Shades of Deception

by Piper Dow

  Wayne’s head was bowed, and his arms were curled around his head, with his fists near his ears. “No, no, no, no, no,” he was mumbling. ““Not my car, no, no, no.” Angrily he wiped his face on his sleeve and turned to face Kelly. “Let’s just go, then. Let’s just go.”

  “No. Not yet,” Dad said, holding out a cautionary hand.

  Surprised, they looked at him.

  He slowly walked around Kelly’s car, crouching down to look at the ground underneath the engine and again at the rear of the car. Reaching out one hand, he touched the grass under the motor and withdrew it, rubbing his fingers together. Moving to the other side, he repeated the motion. This time, his fingers were coated with amber fluid.

  “Don’t touch the car,” he said. “The brake lines have been tampered with. Let’s go, back to the truck. We’re all going together to the hospital. You can call on your cell phone and have someone from the police meet us there.”

  Stunned, Kelly looked at Wayne, then back at her father. She suddenly felt like they were being watched, and copied her father’s actions of a few minutes ago, surreptitiously looking in the neighbor’s yards and up and down the street as they made their way quickly back to the truck.

  “You see how they worked this? They trashed your car and left Kelly’s looking okay so that you would take Kelly’s car. If the brake lines were cut through, you’d have no brakes at all, but you’d feel that as soon as you tried stopping at the first corner. I’m willing to bet they put holes in the line so that you’d be a distance away before running out of brake fluid and getting in an accident,” Dad said. His fingers were tight on the steering wheel, his shoulders tense again. “Kelly, call the police and have them meet us at the hospital. Tell them we’ll be in Sam’s room.”

  Kelly quickly opened her phone and searched for the police station’s number on the internet. She didn’t want to dial 911 since she was having them meet her somewhere else.

  “Police, recorded line,” the dispatcher answered the phone.

  “I need to speak to an officer,” Kelly said. “We think someone is trying to hurt my sister and the rest of us – they attacked my sister last night, and they trashed our house this morning. They destroyed our cars that were in the yard.”

  The dispatcher made her repeat several points of her story before telling her he would send an officer to the hospital to meet them. Kelly snapped the phone case shut to hang up the call.

  “Yeah, I see what you meant, Dad,” she said. She was sure she had sounded like an idiot.

  “Well, that’s why I didn’t want you to touch anything on the cars. This way the police can get prints off of them, hopefully,” Dad said.

  Kelly didn’t say anything. She was thinking of animals, and whether they would have fingerprints to leave.

  “Dad! What time did you go to the house this morning before you went to the hospital and came back with coffee?” Wayne asked. “You would have seen this if it had been done before that!”

  Dad was nodding. “I was thinking the same thing – that gives us somewhat of a timeframe that this must have happened in. The yard looked fine when I went to the house, and that would have been around 4:30 this morning. It’s nearly 10 now, which is still nearly a six-hour window, but maybe some of the neighbors noticed when they went to work this morning, or didn’t see it when they went to work – it would narrow it down more.”

  Dad didn’t bother driving in a meandering path but drove straight to the hospital. “It’s not like they don’t know we’re coming here,” he said when Wayne asked about it. “They know Sam is here.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Kelly and Wayne walked quickly to keep up with Dad, whose determined stride allowed for no questions. They rounded the corner near the elevators just as a young man was stepping into one and quickly joined him before the door had the chance to close. Kelly watched as Dad went to punch the button for the fourth floor, but it was already lit. The ride up was silent, and blessedly short. Kelly and Wayne followed Dad off the elevator as soon as the doors opened, and they walked quickly down the hall and around a corner before Dad stepped to the side of the corridor and stopped. He motioned Kelly and Wayne to be quiet as he handed Kelly the backpack he’d been carrying and turned back to the intersection of the corridors. He stuck his head around the corner to look back at the nurse’s desk.

  He moved quickly back to Kelly and Wayne. “I don’t like that guy. Sam is in room 417 – you two go there and wait until I come. I just want to make sure this guy doesn’t have anything to do with any of this mess. When I come in, we’ll wait for the police before telling Mom and Sam anything that happened.”

