The Girls She Left Behind

by Sarah Graves

  “Didn’t. Got it from Chevrier.” Panic hit her as her air-hunger worsened.

  No comment from Peg as she maneuvered the bag open, wrapped one side around Tara, then pulled it all over the three of them.

  Suddenly they were in the dark. Lizzie felt the cool earthen wall through her hair. “We forgot the flashlight.”

  “No we didn’t.” Peg’s voice seemed to come from a distance. “I don’t want the batteries in here with us if it gets hot.”

  Really hot, she meant. Battery-exploding hot. Lizzie nodded, not having the heart to comment on this possibility.

  Above them all hell was breaking loose; she pressed her face into the cool earthen wall, letting it draw the heat that seemed to be boiling out of her skin.

  “How’d you find us, anyway?” She felt Peg shrug beside her.

  “Scanner. I’ve got one, remember? I heard the dispatch call to send someone out here. Just cops at first, not fire equipment. And when I heard it I had to come, in case…”

  “Sure,” Lizzie said.

  Then another bad thought hit her. “Peg, once the fire gets down here why won’t it suck all the air out of the blanket?”

  Peg shrugged again. “I don’t know, maybe it will. I’ve never been in a situation like this before.”

  Lizzie closed her eyes tiredly. “Yeah, me neither.”

  Then without warning the fire-tent material was very hot. The gaggingly sweet smell, she knew suddenly, was the skin of her own forearm cooking where it touched the tent.

  The air thickened further; she choked, then spat out a large volume of what she realized must be blood. A wave of nothingness went through her, a helpless feeling of everything flowing, of it all just…

  Going away. Her life jumped up before her in bright freeze-frames, like flash cards: Who’s this? Where’s that?

  She knew the answers and then didn’t, tried to cry out and couldn’t, the breath stopped in her throat, torn raw by her own screams, and her ears full of Peg’s shouts.

  The fire tent disappeared, and Tara and Peg, too. Every voice Lizzie had ever heard was all at once in her head and gone.

  Then, though she had never believed—never could have—the angels came, lifting her, and she felt the slow, deliberate beat of their heavy wings as they carried her.

  Carried her away.

  —

  Beat. Beat. Beat.

  That’s not right. That’s not what…

  “How are the others?” someone said. Someone…

  She lay on her back, white light all around, shining from above so brightly that it penetrated her closed eyelids.

  Beat…beat…

  “—okay. Not like this one, anyway. I’d have triaged her to Boston, but she’s nowhere near stable enough for the trip.”

  Something heavy pinned her. Heavy and cold, like a concrete block weighing down her rib cage.

  I have a rib cage. How odd. And that rhythmic sound was not the beating of rough wings at all, was it? But instead—

  Beat. Beat. A heart monitor. She was in a hospital, and the voices she heard belonged to…

  She opened her eyes, forcing apart her lashes, which were sticky with something jelly-like. Chevrier…

  The stocky, silver-haired sheriff sat in a wheelchair with an IV pole attached, the needle taped to the back of his big hand running something into his vein. He wore a blue cotton hospital gown and a white woven hospital blanket was draped around his broad shoulders like a shawl.

  “She going to be okay?” he asked.

  There was a heavily padded bandage around the sheriff’s left shoulder and his rugged face looked sunburnt, irregular patches of his short hair heat-frizzled and one of his eyebrows taped.

  But he was alive. “Well, is she?” he demanded.

  She peered sideways, not raising her head since doing so felt approximately as possible as lifting a ten-story building using only her pinkie finger. Clear fluid dripped from an IV bag on one side; dark-red liquid flowed from a plastic pouch on the other.

  “I think so,” Emily Ektari replied judiciously. “Another few minutes, different story. But she never lost her blood pressure entirely. Good thing that helicopter showed up when it did.”

  Fabulous, Lizzie thought with an irreverence she realized was probably inappropriate for the seriousness of her situation.

  On the other hand, she was almost surely stuffed with very strong painkillers so she should cut herself a little slack, she thought, repressing a giggle.

