The Rosewood Casket (28 page)

“Why, I thought I’d just come and have a word with these folks.” He paused, gulping for breath. “See if I could help them out at all. I have a little trailer on a lot in Hamelin that’s vacant right now. The hot water heater’s broken, but—”

Spencer swallowed the urge to shout at the red-faced man. “No, sir,” he said. “The best way for you to help all of us is to go back to the patrol car, and sit down. Please.”

Frank Whitescarver was determined to be bountiful. He waved past the sheriff at the Stallards. “Hello, folks! No hard feelings, hear? I’ve got me a little trailer in town—oh Lord, Sheriff, she’s got a gun!”

Spencer Arrowood did not have time to turn around. He lunged at Frank Whitescarver and bore him to the ground just as he heard the roar of the rifle.

CHAPTER TWELVE

I now began to mediate an escape.

—DANIEL BOONE

Officer down.
The words gave Millie Fortnum chills. The Wake County Rescue Squad had never responded to such a call before, but they knew the procedure well enough: they were to wait for other law enforcement personnel to secure the area before they approached the injured man. At any crime scene, their orders were to wait until it was declared safe for them to go in. But this wasn’t just any crime scene. This was one of their own.

Please let the lawmen be there already
, thought Millie. It was one thing to gamble with the life of a drunken good old boy or an abusive husband—but she did not think that she could listen to the seconds tick by in the safety of the ambulance while Spencer Arrowood bled to death on the ground outside.

She decided that if the shooter was not actually standing over the sheriff brandishing the gun, then she would get out and do what she could for him, whether LeDonne had arrived on the scene or not.

“I can’t believe that somebody shot Spencer Arrowood,” said Carlton Scott, Millie’s partner for the run.

Millie shrugged. She didn’t want to talk now. She kept hoping that more information would come over the radio, but all was silent. She wondered if the ice water in the pit of her stomach was from fear or from the fact that Carl was taking the roads as if there weren’t any curves in them. He was new to the rescue squad, and inexperienced in handling emergency situations. He had no medical training beyond the brief course work offered to county volunteers. Millie had been patching people up for years, but she wasn’t even a paramedic—just a housewife who had once dreamed of being a nurse. Suddenly it seemed too much responsibility to bear. Spencer Arrowood was her friend. He deserved better than her well-meaning efforts.
Please let it be a flesh wound
, she thought.

It wasn’t.

There was no sign of the second patrol car when the ambulance pulled up in front of the Stallard house, but there was no sign of the gunman, either. Millie was out of the vehicle, and running up the hill toward the body before Carl had time to put the emergency brake on. She and Carl could argue about her decision later, she decided.

J. Z. Stallard was kneeling beside the body, holding a green woolen army blanket in his lap, as if he were unable to decide whether to cover up the wounded man or not. He kept pulling at the corners of the blanket and staring down at the victim. He didn’t even look up when Millie knelt beside him.
He’s in shock
, she told herself, but there wasn’t time to tend to him.

“Did you move him at all?” asked Millie.

J. Z. Stallard shook his head. “I waited. Thought somebody ought to stay with him.”

She nodded. “You did right.”

Spencer Arrowood was unconscious. He lay on his stomach. Millie could see a spreading red stain on his khaki shirt. The bullet had entered the sheriff’s left side a few inches above the waist—at least it had missed the heart, she thought. She knelt down, and began to check his vital signs, forcing herself to concentrate on Spencer as simply another body to be evaluated. She couldn’t afford to lose precious seconds in shock or grief over a friend.

His pulse was rapid, but his blood pressure was low. Internal bleeding, of course. She wondered what organs had been hit, and how fast he was losing blood. His breathing was shallow. She put her head against his chest and listened for a moment. No rales. And no air bubbles appeared in the blood at the wound site. His diaphragm hadn’t been hit. But then, he wouldn’t have lived this long if the bullet had pierced his diaphragm: once the seal is broken on the chest cavity the lungs stop working. He would have died before J. Z. Stallard had time to run to the house and call for help. She had to get him out of the cold.

“Where is the assailant?” Millie asked the old man who stood over her, still twisting his hands in the blanket. She kept working as she talked, getting Spencer ready to be moved into the ambulance.

