Over Her Head

by Shelley Bates

  But sometimes Colin’s practicality wasn’t good. He would give the shirt off his back to a needy person, or front a customer some scrap lumber for free, but to listen to that person’s troubles made him uncomfortable. Colin never borrowed trouble. He spent his energy trying to make sure it stayed as far away as possible. This meant the insurance was always paid up, their cars went in for maintenance on the exact date recommended by the manufacturer, and there was always gas in the generator in the garden shed, in case the power went out.

  But there was more to life than gas and insurance. There was sorrow, and joy, and sharing the highs and lows of life. And sometimes there were things she could only share with her women friends—the ones she’d found in her Bible study group. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, she job-shared as an administrative assistant in the literature department at Murdo University, a private college that sat on the hill on the other side of the highway. But Thursdays were the highlight of the week, when her Bible study group sipped Maggie’s apricot tea and drank from the water of life as they made their way through—this month—the Psalms.

  Half an hour after Nick had dropped her off, she showered, and still feeling that chill that just wouldn’t wear off, she walked six doors down, tapped on the door, and stepped into the Lessers’ living room. She closed the door quietly behind her and pushed the “door dog” back into its place along the bottom, where its long knitted body kept the drafts out.

  Besides Maggie, half a dozen women were already there. The sound of their voices settled like a blanket of comforting normalcy around her shivering soul.

  And then the chatter died away.

  “Laurie, good heavens, look at your face. Are you all right?” Maggie took her coat and slid an arm around her shoulders. “Laurie?”

  The study was held at Maggie’s house to encourage her in her sometimes halting Christian walk, but Laurie led it by tacit understanding. Everyone was used to looking to the members of her family to lead things in Glendale—and they’d been doing so since Great-great-grandpa Tremore had brought the railroad through here when the town wasn’t much more than a clearing in the woods.

  She had to pull it together, even though her spirit felt bruised and her mind was like a frightened bird, unable to settle on anything for more than a minute. All she wanted to do was unload the whole morning’s story on the group, to share it so that maybe the horror would dissipate. Talking it over would bring normalcy back. She hoped.

  Laurie glanced from one concerned face to the next. Natalie, Maggie, Cammie, Mary Lou, Donna, and Janice. Her spine stiffened a little.

  Janice Edgar was the incumbent mayor’s wife, and if there was anyone who could make Laurie Tremore Hale, of the Glendale Tremores, feel not only fat, but also not very bright, it was she. Not that she tried to, of course. She was unfailingly pleasant and always had a perfectly chosen word in season. But despite this, around Laurie she always seemed stiff and proud. She was tall and slender, and her blonde pageboy fell in perfect parentheses on either side of her face. Laurie’s mahogany-brown mane did whatever it pleased unless she braided it tightly in a French braid, where it lay down the center of her back and sulked between her shoulder blades.

  Janice was the type that presided over mayoral teas. Laurie was the type that organized them—and never the twain should meet. Until a few weeks ago, when Pastor Dayton suggested that Laurie invite Janice to prayer group.

  With Janice here, she absolutely could not fall apart. Maybe that was a blessing. “I’m fine. Thanks.” She gave Maggie’s hand a grateful squeeze. “Does anyone know if Tanya Peizer and Debbie Jacks are coming?”

  “Debbie and Jeff went to his mother’s,” Donna Carter said. “She’s going into the hospital in Pittsburgh for some tests.”

  “And Tanya?”

  Tanya was fairly new to their group, and they hadn’t quite gotten to the point of friendship. Friendliness, yes, but not friendship. When the other women, most of whom Laurie had known all her life, shook their heads and looked blank, she said, “I’ll give her a call when I get home. See if she needs anything.” Sometimes a person needed nothing more than encouragement, or sometimes something more substantial, such as a casserole, or a hand getting the housework done.