  Then the first voice spoke again, hoarse sounding as if its owner had been shouting, and this time she recognized it. Dylan…

  The memory flapped up out of a nightmare: first the shots fired, then Dylan grunting with pain, falling.

  But now she recalled the new body armor he’d told her he was trying, with the space-age nanoparticles and the…

  Ouch. Thinking made her head hurt. Also, not thinking. Then as she moved her neck slightly to try to ease the pain slamming through her skull with every heartbeat, she glimpsed the thick plastic tube sticking from between her ribs, running down to a—

  Nope. Not gonna look. But then she did look, curiosity overwhelming a lurch of nausea at the sight of her own blood bubbling into some kind of collecting system hanging off the bottom bed rail.

  “Fortunately the broken bone end that pierced her lung also stuck in it like a plug,” said Emily Ektari. “If it had dislodged before we got her to the OR, she’d have—”

  But the rest was way more information than even Lizzie’s curiosity needed. Fortunately, Emily’s beeper went off and she hurried away.

  “All right,” said Chevrier when she had gone. “I’m getting out of here right now, one night in this joint is plenty.”

  A night? I’ve been here a whole—

  “Hudson, I want to see you this afternoon in my office,” Chevrier went on. “I still don’t know what the hell all that was about, and you’re going to—”

  “Forget it.” Dylan sounded defiant. “You know as well as I do what happened. Those two New Haven women had some kind of a wacko revenge plot going, and it went even more haywire than it was when they first came up with it.”

  How’s he know that? she wondered. The scrape of a metal chair being pulled up to Lizzie’s bed was followed by his next comment.

  “And I’m staying right here until further notice, so if you want to know more,” Dylan added to Chevrier, “you can just put the footrests up on that wheelchair of yours…”

  A figure in a blue scrub suit appeared by the bed. Lizzie glimpsed a syringe of something being shot into her IV. Almost at once her pain eased, then floated away.

  The beep of her heart rate slowed; she felt her neck muscles relax. Even the tube in her side no longer troubled her—or at any rate not much.

  And I’m not afraid. It was as if a sharp metal clamp around her heart had been removed.

  Emily Ektari approached Lizzie’s bed again, eyeing Lizzie’s monitors judiciously.

  “So what was the story with the dead woman from the shack?” Chevrier asked the ER physician.

  “The medical examiner says she’d had big-time head surgery within the past couple of months,” Emily replied. “They put a shunt in her brain. Among other things, it was supposed to drain excess fluid.”

  Emily adjusted Lizzie’s IV, then made a note on a clipboard. “Then sometime within the past few days, she had another injury that started a slow brain bleed.”

  She laid the clipboard down. “The shunt drained the blood for a while, but it wasn’t meant for that, so it clotted off. And when it did—”

  She snapped her fingers softly. “Lights out.”

  Dylan nodded as if this was no more than he’d been expecting to hear. “Our girl Jane knew how to do people in, all right.”

  “Bunch of damn goofballs.” Chevrier sounded fed up, as if he might just spin around and wheel right on out of there.

  Wish I could. Lizzie opened her eyes but the funhouse effect this brought on made her
close them again, dizzily. She tried reaching for Dylan’s hand, but didn’t seem to have one of her own to do it with, her body dissolved somehow to a vaporous substance that was blessedly pain-free. But she could still hear.

  “How’d Gemerle get hold of a box and shovel, anyway?” Chevrier wondered aloud.

  “Forest service,” Dylan replied. “The box had had a dozen shovels crated up in it.” His hand found Lizzie’s and gripped it.

  “I’ll say one thing about Jane, though,” he added. “She may be nutty but she’s got nine lives.”

  Say what? Lizzie thought, fully alert suddenly.

  She’d been floating along on the two men’s conversation, happy as a little clam on a tide of the IV morphine or whatever it was that they’d given her. But now the blissful no-worries effect of the drug faded away fast.

  “…alive,” said Dylan. “I got to talk to her when she first came into the hospital, before they started working on her. She’d lost a big chunk of her scalp and bled like hell, but she came to. Rolled out of that shed and into the water trough outside just in time.”

  At his words, another sharp stab of anxiety pierced Lizzie’s opiate cocoon.

