“I want to go see mommy in heaven.” Given that she was already crying I didn’t want to upset her further. “We’ll see.”

“Will she be normal in heaven?” She tried to control the tremor in her voice.

“What do you mean?”

“Will she be blue, like she was on the bed?”

I squeezed her little fingers again, “No, sweetheart, she isn’t blue anymore.”

Sarah undid her seatbelt and looked up at me to see if I would protest. Normally I would have forced her to buckle it right back up. But her face was begging me to let her crawl under my arm so I lifted my arm and she slid beneath it and up against me. I held her tight. I wanted to make it all better for her, but there was no way to do that. I felt so helpless.

When I pulled into my driveway there were several police cars camped out along with some vans. I took no notice of the lettering on the vans assuming that they belonged to the police department and held forensic equipment or something of that nature. I got out of the car pulling Sarah with me, and lifted her up into my arms. I carried her up the driveway. Detective Bergant stepped out from behind a van.

“I don’t think you want to be here right now.” His eyes were sharp and serious.

“Why not?”

He pointed to the side of a van. It read “Channel 5 News Team”.

I’m sure he didn’t care about my wellbeing. After all I was guilty in his eyes. He was looking out for Sarah. Perhaps there was a soul buried deep beneath the badge he kept on his vest pocket. I turned and walked back toward the car but I heard the distinct clip- clop of high-heeled shoes scraping against the concrete walkway that led to our front door, and son the footsteps were racing down the driveway toward me. I opened the driver-side door and slid Sarah into the car in one motion but before I could slip into the drivers’ seat I heard a female voice closing in on me.

“Did you kill your wife Mr. Derrick?”

A slender pretty little black woman dressed neatly in a business suit charged at me holding a microphone as though it were a spear. She stopped at my door and shoved the microphone against my face. A clumsy looking long haired Asian man with blue-jeans and a white sport shirt was hastily making his way down the driveway, slipping and sliding on the smattering of wet leaves that speckled the gravel, while trying to balance a camera on his shoulder. I closed my car door to shield Sarah from the vultures.

“No! I did not kill my wife!” I felt my face tighten into a scowl as I stared into the woman’s eyes trying my best to withhold the torrent of anger that was building inside of me.

She looked back at her cameraman giving him a wave. I knew instantly that what she wanted most was to capture my scowl on the camera; the scowl of a guilty murderer. I took the opportunity to open my door and climb into my car. I started the car and backed down the driveway with the two of them chasing after me.

“What do they want daddy?”

“Nothing honey. They just wanted to ask me some questions.” I pulled her to me so that she wouldn’t slide off of the seat as I turned out of the driveway and onto the street. I accelerated down Erie road and just drove. I had nowhere to go so I just cruised down Lakeshore Boulevard trying to figure out my next move.

* * *

At seven in the evening, with Sarah asleep in the passenger seat, I turned off my headlights and parked my car at the foot of my neighbor’s driveway and crept through the patch of woods that divided our yards and into my own driveway with the stealth of ninja. I darted from tree to bush to bumper to garage like a clumsy middle-aged giraffe. I was jittery, as usual, when alone in the dark nearly crapping myself when I mistook a two headed chrysanthemum for the eyes of an ogre. I made my way through the once pink-flowered Peonies bushes which lined the front of our house and over to the front door. The crime scene ribbon which had earlier guarded the entry was still in place. I slid across the left side of the house, hugging the vinyl siding, and tripped over some dead potted plants which

Catherine had not gotten planted before the Lake Erie gales began to blow and the planting season had passed. I managed to catch the ground with my hands narrowly missing a head-butt with a thorny flowerless rose bush which doubled as a short green gremlin after dark. For all the noise I was making I might as well have pulled into my own driveway and waltzed through the front door. Instead I removed my muddied tennis-shoes on the black plastic mat at the rear sliding door and I slipped into my house; my house! Why did I feel like such a delinquent?

I found the laundry room in the dark but switched the light on once I was inside with the door closed. There were no windows to betray the light (or the thick musty odor of soiled sweat-socks) so I knew it was safe to illuminate the room. I grabbed a laundry basket and filled it with jeans and shirts and socks and underwear for both Sarah and myself. I turned off the light and slipped back through the sliding doors and back to the driveway. I froze with fear when I got to the bumper of Catherine’s car. At the foot of the driveway I could see the soft orange glow of a Cyclops’s single eye…or, as my brain nullified the illogical probability of the former, a cigarette being drawn upon in the pitch of a moonless night. I was busted. It had to be detective Bergant puffing on one of his Marlboro’s. I stood up and walked boldly down the middle of the driveway and right toward the glowing cigarette. I was nervous and shaking on the outside but I smiled and did my best to exude a calm and innocent façade.

“I’m sorry, I needed some clothes.” I sat the basket on the ground in front of me.

“What?”

The voice was female. It was not the good detective smoking but rather my neighbor Millie.

“Millie, it’s you. I thought it was that damned detective.”

“Oh god! Don’t hurt me!” Millie dropped her newly lit cigarette on the ground and started to back away from me and towards the edge of the street.

“Millie, it’s me. Matt.”

“But you…you killed Catherine.”

“No, I didn’t.” I drew a long breath, “And it’s getting a little tiresome having to defend myself from those ridiculous accusations.” I raised my hands in exasperation and was surprised when Millie flinched. “Millie, we’ve known each other for almost ten years. Have you ever known me to be the least bit violent?”

“But it said on the news…and that detective. He asked me about you. He asked me if I knew…” Her eyes grew wide and she just stared at me.

“Millie…he asked if you knew what?” “If I knew if you and Catherine had been fighting.”

“What else?” I was getting angry. She had obviously done some blabbing. Catherine and I bickered occasionally, like any couple, but we weren’t particularly loud and certainly not physical. It dawned on me that Millie wouldn’t have been so scared of me if she hadn’t exaggerated her story to the detective.

“He wanted to know if either of you were having an…affair.” She cringed as if to defend herself from a blow. “And you said…?”

“I said I didn’t know. I said it was possible.” Once again she cringed as if she was about to be stricken.

“What?” I could hear myself yelling now. “Why would you say something like that?” I stepped over the laundry basket and backed her further down the driveway until her posterior was pressed against the back of my mailbox post. “How could you tell them that I might be having an affair? I’ve never cheated on Catherine in my life.”

“No…no…that’s not what I meant.” She was crying now. She was genuinely scared of me; and why not? I was a murder and a philanderer. I might rape her and kill her too!

“Why would you say such a thing?” Millie, her tall skinny mop-headed frame almost skeleton-like in the dark, turned and ran down Erie road, past my car and up her driveway and into her house, and all the while she was waving her hands about like a panicked school-girl, stumbling and staggering as though she were running from Freddy Kruger. I picked up my laundry basket and walked back toward my car. I got to her driveway just in time to see the light of her foyer disappear as Millie’s front door closed behind her. That explained it, I thought. That explained why detective Bergant interrogated me over my phone-friend Amber. My car was still running. I opened the rear driver-side door and I shoved the basket of clothes into my back seat and I climbed into the car and I drove back to the hotel which I realized Sarah and I would have to call home for days to come.