  Tanya was a single mom, and she lived in that eyesore of a new subsidized apartment complex next to the big discount store on the far side of town. Laurie often felt guilty when she looked at Tanya, who barely held things together and was dealing with a teenager who, from all accounts, was quite a handful. She did what she could, though. It was Laurie who had been behind the cook-in after prayer group last month, where they’d each brought a freezable dish or a plastic container full of snacks and loaded them all into Tanya’s beat-up Honda. Over her teary protests, mind you, but she’d still driven away with it all in the end.

  Laurie tried to get her brain working along normal lines. She needed to start the study. She needed to open with prayer. But instead, her knees buckled and she landed in one of the living room chairs, more by accident than design, and began to cry.

  “Laurie!”

  Cammie slid into a chair next to her and pressed a tissue into her hand. Maggie poured a cup of steaming tea and offered it. The rest of the group pulled their chairs in, as if they could offer comfort just by leaning closer.

  Laurie knew she was distressing them, but she couldn’t help it. What had happened that morning was sitting inside her like a pipe bomb, ready to explode.

  “I need you to do something for me,” she managed at last, after blowing her nose and wiping her eyes.

  “Of course,” Maggie said. “Please drink some of this. Tell us. It’s got to be something awful. I knew the minute you walked in.”

  Laurie took a deep breath. “I need you to pray for me. When I was jogging this morning, something awful did happen.” She paused. “I found a body.”

  Silence.

  “It was a girl. Probably in Anna’s class. She looked about that age.”

  “Who?” Cammie said. “Who was it?”

  Laurie took a sip of tea, then another. “I don’t know. I called 911 right away and they sent an ambulance. But of course it was too late. Then I had to go down to the sheriff’s office and give a statement.”

  The group of women clustered around her. “Oh, Laurie, how horrible. No wonder you’re so upset.”

  It felt so good. No statements of logic, just love and the concern of sisters in Christ surrounding her with warmth. She told them what little she knew, and she even refrained from embellishing the story with speculation and educated guesswork, in case someone might think she was being too dramatic.

  When she was finished, from the edge of the little group, Janice spoke up. The voice that Laurie had heard on television, confident and persuasive on whatever civic point she was making, was soft and hesitant now.

  “Should we pray?” Janice’s fingers riffled the top corner of her Bible’s pages, over and over. “For the family, I mean. Whoever they are. Some poor mother needs to be lifted up before God right now, don’t you think?”

  I should have thought of that. Immediately Laurie felt like an attention hog, guilty of asking for her own support when what she should have done was ask the group to pray for the unknown woman.

  “That’s exactly what we should do,” she said.

  “Janice, maybe you could lead us?” Maggie suggested. “And maybe you could put in a word for Laurie, too.”

  Laurie would have thought that Janice would jump at the chance to lead in this intimate little group the way she led out there in public life. Or that she’d take charge and delegate to someone who had known Laurie and Tanya longer, such as Cammie or Mary Lou. But instead, she hesitated, looked around as though she were trapped, and then nodded at last.

  “All right.” Laurie could hardly hear her. Janice’s face had gone completely white. She closed her eyes with that resigned look that people got when they were about to dive off the highest platform at the community pool.

&
nbsp; “Father God, thank you for the strength we’ve received as a result of this time here with you. We pray for our sister Laurie and ask that you give her the strength to move on after this experience. And please, Father—” Her voice broke, and she swallowed. “Please give your strength to this girl’s mother and her family. Lift them up with the hope that is in you, and wrap your love around them so they’ll know they can get through it. Be with them as they grieve, and remind them that you lost your Son, too. Amen.”

  When Laurie opened her eyes, Mary Lou said, “We need to find out who it was and see if we can do something for them.”

  Laurie spoke up. “My cousin Nick is investigating. But the family has to be notified before they announce anything. It might be in the papers tomorrow.”

  “I’ll find out.” Janice’s voice firmed, and beneath her pale skin Laurie glimpsed the mayor’s wife. The one with connections.

