Photo, Snap, Shot (28 page)

Patricia stepped forward, closer
to Ella and me, and stared down.

“I’m bleeding,” I whined, shifting my weight to free my legs.

Patricia moved even closer.

I sobbed, “I think you broke a tooth.”

Patricia took one more step, angled against the light to check me out. To investigate and preen over the damage she’d done. I turned my face up toward her and pointed to my mouth.

I had to keep her busy.

Behind Patricia, in the glow of the security light, a figure crept toward us. A gleam of silver twinkled. I knew who and what it was, and I turned sick with fear. A wave of protective instinct gave me extra courage. Despite the pain, I had to hold on.

I had to keep Patricia occupied. I couldn’t let her turn around.

“See? See what you’ve done? How could you do this to me?” I sobbed. “How? I’m your friend, Patricia! I can’t move. It hurts. It hurts so much.”

But she didn’t come closer.

I had to get her nearer. I needed to distract her. To keep her focus toward me and and the body on the gravel next to me.

I glanced over at the quiet form next to me. I sobbed, “I think she’s dead! I can’t tell if Ella’s breathing or not.”

The darkness, which had before seemed impenetrable, now yielded shapes. The tail of Patricia’s blouse must be a light color. A flash of it alerted me to where she was. I stifled another urge to cry out loud. The noise would have broken the spell. I had to be quiet. Had to let her think I was down for the count. I did a sidewise push up, every muscle shrieking with pain. A small rock dug into the heel of my hand. I had to bring her down. Otherwise Anya was in danger. And Ella?

Was she dead?

I didn’t know.

Of course, Patricia wanted to check out her handiwork. She bent over to peer down at Ella. I waited as she moved more and more parallel to the ground. Then with an explosive burst of energy, I kicked my legs forward. I kicked at her knees—hard. My feet connected. Hers flew out from under her. She did a half-somersault. Her hands rose as she pawed the air. In a full layout position, she started coming down, her arms flailing in the air.

But she didn’t turn loose of the gun. A spark of light glinted off of it. I traced the arc with my eyes. Rather than turn loose, she’d held on, just as I had done when my bike and I careened down the hill.

Anya jumped out from behind Ella’s parked SUV. The silver shine of the golf club traced a half-circle through the air. Swish, the shaft cut through the night. A metallic clunk told me she’d connected with Patricia’s gun. The weapon flew high overhead, crashed to the ground, and skittered along the gravel a good ways behind me.

Anya pounced forward, carrying the golf club over her shoulder like a bat. She smelled of fear, salty and pungent.

“You leave my mom alone!” she screamed at Patricia. “I’m warning you!”

The club swayed over my daughter’s head. I had no doubt she’d bash Patricia’s brain with it. A tone in Anya’s voice sounded feral, animalistic. Frightening. Even to me.

I didn’t doubt my daughter would whack Patricia—and beat her repeatedly. Neither did Patricia. Patricia raised her hands in surrender. “Please, please don’t hurt me.” She tried to roll away.

I made it to my child in two steps and yanked the driver from her hands.

Patricia scooted back from us, her hands over her head.

Now it was my turn to raise the club and threaten our assailant. “Anya, go grab her gun. Patricia, you move again, and I’ll knock your head into the center lane of Highway 40. You see if I don’t. I’ve had it with you. Hear me? Had it!”

In the distance, I heard a car.

A bright light blinded me.

“Police! Freeze!”

I froze. Every muscle ached to grab my daughter. Anya. My wonderful Anya. She was just out of my reach. How I wanted to hold her! But I did as I was told. I froze.

Men in uniforms ran past me to get to Patricia. I watched them jerk her to her feet.. Finally, I couldn’t help myself. I dropped the club and reached for my baby. From far away a voice said, “It’s okay. I’m here. It’s okay.” I blinked into the light and watched as Detweiler trotted toward us. He pulled us both into his arms and hugged us tight. Beyond him, tires dug into the gravel as an ambulance pulled up, red lights flashing, the rain causing them to flicker like old-time movies.

“Ella—” I said, pointing weakly.

“They’re on it,” he finished.

I watched two EMTs race toward the supine figure.

A cop walked past me and picked up Anya’s golf club from the ground. In the half-light, I could see how young he was and the grin on his face. He extended his palm to my daughter for a high-five. The slapping flesh made a wet splashing sound. “Hey, young lady. That’s some golf swing you’ve got. Woowee. How far do you hit the ball?”

She said, “Two hundred-thirty yards. But I have a mean slice.”

“I’ll bet you do,” said the cop. “But this time you made a hole in one.”

___

The paramedics lifted me into a second ambulance. We followed the first emergency vehicle carrying Ella up Kingshighway, Anya moved away from me only when the EMTs suggested, firmly, that they’d be able to care for me better if they had a clear path to my messed-up face.

My daughter called her grandmother to explain that I’d been hurt and we were on our way to the hospital. I didn’t hear all the conversation because the paramedics were asking me what I was allergic to.

“Guns,” I said. And I meant it.

