I was subpoenaed as a witness in a case I’d never heard of, for an accident I supposedly wasn’t at. It happened on Route 9, outside a town two hours from here, on a Thursday in 2019. I checked my old calendar, and that was the day I drove up for my aunt’s funeral. I have never told anybody I took that road. The lawyer’s office wouldn’t explain anything over the phone. They only confirmed the date and time and told me to bring the notice.
I sat in that waiting room for forty minutes before a man came out and sat down next to me, not across from me. He looked at the subpoena in my hand and asked if I had driven Route 9 that afternoon. I asked who he was, but he ignored the question. Instead, he told me the accident happened at 4:17 p.m., and that a witness had given the police my license plate number. I told him that was impossible because I had never stopped anywhere on that road. He looked at me for a long moment and said, “You didn’t stop.”
The lawyer finally called me into his office and placed a photograph on the desk. It showed a wrecked sedan on the shoulder of Route 9, surrounded by police cars. I recognized the road immediately, but what caught my attention was the vehicle parked behind the wreck. It was my car. Same make, same color, and the same small dent on the rear bumper that I had gotten years earlier. I told the lawyer that I had been driving that car that day, but I hadn’t been anywhere near the accident. He slid another photograph across the desk.
This one showed my car much closer to the scene. The driver’s door was open, but nobody was standing beside it. On the ground was a brown envelope with my aunt’s name written across it. The lawyer said the envelope had been recovered from the accident scene and had never been opened. I told him my aunt had been dead for hours by the time that photograph was taken. He leaned back in his chair and finally explained why I’d been subpoenaed. The injured driver had survived, and three weeks ago, he had finally regained enough memory to identify the person he believed had caused the accident. Then the lawyer turned the final photograph toward me, and I saw who he had named.:::
