Free Red Hook Road by Ayelet Waldman

take her hand and help her over, but the other, the one with the fierce, plain Down East face, refused with a single shake of her head any help he was fool enough to think he could provide. Sheriff Paige had learned over his many years in the department that the best—the only—way to express condolences in such situations was briefly, almost blandly.
    “I am so sorry for your loss,” he began. Then he explained to the women what, as far as he could tell, had happened.
    Until this evening, the Newmarket-based limousine driver would never have had any cause to drive this stretch of Red Hook Road. Hewould not have been familiar with it, and thus would not have anticipated the problem of the sun. If he took the turn too fast and too wide, and then was blinded as he came around the bend, he would have hit the car coming the other way.
    The women stared at the sheriff intently as he talked, watching closely as he drew a picture in the air with his pointed finger.
    When he finished his explanation he paused for a moment. Then he said, “I don’t think any of them knew what hit them. They didn’t suffer.” For a moment he felt embarrassed at what was not, he knew, an entirely honest attempt at solace. He had no idea whether or not they had suffered. How could he?
    Normally the sheriff would not have bothered to come down from Newmarket for a traffic accident. Accidents happened all the time on these winding country roads, people died, especially in the winter, with ice and bad wipers and nothing to do to pass the long dark nights but stay warm over a bottle. Yet there was something about this particular accident; the bride and groom dead at the scene. It was like an old English folk song, he thought, or a tragic poem. He had found himself unable to stay at his desk when the 10–50 came in, and had driven all the way down here, lights flashing and siren wailing, to see it for himself. It was as bad as he had expected, as bad as any accident he had ever seen. The fire in the SUV had burned hot, transforming the body of the driver into a scoriated husk that barely resembled a man. But the two bodies they’d already pulled out of the limousine were worse. Crushed skulls, skin punctured by jags of broken bone, blood everywhere.
    “Is that John?” Jane said gruffly.
    “Ma’am?” the sheriff said.
    “Is that John or Becca they’re trying to get out of the car?”
    “That’s John, ma’am. The boys are working on extracting him. You can see that side’s crushed pretty bad. But they’ll get him out.”
    “If they haven’t extracted him yet,” Jane said, “then how do you know he’s dead?”
    Sheriff Paige frowned and then, uncharacteristically, turned away from her gaze. For a moment he looked down at his shiny black boots. Then he forced himself to wipe his expression clean and meet her eyes.
    “He might be alive in there,” Jane said, her voice harsh and loud.
    “No, ma’am.”
    “How do you know? You haven’t gotten to him yet. You don’t know.”
    “I’m sorry, ma’am. He’s gone.”
    “You don’t know that,” Jane said, her voice rising. “They haven’t even gotten to him yet.”
    “When they moved the … bride, the men made sure.”
    By now Jane’s face was bright red, and beads of sweat gathered at her hairline. She wiped the back of her hand roughly across her forehead. “He might be alive in there. He might be breathing.”
    “I’m sorry, ma’am. He’s not. We’re certain of that.”
    “You don’t know. He might be all right in there. He might be alive.” She inched closer to the wreck.
    The sheriff said, “Please, Mrs. Tetherly, if you’ll just calm down, the firefighters will do their jobs and we’ll have his body out in a minute or two.”
    “Calm down?” Jane shouted. “Calm down? You’ve got some nerve, you son of a bitch.”
    He placed a restraining hand on her shoulder. “Let’s just move back behind the police tape. Give the men room to work.”
    “Get your hands