Free Pictures of You by Caroline Leavitt Page A

Isabelle cried. “She was alive! I saw her standing in the middle of the road!” She wept into her hands and he shut the notebook. She grabbed for a tissue on the table, blowing her nose.
    “You weren’t speeding,” he said. “You didn’t flee the scene and you weren’t drunk or on drugs. I’m filing the case as a formality, and I’ll tell you what. I know what’s going to happen before I even do it. The DA’s going to reject it. The woman’s car was pointing the wrong way and the lights were off. She was in the middle of theroad. She was negligent. There’d have been no way you’d have been able to see the car in all that fog, no way you could have stopped. We didn’t even see the smoke from the cars at first because of all the fog. Worst that’ll happen is your insurance rates’ll jack up.”
    Isabelle tried to keep track of everything he was saying, but his words seemed to be slurring.
    “Forget wrongful death,” he said. “There’s not enough evidence for even a civil suit. And for a criminal case, we’d have to have witnesses.” The detective stood up.
    “The little boy—”
    “He doesn’t count as a witness. He was deep in the woods when we found him. Sick with asthma. Highly unlikely he saw anything.” He stood up. “We’ll be in touch,” he said. “Don’t get up. I’ll let myself out.”
    Isabelle felt frozen to the chair. Wrongful death. She heard the door open and then close.
    The woman died
. She covered her face with her hands. She wouldn’t kill flies. When Luke had found a mouse in the kitchen, she wouldn’t let him call an exterminator and insisted on getting one of those humane traps and freeing the mouse outside after they had caught it.
    She had killed a woman.
    She cried harder, great tearing sobs that made her feel as if someone had punched a hole in her heart. They had all known. Luke. Her friends. She’d call them and they’d deny it, or they’d tell her they were just protecting her.
    She managed to stand up, though her legs had turned to water. She should have known, too. She went into the kitchen, where her laptop rested on the table. She turned the computer on, found the local paper, and went back three days, to Friday, when the accident had happened. Nothing. It had probably happened too late to make the evening edition. She swallowed and hit the link for Saturday’s paper and there it was, spilled across the front page.
    Was Mysterious Murderous Crash
a Snap Judgment of Local Photographer?
     
    Isabelle stood up and then sat down again.
A terrible fog may have led to a mysterious two-car accident Friday that killed a local woman, say the sheriff’s investigators. The woman, April Nash, 35, of 134 Mayfield Street, a waitress at the Blue Cupcake, was apparently driving the wrong way on a one-way road. Her Mercury sedan was parked in the center of the road when it was slammed into by a Honda driven by local child photographer Isabelle Stein. Ms. Nash was instantly killed, and her son and Ms. Stein were both taken by ambulance to Hartford Hospital and later released in good condition. Friends say Ms. Stein was traveling to New York City, but what Ms. Nash and her son were doing on the road was unclear.
County Sheriff Lt. Bob Saldo said an investigation was pending. “We don’t have witnesses, but clearly something was out of the ordinary here and we intend to get to the bottom of it.” Saldo encouraged anyone with information regarding the crash to call 555-987-5940. An investigation is pending.
    There was a black-and-white photo, as shocking as a slap, of two crumpled cars on a lonely road. There was her car, her little Honda, smashed like a metal toy. Pointed toward it was the other car, ruined beyond recognition. For a second, Isabelle covered her eyes. She forced herself to look again, and there was an inset of a beautiful woman laughing, her light hair artlessly cropped, her eyes big as dinner plates. Isabelle began to shake.
    April Nash. Her name was