Girl Under Water: An absolutely unputdownable and gripping crime thriller

by L. T. Vargus

  It spilled down into a seam in the concrete. Filled the gap. Traced along it. A rivulet the width of a finger stretched out from the rest of the circular pool. It looked black where it moved out from under the glow of the marquee.

  Part of her expected Gloria to move. To twitch. To show some sign of life. Anything.

  But the figure held utterly still.

  Charlie hurdled the curb, more details coming into view as she closed the last few yards.

  Gloria’s eyes were pinched closed. Wrinkles surrounding them. She looked tired. Older now than before. But also somehow peaceful despite the ragged wounds.

  Resting. Perhaps for good. Perhaps in peace.

  “Gloria?”

  The sound of Charlie’s own voice surprised her. Sounded dry in her ears. But strong. Calmer than she felt inside.

  Charlie knelt beside the broken figure. The uneven surface of the concrete digging into her knees.

  “Gloria, can you hear me?”

  Gloria didn’t respond. No flutter of the eyelids. No quirk of the mouth. No shudder of the torso.

  The words “not responsive” echoed in Charlie’s head. Someone else’s voice speaking inside her skull now. Clinical. Detached. Victim was not responsive.

  She reached out her hand. Fingers finding that curved place on the neck where the artery nestled. Checking for a pulse.

  Gloria’s skin was already frigid. Shockingly so.

  Charlie held her breath. Fingertips jabbed into the flesh. Waiting for something. Anything.

  “Come on, Gloria,” she muttered. “Stay with me, please.”

  She felt it then. A stuttering pulse. Thrumming. Beating against her fingertips.

  But it was weak. Faint.

  Charlie patted her pocket, feeling for her phone. But it wasn’t there. She’d left it on her desk.

  Movement in the periphery of her vision snapped Charlie’s head up. It was one of the employees from the movie theater, a teenage boy in a red vest and bow tie. Broom in hand and mouth agape as he took in the horror laid out on the concrete.

  Again, Charlie’s voice scared her as it came out. Unexpected, even to her.

  “Call 911!”

  But the kid stayed rooted to the spot, unable to hear her through his own shock. He muttered something she couldn’t hear, but there were other voices now. Other people gathering on the sidewalk. Charlie turned her attention to the crowd, recognizing Paige among a cluster of women from the salon next door.

  “Oh my God!”

  “What happened? Did anyone see what happened?”

  “Someone should do something! Has anyone called the police?”

  Charlie’s eyes found Paige’s, and she called out to her.

  “Call an ambulance.”

  For one heartbeat, she thought Paige was stuck in the same trance-like state the movie theater usher was in. But the girl nodded once and sprinted back toward the office.

  Charlie leaned in and clasped one of Gloria’s hands in her own.

  “Hold on, Gloria.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Charlie removed her jacket and draped it over Gloria, knowing it probably did little to warm her, but it was the best she could do.

  “What happened to the car?” one of the women in the crowd asked.

  For the first time, Charlie glanced around, taking in her surroundings. The car was long gone. The driver hadn’t even stopped to see if Gloria was OK.

  That thought drew her focus back to the fragile body in front of her. Charlie squinted. Gloria’s skin was a ghostly white, her lips looked almost gray.

  Charlie slid her fingers down to the spot beneath the chin again and felt for a pulse.

  Nothing.

  “No, no, no,” Charlie croaked. “Gloria, stay with me.”

  Her mind reeled, scrambling for a solution.

  CPR. She needed to do CPR.

  It had been a while, and she’d never done it for real. Only on a dummy in a class.

  Charlie slid down the jacket she’d covered Gloria with and went through the steps she remembered: probing for the end of the breastbone with her fingertips and then using two fingers as a guide for where to place the heel of her hand. Charlie rested her right hand on top of the left. Straightened her arms. Locked her elbows. And drove the weight of her upper body down.

