Earth to Emily (16 page)

I turned on the sink water and rubbed my hands together under it. “You know how I’m applying to adopt Betsy?”

“Yes, dear. How’s it coming along?” She started on a new cookie basket.

“Well, fine, except I have to live on my own. And I’ve found a place.” I shook my hands to get the excess water off.

She froze with a cookie in each hand. “Really?”

“Yes.” There was a dish towel hanging by the sink, and I used it to blot the last of the water off my hands.

She resumed putting cookies in the basket. “And?”

I turned to her. “It’s a duplex off Soncy Road.”

“That’s close.” She smiled at me.

I exhaled. A smile was a good sign. “My lease could start after New Year’s. I need to sign it and take the security deposit and first and last month’s rent over.”

She nodded. “Good for you.”

I nearly fainted. That had gone so much easier than I’d expected. Who was this woman, and what had she done with my needy, dependent mother? Battle won—or rather, battle conceded by the opposing side—I didn’t linger on the subject.

I leaned back against the counter. “So, what are you going to do this afternoon?”

“My friend Josie is opening her salon for me, and she’s doing a complete Christmas makeover on me, including manicure and pedicure.”

“That’ll set you back a pretty penny.” I was a little bit jealous that she hadn’t invited me, but I was glad she was doing something fun.

“She’s giving me a huge discount as a Christmas present.”

“Do you want me to drop you off and pick you up? The roads are getting bad.”

“No, that’s okay.” She finished up Bing Crosby’s big number with him, wishing for a white Christmas, which she’d definitely have this year.

I looked at the time on my phone: eleven thirty. “Mother, I’ve got to go meet a client. I can help you with the dishes later.”

She waved her hand at me, and joined in with the next tune. Dionne Warwick: “O Holy Night.”

I threw my apron in the dirty clothes, smiling at my mother’s off-key voice. I hadn’t forgotten about my problems, or Betsy’s, but I was keeping them in perspective and looking forward to an evening with Jack. Before I realized what was happening, I heard my own voice belt out, “A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices.”

Mother had broken me down. In a good way, because I was no help to anyone if I didn’t stay upbeat. It didn’t mean I didn’t wish Betsy was here with us so we could teach her all the words to our favorite carols and how to decorate cookies with the perfect swoosh of snow icing. I wiped a tear from my eye, happy mixed with sad, and pulled open the front door, singing, “O ni-ight divine.”

Siri directed me through the slippery white streets of Amarillo
.
I took Washington south from I-40, driving slowly and carefully. The pellets earlier had definitely been ice, and they’d stuck. Nothing I hadn’t driven on every year since getting my license, but what I’d learned from Dad years ago still applied: heavy sliding objects don’t stop or turn well, but they crunch real good. I had stomped my brakes and turned too late one winter day, sliding my car right into one of Tech’s new stock trailers, and I still winced as I remembered waiting for the inevitable sound of crumpling metal. Lesson learned: The best way to stop or change direction on ice was to coast.

So I rolled along like a turtle, creeping through intersections, passing other vehicles planted against each other, curbs, and light poles. I saw a tree seller in a parking lot on my right. He had nothing but a few scrubs left, and he was ringing a large handbell. He’d have a heck of a time selling the rest of them in weather like this, but I was impressed that he was trying. I hoped those fuddy-duddy Hodges at least had a Christmas tree at their house.

I made a right on Shasta without losing traction, stopping in front of 1000 without even applying the brakes. The house was at the end of a cul-de-sac, with an oversized square of yard on one side of the front sidewalk and a smaller square of one on the other. It looked like most of the other houses on the street. Small one-story ranch houses circa 1970, brick mostly in shades of tan to match the landscape, what there was of it. The house had no driveway or garage in front, nor any car at the curb. No lights shone from inside, either.

My phone made a random noise. I sighed. I really had to fix the notification sounds. I turned it over. A call, but I’d lost my darn contacts so iPhone couldn’t tell me the name of the caller. It was a 340 area-code number, though, and that meant Katie, or someone else from the Virgin Islands.

I accepted. “Hello?”

“Merry Christmas!” Katie’s pretty voice sang out.

“And to you, Katie Kovacs! Did you get my card?”

“I did. Ours will be late. But that’s not why I called.”

“Oh? What’s up?”

“You know Ava is in Amarillo?”

“I knew she would be in the area sometime soon, but not when.”

“She had a big Christmas Eve shindig there tonight, but it’s been weathered out.”

How weird to be doing a show on Christmas Eve, in Amarillo no less,
I thought. But I said, “Poor Ava.”

I got out of the car, slamming the door. The cold and wind and ice pellets attacked my exposed nose. I’d worn a scarf, but now I wound it higher, over my nose, muffling my mouth. I started for the front door.

“Yeah. Her phone battery was on fumes, so I said I’d call you to see if she could crash at your place tonight.”

Oh. Oh my. I love Ava, but she is, well, a
handful
. I pressed the button for the doorbell. “Mother and I have a guest room she can stay in, but I’m heading to New Mexico tomorrow with Jack—”

“
With
Jack or ‘with Jack’?”

