Eager to be out of its way, she quickened her step. At the corner, she turned onto Birch Hill. The car climbing it—a bare-bones Jeep—was twenty feet off but approaching steadily, so she hopped from the street into the deeper snow at the side.
The pickup kept coming. Alarmed by its speed, fascinated in a horrified way, Bree stopped walking. The pickup looked to be dull blue and old. She figured that whoever was driving was either drunk, inexperienced, or just plain dumb.
“Slow down,” she warned. At the rate it was going, it would surely skid when it turned. And it was going to have to turn, either right onto Birch Hill or left around the oval. If it went straight, it would hit her head-on.
Suddenly frightened, she moved. Running as quickly as she could through the deep snow, she started down Birch Hill, but it was an ill-timed move. Seconds after she passed the Jeep, she heard the crunch of metal on metal. Then the Jeep was skidding back, sliding faster than she could run and in the god-awful same direction.
Its impact with her was quieter. She felt a searing pain and a moment’s weightlessness, then nothing at all.
Chapter
2
The first hit sent the Jeep skidding sideways and back. When the pickup tried to swerve away, it skidded into a broadside hit that crushed the Jeep against a stone wall. On the rebound, the pickup ricocheted back to the center of the road and sailed off down the hill.
Tom Gates didn’t see that. He had only one thought in mind. Heart pounding, he rammed his shoulder once against the Jeep’s door, realized that it was too damaged to open, and scrambled over the gearshift to the passenger’s door. When it wouldn’t budge, he raised his feet, kicked out the glass, and tumbled through. He grazed the edge of the stone wall on his way to the snow but was on his feet in an instant, racing back over the wall and around the Jeep.
He searched the road and saw nothing. He fell to his knees beside the Jeep, searched underneath, ran to where it met the wall, and, putting everything he had into the effort, moved the Jeep enough to see that no one was trapped there, not even down by the tires.
Frantic, he looked around. He was sure that someone had turned the corner seconds before the pickup hit him. He had hit whoever it was. He was sure of that, too.
He had just spotted a dark lump in the snow when a light came on in the house deep in the yard. “Anyone hurt?” Carl Breen hollered.
“Yeah,” Tom hollered back. “Call an ambulance.”
He stumbled to his knees by the inert shape, reached out to touch it, paused. What to do without causing greater injury? The legs looked normal, no grotesque angles there, but an oversize jacket hid everything above. Crouching over the head, he saw a face, which meant that whoever it was wasn’t suffocating in the snow, assuming that whoever it was hadn’t died on impact. At least he saw no blood in the snow.
“Hey,” he said urgently, “hey. Can you hear me?”
A hood covered half of the face. When he loosened its strings and eased it back, recognition was instant. No matter that her normal coloring had gone ashen. If the fineness of her features hadn’t given her away, stray wisps of dark hair would have.
Tom closed his eyes and rocked back on his heels. It was Bree, sweet Bree from the diner.
“Christ,” he whispered, coming forward. He touched her cold cheek and pulled the hood up again to protect her face from the falling snow. He felt her neck for a pulse, though his own was pounding so hard he didn’t know whose he perceived. Her skin under her clothing was warm, though. Taking hope from that, he pulled off his jacket and spread it over her.
That was when he saw her hand, little more than a small band of knuckles at the end of her sleeve. It was cold and limp. Taking it gently, he rubbed it to warm it up.
“Bree?”
She didn’t move, didn’t moan, didn’t blink.
He slipped a hand inside the hood and put it to her cheek. “Can you hear me, Bree?”
A beam of light swung past him, then returned. Squinting into it, he saw Carl Breen trudging through the snow. His wool topcoat flapped over wash-worn pajamas. He had a southwester on his head and unlaced galoshes on his feet.
The beam of the flashlight shifted to Bree. “Is she dead?” Carl asked.
“Not yet. Did you call?”
“Ambulance is on its way.”
“How long will it take?”
“Good weather? Ten minutes. This weather? Twenty.”
“Twenty?” Tom cried. “Christ, we need something sooner than that.”
Carl was bending over, lifting the edge of her hood. “What was she, coming from work?”
“Twenty minutes is too long. She can’t lie here that long.”
“Won’t have to. Chief’s on the way. Travis, too. He’s a paramedic. Need a blanket?”
“Yes.” While Carl plodded back to the house, Tom kept one hand around Bree’s and the other on her cheek, so she would know that someone was there.
