Free An Accidental Death by Phyllis Smallman

An Accidental Death
    Cash was missing. We knew who’d taken it. Once again, Aunt Kay and I went looking for my brother Scott. We found him in the backyard of my parents’ house. They were paying him to put down new patio stones around the pool while they were on vacation but Scott hadn’t made much progress. It was pretty much the same as it had been the week before.
    Scott wasn’t alone.
    “Figures.” My disgust was boundless but Aunt Kay’s reaction was rage.
    She charged towards Ryan, swinging her bag at his head and screaming, “Stay away from him with your poison!”
    Ryan raised his arm to defend himself. “Crazy old bitch.” He danced away from her, yelling, “Knock it off.”
    But Aunt Kay didn’t stop, kept hitting him again and again with her purse.
    I laughed. My kind, gentle aunt, an overweight pensioner, was going after a drug dealer with her purse and I laughed. I didn’t step in to stop her or even help her. I laughed.
    Steel flashed.
    “No,” Scott shouted and slipped between Ryan and Aunt Kay. We all froze in place, absorbing events that couldn’t be changed, while overhead a raven cried. Its shadow flew across the surface of the pool and then I heard Scott’s soft, “Oh.”
    Aunt Kay caught Scott as he fell, wrapping her arms around his waist and trying to hold him up. Scott’s hand opened and a plastic baggie, with three pieces of crack cocaine that look like chunks of dirty plastic, fell to the stones.
    Ryan shot towards me, headed for the street. I picked up a shovel and swung, without thinking. Ryan fell at my feet and I ran for the kitchen to dial 911.
    When I came back, Ryan lay face down and spread-eagled in the pool. Aunt Kay’s right arm was in the water, almost up to her shoulder, her hand on Ryan’s back. She looked up at me with a blank stare.
    “Let him go,” I said.
    Frozen in place, still holding Ryan down, she didn’t respond.
    I pulled her to her feet saying, “I’ll get him out.”
    I rolled Ryan over the concrete surround of the pool and onto the gravel where he lay with vacant eyes staring up at the impossibly blue sky. I drew my sneaker carefully through the long lines his heels had made entering the pool, smoothing them over and hiding them. Then I hauled Ryan off of the concrete to lie on top of the marks my sneakers had concealed. Only then did I roll him onto his stomach, just as I’d been taught when I was a good girl guide.
    A siren wailed in the distance.
    Aunt Kay still cradled Scott in her arms, crooning to him softly. When I took Scott’s body from her she tried to clutch him back but I grabbed her upper arms and shook her gently, forcing her to focus on what I was saying.
    “It was an accident, wasn’t it?”
    I brushed her hair back from her forehead. “After I hit Ryan with the shovel, he tried to get up. He was disoriented and stumbled into the pool, didn’t he?”
    She didn’t answer.
    The sirens grew louder.
    “It was an accident. You tried to get him out of the water but he was too heavy for you.”
    Awareness came into her eyes and then came panic. She turned her head towards the wail of the sirens.
    I cupped her chin in my hands, turning her face back to mine. I said, “It was an accidental death.”
    She nodded.



CHAPTER 1
    It was Sunday morning and I was out on the lanai of my borrowed beach house, sprawled in a canvas lawn chair, the Sunday Herald dis­carded at my feet. The bright Florida sun was giving me a headache. I couldn’t find the energy to go inside the air-conditioned house or even move into its shade. I’d surrendered to lethargy and given up on everything but breathing.
    The September air was heavy with humidity. At ten o’clock in the morning, the temperature already hovered around ninety, with a forecast for worse to come. Overhead small white clouds, eager to be gone, rushed across the sky, leaving nothing behind but the drought that wouldn’t end.
    Elvis flew in with wings extended, neck out and long legs