  Well, Laurie had connections, too. She was just going to have to lean on Nick a little. After all, she had found the poor child’s body, so she should be the one to take the lead in helping the bereaved family through this terrible time.

  Chapter Three

  To group: Budz

  From: JohnnysGrrl

  5-0 found her. Shut up.

  The thing Nick liked most about the folks who worked in the county coroner’s office was their sense of humor. He supposed that it was a defense mechanism more than anything—you had to find a way to regain your emotional balance when you were faced with the sometimes grisly end result of simply being human.

  As he was about to do today.

  He paused at the door and pulled a pair of blue paper booties out of the receptacle next to it. He snapped the fragile protection over his shoes and then donned a white apron. He looked like the guy behind the meat counter at the local grocery—if you didn’t count the uniform and the radio clipped to his shoulder.

  Lisa Nguyen looked up when he pushed open the door. Her white overalls were still spotless, which meant he was on time and she wouldn’t threaten him with her rose loppers for being late to the autopsy.

  He had a healthy respect for a woman who had a pair of rose loppers and wasn’t afraid to use them.

  “I could have done without this today.” She waited for him to snap on a pair of latex gloves and take his place at the end of the table on which the girl’s body lay. “She can’t be much older than my Jessica. Makes me think about things I usually manage to block.”

  “She was fourteen.” He schooled himself to impassivity as he looked down at the girl. Her eyes were closed, all expression wiped away by the finality of death. Her smooth oval face had a chin he could imagine might get pretty stubborn, but her mouth, which had been outlined in some dark lipstick, now worn away, held a heartbreaking innocence. “Some days the thought of being a parent scares me.”

  “It should.” As gently as if the girl had merely been sleeping, Lisa touched her cheek. “You risk your heart every single day. I hope I never have to face what this poor child’s mother is facing right now.” She glanced up at him. “If we get too cavalier about death in this job, it’s time to find another one.”

  On the basis of the school ID in a folder in her back pocket, the coroner himself had gone out to notify her next of kin. The girl’s clothes and any jewelry she’d worn had already been processed by the technician, and were bagged and waiting in the property closet for her family to pick up.

  There were bags in that closet that had been there for years. Maybe the families had never been able to face that final duty. Or maybe there were no families to come. But there they sat, those sad plastic bags holding the last things in which a human being had seen value.

  Nick thought of the coroner going out to find one of these families. He supposed he should be thankful for small mercies. His experience in informing parents that their kid had been picked up for reckless driving wasn’t quite the same as the coroner’s having to tell them their child would never come home.

  As the deputy first at the scene, though, it was his job to watch the autopsy and hear the preliminary findings. He glanced around the antiseptic room with its three autopsy bays, racks of tools, white linoleum, and bright, no-nonsense lighting.

  Aha. There it was.

  A metal bucket sat under a workbench about three feet away. Just in case. He stood a little straighter. As a point of pride he’d make sure he didn’t use it, but still, he felt better knowing it was there.

  Lisa made notes in a spiral notebook as she worked, but directed comments over her shoulder to him. “There’s a lot of lividity in the thighs and chest, and grains of sand everywhere in her clothing. Was she found lying on her stomach?”

  “Yes. On a sandbar in the middle of the river.” The contents of his initial report remained vivid in his mind. “Her feet were bare when she was found. She might have been abducted from her bedroom, though she was fully dressed.”

  “Impact with the water and any time in the current could have forced her shoes and socks off,” Lisa said. “It’s not likely she was an abductee—she was wearing a jacket and a scarf was knotted around her neck. Her clothes weren’t damaged much. Given the riverbed and the brush along the banks, I could speculate that whatever happened to her happened fairly close to where she was discovered.”

  “Maybe she fell or jumped off the bridge.”

  “Now that I should be able to tell you pretty shortly. But in my experience, jumpers take off their coats before they go in. Heaven knows why.”

  “Any ideas about time of death?”

  “Uh, last night?”

  “Very funny.”

  “Nick, you know this isn’t CSI. We can’t pinpoint it to the hour. Not to mention that the temperature of the water makes my thermometer readings meaningless.”

