“No!” Cruz says. “I didn’t notice anything except Vivi lying on the ground! I called 911, I waited for the ambulance to get there, and then I ran to the house to tell Leo what happened.”
“But you didn’t call him from the scene?”
“No.”
“You didn’t call your best friend to tell him his mother was hurt?”
Cruz removes his glasses and sets them down on the table, and it’s only then that the Chief notices one of the lenses has a crack in it and there’s the start of a bruise under Cruz’s left eye.
“Leo and I got into a fight last night,” Cruz says. “I didn’t think he’d answer if I called.”
A fight, the Chief thinks. That could explain the glasses, the eye, Cruz racing over to the Howe residence at seven in the morning.
“Did you see anyone in front of you on Madaket Road?” the Chief asks. “Maybe a car that pulled over?”
“No,” Cruz says.
The Chief will need to look at the scene himself, but if he’s understanding it correctly, whoever hit Vivian Howe would have been turning onto Kingsley, as Cruz would have done. There’s no chance that a car driving on the Madaket Road would have hit someone who wasn’t even on the bike path yet. But if a driver took the soft left onto Kingsley going too fast and not paying attention, he could have hit a pedestrian. Then, if he knew Kingsley was a dead end and he wanted to get away cleanly, he most likely would have backed up and continued down Madaket Road.
It must have been a local, the Chief thinks. And his day gets even worse. “So you called 911 and then what happened?”
“I waited with Vivi,” Cruz says. “I held her hand and tried talking to her in case she could hear me. A couple of cars stopped; one woman asked if I was the one who’d hit her…”
“But you weren’t?” the Chief asks gently. He knows that frequently in hit-and-runs, the person who did the hit is the one who calls it in, pretending to be a bystander. Is that what happened here? Did Cruz turn onto Kingsley too fast, did Vivian Howe appear in his path so suddenly that he couldn’t react, was the sun in his eyes, was he upset about the fight with the son, was he, maybe, going over to apologize? The Chief had raised his own two kids and then he’d raised Tess and Greg’s kids, Chloe and Finn. He has experienced enough teenage drama to write a six-season Netflix series. Any one of his kids could have taken an eye off the road to text or change the radio station—and unintentionally mowed someone down. “You weren’t the one who hit her? If you did or you think you might have and not realized it, now is the time to tell me. I know you have a bright future ahead of you and you want to preserve that—”
“Chief Kapenash,” Cruz says, and suddenly the kid is clear-eyed and earnest. “I didn’t hit Vivi. I didn’t see who did. I didn’t see anyone until after I called 911. Vivi was on the ground when I found her.” Cruz closes his eyes, and tears stream down his face.
The Chief sighs. He knows he shouldn’t necessarily believe the kid, but he does. “We’ll need to impound your Jeep until forensics can check it out, son, I’m sorry.” He stands up. “Call your dad, have him come get you. I’m sorry this happened. I know you lost someone important to you in a tragic way. I’ve been there myself.”
The boy is crying so hard now it sounds like he’s choking. “She was like a mother to me,” he says. “I was her favorite child.”
Vivi
She rises, higher and higher. She supposes this is a good thing—up and not down—but she feels like she’s heading to the grocery store without her wallet. Which is to say, she’s not prepared. She has unattended business, big and small, back on the ground, in her life.
Small: Her new All-Clad three-quart sauté pan is still sitting on the walk and she knows that Leo and Carson will never notice it. They’ll step over it, and it will fill with rain and insects; maybe one of the field mice that have been infesting Money Pit since Vivi bought it will drown in it, or an unsuspecting blue jay will dip its beak into the acrid black water, mistaking the pan for a birdbath. It will fill with snow; it will become fused with the slate of the walk before anyone thinks to pick it up, take it inside, and scour it.
Willa will do it when she comes over, Vivi supposes. Or Vivi’s landscaper, Anastasia—a woman whose photo is in the dictionary next to perfectionist—will handle it.
Small: Vivi has an outstanding invoice from Anastasia for twenty-one hundred dollars; that needs to be paid.