Unhinged by Sarah Graves

the table as man and dog exited.
    Wade took one of Wyatt’s arms, George took the other, and together they got the drunken man on his feet.
    “We’ll get him to his room,” Wade told Fran, who watched tight-lipped before leaving on her own; I’d scarcely heard a word from her all night. Instead she’d cast speculative looks at Roy McCall, who’d returned them in a way I thought might bode interestingly for Fran in the future.
    Between the two men Wyatt stumbled in winey befuddlement as from the other side of the house I heard a roar: Sam’s old car starting at last with a bang of backfire and then a clattering of valve-chatter as it headed downtown.
    “Thanks,” Harry told me, opening the door with Prill hugging his leg. From the first, she’d positioned herself at his side as if to keep anyone else from getting near him.
    Overhead, the stars twinkled with unusual brilliance, their light amplified by the first hints of storm-fueled humidity.
    “Don’t mention it,” I said, and was about to say something more. Something on the order of:
    Don’t lie to me. I’ve been lied to by the best.
    But from down the street I could still hear Sam’s car, its engine howling. The sound, as of somebody trying to go fifty in second gear, was not among those I’d come to think of as normal from the old vehicle.
    “Ellie,” I called, pierced by a premonition. “Catch Wade and George.”
    Maybe if they got there in time they could stop whatever was happening; hold it off, get in front of it somehow.
    But by now they’d have heard it, too, the whole town alerted by that ghastly scream of metal-on-metal protest.
    Sam,
I thought, standing there frozenly.
Maggie
.
    Then came the crash.
     

Chapter 3
     
    “My fault,” Harry Markle told me in the hospital corridor.
    After the sirens. After the ambulance.
    After the Jaws of Life.
    I wheeled on him. “What’re you talking about? You didn’t have anything to do with it, you weren’t anywhere
near
. . .”
    But then I stopped, because Harry had a look on his face and I’d seen that look before. The guy wearing it had been sitting in my office making a will, two other guys waiting for him outside. He’d called the two guys in to witness it so I could notarize it.
    After that, no one ever saw him again. A favor, it had been, to my guy: letting him make a will. A sign of respect from better times. But times change. And my guy had known it.
    Harry, too. “Come on,” he said now with quiet intensity, indicating a sign on the wall near the recovery room: CAFETERIA ->
    Sam and Maggie were sleeping off the anesthesia. Sam had a broken clavicle. Maggie needed surgery to find and fix abdominal bleeding. But both kids had been wearing seat belts and both, the surgeon—not Victor—assured me, would be just fine.
    At the crash site, things had been different. A vivid mental snapshot of an ambulance technician’s fist rising into the air kept making me feel short of breath. A fist rising and slamming down on Sam’s chest, because his heart had stopped.
    “It was an accident,” I said numbly again, pulling a plastic chair from a cafeteria table.
    The place was deserted at three in the morning, fluorescents humming overhead but the coffee urn producing only a sour black liquid. “They say Sam’s heart’s fine now, though.”
    The surgeon, a pleasant Pakistani gentleman with enough credentials to float a barge from here to his homeland, had told me that broken collarbones healed so readily, you could put the two pieces at opposite sides of a room and they would still knit back together almost immediately. And in a young man Sam’s age, the surgeon had continued kindly, even such a blow to the chest was not a thing to be overly troubled about. All would be well.
    “But you lied,” I added to Harry Markle, anger piercing the fog as I swallowed the bitter stuff.
    “There’s no Ciro’s on Lombardy Street,” Harry agreed, “and I don’t know of any Dorian’s Grill. But was I