Guess what Mommy has tomorrow?” I said to Brandon. We were at the kitchen island; he was working on his homework; I was on my iPad, doing my daily check for any articles connected to the accident.
He didn’t answer.
“Did you hear what I said?” I glanced away from the iPad. “I asked if you knew what I’ve got happening tomorrow?”
I could see he was off in one of his little worlds.
“I’ve got a job interview,” I said, trying to steer him back to the conversation and away from his mood. “Not just an interview, a second one. I think maybe they like me.”
“Who?” he said distractedly.
“This local TV station. It’s in White Plains. So it’s close by.”
He looked up from his notebook. “This is stupid, Mommy. Why do I have to do this?”
“Because you have to, Brandon. Just stick with it. You’re almost done.”
“So you’re going to work in TV now? No more advertising?”
“I told you, the advertising job is over, honey. And that’s if they hire me. I’m sure there are lots of other people they’re talking to who are just as qualified. But you never know.”
“They’ll hire you,” Brandon said, his face down at the level of the notebook, sketching out one of his wild-looking monsters.
“Well, that’s good to know. I wonder if I can get you on the hiring committee? I could use someone on the inside.”
“Tie, tie, tie, tie, tie . . . ,” he began to drone.
“I thought that was funny,” I said. “Why don’t you put aside what you’re doing and get back to your math. That’s what you’re supposed to be doing now, right?”
“I like drawing.”
“I know you like drawing, Brandon. And I like your drawings. But it’s math time now.”
“Tie, tie, tie . . . ,” he said, tuning me out.
“Brandon, please . . .”
He started drawing jagged lines through his math page, jerking his pencil in defiance, defacing the homework.
“Brandon, stop! Now.”
“Tie, tie, tie . . .”
“Brandon, you heard me.” I reached for his hand. “I said stop!”
He tightened the grip on his pencil without even looking up, continuing to scrawl his angry lines. I finally pulled it out of his grip and he looked up at me, like I’d stolen something from him, and I saw a wildness I knew.
Mean Brandon.
“Why would they want anyone else? If they do, I could go over and kill them.”
I looked at him in shock. “Brandon, you know that’s not funny!”
“I don’t mean it to be funny, Mommy. I’ll send Polydragon. He can do that, you know! He can go over and eat them, like Chicken McNuggets, if I tell him to. M’wom, m’wom, m’wom!” he said, making loud chomping noises.
“Brandon, stop that now!” Sometimes he just said things, things he knew were inappropriate and would make me angry. Sometimes it was something else that he just couldn’t control.
He suddenly looked away before he could get a reaction and the fierceness was gone. “That was just a joke, Mommy. I’m not really going to do it.”
“Well, it wasn’t funny,” I said. “You know better. You have to watch what you say.”
“I’m going to watch TV.”
“Brandon!”
He got up, leaving his schoolbook on the counter. Most any other time I would have brought him back, put the math book back in front of him, and made him stay on task. But tonight I just exhaled, spent and not up to the effort.
For years, we couldn’t get him to even look at his at-home assignments. He would just stare at the page, muttering his persistent, distracting phrases. Or scribble illegibly, even though he knew exactly what to do. Or sometimes hurl the book in anger or rip pages out. And if he received a time-out and was sent to his room, he would go in the bathroom and slam the toilet seat up and down for an hour.
At least that was the old Brandon.
I went back to the iPad and continued my search. First I put in “Joseph Kelty,” as I always did. Then “Bedford, New York, auto accident.”
Nothing.
On the Journal-News site I did find another article on the continuing string of home break-ins, the third in the Mount Kisco area, not so far from us. I also saw something about a new exercise studio opening up in Armonk dedicated to the barre method, which I’d been dying to check out.
I was about to exit when it caught my eye:
Pharmacist Tied to Fatal Auto Accident Found Dead in Briarcliff Home
My heart came to a stop. I clicked on the link and began to read:
Roland McMahon, a pharmacist with the CVS company, was found hanged in his Briarcliff Manor home, an apparent suicide.