  “Ballpark?”

  Lisa sighed. “Ballpark—last night. No earlier.” She hovered over the girl’s head and touched her cheek, this time to indicate the injuries rather than mourn. “Bruising here, too, consistent with a blow. A slap, maybe. Uh-oh.” Her fingers, gloved in thin latex, moved through the girl’s hair. “This is nasty. Skull fracture. A deep one. I’ll know more when I examine her brain.”

  Nick glanced at the bucket, then away.

  He hung on to his cool as Lisa completed the external exam and moved on to the part with the rose loppers. “This is interesting.” After thirty minutes of careful work, Lisa’s white overalls were covered in stains. “Water in the lungs. Means she was breathing when she went in. We have a couple of ounces here. I’ll tell you in a couple of minutes whether the skull fracture happened before, after, or during.”

  Nick concentrated on the bucket for the next few minutes, until Lisa spoke again.

  “You okay, Deputy?”

  He nodded.

  “You sure? ’Cause I can give you all the details in my report.”

  “Thanks, but I need the preliminary findings today. We had a report of a disturbance on the Susquanny Bridge last night, and I think it might have been connected to our girl here.”

  “Is Forrest on it?”

  “As we speak.” In their county, the coroner’s investigators processed the crime scene, not the cops. They had specialized training—and an eye for minuscule detail that often meant the difference between securing or losing a conviction. “Depending on what he finds up there, we might have a homicide on our hands, not just an accident.”

  “Well, from the look of the marks on her face, and what seems to be finger-shaped bruising on her chest, I’d say the chances are pretty good.”

  Nick winced as the whine of the Stryker saw drowned out her voice. Lisa made a series of notes, then glanced at him again. “Water in the cranial cavity, too. So the blow to the head happened before she went in. And it’s a funny shape.”

  “Yeah?” He risked a look.

  She opened her thumb and forefinger into an L, then pointed. “See this? A right angle. Blunt trauma, like from the corner of a brick, only bigger.”

 
He thought for a second. “Have you ever been up on that bridge? Maybe when you were a kid and wanted to try diving in?”

  She gave him the kind of look big sisters have given clueless little brothers for millennia, and shook her head. “Do I look like I have a death wish? Besides, I didn’t grow up here. My folks moved out to the San Joaquin Valley in California when they left Vietnam. Not a lot of bridges you’d want to jump off out there.”

  “It’s like a rite of passage around here. Anyway, what I was getting at is that the undercarriage of the bridge is made of these big wood beams.” He made a square in the air with his hands. “Twelve by twelve at least. Would this”—he indicated the angle-shaped depression—“be consistent with one of those beams?”

  Lisa nodded. “I’d say yes. Look at this.” She indicated a discolored area on the brain where the dura mater had been pierced and shredded. “Subdural hematoma. Lots of blood. Whatever hit her, it rendered her unconscious immediately. I’d say Forrest ought to know soon, if he hasn’t examined the area already.”

  “I’ll drive out there myself as soon as we’re done.”

  “For your purposes, we are.” Lisa pulled her mask down over her chin, so that it hung around her neck. “My preliminary findings are that the cause of death is drowning, precipitated by blunt trauma to the head, sometime in the last twelve hours. That good enough for you?”

  “As my grandma says, it’s good enough to be going on with. Thanks, Lisa.”

  “No problem. It surprises me to get a case like this. Mostly all we get are indigents and traffic fatalities. This is a little uglier.”

  “If we’re talking homicide, it’s going to get a lot uglier.”

  “Job security,” Lisa quipped and turned back to the body. “Come on, darling,” she said softly. “Let’s finish up, take our organ samples, and put you back together for your family, okay?”

  Nick left her to it. He passed the bucket without giving it a look, removed the apron and booties, and tossed them in the HazMat bin. Then he walked with measured steps out the back doors and into the coroner’s gated parking lot behind the building.