In a moment of panic I wondered if Abby had set me up.
“Did Abby tell you I would be here?”
“Who’s Abby?” Brock asked. “That Amish girl you were talking to? You spend too much time with the buggy riders, Red.”
Curt nodded. “Brock’s right. You don’t need those Amish wimps. Come with Brock and me. We’ll show you a good time that will calm you right down.” He took a step forward.
I took a step back toward the ice. Maybe if I can get them to follow me onto the ice, I can circle back around and run to my car. My cell phone felt heavy in the inside pocket of my coat. The phone’s plastic body sat on my chest, but it might as well have been in my office at Harshberger—it was buried under too many layers in my coat to grab easily.
Brock walked to the edge of the pond. “You aren’t thinking of going ice skating now, are you?”
“You know how to ice skate?” I snapped.
A lazy smile crossed his face. “I might be willing to learn for the right person.”
My stomach curdled. “Can’t you leave me alone? Don’t you realize Chief Rose wants an excuse to throw you back in jail?”
Brock straightened to his full height. “That hurts, Red, that really hurts.”
Curt pulled at his goatee. “I don’t care what the lady cop wants. I only care about what we want. Right now, it’s you.”
My heart pounded so hard in my chest, I wondered if the geese could hear the thumping. Without a thought about the thinness of the ice, I raced for the frozen pond. My boot, sturdy or not, slipped on the glassy surface. When I was on the ice, I saw the movement of water. My stomach dropped. The pond was melting.
Brock took advantage of my hesitation and stepped on the ice.
I held out my hand. “Don’t come any closer!”
He rushed ahead.
“No! The ice will break.”
As I yelled the last word, a deafening crack shook the ground beneath my feet. I turned and ran full tilt to the opposing shore. The cracking sound followed me. Behind me I heard a cry and a splash. I didn’t look back until safely on firm ground. Grasping my knees, I gulped air.
Brock’s head bobbed over the edge of the ice.
“Dude, stand up!” Curt’s voice was three octaves higher than normal.
“I can’t.” Brock was already turning a bluish gray color. “The water is too deep. I can’t touch.”
Brock was over six feet tall. The water had to be eight or more feet at that point for him not to be able to touch the muddy bottom.
Curt took a step onto the ice. A crack raced across the surface, and he jumped back. His eyes, wide with fear, locked with mine across the ice. “You have to help. I’m too heavy. I’ll break the ice.”
Brock’s eyes were the size of softballs.
I could easily get away now. They would have no way to stop me. I could be in my car within five minutes, but I knew I could never leave them like that. “Is your truck here?”
“Yea. So?” Curt said. Even with his best friend in danger he had attitude to spare.
I ignored his tone. “We need some rope. Do you have any rope in your truck?”
He nodded.
“Go get it.”
Curt didn’t move.
“Go!”
Curt turned and ran. I heard him stomp through the forest breaking branches and leveling saplings in his wake. While Curt got the rope, I fumbled with my coat and pulled out my cell phone.
“911. What’s your emergency?”
“This is Chloe Humphrey. I’m at Appleseed Pond. Someone fell through the ice.”
The operator voice was sharp. “How long as the person been in the water?”
“Maybe three minutes,” I guessed. It seemed longer than that.
“I’ll send a squad right away. What’s the name of person in the water?”
“Brock Buckley.”
I looked out over the ice, no longer able to see Brock’s head.
“Brock! Brock!”
“Miss, what’s going on?”
“I can’t see his head. I have to go look.”
“Miss, stay on the phone . . .”
I tucked the phone back into my inner coat pocket but didn’t hang up.
“Brock! Wave a hand if you hear me.”
The tip of his fingers appeared and relief rushed through my body. I took a tentative step out onto the ice. The cracking started again. It wasn’t as loud as when Curt stepped onto the pond. I crouched on all fours and slid onto my stomach to distribute my weight more evenly across the ice. The ice would be less likely to crack that way—at least I hoped so.
“Lord, please don’t let the ice break,” I whispered.
Cold seeped in through my jeans and coat. My legs were soaked to the skin. I slid. Brock was twenty yards away from me.
I inched closer and reached the edge of the hole Brock bobbed in. His face was blue. Ice crystals gathered across his eyebrows and eyelashes.
I lowered my right hand into the hole in the ice. Freezing water slashed my exposed wrist, sending chills through every nerve in my body. “Give me your hand.”
His teeth chattered, and eyes stared at me as if he didn’t understand the words coming out of my mouth.
“Give. Me. Your. Hand.”
He did, his fingers so blue they reminded me of the blue raspberry popsicles Mrs. Green gave Tanisha and me in the summers. I shook the childhood image from my mind and concentrated on Brock.
Curt crashed his way back through the forest. “I got the rope!”
I gripped Brock’s hand, my fingers already numbed by his frigid touch. The cotton glove I wore was no help. I cranked my neck in an awkward angle to see Curt. “Make a loop with the rope that’s big enough to fit over his head and shoulder. Can you do that?”
Curt nodded.
“Then do it,” Brock snapped. It was the first time he had spoken in a long while.