After a moment’s hesitation, J. Z. Stallard said, “She took off.”

She? The shooter was a woman? Millie glanced up at the man’s ravaged face, and decided not to ask any more questions. The hows and whys didn’t matter to her, anyhow; it would be enough if she could patch up Spencer Arrowood so that he could make it to the medical center. She tried not to think of all the times that they had been together at scenes of tragedy: wrecks, fires, and now and then a shooting. She mustn’t think about it now. Every second mattered.

Carl was beside her now with the stretcher. “Millie, we were supposed to wait in the ambulance—” She looked at him, and his voice trailed off. “Oh, hell,” he said. “We couldn’t just let him lay here, could we? The sheriff.”

Together they lifted him onto the stretcher and wheeled it back down the hill to the ambulance. Millie wished they could race away, as medics did in television dramas, but real life wasn’t nearly so neat. It would be several more precious, frantic minutes before they could leave. Carl had to radio the hospital with information on the patient’s condition.

Millie was putting the I.V. in Spencer’s arm. “Tell them
left lateral abdominal gunshot wounds, no rales,
” she said to Carl. “
Probable circulatory shock due to blood volume loss.
Tell them I’m doing an art line on the subclavian artery. The vital signs are…”

“Patrol car just pulled up,” Carl announced. “Wake County Sheriff’s Department.”

“LeDonne. Fine. If he yells at you for entering an unsecured crime scene, yell back. Just keep him away from here.” She adjusted the oxygen mask on Spencer’s face. “Radio JCMC. I’m about ready to go.”

Deputy Joe LeDonne was in charge now, but that fact gave him no pleasure. He had never felt so alone.

When the call came in from Stallard’s farm, notifying him of the shooting of Spencer Arrowood, he had double-checked to make sure that the rescue squad had been dispatched to the scene, and then he had attempted to beat them there, taking the curves of the Hamelin back roads at a speed just short of suicidal. They were closer to Ashe Mountain than he was. He hoped they’d had the sense not to wait. He didn’t think that this particular assailant would pose a threat to ambulance personnel. If he was wrong, he’d deal with it when the time came.

The incoming message had been garbled. J. Z. Stallard spoke clearly but did not elaborate. He had sounded, strangely calm as if he himself did not believe a word he was saying. LeDonne’s own sense of shock and rage, coupled with shrieks in the background from the uninjured Frank Whitescarver made the conversation disjointed and nearly unintelligible.

Spencer was alive but unconscious: that much he knew.

Damn Martha, he thought, as he drove. If she were still dispatcher, instead of off taking cop lessons at Walters State, the investigation would be proceeding like a military exercise, and he would be able to linger at the hospital until he knew for certain that the sheriff was out of danger. Martha would have known what to do, whom to call. Jennaleigh, whose tenure as dispatcher could still be measured in weeks, needed explicit instructions, and he would have to return to the office and instruct her. No one had covered this contingency in her hasty training session. As it was, LeDonne would have to swallow his rage—grief was still a long way off—until he had the assailant in custody. He kept his hands from shaking on the steering wheel by picturing himself shouting at a recuperating Spencer Arrowood. “Didn’t I tell you not to trust anybody!” he would say. “Old friends, my ass! A woman with a gun is like a chimp with a hand grenade.” He prayed that he would have the luxury of that anger.

Later—much later—he would have to call Martha to tell her that things were under control and that she needn’t come back to help. He would promise to keep her informed of the sheriff’s condition. When she blamed herself for not being here, he would choke back words to keep from agreeing with her. He decided that he might even wait a day or so to call her. Let her know about the crisis after the urgency was past, and he could truthfully say that the suspect was in custody and the sheriff recovering from his wounds. She mustn’t abandon her training out of guilt or sympathy, and she mustn’t be allowed to think that LeDonne couldn’t handle an emergency on his own. It occurred to him that the shooting of a county sheriff would make headlines all over Tennessee, and that Martha would know sooner than he planned to tell her. He must call her as soon as he could spare a moment. She mustn’t hear this news from someone else. And Spencer’s mother. She had to be told. But there wasn’t time. Could Jennaleigh handle so delicate and tragic a message? Jane Arrowood had already lost one son in a firefight. Please let her not lose another.

