by Nic Joseph
That word.
“Nope. Just the air thing. That I just mentioned…”
Gayla had asked me that question at least two dozen times since the shooting. She asked me on days like this, when there was actually some truth to it, but she also asked on days when I looked tired, or wasn’t smiling enough, or took too long to respond to a question.
I’d echoed the word blackout only one time, but it had stuck, hard. The word fell from my lips during a therapy session two days after the Glenwood Bank shooting. I was sitting across the desk from Dr. Mary Cain during one of our mandated follow-up session.
“You understand that this is just a routine evaluation after what happened on Tuesday,” she’d said.
“Yes,” I’d responded. “I understand.”
“Good.” Her hands were crossed on her desk in front of her. There was an open file folder beside them, but she hadn’t looked down at it once. “Thanks to your quick action that day, the assailant, Vincent Crane, was killed on the scene, and no innocent lives were lost. The only injury was that of the teller, Patricia. She owes you her life.”
I nodded. I was tired of that phrase, too. Pat didn’t owe me anything. But all I said was “Yep.”
“So how have you been?”
“How have I been?”
“Yes. Since the incident.”
I spread both hands in front of me, not sure how to answer. “I’ve been okay,” I said. “Not, you know, amazing. But okay.”
She nodded in her slow, deliberate way. “Are you ready yet to tell me about what happened after the shooting?”
“Nothing happened,” I said. “It was just, you know, a lot of stress, and I just… I needed a moment.”
“You were unresponsive,” Mary said. “That’s what the officers said. Right after you took Crane down, you just stood there.”
I’d practiced a hundred answers for her, but in the moment, I just wanted her to stop talking about it. I couldn’t tell her that the moment my gun went off, the visions had started—the bullet fragmenting into millions of tiny pieces and hurtling not at the perp but right at me. I’d frozen, raising my hands above my head to shield myself. I still remember rocking back and forth, fumbling through my three-part test as everyone else rushed toward Patricia.
“I was tired, and my adrenaline was high, and I guess I blacked out a little,” I said.
“You blacked out?”
“Not really. I mean—” I took a deep breath. “I’m not sure.”
“Does that happen often?”
“No,” I said, and it was partially true. I never blacked out, but the visions happened all the time. I could always tell when they were coming, and I knew how to excuse myself, pop a couple of mints, and slow my breathing down.
“We’re going to ask Gayla to watch out for any signs of the blackouts and keep us updated, okay?” she said.
I started to protest, but she shook her head.
“This is coming from the chief, so there’s no point in arguing it.”
The chief of police, Ben “Brick” Peters, was not the kind of boss you questioned—he rarely changed his mind, and he was even less inclined to do so if he felt pressured. Brick was known for his loud, booming voice, his quick temper, and his ability to silence a room just by walking into it. He’d gotten his nickname because someone once said that talking to him was like talking to a brick wall—you could never win an argument with him.
Brick had taken it as a compliment.
Mary was right about one thing—there was no point in arguing it.
• • •
Gayla was quiet as we made our way across the property. There were even fewer people milling around now. The handful of neighbors that had been outside when we arrived had all gone back home. There were only two police cars left out front. Even with the scattering of people left, it was remarkably quiet, as if someone had pushed a Mute button on the night and everyone was treading as lightly as possible.
As we stepped onto the neighbor’s property, Gayla turned to me. “Whenever you want to talk, you know I’m here for you.”
I knew that she was genuinely worried about me, but that didn’t make her prying any easier. I nodded and hoped we could put the whole thing to rest, at least for the night.
The Paxtons’ home was similar in structure to the Lindseys’, and they’d both obviously been built around the same time, maybe by the same developer. We walked up the steps and crossed the porch. I could see that the lights were still on in the home, which wasn’t too surprising given all of the activity next door. Gayla and I stood side by side as she pressed the doorbell and waited.
A moment passed, and I heard a noise on the other side of the door.
It swung open a few seconds later, and we stood eye to eye with a petite, nervous-looking woman.
“Yes?” she said. The woman was in her thirties, wearing a long, light-blue bathrobe, and she folded her arms across her chest. There was a cigarette hanging from her fingertips, and it shook slightly, giving away her nervousness. Her long, brown hair was pulled back from her face in a low ponytail.
“Hi, we’re with the police,” Gayla said, introducing us. “Do you mind if we come in?”
The woman nodded and stepped back so that we could enter. “I saw you when you arrived,” she said.
“Are you Jane Paxton?” I asked.
She nodded.
“We know that you already talked to some of the officers on the scene, but we were wondering if we could take just a few more minutes of your time. Sorry to bother you this late.”
The woman looked back over her shoulder and nodded again. “How is Emily?” she asked, her arms clinched across her body like a shield. “Is she going to be okay?”
“Emily is at the hospital right now. We just came from there,” Gayla said. “She’s obviously been through a lot tonight, but it seems like she is going to be okay. We’re trying to figure out what happened to her.”
“This is so ridiculous,” Jane said. “I just… I can’t believe this is happening.”