  Wayne nodded. Kelly glanced at the room number on the door across the hall – it was 405. They walked down the hall, scanning doors as they passed. They reached the end of the corridor before finding Sam’s room. The directional sign on the wall across the hall indicated that 417 was to the right. They turned right and headed down that corridor, nodding at a middle-aged woman wearing a johnny walking with an IV pole, then found Sam’s room halfway down the hall on the left.

  The door was open, but the curtain just inside the door was drawn. Kelly knocked on the door as she entered the room and parted the curtain. Mom was sitting in a folding chair near the head of Sam’s bed, one hand resting on the bed holding Sam’s hand, with her eyes closed. Sam’s eyes were closed, too. Kelly and Wayne moved quietly into the room, walking around the foot of the bed to the other side where there was more room. Mom opened her eyes and lifted her head, smiling tiredly as she met their eyes.

  “The nurse was in about 20 minutes ago,” she said. “She said Sam seemed more comfortable than she had all night – she was thrashing around a little in the early hours. They’ve given her I.v. antibiotics and pain relievers, and she just gave her something because she’s running a little temp. They may have to change the antibiotics – a fever could mean she is getting an infection, and if she’s getting one while they’re already giving her antibiotics, they could be the wrong ones.”

  “Mom, you look exhausted,” Kelly said. Mom’s chin-length hair was sticking up at odd angles, frozen in clumps thanks to leftover hair product, and she had dark smudges under her eyes from not taking her make-up off the night before.

  “Yes, well, the hospital is not the easiest place to get a good night’s sleep,” Mom said, stifling a yawn. “Where’s Dad? Isn’t he with you?”

  “Yeah, he wanted to check on something at the nurse’s station,” Kelly said. “He told us he’ll be right along.”

  Wayne walked over to the windows and pulled the curtain to the side a few inches, looking down at the parking lot below and at the street running parallel to the hospital.

  Kelly dropped the backpack into the chair on the side of the bed and propped herself against the window sill instead of taking a seat in the chair. She leaned forward, hands on her knees. She looked up at the bags of fluid slowly dripping their contents into Sam’s arm. A large bag of saline solution – Kelly assumed that was to prevent dehydration, and a smaller bag labeled “vancomycin.” She figured that must be the antibiotic her mom had mentioned. Sam had on a johnny, but Kelly could see gauze and iodine-washed skin under the edge of the johnny near Sam’s neck. Her arm was swathed in gauze, too, some of which was tinged with orange seeping through from underneath. Her fingers on that hand were swollen and still had iodine wash on them.

  Wayne glanced out the window again, then turned his head to the doorway as they heard footsteps approaching. A hand pulled the curtain aside, and Dad stepped into the room. He was followed by a police officer.

  “How is she?” Dad asked. “Is she still asleep?”

  Mom nodded, looking past Dad to the police officer.

  “Okay,” Dad said. “Debbie, we called the police. I think this may be something bigger than I thought it was at first, and I think we may need help. Somebody was at the house this morning after I left to come here.”

  Mom gasped, bringing both hands up
to cover her mouth. “Thank God none of you were there!”

  The police officer drew a notebook out of a pocket on the side of his leg and withdrew a pen from his shirt pocket.

  “I’m Officer Martin. Why don’t you start from the beginning? Which one of you called the station?”

  Kelly waved her hand, embarrassed. “I did, but Sam is really the beginning of the story, I guess.”

  Dad chimed in. “We actually don’t know the beginning of this, but I can give you the part where we came in.” He motioned at Mom, “Debbie got a call from Sam yesterday on her cell phone, asking her to go to the bus station and pick her up. It was just after supper; the kids were downstairs getting ready to go to their party, so we just left a note and went to the bus stop. We got there, but couldn’t find Sam. I saw her hat near the side of the building. We went around the side, and saw these…” Dad’s voice faltered a bit. He took a deep breath before continuing in a stronger voice, “these creatures, all fighting around something on the ground. We saw a shoe on the ground near them – we ran down the alley and the things scattered. Sam was on the ground, bleeding, unconscious.”