  Gloria’s chest held firm through the first few compressions. But on the fourth, Charlie heard and felt a terrible crunch as the cartilage between her ribs gave. Charlie ignored the instinct to stop then, blanked out the voice in her head that worried she might be hurting Gloria. She had to keep going until the ambulance arrived.

  She counted out thirty compressions and checked Gloria’s airway, pausing to consider the fact that much of her face was a bloody mess of road rash. As gently as she could, Charlie pinched Gloria’s nostrils shut and delivered two rescue breaths.

  One.

  Two.

  She waited then, her face next to Gloria’s, listening for her breathing to resume.

  When it didn’t, she began again with the compressions.

  Paige returned, phone pressed to her ear. She was saying something, asking questions, but Charlie couldn’t answer. Knew she couldn’t allow her concentration to be broken, even for a moment.

  Charlie’s awareness shrank down until she was cognizant of nothing beyond her own movements and Gloria’s body.

  The next stretch of time progressed in increments of thirty compressions and two breaths. Eventually, she was out of breath, sweating, wondering how long she could keep it up.

  It wasn’t until one of the paramedics touched her arm and told her he’d take over that she stopped.

  All the outside stimulus she’d been blocking out flooded in at once, overwhelming her senses. The red and blue flashing lights of the ambulance. The murmur of the onlookers, a crowd that had tripled in size without Charlie noticing.

  The other paramedic was a woman, and she started firing questions at Charlie while she unpacked her kit.

  “Can you tell us when you first started delivering CPR, ma’am?” The woman checked her watch. “Since the 911 call?”

  “Yes,” Charlie said, shaking off the disorientation. “It was right around then.”

  The woman snapped on a pair of gloves.

  “Dispatch said it was a hit-and-run. Is that correct?”

  “Yes,” Charlie said.

  She struggled to her feet, noticing that the rain had let up. Even so, the aftereffects of the adrenaline left her shaky and cold. And why was she barefoot?

  “How fast was the vehicle going?” the woman asked. “Could you tell?”

  Charlie shook her head, teeth chattering.

  “I don’t know. Fifty. Maybe faster?”

  “And was it a direct hit or more of a side-swipe? Did she go under the car at all?”

  “No, it hit her pretty much dead center and threw her up into the air.”

  The two paramedics exchanged some medical jargon that Charlie didn’t understand, and then the woman took a pair of scissors from her bag and cut the front of Gloria’s blouse open.

  “Charging now,” the woman said, pressing a button on a boombox-shaped contraption beside her. There was a digital screen with a heart rate monitor in the center of the device. A defibrillator.

  “Heard,” the man answered, continuing chest compressions.

  A robotic voice came from the defibrillator: “Connect electrodes.”

  The woman followed the instructions, wiping Gloria’s exposed skin with gauze and attaching the sticky pads to her chest. The defibrillator whooped.

  “Clear.”

  “Clear.”

  Both paramedics removed their hands from Gloria’s body, and a moment later, her body pulsed violently.

  The male paramedic glanced at the machine and immediately began compressions again.

  The woman pulled something from her bag that looked like a clear balloon and placed it over Gloria’s mouth, using it to force air into her lungs.

&n
bsp; When the defibrillator machine whooped again, the two paramedics prepared for the shock.

  “Clear,” they said in unison.

  Gloria’s body convulsed again.

  Charlie just stood there, arms wrapped around her own body to ward off the chill she felt. She hoped she never had to perform CPR ever again, but this was somehow worse. Standing by and watching as someone else struggled to keep Gloria alive.

  A fire truck arrived, followed by two police cruisers. The growing crowd of first responders urged the onlookers back and quickly blocked Charlie’s view of the scene.

  Someone took her by the arm and guided her under the awning of a nearby building. Charlie’s eyes were still glued to the huddle around Gloria, and the person talking to her had to snap their fingers in her face to finally gain her attention.

  Charlie blinked. Realized it was Zoe that had been talking to her.

  “Jesus, Charlie. Are you OK?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re totally spaced out, and you’re barefoot, for God’s sake. Let’s go inside.”

