“I talked to Reed briefly. He wasn’t very involved.”
“Right. Under ordinary circumstances, when the Hanover officer… uh, Sinclair, rolled up. Reed would have told him things were under control and done all the diagrams and measurements himself. But he sees this low three-digit tag and bells go off. He knows the car belongs to somebody important in government.
“Sinclair gets to do his thing while Reed gets on the radio and the phone, calls for a supervisor, runs the tag ASAP. Bingo. The car comes back to you, and now his first thought is ifs you inside. So you can imagine how it was out there.”
“A circus.”
“You got it. Turns out Sinclair just got out of the academy. Your wreck was his second.”
“Even if it was his twentieth, I can see how he might have made a mistake.
There was no reason for him to look for skid marks two hundred feet up from where Lucy went off the road.”
“And you’re certain it was a yaw mark you saw?”
“Absolutely. You make those casts, and you’re going to find the impression on the shoulder’s going to match the impression back there on the road. The only way that yaw mark or scuff could have been left was if an outside force caused the car to suddenly change direction.”
“And then acceleration marks two hundred or so feet later,” he thought out loud.
“Lucy gets hit from the rear, taps her brakes, and keeps on going. Seconds later she suddenly accelerates and loses control.”
“Probably about the same time she dialed Nine-one- one,” I said.
“I’ll check with the cellular phone company and get the exact time of that call. Then we’ll find it on the tape.”
“Someone was on her bumper with their high beams on, and she flipped on the night mirror, and finally resorted to putting up the rear sunscreen to block out the glare. She didn’t have the radio or CD player on because she was concentrating hard. She was wide awake and scared because someone’s on top of her.
“This person finally hits her from the rear and Lucy applies the brakes,” I continued to reconstruct what I believed had happened.
“She drives on, and realizes the person is gaining on her again. Panicking, Lucy floors it and loses control. All of this would have taken place in seconds.”
“If what you found out there is right, it sure could have happened exactly like that.”
“Will you look into it?”
“You bet. What about the paint?”
“I’ll turn it, the taillight unit, and everything else in to the labs and ask them to put a rush on it.”
“Put my name on the paperwork. Have them call me with the results right away.” It was five o’clock and dark out when I got off the phone in my upstairs office. I looked around dazed, and felt like a stranger in my house. Hunger gnawing my stomach was followed by nausea, and I drank Mylanta from the bottle and rummaged in the medicine cabinet for Zantac. My ulcer had vanished during the summer, but unlike former lovers, it always came back. Both phone lines rang and were answered by voice mail. I heard the fax machine as I soaked in the tub and sipped wine on top of medicine. I had so much to do. I knew my sister, Dorothy, would want to come immediately. She always rose to crisis occasions because it fed her need for drama. She would use it for research. No doubt, in her next children’s book, one of her characters would deal with an auto wreck. Critics again would rave about the sensitivity and wisdom of Dorothy, who mothered people she imagined much better than she did her only daughter. The fax, I found, was Dorothy’s flight schedule. She was arriving late tomorrow afternoon and would stay with Lucy in my home.
“She won’t be in the hospital long, will she?” she asked, when I called her minutes later.
“I imagine I’ll be bringing her here in the afternoon,” I said.
“She must look terrible.”
“Most people do after automobile accidents.”
“But is any of it permanent?” She almost whispered.