She sounded like Wallace. “I’ll let you know when we get back.” I rang the bell again and peered through the opaque glass in the front door. I couldn’t see any movement inside. I knocked on the glass, hard enough to hurt my gloved knuckles.

“Sounds promising.”

I couldn’t text Beth while I was on the phone with Katie, so I decided to walk around back and see if I could get her attention from there. I tramped over icy ground cover in the yard. “Anyway, she’s welcome, but I won’t be here after tonight.”

“I’ll tell her.”

I opened the side gate, leaving it ajar behind me. “And you guys, is everyone doing all right?”

“Oh my gosh, the girls are about to start walking, and Thomas is so hyper. Thank God for my in-laws. And Nick. Nick is a dream.”

As I emerged from the narrow strip of brown and white patchy lawn between the six-foot wooden fence and the house, I came around the back corner straight onto a concrete porch, placing my feet carefully so I wouldn’t slip on the ice that was thicker there from the gutter downspout. I looked up after I was on the porch and stopped short. One more step and I would have planted my foot in the midsection of a woman, a woman lying facedown and unmoving.

I screamed, once, long and loud, and dropped my phone to my side. Even from that distance I could hear Katie.

“Emily, what’s wrong? Are you all right?”

I put the phone back to my ear. “I . . . I, yes, I just found someone who’s not. I’ve got to go. Have Ava contact me.”

I hung up and crouched beside the prone woman. She had on gray sweat pants and a matching hoodie with zebra-print house slippers. I rolled her toward me. Her face was ghoulishly pale, but still I recognized her. Ivanka, the woman I’d met at the Love’s truck stop. The makeup that had camouflaged her a week ago was absent now, and she looked closer to my mother’s age than mine. She was even smaller than I remembered her, almost like a young girl.

I jerked my glove off and tossed it aside, then put two fingers against the cool skin at her carotid. No pulse. I readjusted my fingers to try again. They were already as cold as her neck. I’d never seen a dead person up close, but I’d seen plenty of dead animals closer than I’d liked. Despite my love of target shooting, it didn’t translate to hunting. Dad took me one time, and I’ll never forget the young pronghorn antelope’s eyes as the light faded from them. It had chilled me to the bone. They’d looked like Ivanka’s did, and hers were having the same effect on me now.

Suddenly I felt very exposed, and I jumped up, looking around me. The blinds on the back windows were closed. I still didn’t see any lights on. I could see in the kitchen through the glass half of the door, but when I pressed my face to the glass for a better look, I couldn’t see anyone inside. I tried the back door. Unlocked. I hesitated. I had no business in there, and there was a woman out here I might be able to save. I released the knob. Quickly, I scanned the backyard. It was covered in a blanket of crisp unbroken white. No trees. No shrubs. No furniture. Just weathered boards jutting up to a puffy gray sky. I didn’t see anyone, not even any tracks save my own, but that didn’t make the vulnerable, watched feeling go away.

I dialed my phone. It went to Jack’s voice mail. “Call me. I went to visit a friend of Nadine’s, and she’s dead in her backyard. Oh, and it’s Ivanka from Love’s last week, the dancer.”

I hung up and dialed 911.

A woman answered in a drawl. “9-1-1, what’s your emergency?”

“I’ve found a woman in her backyard at 1000 Shasta. She’s not breathing. Please send help.” I dropped the phone and kneeled beside Ivanka. At close range, her cheap perfume nearly knocked me over, and I breathed through my mouth to avoid it. I tilted her head back, listened for the breath I knew wasn’t there and started CPR.

***

A bundled-up female police officer arrived five minutes later. I was still doing chest compressions and life breaths with Ivanka, and I didn’t catch the woman’s name. I didn’t even get much of a look at her before she took over the CPR. By the time the ambulance arrived, five minutes after the officer, it was clear nothing would help Ivanka, or Beth, or whatever her real name was. In the meantime, I had slowly but surely nearly frozen to death. I moved as close as I could to the house, out of the howling wind and pelting ice, and wrapped my arms around myself.

A second officer arrived, this one male but equally bundled. He conferred with the female officer for a moment out of my earshot. Her back was to me, but I saw her motion my way.

He walked over to me. “I’m Officer Jones. I’d like to ask you a few questions. We could talk here, or we could sit in my car where it’s warmer.”

My teeth chattered. “Emily Bernal. C-c-c-car.”

As we walked around to the front of the house, my phone rang.

“Do you need to get that?” the officer asked.

Probably.
“No.” I let it go to voice mail.

We reached the squad car. Officer Jones, who looked roughly my age somewhere peeking out from all the winter clothing on his face, head, neck, hands, and body, opened the rear door for me, giving me an unwelcome surge of déjà vu. I frowned. To think I’d gone my whole life without getting in a cop car and was now being put in the backseat of one for the second time in a week.

He must have understood the look on my face, because he said, “Would you rather sit in front?”