  “No, I want to stay,” Charlie said, resisting Zoe’s nudge to get her moving. Reality slammed into her then, and she remembered Gloria’s brothers and sisters. “Her family. Someone needs to tell them.”

  “Don’t worry about that. We’ll handle it,” Zoe said, taking off her uniform jacket and draping it over Charlie’s shoulders. “Did you see it happen?”

  “I saw… everything. I was standing right in the doorway and…” Charlie trailed off as the horrible scene replayed in her mind.

  “OK.” Zoe’s eyes were filled with concern. “We’ll need to get a statement from you in a bit. If you’re up for it.”

  “Of course,” Charlie murmured, still watching the cluster of bodies obscuring Gloria from view.

  They observed the scene for some time before Charlie detected a shift in the energy. The knot of people around Gloria began to break up, first responders wandering away one by one. She caught a glimpse of the paramedics packing up their stuff, and she thought that meant they’d done it. They’d gotten her heart beating again. Gloria would live.

  And then she saw the expression on the female paramedic’s face. The hard set of her mouth. The furrow of her brow.

  A moment later, a deputy unfurled a white sheet and draped it over the lifeless figure on the sidewalk.

  Gloria Carmichael was dead.

  TWENTY-TWO

  The next hour blurred past. It felt like the rest of the world was distant from her, quiet and hazy, like she was underwater.

  A detective came over to take an official statement. Charlie had a hard time focusing on his questions, struggling to concentrate for longer than a few seconds at a time.

  The detective’s mustached face blinked at her. Lips moving.

  “Can you tell me what kind of vehicle it was?”

  Charlie closed her eyes and willed the scene to mind. This was important. She had to remember.

  But it had all been so fast. Two seconds, at most. Gloria turning at the sound of the engine’s growl. The way it struck her below the knees, sent her flying.

  “It was a car,” Charlie said, starting with the easiest detail first. “A sports car.”

  Detective Mustache nodded. Waited for her to go on.

  She took a deep breath and let it come to her. A smear of crimson slicing through the murk of the rain and colliding with Gloria’s body.

  “Red.” Charlie shivered. “Bright red.”

  “And did it swerve? Slam on the brakes before it hit?”

  “No. It sped up, I think.”

  She pictured it again. Watched the violent movie play in her head. The approach. The impact. Those red brake lights glinting over the wet asphalt, but only for a second.

  “The car’s lights were off.”

  That got his attention. Made his mustache twitch.

  “You’re certain of that?”

  “No headlights. No taillights trailing away. The brake lights flared for a split second, shortly after impact, but that was it.”

  Detective Mustache’s pen flicked over his notepad. Probably writing down some variation of what Charlie was thinking now.

  Gloria had been hit on purpose. Dutch’s killer had just claimed another victim.

  When the police finally wrapped up their work and cleared the scene, Charlie realized how late it had gotten.

  “You’re going to be OK?” Zoe asked as she walked Charlie back over to her office. “I don’t get off work for another hour, but I could come check in on you.”

  Charlie shook her head.

  “I’m alright.”

  “You sure?” Zoe said, looking unconvinced.

  Charlie forced a reassuring smile.

  “I’m fine. Really.”

  It was a lie, but Charlie didn’t see what good it would do for Zoe to go on worrying about her.

  Zoe waited until Charlie had passed through the front doors before giving a wave and taking off. Paige jumped to her feet at the jangle of the bells over the front door.

  “What are you still doing here?” Charlie asked.

  “I thought I should wait for you.”

  “That was good of you,” Charlie said. “But you didn’t need to stay.”

  “I didn’t know what else to do.” Tears formed at the corners of the girl’s eyes. “It was just so awful, I couldn’t imagine going home and… pretending like nothing happened.”

  Charlie remembered that same thought turning over and over in her mind when Allie had died. How utterly wrong it felt that her entire world had been ripped apart while the rest of humanity continued on in their routines.

