“What’s happened? How bad?” Owen asked, gulping, his palms and arms tingling, his body meeting resistance in this new medium of circumstance. This time he couldn’t just close his eyes and roll over and go back to sleep. His mother and father weren’t in the next room.

Ed, hurrying ahead, shook his head as if the question were a bee or horsefly buzzing at his ears. “They didn’t say. You know how cops are, they hide their stupidity by clamming up. They said an accident, and they wanted you there.”

They arrived at Ed’s car, a new bronze-colored Mercedes, in its numbered space on the asphalt factory lot. Ed had always been the one to act the role of company head; he had a mental image of the rewards and responsibilities. Owen had tried to shrug it all off, driving a red Corvette like a kid. The inside of the Mercedes, though, smelled of pizza and onion-laden takeout, along with fresh leather and assembly glue.

Owen’s face felt hot, as if looking into an oven. He said, “I just saw her, twenty minutes ago. She had an appointment in Hartford; she was late.”

“With that Irish lawyer?”

He knew he was Irish. Phyllis told Ed everything, or most everything, and Owen couldn’t resent it. “Yes.” Ed was loyal, Ed was big. Phyllis’s hands had flown apart, describing her lost boyfriend Hank as “enormous.” Owen hadn’t been quite big enough.

Ed was saying, “She hated that guy. One of these Mick fast talkers, she felt he was trying to con her. Micks’re all male chauvinists.” He drove with speed, but carefully; the car’s sheer weight made it seem a placid ride, four miles in less than ten minutes. The twisting back road, a short-cut to Hartford for those that knew it, was puddled with wet leaves knocked down by last night’s rain. The coruscating blue lights of several police cars were visible well ahead; a young cop controlling traffic through the remaining lane waved them through, until Ed talked to him, in words Owen couldn’t hear. There was a drumming in his head. He had already spotted the Falcon station wagon next to the woods beyond the shoulder, upside down.

His heartbeat had become so rapid it pushed him across events, missing whole sequences. He wasn’t aware of Ed’s steering and braking, only that the Mercedes was stopped. For the longest time he couldn’t figure out how to open the door: the handle was smaller and higher than in the cars he was used to. He saw that a door of the upside-down Falcon had been pried open and a gray blanket covered something long next to it.