Shock started to set
in once I was in the emergency room. My memory is a little patchy about all that. At one point, a doctor turned to Anya and said, “Young lady, you need to go sit down outside,” and a nurse took my daughter away. I heard hollering and yelling and realized dimly that Sheila was on the premises.

Boy, was she mad.

With me.

One of my caregivers wore a green smock with animals on it. I tried to focus on those cavorting cartoon dogs and cats. Briefly I wondered if I’d been taken to a veterinary clinic. That’s how loopy I was. The nurse started an IV, shined a penlight in my eyes, asked me questions, and took my vitals. “You’re off to get pictures taken, Mrs. Lowenstein. We need a better look at that skull. Seems to me you’ve got a bit of that Humpty-Dumpty action happening.”

I tried to nod, but the motion brought a body-curdling pain. I whimpered instead. I was alone. My fingers crawled across the starched sheets for … what? I realized I’d been holding my daughter’s hand throughout the ambulance ride and most of the intake procedure. A pair of eyes in a mask introduced himself as Dr. Pedro. He peeled back my gown to give me a thorough going over. “Good Lord, woman, you have bruises all over your body.” Dr. Pedro decided I was the victim of domestic abuse. He stepped outside and grabbed the nearest police officer. I heard Detweiler’s voice and caught words like “bike accident … run off the road … happened yesterday.”

Dr. Pedro’s bushy eyebrows were nearly up in his surgical hat-thingie when he came back to me. “Have you considered a more sedentary lifestyle? Usually I’m suggesting more exercise, but this isn’t agreeing with you. Off you go to get those pictures taken.” Over my head, to the orderly, he said, “Make sure you strap her down tightly. She’s having a bad couple of days.”

Gunshot wounds generally move right to the top of the triage tree. Seconds after my arrival, the emergency team discovered what I already knew. Ella had taken a hit. The bullet collapsed her left lung. She’d been really lucky because a few more minutes and she would not have survived.

Me? I had a concussion. See, you only hope you’ll pass out from the pain. But you don’t. And the nice people in the ER want you conscious as long as possible so they can ask foolish questions like, “Heck of a night, eh? What on earth were you doing facing down a woman with a gun?”

Fortunately the pictures only showed a terrible bruise where Patricia had whacked me with the revolver. She’d split my lower lip, which required two stitches, and she’d loosened my teeth. My upper right front tooth now had a tiny chip in the bottom. I’d also bitten through the inside of my lower lip, so that took four stitches. And my skin had ruptured at my left temple, so they slapped on a couple bandages. All in all my face was a crazy quilt of cat gut or whatever they use these days and plastic do-hickeys that functioned basically as photo splits.

But Dr. Pedro seemed pleased with the results. “You’ve got one heck of a hard head. Lucky girl. Only a minor concussion. Pretty good, considering.”

A young man in blue scrubs walked my bed down a long hallway. I was definitely there for an overnight. Detweiler caught up with us and took my one free hand. The other had tubes attached. The medic and he exchanged glances. The detective dropped my hand and walked alongside.

The vein in his forehead pulsed. “A near miss in Ladue, a wild bike ride, barbecue with white supremacists, and a shooting in the park?”

I lisped, “Yeth, it-th been kind of a biz-thee week.”

“Got anything I can use on Patricia?”

I’d been thinking about this. The pain had actually sharpened my reasoning. I hoped for some nice drugs when I was settled in my room, so I had to talk fast. “Check out the commemorative paving brick in the display case on Coach Bosch’s mantel. That’s the murder weapon. Patricia took it back from Coach, killed Sissy, rinsed it clean, and had it framed.”

“Will do. What was her motive?”

“Love,” I said sadly.

The medic maneuvered me into the elevator and gave him a long look. “I’ll be taking Mrs. Lowenstein past the nurses’ station.” Detweiler nodded to him.

“I’ve got to go,” he said. “I’ll check on Anya and follow up on all this.” With the precision of an about-face, he peeled away from us.

It seemed a bit abrupt, but he did have a murder investigation to close.

I spent the next
morning pretty well out of it. I burst into tears twice while getting up to use the restroom. I dozed off frequently, but woke up to a bad dream, about something I couldn’t pin down. My mood was dark, and of course, my whole body hurt from the banging around I’d had. Dr. Pedro reminded me I’d conked my head twice within days, counting my bike crash. He checked me and decided I should stick around another twenty-four hours.

Chief Holmes, I believe, was pleased the hospital decided to keep me off the streets. Patricia Bigler’s arrest was taking longer than expected. Her family hired a good criminal attorney, who kept her out of custody and tried to negotiate for some sort of diminished mental capacity charges.

The chief stopped in to see how I was doing. “Patricia Bigler had been treated for severe post-partum depression after each of her miscarriages. Later she had what we used to call a nervous breakdown. Frankly, I think her problems were much more extensive and long lasting than anyone realized. But her family is very well-connected. Her doctors were part of her social circle, so her mental state was kept under wraps. She managed well in certain environments, like helping out at school with supervision and limited stress. There, the relationship between Ms. Gilchrist and Coach Johnson exacerbated her racial prejudices and tipped her over the edge.”

