The Clean Weekend

Chapter 1: The Knock

The knock came at 6:02 a.m., though Nora would not learn the exact time until she read it in a police report weeks later. What she remembered was the sound itself — three measured raps, unhurried, the kind that said we can wait but you cannot.

She had been awake for eleven minutes, sitting on the edge of her bed in a T-shirt and underwear, staring at the coffee maker across the studio apartment as though willpower alone might start the brew cycle. Her shift at Rhode Island Hospital had ended at two in the morning. Four hours of sleep was not enough. Four hours of sleep was what she got.

The knock came again.

Nora pulled on yesterday's scrub pants, padded across the cold floor, and opened the door without checking the peephole, because in her experience the people who knocked at six in the morning were either her landlord or a package driver who'd given up on the buzzer.

Two people stood in the hallway. The man was mid-fifties, heavyset, wearing a brown sport coat that had been dry-cleaned one too many times. The woman was younger, maybe forty, with short auburn hair and a lanyard badge she was already holding up.

"Nora Sheehan?" the man said.

"Yes."

"I'm Detective Paul DeRosa, Burlington Police Department. This is Detective Karen Flagg. May we come in?"

Burlington. The word snagged. Burlington, Vermont, was three and a half hours north. She had not been to Vermont in years.

"What's this about?" Nora asked, but she was already stepping aside, because nurses learned early that blocking a doorway never made bad news smaller.

DeRosa entered first, scanning the apartment the way people do when they are professionally trained to notice things. Flagg followed, quieter, her gaze settling on Nora's face and staying there.

The apartment was small and honest about it. A kitchenette, a foldout couch she'd stopped folding, a card table she used as a desk. The walls held one framed photograph — Nora and her brother Tom at a Red Sox game, both of them sunburned and grinning — and a whiteboard calendar dense with shift rotations. No art. No plants. The place looked like what it was: a life stripped to essentials after a divorce that had taken everything else.

"Ms. Sheehan," DeRosa said, settling into the one chair she hadn't offered him, "do you know a man named Glen Pomeroy?"

Nora repeated the name silently, testing it against memory. Glen Pomeroy. Nothing.

"No," she said.

"You're sure?"

"I'm sure. I don't know anyone named Pomeroy."

DeRosa glanced at Flagg. Flagg opened a leather portfolio and removed a photograph — a headshot, the kind taken for a corporate directory. The man in it was perhaps sixty, silver-haired, thin-lipped, with the particular tan of someone who golfs.

"Never seen him," Nora said.

DeRosa nodded as though this confirmed something. "Mr. Pomeroy was found dead in his home in Burlington three nights ago. He'd been shot twice."

Nora waited. The information was terrible but abstract, the way all death was abstract until it wore a face you recognized.

"I'm sorry to hear that," she said carefully. "But I don't understand why you're here."

Flagg spoke for the first time. Her voice was flatter than DeRosa's, more precise. "Ms. Sheehan, do you own a 2019 silver Honda Civic, Rhode Island plate Bravo-Kilo-seven-four-one-nine?"

"Yes."

"Where is that vehicle now?"

"In the lot behind this building. Spot fourteen."

"And where was it three nights ago? Friday night into Saturday morning."

Nora blinked. Three nights ago she had worked a double — twelve hours Friday into Saturday. She remembered because a nineteen-year-old motorcycle accident had coded twice and she had been the one compressing his chest both times, feeling his ribs flex under her palms, feeling the second time that the ribs were already giving way.

"Here," she said. "Parked downstairs. I was at work."

Flagg removed a second item from the portfolio: a printout showing a grainy overhead image of a silver car passing beneath a highway gantry. The timestamp read 10:47 PM. The license plate was legible.

Bravo-Kilo-seven-four-one-nine.

"This is your vehicle passing through the I-89 toll gantry in Lebanon, New Hampshire, at ten forty-seven p.m. Friday," Flagg said. "Two hours and twelve minutes before Glen Pomeroy was shot."

Nora stared at the photo. The car was hers — same dent on the rear quarter panel where Mark had backed into a mailbox two years ago, same Red Sox bumper sticker Tom had slapped on at that game.

But she had not been driving it.

"That's not possible," she said.

"The plate matches. The E-ZPass transponder matches. The vehicle description matches."

"I was at work. You can check with the hospital. I clocked in at six p.m. Friday and clocked out at six-fifteen a.m. Saturday."

DeRosa leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. "We will check. But I want you to think carefully, Ms. Sheehan. Is there anyone who had access to your car that night? Anyone who might have borrowed it?"

Nora's mouth opened. Then closed.

Because the answer to that question was not simple, and the truth of it — the full, complicated, dangerous truth — began eight months ago in a place she had never spoken about to anyone except her brother.

"No," she said. "No one."

It was the first lie she told the detectives. It would not be the last.

DeRosa studied her for a long moment, then produced a business card. "We'll be in touch, Ms. Sheehan. I'd encourage you not to travel."

They left. Nora locked the door, leaned against it, and pressed both hands flat against the wood as though holding something out.

Then she picked up her phone and called her brother.

Tom answered on the second ring, his voice thick with sleep. "It's six in the morning, Nor."

"I need you," she said. "Now."

Something in her tone cut through. She heard the rustle of sheets, the creak of a bed frame. "What happened?"

"Someone used my car to kill a man in Vermont. And I think I know who."

Silence. Then: "Don't say another word on the phone. I'm coming."

He hung up. Nora stared at the blank screen, then at the grainy toll photo still lying on her card table where Flagg had left it — deliberately, she now realized, like bait.

The driver in the photo was wearing a scarf. Nora recognized it. She had bought it at a thrift store in Worcester eight months ago, the same day she had handed her car keys to a woman who called herself Paula Pomeroy and said, with tears in her eyes, "You saved my life."

Nora sat down on the edge of her unmade bed and began, very quietly, to shake.