  “Saved herself,” Dylan said. “But she’s not going anywhere.” His head jerked toward a stretcher just now rolling by the foot of Lizzie’s bed. “Not under her own power, anyway.”

  Strapped to the stretcher by thick leather restraints, the figure was near unrecognizable with its bandage-swathed head and thickly gauze-wrapped arms, its face heavily painted with white ointment and scalp mottled with patchy burnt areas.

  But I’d know her anywhere…They’d have wanted her medically stable before the cops took her into custody, of course; that was why Jane Crimmins was still here.

  “Hey,” Dylan said, frowning abruptly.

  Following his gaze, she blinked in amazement at how much blood she’d just suddenly produced. Then came shouts, hurrying nurses, and Emily Ektari’s dark eyes peering from behind a hastily donned surgical mask.

  Finally came a feeling of speeding along way too fast, as her injured body—I have a body, she thought wonderingly—was rolled out of the treatment cubicle.

  “Prep the OR stat,” someone said.

  —

  Seated outside the eye clinic, Tara watched the stretcher rolling by with eyes that still felt raw and scratchy. Her throat hurt, too, from screaming to get out of the box she’d been buried in, and from crying pretty much nonstop since she’d been rescued.

  “That’s her, isn’t it?” she murmured. “She’s the one who was with me in the shed when you came and saved me?”

  She felt her mother’s arm tighten around her. “Yes. But it wasn’t only me. We did it together, all three of us.”

  She squeezed Tara’s arm again. “You by hanging in there and never giving up, me by being prepared…”

  Pushed by two nurses, the stretcher rolled away fast through a door marked SURGERY. In its wake a housekeeping aide mopped a trail of bright blood drops.

  “And Lizzie Snow,” Tara’s mother finished. “By not giving up on me.”

  Tara bit her lip. “Is she going to die?”

  “No, honey. Deputy Snow is going to be fine.”

  Her mom’s arm tightened again. Ever since they’d been home, her mom had been saying that everything bad was all over, and from now on life was going to be good.

  But Tara didn’t believe it. Aaron was dead, for one thing, and she still felt guilty about it. If she hadn’t gone off with him, if she hadn’t been hitchhiking; if, if, if.

  And somehow the worst of it was that her mom seemed to think she knew what Tara was going through. But she didn’t. Being taken, sure she was going to die…no one could understand.

  No one. “Honey?” Her mom peered at her in concern. “Honey, I know what you’re—”

  “No you don’t,” Tara spat. “You don’t know, stop saying you do.” Screaming now and not caring. “No one understands any of it! You’re all just stupid and ugly and…and bad!”

  She was on her feet, sobbing, the fear coming back again and the shame along with it because it was all her fault…

  “Tara.” Her mother’s arms were around her suddenly. “Tara, listen. You don’t think I get it?”

  And here it all came again, it’s all going to be all right, blah-di-blah. But what she heard next was not what Tara expected:

  “You’re right. Nothing will ever be the same.”

  Tara glanced up. “How…how do you know?”

  Her mother looked weary. “I never meant to tell you. Now I have to. But first, you have to promise that afterward…that you’ll still love me.”

  Tara’s throat ached with tears. “Okay,” she said, meaning it.

  The clinic nurse beckoned. Peg stood. “Come on, then, let’s get this appointment over with.”

  Tara got up, too. “And then I have a story to tell you,” said her mother. “I don’t think you’re going to like it.”

  She sighed, guiding Tara forward. “But it’s a story you need to know. So you’ll believe you’re okay.”

  “Okay,” Tara repeated, thinking one step. Then another. Not that hard if you just took them one at a time. So maybe—

  “Hello, Tara.” The nurse smiled kindly at them.

  So maybe her mother really did know best.

  SIXTEEN

  FIVE DAYS LATER

  Unidentified white female, age approximately ten years, hair blond, eyes blue…

  “Those space-age polymers worked.”

  Saying this, Dylan glanced over at Lizzie from behind the wheel of his own car, a beautifully kept old red Saab 900. He’d insisted on driving her to the medical examiner’s office in Augusta to view the body.