“Oh my God! Rollie.” I exhaled. I felt my stomach fall.
The body was discovered by his wife, Annemarie, Wednesday night after she’d returned from an outing with friends. Attempts to revive Mr. McMahon by paramedics proved unsuccessful and he was declared dead at the scene.
There was a photo, the image there of the guy I recalled: ruddy-faced, soft around the belly, his tie undone, and acting a little squeamish at the sight of Kelty in his mangled Honda.
I leaned closer:
Coincidentally, McMahon, 58, who worked at the CVS store in Bedford as their chief pharmacist, was in the news in the past month as the only eyewitness of a fatal accident on Route 135 in which Joseph Kelty, of Staten Island, New York, was killed. No one was criminally charged and Sergeant Richard Toomey, of the Briarcliff Manor Police Force, insisted, “There was no reason to consider the two incidents as related in any way.”
Annemarie McMahon, being consoled by her daughter, said, “We’re all in shock. I’d just left him. He was staying home to watch a game. He never once showed any sign of depression or anything like that. It just makes no sense that he would do something like this. We were leaving on a cruise of the Caribbean in two weeks.”
A family member said McMahon had no known financial problems and was in good standing at work. He leaves behind a wife and three grown children. He was a member of the Pharmacological Society of America and was voted Westchester Pharmacist of the Year in 2007.
A knot tightened inside me. He’d hanged himself?
I read the article again, and it didn’t get any less troubling. I didn’t have a clue if what had happened was connected in any way to the crash. More specifically, to the money I’d taken. Meaning, my imagination started to run away with me—whether he’d actually killed himself at all. Or . . .
I shuddered as a presentiment of fear wormed into my brain. Or, if someone was trying to track the money. Oh, God, Hil . . .
Maybe it would come out that he’d had cancer; or that he’d lost his life’s savings in a kind of speculative investment; or that he was being treated for depression; or that he was having an affair. You hear about these things all the time. I thought back to what I’d told him at the site. “I’m Jeanine . . .” That was all. No last name. No way to find me. I’d been careful, I reassured myself.
And even if something had happened, something unimaginable, crazy, he had no way to trace me. But it all tingled terrifyingly on my skin.
Poor Rollie. Could he really have killed himself?
I thought back through everything I could remember from the moment he came down the slope. There was no way anything could point to me if, as insane as it sounded, this somehow wasn’t a suicide after all.
Right?
Inwardly, I think I knew it from that very moment. Despite what the obituary said. Despite the police saying that they weren’t looking at the two events as being related.
Why would they? They didn’t know.
But I did.
As far as anyone else would be concerned, Rollie would have been the first person at the accident.
The only person.
The only person for anyone who might be on the trail of what had happened to that money.
You’re thinking crazily, Hilary. I tried to bring myself back to reality. You’re watching too many detective shows . . .
But if it wasn’t—I pressed my fingers to my forehead—if what happened to Rollie wasn’t a suicide at all, but the work of someone who had managed to track him down, let’s say from an article in the newspaper, or from the cop who came on the scene just as I took off. Polluto. Or from the fucking police report, for all I knew. That was all possible, right . . . ?
Someone looking for that money . . .
Then I’d basically set him up. He was killed because of me.
I was the one they were really looking for, not him.
My stomach went into free fall.
Suddenly I noticed Brandon back at my side, the defiance gone. “What’s wrong, Mommy? You’re all white.”
“Nothing, baby,” I lied, drawing him close to me.
I’d saved the biggest lie for myself. That in trying to help my son, had I now put him in danger? If Rollie had been murdered for what he didn’t know, for what he had no idea had taken place, what would they do if they found me?
“Nothing,” I kept repeating, stroking Brandon’s hair over and over, terrified inside. “Nothing’s wrong, honey.”