen tries not to make a face. Not because of Florida, but because the Sean she remembers would have been in Russia, a dashing foreign correspondent or diplomat. He’s still pretty dashing. Close up, she can see a few flecks of white in his hair, but the very dignity that bordered on priggish in a teenage boy suits him now. He has finally grown into his gravitas.
    “I feel awful that I didn’t know. When is the funeral?”
    “Tomorrow. Visitation is tonight.”
    Gwen calculates, even as she knows she must find a way to attend both. She will have to ask for another half day at work, make arrangements for Annabelle tonight. There is already so much to be done. But this is Go-Go—and Sean, her first boyfriend, even if she seldom thinks of him in that context. Gwen is not the kind of woman who thinks longingly of her past, who tracks down old boyfriends on the Internet. The Hallorans, along with Mickey Wyckoff, are more like the old foundations and footings they sometimes found in the woods,