LeDonne tried to think of six things at once—anything except the possibility that his brother officer was going to die.

He did not hit the siren until a quarter of a mile from the turnoff. He would say that he didn’t want to draw attention to his presence in case the suspect was nearby, but the truth was that with everything else crowding in on his thoughts, he had simply forgotten to hit the switch. There was noise enough in his head—so much that he did not even notice the absence of the siren. He swung the patrol car into the dirt road beside the mailbox marked Stallard. The ambulance was still there, its motor idling, and the lights on. There was no sign of the squad themselves, though, and no sign of a body. He pulled up next to the driver’s side.

Don’t waste time parking and walking over there, he thought. There may not be any more time.

Carlton Scott’s face appeared at the driver’s window. He rolled down the glass and peered out. “We’ve got him,” he said. “We’re stabilizing for the run.”

“JCMC?” The Johnson City Medical Center was the best and closest facility. They had sent people there often enough: people from car wrecks, mostly, and an occasional wounded hunter.

“Right. We’re almost ready.”

“Where’s he hit?” asked LeDonne, willing his voice to stay steady.

“Upper abdominal. He’s losing a lot of blood, but he’s lasted over twenty minutes now. That’s a good sign.”

“Let’s go!” LeDonne recognized Millie Fortnum’s voice, shrill with urgency. If there was anything to be glad about on this awful day, it was that she had been on duty when the call came in.

“Is he conscious?” asked LeDonne.

“No. We have to get him out of here fast. We’re sending another crew in to check on the old man and the real estate fellow,” said the ambulance driver. “The old man isn’t injured, but he’s had a bad shock. Go easy on him.”

LeDonne nodded to Millie and her partner, and held his breath as they pulled away.

J. Z. Stallard was waiting for him in the yard. The old man looked on the verge of collapse, as pale and tottery as he was, but LeDonne had no concern to spare for a possible accessory. He slammed the car door, and without preamble said, “Where is she?”

“Gone. The real estate man is in the parlor. He’s not hurt, just shaken up from being thrown hard to the ground.” His voice quavered as he added, “She didn’t mean to do it.”

“No?” said LeDonne, who didn’t much care what the suspect’s intentions had been.

“She was upset about us losing the farm, and she was angry at Frank Whitescarver, who did us out of the land. He bought it at a tax sale, you know, and we reckoned that he’s the one who made them have the tax sale to begin with. There’s lots of other folks owes taxes, and nobody’s putting them out of their homes. Dovey said it wasn’t right, and that she wasn’t leaving. I think she meant to scare him off with the gun.”

“It’s attempted murder,” said LeDonne. “Where is your daughter now?”

J. Z. Stallard’s eyes were wet. “I told you she’s gone,” he whispered. “As soon as she saw what she’d done—the sheriff jumped in front of Whitescarver, you know. He went down protecting that awful little man—Well, as soon as Dovey saw that, she lit out.”

“On foot?”

“Yes. Into the woods.”

“Where is the weapon?” asked LeDonne.

“She dropped it at the barn. But she took a pistol with her.”

*   *   *

Kayla knew the ridge beyond the Stargills’ fences well enough by now. In the forest the tangle of tree limbs and the occasional rustling noise just out of her line of sight no longer frightened her as it had when she arrived. Clayt had explained what the noises might be, and he had told her stories about wonderful plants and animals that lived in the woods. It seemed a friendly place to her now, not an endless closet full of monsters. When she tired of exploring the front garden and the barn, she glanced toward the house to see if anyone was keeping an eye on her, and, satisfied that she was unobserved, she slipped away up the hill toward the Stargill burying ground, and to the woods beyond.

Clayt had told her stories about playing pioneer in those woods when he and his brothers were children. Kayla couldn’t picture Charles Martin Stargill doing anything as un-grown-up as playacting with a popgun. To hear him tell it, he had spent every minute of his youth practicing his guitar and writing songs. Kayla hadn’t been able to find any toys in the attic, but she decided that she could play in the woods without them. Back in Nashville her mother had taken her to see the
Pocahontas
movie, and Kayla thought she might pretend that she could find a talking tree or a friendly raccoon in the forest as the cartoon Indian princess had done.