“Sid,” Ben said, mustering his softest tone, “I can’t imagine what that was like, the pain and the horror of that night. But I know that for years you’ve said that you don’t think your girls died in that fire. How could that be?”
Sid sat up and wiped his eyes again, like he was resetting himself, moving into a different mode of conversation. “I can’t explain it, I just know it in my bones.”
“You understand that from my vantage point, someone who came into this not knowing anything about you, it just doesn’t make sense.”
“But you have to believe me!” Sid reached out and grabbed Ben’s hands.
Ben decided to lie a little. “I want to. I really do. And I’m perfectly willing to listen to any odd theory you might have. Trust me, I’ve seen some things you wouldn’t believe.”
Sid released him and sat back. “Like what?”
“I can’t really say.”
Sid scowled. “You’re bullshitting me.”
“No, no, that’s not it,” Ben said, trying to sound convincing. “It’s just that . . . well, you know how anything you tell Grace or me or the other investigator who’s working on your case is privileged? You could tell me right now that you set that fire knowing full well your girls would die, and I would have to keep that secret.”
Sid gave him a hard look. “You made a promise. To keep a secret?”
Ben nodded. “I know you don’t know me and you’ve got no reason to trust me, but I do keep my word. I’ve promised the people involved never to talk about it, but, yes, I’ve seen something you’d never believe. Still, that doesn’t mean I’ll believe anything anybody tells me. What makes you think your girls are alive?”
Sid slumped back in his chair. “I told you, man, I don’t know. It’s just something in my gut. You got kids, man?”
“No,” Ben said, continuing to hold back as much personal information as he could.
“Then you don’t know. You know things about your kids that you can’t explain.”
“If that’s true,” Ben said, deciding to press a bit, “how come Teresa doesn’t believe you?”
It took a moment for Sid to come up with an answer. “You’ll have to ask her. I mean, we all have our own truths. Hers was that she had to get on with her life, for Toby and herself. Mine is that I can’t get away from what happened that night. It’s why I’m here, ain’t it?”
Ben was willing to concede the point. He was also ready to conclude that Sid’s belief about his triplets wasn’t much more than wishful thinking, so he decided to pivot away for a moment. “You mentioned the stuff about the shed and the ladder. Is there anything else you remember that was odd? Not just about that night, but any time after the triplets were born?”
Sid closed his eyes, looking deep in thought for a long while. “There was this one thing,” he said finally. “It was while everybody was still in the hospital. I’d gone to get some things for Theresa. When I came back, there was this man in her room, talking to her.”
“A man?” Ben asked. “Was it a doctor or nurse, some kind of technician?”
“I thought he was, at first. From behind, he had the same kind of build as Teresa’s doc. He was in a suit, but I figured he had just stopped in on his way in or out of the hospital.”
“He wasn’t a doctor?”
Sid shook his head. “He was asking Teresa all these questions, but they were the kind the doctor would already know, right? When the girls were born, the specific time. The date. He stopped when I asked him who he was.”
Ben leaned in just a bit. This was the first out-of-place thing Sid had said that resonated with him. “What did he say?”
“Just that he heard about us in the news and he wanted to wish us good fortune,” Sid said. “I remember that now. Who does that?”
All Ben could think of was how, in the modern world of social media, everything about those girls would have been online, and people far and wide would be doing just that. Still, it was odd for someone back then to do it in person. “Wait, did you say he read about you in the news?”
Sid nodded. “Didn’t say where, specifically, but we were in the news a little. Triplets, identical ones no less, are kind of rare.”
Ben marked that down as one more thing to follow up on. “You remember anything else about this man? What he looked like? I don’t suppose he gave you a name.”
“I asked his name, but he wouldn’t give it. He weren’t rude about it or nothing, just, what’s the word,” Sid paused for a moment. “Slippery. Guy struck me like he lied for a living.”
Ben fought back the urge to make a joke about lawyers. Sid’s fate was in the hands of one, of course.
“Other than that, the only thing I remember is that the suit he was wearing was black. Black coat, black tie, white shirt. It looked kind of old fashioned, yet very crisp.”
“Huh,” Ben said.
JD Byrne 