  “No. You don’t have to pretend like nothing happened.” Charlie slung an arm around her. “I want you to go home and take a hot shower. Then make yourself a cup of tea and put on a movie or a TV show you’ve watched a hundred times that always makes you feel good.”

  Paige nodded, seeming slightly more at ease.

  “Then what?”

  Charlie rested her hands on Paige’s shoulders and looked her dead in the eye.

  “Then you get some sleep so that tomorrow you’re ready to help me find the son of a bitch who did this. Can you do that?”

  That got a tiny laugh out of Paige. She sniffled.

  “Yeah.”

  “Good,” Charlie said. “Now gather up your things, and get out of here. I’ll close up.”

  Paige did as Charlie said, tossing a water bottle and her phone into her purse and slipping into her jacket. As she headed for the door, Charlie called out to her.

  “Don’t forget to eat something. You won’t feel like it, but even if it’s just some crackers or toast or something, get some food in your stomach.”

  Paige gave a dutiful nod before disappearing outside.

  The sudden quiet of the empty office seemed to close in on Charlie like a cloud. The exhaustion hit her all at once, and she let herself slump down onto the leather couch.

  Her eyes blinked shut. She needed to lock up, haul her ass up to her apartment and get out of her damp, blood-soaked clothes. But just now, she was so tired all she wanted to do was curl up here on the battered old sofa.

  Anyway, there was no harm in resting her eyes for a minute.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The rain pattered down in the dream, rivulets streaking Charlie’s face as she stumbled toward where Gloria lay in the street. But the air was thick and wrong, slowing her movements. She tried to run, to get there faster, but the more she struggled against it, the more it seemed to hold her back.

  No matter what she did, she couldn’t get to Gloria. Couldn’t help her. Could only stare at the broken figure sprawled on the concrete.

  Powerless.

  Charlie woke with a silent scream on her lips. Not because of the dream.

  Someone was in the room.

  A man’s figure hovered over her. Broad shoulders. Hands on her arms, shaking her awake.

  Charlie tried to blink away the sleep and conf
usion. Tried to remember where she was.

  Drop ceiling. Harsh fluorescent lighting. Carpet that smelled of the Parliaments Uncle Frank used to smoke.

  She was in the office. She’d fallen asleep on the couch in the front room.

  That made sense. What didn’t make sense was Brandon Carmichael’s presence. He knelt before her, eyes wide with concern.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “The lights were on, and when I came to the door, I saw you through the window,” he said. “I had to see if you were alright.”

  “I’m fine. I fell asleep, that’s all.”

  There was a note of panic in his voice that seemed overblown given the fact that she’d only been having a nightmare.

  “But what happened? Are you injured?”

  Charlie realized finally that he was staring at the blood on her shirt—Gloria’s blood—and assumed it was hers. She gazed down at the irregular blotches and smears staining the fabric.

  “It’s… not mine.”

  He reeled back after a beat, no doubt realizing whose blood it was.

  “Oh,” he said. “Jesus.”

  Charlie sat up straighter, the gravity of the situation sobering her up in an instant.

  “I am so sorry for your loss,” she said.

  “Thank you,” he said, avoiding her gaze.

  It struck Charlie that she didn’t know whether the police had told the family that the hit-and-run hadn’t been an accident.

  “Have you talked to the police?”

  “Yes,” he said, then shook his head. “Well, Wesley did. He’s the one who got the call.”

  Charlie nodded, thinking that if the only call Wesley had received was the one directly after the incident, then they didn’t know yet.

  “That’s why I came down here, actually,” Brandon said. “We’re all meeting at the house, and we thought… well, I guess we have questions, seeing as you were there when… when it happened. Not to mention all the stuff with the estate. We’re all in shock, but Wesley’s kind of freaking out now that he’s realized all of Gloria’s responsibilities are going to end up falling on him.”

  He scrutinized the blood on her shirt. The streaks of mascara she hadn’t quite been able to wipe away completely.