As the elevator doors opened, Sofia told me something she had not shared with the police because she had considered it irrelevant.
A woman had visited the hospital two days after the crash claiming to be a friend of Lena’s family.
She had brought expensive flowers and asked whether Lena remembered the truck’s color.
“What did the woman look like?” I asked.
Sofia described silver hair, a camel-colored coat, and a pearl pin shaped like a bird.
Gwen wore that pin to nearly every charity event in town.
I asked Sofia to tell Detective Brooks exactly what the woman had said.
When I reached the parking garage, my hands were shaking so badly that I sat in the car for several minutes before starting the engine.
The next person to contact me was not Kira at the body shop or Detective Brooks.
It was Gwen’s daughter Alice.
Alice Mercer was twenty-eight, worked at a marine supply warehouse, and had moved back into her mother’s house after a difficult divorce.
We had exchanged greetings over the fence but never spent more than a few minutes talking.
She knocked on my door just before sunrise with a canvas bag over one shoulder.
Her face looked gray in the cold light.
“I need to say something,” she whispered.
I opened the door but did not ask her inside until I had looked toward Gwen’s house.
“My mother is asleep,” Alice said.
“For once.”
I led her to the kitchen.
She held a paper cup of coffee with both hands, although she did not drink.
“I was in Evan’s truck,” she said.
The confession arrived without warning.
I sat down across from her.
“The night Lena was hit?”
Alice nodded.
“Evan was driving us home after an argument at a restaurant.”
“What happened?”
She stared at the steam rising from her coffee.
“He took the service road because he didn’t want the police to see him.”
“Why would the police see him?”
“He had been drinking.”
Alice closed her eyes.
“I told him to slow down, and he told me to stop acting like Mom.”
I waited.
“I saw the bicycle light,” she said.
“He turned too late.”
She described a hard jolt, an awful noise, and Evan pulling the wheel toward the shoulder.
She had reached for her phone, but he had grabbed her wrist.
“He said we couldn’t call because he’d go to jail.”
“Did you tell your mother?”