While she was talking, a man appeared from the rear of the house, wiping his hands on a dish towel. He was tall and thin, and he walked quickly toward us, a mixture of exhaustion and concern on his face. “Hi, Detectives. What can we do for you?” he said.
“Mr. Paxton?”
“Ed,” he said.
“We just have a couple more questions about what happened tonight,” Gayla said. “Jane, I’m sorry to make you do this again, but you’re one of the last people to have seen Emily before she was taken to the hospital. Is there anything else you can think of, that you didn’t already tell the officers outside, that might tell us what happened?”
Jane bit on her bottom lip. “Not really,” she said. “I mean, I told the other guy, Mr. King? Yeah, I told him everything I knew. I don’t know what else I can tell you.”
“How close are you and Emily?” Gayla asked. “Are you two friends?”
Jane seemed to think about this for a moment, and she took a long, slow pull of her cigarette. She dropped her hand to her side and exhaled, the smoke curling its way out of her nose and mouth. “I mean, we’re as close as I think she is to anyone else in the neighborhood,” she said. “If that means anything. I always try to get her to come out more, to hang out with some of the ladies from the block, but she’s very private. I’m okay with that, though.” She shrugged.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Everyone has their way. I don’t think people allow for that enough, you know. You’re supposed to be this or that, or outgoing, or funny, or charming, but Emily wasn’t like that, and I think it rubbed people the wrong way. She liked being alone a lot more than she liked being with people, which was okay with me. I have a lot of friends. So when she wanted to hang out, she told me, and we did. It wasn’t
weird for me not to hear from her for a few weeks, too.”
“What do you mean, it rubbed people the wrong way?” I asked.
“Oh, nothing serious,” she said. “Some of the other ladies in the neighborhood, you know, we have a little girls’ club. We get together and go for walks, or watch movies, or whatever. Emily didn’t like to do all those things, and I think some of the girls thought she was a little stuck-up. Nothing big, though, just neighborhood chatter.”
“Honey,” Ed Paxton said wincing. “You’re making it sound like—”
“I’m not saying that has anything to do with what happened,” she said. “I’m just telling them what the girls thought.”
“What do you all think happened to her?” Ed asked Gayla and me. “I mean, you guys have to have some idea, right? Did someone break in? We just got a new alarm system, just in time, I guess. You can never be too careful.”
“We’re not sure, and we’re trying not to make any guesses,” Gayla said. “But there was no sign of a break-in. What can you tell us about Emily’s husband, Dan? Were either of you close to him?”
“Nah, I never met him,” Ed said. “They’ve only lived there for a couple of months, and the husband’s always at work.”
“Yeah, he’s never home. Emily’s always by herself. He seems like a sweet man, though, from what Emily has told me.”
Gayla and I glanced at each other. I could think of a lot of words to describe Dan Lindsey after our brief meeting, and sweet wasn’t one of them.
“She talks about him a lot?”
“I wouldn’t say a lot, but she’s told me some stories,” Jane said. “Since she works from home, sometimes she’ll invite me over for a cup of coffee, you know, when she’s feeling social. And she’ll tell me stories about him, about their honeymoon, things like that.”
“Mrs. Paxton, do you know what it is that Emily does for a living?” Gayla asked.
“Uh, she’s some kind of consultant, I think,” she said, frowning. “Must be nice, because she can work at home on the internet. I’ve been thinking about looking for some kind of part-time work from home myself.”
Gayla looked at me and raised her eyebrows but let it go.
“Do you think they could have gotten into an argument?” I asked. “Have you ever heard or seen the Lindseys fighting?”
“When?” Ed asked. “It’s not like they would come and do it on our front yard. We don’t know what goes on in people’s houses, so we would just be speculating.”
“Ed!” Jane said to her husband.
“What?” he asked. “I just… Honestly, I really don’t think it’s our place to get involved.”
“They just want our help,” she said. She turned back to me. “Look, if what you’re asking is whether I think Dan Lindsey could have hurt his wife, the answer is definitely no.” She looked at her husband, who rolled his eyes. “You’re right, I don’t know that,” she said to him before turning back to us. “But if you could hear the way she talks about him, the things he does for her… Those two are in love.”
“Jane, now you’re just making things up.”
“No, they asked me what I think.”
Gayla cut in. “If you don’t mind, could you go through what happened tonight once more for us? Every detail matters in a case like this.”
Jane nodded and took a brief glance at her husband before responding. “I went over to the house, because Emily borrowed a can opener from me a couple of weeks ago. So I went by to get it back. I didn’t know if she was home, but I figured it was worth a try. I went out my kitchen in the back and walked over to her patio door. That’s when I saw her.”
“What exactly did you see?” I asked.
“I walked up to the patio door, and there was really only one light on in the house. It was dark in there, pretty hard to see.” She paused and swallowed as she rearranged her robe and crossed her arms in front of her again. “But then I saw her sitting there. Her husband was standing over her, and she was all covered in something. At first, I just thought it was dirt or something. Just these dark smudges on her face.”
