The Day After Yesterday

As a child, my parents were killed in an automobile wreck and now, on the downslope of my life, my two dearest friends - the closest thing to a family left in my world - had just met the same fate.

Bomber - that clucking old grandmother of the streets and highways, the most careful driver I had ever ridden with - had somehow managed to fatally flip his beloved, meticulously maintained vintage Buick in a single-vehicle rollover. His Gal Friday, Liz, was with him.

I kept thinking about the way Liz and Bomber had looked on the embalming tables at the funeral home. Curiously unmarked by the car crash that had taken their lives, they simply appeared cold and waxen and still - forever stilled. And then I got a call from Bomber's niece, Abby:

"Some things seem to be coming to light . . . some facts, allegedly . . . about the accident that claimed the lives of Uncle Bomber and Miss Grimaldi. It's causing some nasty, hurtful gossip that's starting to make me pretty damn mad."

"Gossip about Bomber and Liz?" At the implication, I felt my own surge of defensive anger.

"More specifically about the accident. About what caused it. Word's going around now that Bomber was drunk. That the bodies and the inside of the car reeked with the smell of booze. That they found empty beer cans and a spilled bottle of open whiskey in the wreck."

Bomber was diabetic, he had to be careful as hell with his alcohol intake. When he drank, it was very selective. It wouldn't have been whiskey and beer and it sure as hell wouldn't have been while he was out driving on roads he'd never traveled before. As far as Liz, when she drank it was vodka. Never anything else in all the years I knew her.

"There's more," Abby said. "Supposedly there were signs that Uncle Bomber and Liz were . . . you know, fooling around. While they were going down the road. What they're saying is that his pants were . . . well, unzipped. And her panties were completely off, and her front unbuttoned."

Bomber and Liz were friends - platonic friends - for twenty-five years. In all that time there was never any romantic or sexual attraction between them. If there had been they were both certainly free to act on it, but no sparks ever got struck. So all of a sudden they go out to Nebraska and can't restrain themselves from behaving like a couple of hormone-charged teenagers? Bomber was pushing seventy, and although she'd probably come out of her grave if she heard me say so, Liz wasn't exactly a spring chicken anymore, either. No matter who they were, what are the odds of two mature, long-time friends suddenly carrying on like that?

I'd been in such a stunned state by the news of my friends' deaths and then had gotten so immersed in the whirl of activity surrounding the funerals and so forth that the possibility of their fatal car crash being anything other than an accident had never entered my thoughts. There had been no hint, no reason to suspect something like that. But now there was. And no matter how faint the tremors causing these suspicions, the one thing I was certain of was that I would neither rest nor leave Nebraska until I had run some answers to ground.


Genre: Mystery