“The idea that Corey and Sissy would move to another state and take Christopher away from her must have been the final straw,” I said.

“No. I think the final straw for Mrs. Bigler was her teenage daughter Elizabeth pulling away from her.”

I must have shown my surprise. The police chief smiled at me. “It’s hard for everyone, Kiki. Watching your child pull away. Elizabeth was tired of her overbearing mother. I remember when my boys were teens. They gave my late wife fits. She used to say that we parents are the bones on which pups sharpen their teeth. My boys sure let us know they were ready to be independent,” he chuckled.

“If a woman sees her whole purpose in life as being a mother, she can fall apart when her children no longer need her. Not that it excuses murder. You know, Kiki, over the years I’ve come to believe it’s almost a waste of time to ever try to second-guess people. They do what they do for reasons I’ll never understand.”

“I hear you, Chief.”

Ben showed up with flowers. I didn’t know what to say. He suggested we’d have a talk later, but meantime, he added, “I was wrong to try to boss you around. I’m sorry.” He kissed my cheek very tenderly and asked if he could give me a ride home when I was released. He told me about the progress made in shutting down the Crusaders for Racial Purity’s CD launch. “We covered it, sent it out on the wire, and got it halted immediately. You’ve given our paper the biggest scoop of the year. More importantly, we’ve struck a blow against hate-crimes and bigotry. The backlash is sure to make the white supremacy movement think twice before trying this again.”

Mert brought brownies from Johnny, and news that she was taking good care of Gracie. My friend clucked her tongue at me. “Girlfriend, we need to talk. Dodie and Horace are worried sick about you. Even Bama called. Leastways, you need a new hobby. How about you and me going to the shooting range once you get shed of here? Now that’s a skill you can put to good use.”

Clancy sent a huge yellow and orange sunburst mum, a cluster of Mylar balloons, and a teddy bear wearing a helmet. To his chest was pinned this message: “You need protection like this!

Anya and Sheila dropped by briefly with a bag of iced cookies from Kaldi’s. Anya was a little weepy, but Chief Holmes had talked with her. He told her she should be proud of herself. After all, she probably saved my life and Ella’s too.

My daughter also brought me a new book I’d been wanting and a huge “get well” card. I could tell Sheila was biting her tongue to keep from scolding me. I knew she couldn’t wait to chew me out for putting Anya in danger. She was probably well within her rights.

Maggie came by that evening with an armful of tabloid magazines. “Mindless reading.”

“Appropriate for a broad with a scrambled brain, eh?”

We sat quietly for a few minutes. Finally she said, “I owe you an apology and an explanation. I overreacted to what you told me about Sissy Gilchrist’s parents’ decision not to press charges when she was molested. When I was a sophomore in high school, I was attacked when I’d stayed late after school to work on a library project. It was November. I missed the second bus. My parents both worked and couldn’t come get me. I stepped outside into the cold and drizzle. It was nearly dark. My scarf and hat covered most of my face, so I couldn’t see clearly. A man jumped out from a clump of bushes.”

She struggled with her emotions. “He hit me over the head with a baseball bat. I needed twenty stitches. See?” She parted her hair to expose a pink line. “That’s why I always wear my hair parted like this. To cover up. I was violated.

“The news traveled fast. The stories, well, they were pretty lurid. I went back to class, a week later, but everyone whispered behind their hands. I couldn’t take it. I crawled into bed and I didn’t come out for a long time. Missed all kinds of school. I had to be tutored to catch up. That summer my dad took a transfer, and we moved to another state.”

“I am so sorry,” I managed to whisper. This put a new face on Maggie, sturdy Maggie.

After she left, I reflected on how falsely secure our lives are. We don’t want to believe evil exists right alongside us. We picture the devil as wearing horns, smelling of brimstone, and generally announcing his presence with sound and fury. But a smart demon cloaks his face in a bland smile and flies beneath the radar.

We believe trauma survivors will look scarred and different. That they will wear their pain openly. But we’re wrong. Their struggle is not to get by, but to return to normal. Camouflage is not only a survival tactic for the animal world. It’s an important asset to the human species as well. It allows us—good and evil, whole and hurt, sane and unstable both—to blend in.

Because when we don’t blend in, when we stand apart, we’re at risk of being culled from the herd. It is when we stand alone that predators can pick us off.

I snuggled beneath the too-crisp sheets of my hospital bed. I took note of the brownies, the magazines, the new book, the big “get well” card, the shiny balloons, the silly teddy, and of course, no one could miss all those flowers. Woo-wee. My room was awash in the sweet floral fragrance. All around me were signs that I was not alone. That I had friends and family, and I was loved.

Everyone had been by to see me.

Everyone, that is, except Detective Chad Detweiler.

I closed my eyes and drifted off. My room was dark. But my cracked door let in a little light. A movement at the foot of my bed aroused me. A nurse was readying the blood pressure cuff and the finger monitor of my blood gases. Her back was to me as she worked. Something about her seemed familiar. Then she turned and smiled down at me.

It was Brenda Detweiler.

The End