“Any reason why you went to the patio door and not the front?” Gayla asked.
Jane shrugged. “I do that sometimes. We both do. My kitchen is in the back of the house, just like hers, and so we usually come in and out that way.”
“What was Dan Lindsey doing when you got to the door?”
“Well,” she started, biting her bottom lip. “He had both hands on her shoulders, and he was shaking her a little.”
“Shaking her?” I asked.
“Not hard, not like that,” she said. “Just…trying to get her to move. She was like… I don’t know how to describe it. She kind of flopped around while he was shaking her, as if she wasn’t holding her body up, you know? I’m not explaining it right. Point is, I didn’t really understand what I was seeing, so I tapped on the glass, and that’s when he saw me.”
“What did Emily do when you tapped on the glass?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “I don’t think she moved at all.”
“Then what happened?”
“I waved at him to come over, and when he opened the door, I told him who I was and asked him what was wrong. He looked completely freaked out, which scared me even more. He told me to go and call the police. Said something happened to Emily, and he didn’t know what.”
“Did you see the knife?”
“Not really?” she said. “When I first saw her through the glass, I could see that she was holding something, but I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t find out it was a knife until later.”
“Did you hear her say anything?”
“Not until he opened the door. She was moaning, like she was in pain. It was horrible.”
“So what happened after that?”
“I ran back to my house to call the police. They were here in less than five minutes. By the time they got here, Dan had gotten her halfway into the foyer, but she was fighting him. Screaming. It was horrible. They wouldn’t let me get close, but the sound was just…” She shook her head. “The cops took over when they got there, and they sent me back home.”
“So you didn’t interact with her at all?” Gayla asked.
“No, they told me to stay back. I don’t even know if she actually knew I was there,” Jane said. “She was so messed up.”
“Maybe Emily’s not the one who was hurt,” Ed said suddenly. “Maybe she did something to her husband. Everyone always assumes the husband had to pull a dick move, but maybe it was her. She’s the one with the blood and the knife.”
Jane gave her husband a scathing look. “I thought you didn’t want to get involved,” she said.
He shrugged.
“All right, well, I think that’s all for tonight,” Gayla said. “We really appreciate your time. If you think of anything else, please give us a call, okay?”
“Yes, of course,” Jane said, and she tossed a look at her husband when he didn’t respond. “If either of us thinks of anything, we’ll call you.”
Gayla and I stepped back outside and walked slowly back to the Lindsey home. My arm was still tingling, and I rubbed it again. Gayla looked over at me, but she didn’t say anything. We’d just reached the Lindseys’ front steps when Derrick came walking out quickly, his cell phone to his ear.
“Yeah, I’ll let them know,” he said before hanging up. “We have to go to the station,” he said.
“Why, what’s up?” I asked.
“A call came in from a cabdriver. He said he made a drop in this area earlier tonight. Around 8:00 p.m.”
“Emily?”
“Yeah, it looks like it. When the cabbie got home and checked his backseat, he found a lot more than loose quarters and lost wallets. He found blood. Lots of it. He’s on his way to the station now.”
“Let’s go,
” Gayla said.
Chapter Eight
Then
There were five of them.
There was twelve-year-old Jack, of course, the unlikely leader. When he first told Lill that he wanted to try to get upstairs on June 2, she’d all but laughed in his face.
“Impossible,” she’d said. “Sorry, Jack. You’re not the first kid to try it, by far. I guarantee, every trick you’ve come up with has been tried before.” Lill was only thirteen, but she added things like “by far” and “I guarantee” to her sentences sometimes, making her sound much older. “Why do you want to get up there so badly anyway?” she asked.
They were sitting side by side in the library, a six-hundred-square-foot room on the compound’s third floor. The children were allowed to spend an hour there in the afternoons, after their daily lessons were complete. It wasn’t a library in any traditional sense, since it had only a small selection of books that had been carefully chosen by Frank and the mothers and which the children rarely touched. Mostly, they spent their time in the library working on assignments or socializing before dinner.
Lill had been humming softly to herself and working on her warrior project when Jack approached her. The older children had been tasked with defining what it meant to be a female warrior and creating a figure to represent it.
“Our mothers are the strength of our community,” Frank had said during assembly one day. “I want you each to create a warrior—modeled after one of our mothers—using tools from the art room. Be creative. We’ll display them in the library.”
Lill was sketching on a piece of paper when Jack sat down beside her, the soft melody she was humming filling the air. There were a couple of other children in the room, but no one seemed to mind. They were used to Lill singing—she sang in class, in the hallways, in the nursery, and in the children’s wing before bed. The mothers all loved her voice and rarely asked her to keep it down.
Jack wasn’t sure how to respond to Lill’s question about why he wanted to go upstairs. He decided to go with honesty. “Because…” he answered, trailing off as he watched Mother Paula, the librarian, approach them. The woman smiled thinly and nodded as she moved past them toward the back of the room. “Because of Mother Breanna.”