Curt fumbled with the rope. Finally he was able to tie it into a loop.
I was eye to eye with Brock now, closer than I ever wanted to be. I could make out the individual shapes in the tobacco stains on his teeth. I saw the hair inside of his nose and the bloodshot veins in his eyes.
“Throw it to me!” I yelled.
Curt threw the rope, but it landed way off the mark to my right. I would have to let go of Brock’s hand in order to reach it. My hand was so cold, I knew if I let go I wouldn’t be able to grip his palm again.
“Try again.”
“He can’t throw a rope.” His teeth chattered. “C-Curt’s never done that. He’s not a c-cowboy,” Brock said.
“Be quiet,” I snapped. “You’re not helping.”
Despite the blue look to his face, he glared at me. The fear I saw earlier was gone. Now, he was angry.
The rope hit me in the side, and I grabbed it with my free hand. It’s roughness scratched the surface of my palm. I hadn’t realized I’d lost my left glove sometime during the rescue.
While I tried to maneuver the rope into place, I felt Brock’s fingers slip from mine. I gripped them. “Don’t let go of my hand.”
His eyes were closed and his head lolled to the side. Thankfully, it rested on the edge of the ice, so it wasn’t under water where he could drown. I let go of the rope and slapped him across the face.
His eyes snapped open. They were glassy, but fury resided there too. I felt the strength come back into his hand as he held onto mine. A half hour before, he could have crushed my small hand in his. Now my hand was keeping him alive. I reached again for the rope and slipped it over his head and under his left armpit, pulling it tight. To do that, I had to put my arm up to the elbow in the icy water. It felt like a thousand syringes stabbing my hand and arm all at the same time.
&nbs
p; I angled my body, so that I could see Curt. “I got him. Pull on the rope.” I slid back on the ice to make room. Brock held onto my hand with renewed strength. “W-Where are you going?”
I pulled my hand from his. “I have to go to the pond’s edge to help Curt pull you out.”
Tears sprang to his eyes and he placed his large head back on the side of the ice. A stab of guilt hit me.
“I need help!” Curt cried, spurring me into action. I belly-crawled in his direction.
“He’s too heavy,” Curt said. “Or he’s caught on something. I can’t pull him out.”
Thrashing and cries came from the direction of the parking lot in the woods—like Big Foot himself was headed our way.
The first one to pop into the clearing was Chief Rose. She took in the scene.
“We’re holding him up by a rope but can’t pull him out.” A full body shiver shook my being. I wrapped my arms around myself.
EMTs crashed through the woods. One took the rope from Curt’s hand, while a second EMT tethered yellow nylon to the harness around his waist. He wore a wetsuit. Something told me this was not the first time someone had been fished out of Appleseed Pond.
Someone wrapped an aluminum blanket around my shoulders. It helped, but I wondered if the shivering would ever end.
The EMT wrapped another rope around Brock and spoke with him. He held up his thumb, and three large EMTs yanked on both of the ropes. Nothing. The EMT on the frozen pond used an ice pick from his tool belt to free the parts of Brock’s clothing that had stuck to the edge. He gave the thumbs-up sign again.
They yanked and Brock popped out of the hole like a penguin from the ocean.
The EMT on the ice wrapped an aluminum blanket as best as he could around Brock, and they pulled him the rest of the way to safety. Suddenly he was surrounded by EMTs.
Curt crowded them. “What’s going on? Is he okay?”
One of the EMTs elbowed him away. “We need room to work.”
Curt jumped back like a puppy that had been struck on the head.
Chief Rose sidled up to me. “How are you?”
My teeth chattered. “Fine, I think.”
Those ever-present aviator sunglasses sat on the top of the police chief’s head, tucked in between her brown curls. “What on earth were you doing out here with these two? More than once I thought I told you to stay away from them.”
“I wasn’t here with them. We ran into each other.”
“You seem to run into them a lot.” She removed her leather gloves and tucked them under her arm. “Give me your hands.” She sounded so much like I had just moments before when I asked Brock to give me his hand. She removed the soaked-through cotton glove from my right hand and stuck it into her leather coat pocket, then she put her gloves on my hands.
Her gloves were a touch too large. My fingers didn’t reach all the way to the tip, but they were warming up. “Thank you,” I murmured.
“How did you run into them?”
My teeth chattered again. “I was here talking to Abby. There was something about the haircutting she wanted to tell me.”
“What was it?” Her tone was sharp.
My shoulders drooped. “I don’t know. She chickened out and wouldn’t tell me. In the end, all she told me was to stop investigating and leave the Amish alone.”
The chief looked disappointed. “I hear that all the time myself.”
“My gut tells me Abby and her friends are more involved in this than we were first led to believe.”
“You might be right. I will take a look at them again, but I don’t believe any of them were strong enough to stab Young like that.”
An EMT walked up to us. It was Nate, the same one who took me to the hospital the night I found Ezekiel’s body. “Chief, we need to take Miss Humphrey to the hospital to check her out.”
I grimaced. “I feel fine. It’s nothing a hot cup of coffee and a warm bath can’t fix.”