  Nicki. It might be…

  “In the vest?” she replied. He’d kept up a line of chatter all the way from Bearkill, on country roads to Houlton and then on I-95.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Frickin’ bullet packed a helluva punch and I’ve still got a bruise the size of Texas on my chest. But since the rescuers didn’t have to pick me up in pieces and stuff them in a body bag, I’d call it a success.”

  Engaging her in small talk was his attempt to keep her mind occupied, she supposed. That way maybe she wouldn’t dwell on the small body awaiting her identification.

  But it wasn’t working. Cause of death, blunt-force trauma.

  “You never asked how come they found us there,” Dylan said. “And I wouldn’t bring it up, but you owe that office assistant of yours a big vote of thanks.”

  That got her full attention at last. “Missy Brantwell? But I thought—”

  “Right, that she’d hightailed it out of town for the last time along with everyone else. Which she had. Got her mom and her kid situated. But then she came back.”

  Oh, for pete’s sake. But of course; that was Missy.

  “Couldn’t raise you on the phone or the radio, or find me or Chevrier, either, so she called Trey Washburn,” Dylan said. “He started phoning around, and once he heard about Chevrier calling for backup, he had some creative suggestions about where to look for you.”

  Now they were south of Bangor, speeding through flat, empty territory with nothing but a thin scrim of evergreen trees on either side: each exit miles from the previous one, gas stations and convenience stores sited directly at the ends of the ramps, signs visible from the interstate.

  “Trey knew about the sheep hut,” she said.

  A state cop flew by with his lights on, no siren. When they caught up, the trooper had a car pulled over and was approaching. Dylan lifted an index finger in salute as he drove past, and the trooper nodded sideways in reply without taking his eyes off the targeted vehicle.

  “Right,” said Dylan. “Trey called the forest service and the ’copter pilot said she thought she could probably beat the flames back enough with the rotors, ’cause it was raining by then.”

  The storm, when it finally came, had been historic; two-plus inches of rain overnight and mo
re the next day, dousing the fires decisively. Not that Lizzie had noticed any of it; she’d been busy learning to breathe again after surgery for a punctured lung.

  The first exit sign for Augusta appeared. He pulled out and passed a small sedan, then got over to the slow lane once more.

  “And Trey was right,” Dylan said. “About his hunch. So here you are now.”

  “So here I am,” she repeated shakily. Once the chest tube was out there’d been little reason to keep her in the hospital.

  Or so she had insisted, and at last Emily Ektari had given in. They rode in silence awhile. Then: “What about the cars?”

  Dylan laughed humorlessly. “Turns out Cam Petry flew here. Bangor to Portland, there to Houlton. Then she rented a car.”

  He pulled out and passed a fuel truck. “And Jane had a Lexus she’d bought back in New Haven. Both vehicles in the impound lot now.”

  He returned to the right-hand lane. “Plus the stolen van, that’s all of ’em.”

  The Saab still handled as neatly as ever, she noted, trying not to think about how much she had missed it.

  And him. “Snow tonight,” she said, looking out at the iron-gray sky.

  He glanced at her again. He had been, since the events of a few days ago, unceasingly kind. “Yeah. Lots, they say.”

  In the heavy rain’s aftermath it had turned very cold. Back in Bearkill, people were wearing parkas and boots and mounting plow blades on their pickup trucks.

  “Here we are.” Dylan took the downtown exit with the ease of long familiarity, wound through back streets along the river, and pulled into a gated parking lot.

  Inside the low brick building, the walls were institutional green, the overhead light buzzing fluorescent. He led the way down linoleum-tiled corridors to an office anteroom, then into a large cool open area like a surgical suite.

  The clock on the only wall that was not lined with morgue drawers read two o’clock; they were right on time. A young man came in, wearing a lab jacket, corduroy slacks, and Hush Puppies.

  He had an ID badge, too, but she didn’t bother reading it. Her mouth was dry, her heart hammering. Dylan’s hand cupped her elbow.

  “Will you know?” he asked.

  She nodded. Half the toe tag was in the slot on the drawer’s end plate. The other half would be on the body.