The Accidental Detective

assured her. “Not if we’re careful. There. No—there.” Just as her attention drifted away in conversation, she found it drifting now, floating toward an idea, only to be distracted by Lynette’s insistent touch. Later. She would figure everything out later.
    “Y OU’RE NOT GOING TO BELIEVE THIS ,” Sally told Lynette at the beginning of their third week together, during one of the commercial breaks on
The View.
“Peter found out about us.”
    “Ohmigod!” Lynette said. “How?”
    “I’m not sure. But he knows. He knows everything. He’s threatening to take the children away from me.”
    “Ohmigod.”
    “And—” She turned her face to the side, not trusting herself to tell this part. “And he’s threatening to go to Alan.”
    “Shit.” In her panic, Lynette got up and began putting on her clothes, as if Peter and Alan were outside the door at this very moment.
    “He hasn’t yet,” Sally said quickly. “But he will, if I fight the change in the custody order. He’s given me a week to decide. I give up the children or he goes to Alan.”
    “You can’t tell. You can’t.”
    “I don’t want to, but—how can I lose my children?”
    Lynette understood, as only another mother could. They couldn’t tell the truth, but she couldn’t expect Sally to live with the consequences of keeping the secret. Lynette would keep her life while Sally would lose hers. No woman could make peace with such blatant unfairness.
    “Would he really do this?”
    “He would. Peter—he’s not the nice man everyone thinks he is. Why do you think we got divorced? And the thing is, if he gets the kids—well, it was one thing for him to do the things he did to me. But if he ever treated Molly or Sam that way …”
    “What way?”
    “I don’t want to talk about it. But if it should happen—I’d have to kill him.”
    “The pervert.” Lynette was at once repelled and fascinated. The dark side of Sally’s life was proving as seductive to her as Sally had been.
    “I know. If he had done what he did to a stranger, he’d be in prison for life. But in a marriage, such things are legal. I’m stuck, Lynette. I won’t ruin your life for anything. You told me from the first that this had to be a secret.”
    “There has to be a way …”
    “There isn’t. Not as long as Peter is a free man.”
    “Not as long as he’s alive.”
    “You can’t mean—”
    Lynette put a finger to Sally’s lips. These had been the hardest moments to fake, the face-to-face encounters. Kissing was the worst. But it was essential not to flinch, not to let her distaste show. She was so close to getting what she wanted.
    “Trust me,” Lynette said.
    Sally wanted to. But she had to be sure of one thing. “Don’t try to hire someone. It seems like every time someone like us tries to find someone, it’s always an undercover cop. Remember Ruth Ann Aron.” A politician from the Maryland suburbs, she had done just that. But her husband had forgiven her, even testified on her behalf during the trial. She had been found guilty anyway.
    “Trust me,” Lynette repeated.
    “I do, sweetheart. I absolutely do.”
    D R . P ETER H OLT WAS HIT by a Jeep Cherokee, an Eddie Bauer limited edition, as he crossed Connecticut Avenue on his way to Sunomono, a place where he ate lobster pad thai every Thursday evening. The driver told police that her children had been bickering in the backseat over what to watch on the DVD player and she turned her head, just a moment, to scold them. Distracted, she had seen Holt and tried to stop but hit the accelerator instead. Then, as her children screamed for real, she had driven another hundred yards in panic and hysteria. If the dermatologist wasn’t dead on impact, he was definitely dead when the SUV finally stopped. But the only substance in her blood was caffeine, and while it was a tragic, regrettable accident, it was clearly an accident. Really, investigators told Holt’s stunned survivors, his ex-wife and two children, it was surprising that such things didn’t happen more often, given the congestion in D.C., the unwieldy SUVs, the mothers’ frayed nerves, the nature of dusk, with its tricky gray-green light. It was a macabre coincidence, their children being classmates, the parents being superficial friends on the sidelines of their sons’ baseball games. But this part of D.C. was like a village unto itself, and the accident had happened only a mile from the school.
    At Peter’s memorial