  Dad’s voice faltered again, and he covered his face with his hands. Kelly noticed that his hands were shaking.

  “We ran to her,” Mom picked up the story where Dad had left off. Her voice was low and quiet, but level. “I picked her head up, we tried to stop the bleeding using her jacket to put pressure on. Steven called 911 for an ambulance. While we were waiting – it seemed like forever, but I think it was only 5 or 6 minutes – Sam woke up. She was frantic that we take her backpack and look at what she kept calling her proof. She wouldn’t agree to get in the ambulance until Steven said we would look at it, promised that we would keep it safe.”

  Officer Martin had written a few notes in his notebook, but mostly he watched Dad and Mom as they talked. Occasionally his glance flickered toward Kelly or Wayne, and once or twice to Sam, still motionless in the bed.

  “What did these ‘creatures’ look like? Did you see anyone nearby? Did it look like they had been trained to attack or anything?” he asked.

  His face was smooth, impassive. Kelly couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or thorough. Maybe he was gathering fodder for his turn at “you won’t believe the nut-cases I had to deal with” tomorrow.

  Mom and Dad looked at each other. Dad’s mouth opened, then closed. He tried again but got no further. Mom closed her eyes.

  “They looked like werewolves, but, not wolves,” she said, sounding reluctant. “Like people who had changed into some kind of animal, some kind of bear, or, or, I don’t know, huge dog or something.” She opened her eyes and looked straight into Officer Martin’s face. “Their bodies were still mostly human – they had hands. They had clothes. But their heads – their faces – I’ve never seen anything like them in my life.”

  Officer Martin’s gaze passed slowly between Mom’s and Dad’s faces and back before he broke the silence.

  “Would you be able to describe them accurately enough to work with a sketch artist?”

  “We, well, we think we have pictures,” Dad offered slowly.

  Kelly quickly picked up the backpack and reached her hand in, grabbing the top notebook and flipping it open. She shuffled through the loose pages until she came to the two pictures that Sam had printed out and held them out to Officer Martin.

  His gaze was shuttling between all of them, now, and traveling around the room as though he was half-way between not wanting to offend the crazy people and expecting someone to point to the corner of the room where a camera was hidden to catch his expression over their practical joke. He reached out to take the pages from Kelly and glanced down, then stopped and stared at the photo on top.

  This photo was sharper than the pictures that Kelly had scrutinized on the laptop earlier that morning. Kelly had looked at it last night but turned to the images on the laptop this morning because she could study them better. She was too adept at manipulating images for her art to trust printed materials not to be altered.

  The top picture was taken in Sam’s apartment. Nearly half of the yellow flowered couch was visible in the image, as well as the counter that separated the tiny kitchen from the dining room. Kelly figured that Jill must have taken this picture; it appeared that Sam was asleep on the couch. There was certainly a head laying on the couch, and the hair color was the same as Sam’s. The person was facing the other direction, though, so Kelly couldn’t be sure.

  Between the couch and the counter stood a figure wearing dirty jeans and a wrinkled, stained t-shirt. The man – Kelly assigned the person that detail based on the physique, not the face – looked like he was laughing. He held a half-eaten sandwich in one hand. His elongated snout was thin, and his face was sparsely covered with hair. Through his eyes, though, he reminded Kelly of Jill’s boyfriend, Mark.

  This and the rest of the photos that Sam had copies of were printed up on regular paper. Kelly wondered if Sam had somehow gotten hold of Jill’s phone to print them up, or how she had gotten copies.

  Officer Martin looked up at Kelly, then at Mom and Dad. “Where did you get this?” He flipped quickly to the second page in his hand, which held a printed image similar to the first one. “Where did you get these?” He corrected himself.

  “Sam had them in her notebook,” Dad said. “When she agreed to go in the ambulance, I took her backpack with her notebook and laptop. We looked at the papers she had inside when they had taken her into surgery. I didn’t get to look at the stuff she had on her laptop until I went home.”