Nate shook his head. “We either check you out at the hospital or you sign a form that says if you die from hypothermia it’s not our fault.”
Excellent bedside manner. Grudgingly, I said, “I’ll go.”
“This conversation is not over,” Chief Rose said. Her curls bounced as she moved, giving her a girlish air. However, one look into her eyes told you she was no girl. She placed a hand on my shoulder. “You know, if you hadn’t been here, he might have drowned. You saved his life.”
The weight of her comment sunk in. I watched as a group of EMTs hoisted Brock onto their shoulders on an emergency plank. Curt followed at a distance. He seemed to have shrunk in the last hour. Uncertainty ruled his expression, and his hands were clamped together as if he didn’t trust their movement.
“Will Brock be okay?” I asked the EMT.
“He should make a full recovery. He won’t even lose any fingers or toes.”
Really, the guy should go into grief counseling.
The EMT cleared his throat. “You are going to have to call someone from the hospital to drive you home.”
I dreaded that call to Timothy. He wasn’t going to be happy about it. Neither was Becky. They already thought I was fragile from my spill after finding Ezekiel’s body. This incident, because it involved Curt and Brock, almost felt worse than finding a dead body.
“What about my car? Should I just leave it here?”
Chief Rose held out her hand. “Give me your keys. I will have one of my officers drop it off in front of your house.”
I reached into my pocket and dropped the keys into her glove-less hands.
She clasped her fingers around them. “I’ll be seeing you later at your house—not at the hospital.” She smiled. “You keep going to the hospital like this, Humphrey, they will have to name a ward after you.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Ah.” She snapped her fingers. “I got a smile out of you. That’s what I wanted.”
I knew she wanted a lot more than that.
Chapter Forty-Two
I couldn’t believe I was in the emergency room again. I was even on the same examining table, surrounded by a pink curtain. A nurse slid a protective covering on an ear thermometer. “I didn’t expect to see you back here so soon.” She checked my temperature. “Ninety-seven point nine. Low, but nothing a hot mug of cocoa can’t cure.” She made a note on my chart and slipped behind the curtain.
I let my feet dangle from the hospital bed as they did on doctor’s visits as a child. Thump, thump, thump. My heels hit the drawers under the bed. In a rush, I remembered being at the doctor with my mother and her telling me not to kick the hospital bed. In my mind, I heard her voice and saw her annoyed expression. It took my breath away.
The nurse pulled back the curtain. “We have a couple of guests that insist on seeing you.”
Timothy and Becky rushed toward me.
Becky threw her arms around my neck. “Chloe, what happened? Timothy said you fell into the ice and almost drowned.”
I hadn’t much time to explain to Timothy what had happened. I’d told him over the phone that someone had fallen into the Appleseed Pond. I hadn’t meant to imply it was me. I figured it was better to tell him about Curt and Brock in person. “No, I’m fine. I wasn’t in the water.”
The nurse made another note on her chart. “She saved the guy who fell in. She’s a hero.”
“You saved someone.” Becky squeezed my hand. “Tell us everything.”
Timothy frowned and watched me closely, as if he knew he wouldn’t like what I was about to say.
I swallowed. “It was Brock.”
Becky dropped my hand. I doubted she could be more surprised if I had told her I’d flown to the moon and back while they attended choir practice.
Timothy became extremely still. “How is Brock?�
� He directed his question to the nurse.
“He’ll be fine. We’re keeping him in the hospital overnight for observation. His temperature dropped dangerously low, but I expect he’ll be discharged by early afternoon tomorrow.” She patted my shoulder. “You’re free to go now, Chloe. Do me a favor. Don’t show up here for a while. This is turning into a weekly occurrence.” The nurse slipped by the curtain and on to the next patient.
I climbed off of the examining table. “I’ll need to grab my coat and we can head home. The nurse said it was at the front desk. I left it in the ambulance.”
“Becky, can you find her coat?” Timothy asked.
Becky’s face fell into a slight pout. “I want to hear about what happened.”
“You will.” His tone was firm. “I want to talk to Chloe alone for a moment.”
I sat back down on the table.
Annoyance flashed across Becky’s heart-shaped face, but she did as she was told.
When she disappeared behind the curtain, Timothy glared at me. “What were you doing alone with Brock?”
“Curt was there too.”
His eye twitched. “Does that make it better?”
I folded my arms across my chest. “I tried to call you twice. I sent you a text message.”
“What did it say? I’m going into the woods with Brock and Curt. See you later.”
“No. If you’d ever look at your messages, you’d know I was meeting Abby there. There was something she wanted to tell me about the haircutting.”
He glared down at me. “What was that?”
My face flamed. “I-I don’t know. She changed her mind. She’s afraid of something or someone.”
“Okay, so you were in the woods with Abby. First of all, why didn’t you meet her in town? How stupid it is to go into the woods alone with someone you hardly know. I thought you were from the city. Don’t you have street smarts?” His voice shook.
“She wouldn’t talk to me otherwise. She was scared someone would see us, and furthermore, she’s an Amish girl. What harm could she do to me?”
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