“I would, thank you, if that’s all right.”

He shut the back door and opened the driver’s door, got in, and then opened the passenger door for me from the inside. I slipped in, too. He pulled off all his outerwear except his coat, and underneath I saw that not only was he about my age, but he looked like Channing Tatum. Definitely the hottest police officer I’d seen in Amarillo. Scratch that. That I’d seen, ever, anywhere.

He picked up a clipboard that was between us on the seat and clicked a ballpoint pen. “Just a few questions.”

“Absolutely.”

“Your full name, address, and birthdate?”

I told him.

“How did you know the deceased?”

“I didn’t.”

He glanced up from his paper. “How did you come to be in her backyard?”

Lately I’d had far too much need to use the coaching I’d heard Jack give his clients. He always stressed to volunteer as little information as possible to the cops, so I spoke judiciously. “One of her coworkers introduced us virtually, and she asked me to come by.”

“You’d never met her?”

My mind flashed to Ivanka’s face under the fluorescent lights in the Love’s parking lot, snow falling around us, her sashay as she took Wallace’s arm. Had she introduced herself to me? She had not. So I answered truthfully, if incompletely. “No.”

“Do you know what she wanted with you?”

I’d thought about this question long and hard while I gave Ivanka the breath of life. No way was I telling a random cop that Ivanka and I both held low opinions of some of their brethren. “Um, I work for a criminal attorney. My understanding was that she had run into some trouble and needed advice.”

He nodded. “You mentioned her coworker. Where did they work?”

“The Polo Club.”

“Ah.” He looked up at me, like he was trying to figure out if I was hiding a secret life as a dancer, too.

“I don’t work there.”

He pinned his eyes back to his clipboard. “Did you see anybody else when you got here?”

“No.”

“How’d you end up in the backyard?”

“I knocked on the front door but there was no answer. I knew she expected me, so I went around back in case she hadn’t heard me.”

He looked at me sideways without turning his head, his eyes narrowed to slits. “Do you always go into people’s backyards if they don’t answer the front door?”

Truthfully? Usually. “No,” I said.

He stopped writing. “And this time you did, because why?”

“It was freezing outside. I didn’t want to leave unless I’d tried every way I could think of to keep our appointment, but if she wasn’t there, I wanted to get back in the car with the heater on. And not have to come back later.”

He twirled the pen through his fingers, appearing to be lost in thought.

My phone rang again. I ignored it.

“Was there anything at all that you saw that led you to form an opinion as to how”—he glanced at and tapped a display screen mounted on his dashboard and facing him—“Beth McIntosh died?”

Other than ice? A hard concrete patio? Again, I stuck to the minimum responsive answer to his question. “No.”

“All right, we’re nearly done here, Ms. Bernal, if you’ll give me a few more minutes.”

“Sure.”

He began typing into the keypad of the device on his dashboard; I checked my voice mail. Two messages. The first was from Jack. Returning my call. Did I need him to come? Was I okay? I texted my response:
No. Yes. But thanks.

The second one was Ava. Her phone was dead. She was calling from a pay phone at the bus station for a ride, and, from the sound of her voice, she was extremely cold. If my phone rang again, I would have to answer it. No fair leaving her standing out there dialing me over and over.

Officer Jones said, “So, this isn’t the first dead body you’ve found for us?”

“What?”

“It says here that we responded to a 911 call over the murder of Maria—”

“I didn’t make that call, and I never saw a dead body. I was unconscious on the floor. The person that murdered her almost got me, too.”

“Hmm. And last week you were brought in—”

“As a form of harassment.”

He read some more, and his lips moved.

“Listen, I have a friend who is expecting me to pick her up at the bus station. Hence my ringing phone. She’s waiting for me out in the cold. I hadn’t really anticipated finding a dead person today. I want to help, I really do, but if we’re done, I do need to go.”

His eyes moved back and forth as he stared at the display. Acting as if he didn’t hear me, he said, almost fearfully, “You filed a complaint against Samson and Burrows?”

“I did, but it doesn’t have anything to do with”—I waved my hand in the general direction of Ivanka’s backyard—“this.”

He pursed his lips, nodding slowly, staring again at the screen. “Yeah, you’re probably right.” He pressed a button and the slight glow from his screen disappeared. “Someone will call you if we have any more questions, but this case looks like a pretty simple slip and fall. We get those in this kind of weather. Thank you, Ms. Bernal.”

“You’re welcome.”

I opened the door and got out, then leaned back in. “Merry Christmas, Officer Jones.”

“Merry Christmas to you, too.”

I walked to the Mustang, which was now frigid inside. I turned it on, with heater and defrost on full icy blast, Wallace’s comment to me earlier be damned. Only an hour or so had passed, yet a layer of ice covered my windshield. My phone made one of its inexplicable noises. I turned it over.

Laura:
We are ALL looking forward to seeing you tomorrow.
She ended with a smiley face.

I typed one-thumbed, keeping my other hand deep in my pocket as the temperature in the Mustang rose a nanodegree at a time.
Me too!