  Officer Martin nodded. “I’ll need to see what else she had with her, and I’ll need her laptop.”

  “There’s more,” Wayne said. “Somebody jacked my car!”

  With a few probing questions from Officer Martin and interjections from Wayne and Kelly, Dad finished telling about the security guard’s story about stopping men claiming to be students from getting into the hospital overnight and then finding their house toilet-papered and their cars vandalized. Officer Martin called the station to have a couple of officers sent to investigate the house.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Kelly paced in front of the coffee vending machine in the hallway break area. They had been sitting in the hospital room for hours, waiting. Waiting for Sam to wake up, waiting for the police to come back or call or give them an update of what was happening. Kelly had charged her phone and was able to look at the photos and files she had emailed to herself from Sam’s computer, but she was getting tired and bored just sitting around, waiting.

  At least Mom had gotten some sleep. She had dozed off after the police officer left, and Kelly had urged Wayne and Dad to leave the room so they wouldn’t accidentally wake her. Mom had curled up in the chair that pulled into a bed, with one hand curled up under her cheek. She’d been that way for more than two hours. Dad had come back to the room and told Kelly she could take a breather.

  Sam had still not woken up enough to talk to. A nurse had been in just before Mom dozed off to retake vitals. It seemed to Kelly that, even though the nurse assured them that Sam was likely just sleeping off stress, something more was going on. Who needs to sleep that much from surgery? It wasn’t like she had been in a car accident and had a brain injury –– her face laying on the pillow was thinner than normal but otherwise looked perfectly healthy. Kelly had been going over the journal entries she had emailed herself while Sam and Mom dozed, trying out different scenarios in her mind to see if they explained what Sam had written.

  She’d excused herself from the room to get a coffee, but instead was pacing back and forth, money still in her pocket. Kelly was glad they had called the police in, and it seemed like they were being taken seriously, but sitting around waiting for someone else to save the day was beginning to wear.

  Even though she had told Wayne they needed to look at this from all angles before coming to the conclusion that Sam was crazy, Kelly had to admit there was some validity to his argument. What she knew ab
out schizophrenia, admittedly very little, seemed like a good fit to Sam’s disorganized thoughts and insistence that someone was watching her.

  Kelly looked at the vending machine without really seeing it. She felt like her brain was struggling to gain traction under the weight of too much thought. A noise from the end of the hall drew her attention. A couple of nurse’s aides walked past the intersection, laughing as one told the other about dropping her coffee, her bagel, and her change from the cashier that morning and deciding to go home and start the day over. Kelly turned back to the vending machine, but a red sign hanging from the ceiling part way down the hall caught her attention, and she glanced back at it. It pointed down another hallway to what it promised was a chapel.

  Kelly’s legs were moving before she was conscious of making the decision to go to the chapel. A sense of relief buoyed her as she neared the room at the end of the hall. Inside were a dozen small pews all facing the back wall, where a platform held a podium with a microphone on a stand. There was a cross on the wall behind the podium. An alcove to one side of the plinth held a statue of a woman Kelly assumed was Mary, Jesus’ mother.

  As she walked into the room, Kelly noticed several of the pews had books on their cushioned seats. Moving into one of these, Kelly sank onto the cushion and took a deep, slow breath. She closed her eyes, focusing on relaxing her tense shoulders and trying to free herself from the tension that had built up since last night. Opening her eyes, she reached out to pick up one of the books from the seat near her. It was a hymnal. Letting it drop open, she saw the words to one of the praise songs and recognized the tune.

  “Lord, I need you. Oh, I need you. Every hour I need you. My one defense, my righteousness. Oh God, how I need you.” Kelly smiled as the melody played in her head. She flipped the pages in the book and found several more familiar songs to hum along with before bowing her head. “God, I don’t know what’s going on, but I know that you know. I’m praying for your protection - for me, for Sam, for all of us. Keep us safe, keep us whole, and help us to stand strong with whatever is going on here. Give us peace, Lord, please.”