“Christ, I’m sorry,” he murmured. “Ten feet up or back, and I’d have missed you.” He leaned close, looking for movement. “Are you with me, Bree?” He didn’t know what he would do if she died, couldn’t conceive of living with that. Being a self-centered bastard was one thing. Causing someone’s death was something else entirely.
“Hang on, baby,” he murmured, looking at the road, rocking impatiently. “Come on, come on. What’s taking so fucking long?”
Carl returned, unzipping a high-tech sleeping bag. “My grandson’s,” he explained, and shook it out over Bree. Squatting, he said, “Quite some noise, that crash. What happened?”
Tom shot another glance at the street. “Where are they?”
“Chief was down Creek Road when I called. He’ll be coming up East Main.” He shone his flashlight on Tom’s face. “You’re bleeding.” Tom pushed the light away, still Carl saw fit to inform him, “Your face got cut.”
Tom felt nothing but fear. Again he searched Bree’s throat for a pulse, sure he felt one this time, though it was weak. Slipping his hand inside the hood, he cupped her head. “They’re almost here, Bree. Help’s almost here.”
Miraculously, then, it was. In what seemed the best thing to have happened to Tom in months, the headlights of the Chevy Blazer that served as a cruiser for Eliot Bonner, Panama’s police department, preceded it by seconds around the corner. Travis Fitch followed close in his own car. Both vehicles pulled in at either end of the Jeep, doors opening in tandem, drivers running through the snow in the crisscross of headlights.
Travis, in his early thirties and beanpole long, wore dark pants and a dark hooded jacket. Eliot was a bit older, a bit shorter, a bit heavier. In his plaid jacket and orange wool cap, he looked more like a hunter than a police chief, which, given Panama’s minimal law enforcement needs, wasn’t far off the mark.
Though Tom shifted to allow Travis access, he kept the back of his fingers against Bree’s cheek. “She hasn’t moved,” he said, giving in to traces of panic, “hasn’t opened her eyes or said anything.”
Travis was feeling around under the coverings.
The police chief hunkered down beside Tom. In a gravelly voice to match his beer belly, he said, “Jeep’s a mess. What happened?”
Tom was watching Travis, wondering if he knew what he was doing. “A truck hit me. I hit her.”
“Must’ve done it real hard, to throw her so far. Where’s the truck?”
Tom twisted to look down the road. It was nowhere in sight. Swearing softly, he twisted back to Bree. “What do you feel?” he asked Travis.
“Neck’s okay. Spine’s okay. I think the problem’s inside.”
“What do you mean, inside?”
“Stomach, or thereabouts. Somethin’s hard.”
“She’s bleeding internally?”
“Looks that way.”
“Who was driving the truck?” the chief asked.
But Tom couldn’t think about the truck yet. “Can she bleed to death?” he asked, as Travis worked his way down Bree’s legs.
“How do you stop the bleeding?”
“I don’t. Surgeons do.” He re-covered Bree and pushed to his feet. “I’m calling ahead. They’d better get in someone good.” He loped back through the snow to his car.
“Where will they take her?” Tom asked Bonner. He didn’t want Bree to die, did not want Bree to die. For the first time in seven months, he wished he were back in New York. There, she would have had top doctors, no questions asked. Here, he wasn’t so sure.
“There’s a medical center in Ashmont,” Bonner answered.
There certainly was. Tom had been there. It had been just fine for stitching up his hand, but Bree hadn’t been cut by a saw. “She needs a hospital.”
“She needs fast care,” the chief replied. “No chopper’s taking off in this snow, so she’s going to Ashmont. They’ll get a surgeon up from Saint Johnsbury. If he sets off now, he’ll reach Ashmont by the time she’s ready.”
“Does Ashmont have operating rooms?”
Bonner screwed up his face. “Hell, man, we’re not hicks. Our operating rooms may not be as state-of-the-art as yours, but they get the job done. We don’t like dying any more’n you do, y’know.”
Tom straightened. He wasn’t the helpless type. Yet what he felt now ranked right up there with what he had felt all those months before, standing alone at his mother’s graveside with nothing to do but grieve. “Someone has to call her family.”
“Well, there isn’t any of that to speak of,” Bonner advised, “not for Bree. Her mother left her when she was a baby. Her father raised her, but he’s been dead three years now. There weren’t any sisters or brothers. No husband. No kids.”
That surprised Tom. He had watched Bree work. She had always seemed so self-possessed, so grounded, that he had assumed she had the solid backing of family. He pictured her with a husband and a child or two, maybe a mother or sister to help with the kids while she worked. He had envied her that, had envied her for belonging.
Bonner rose. “Flash is as close to family as she has. I’ll give him a call.”
He set off just as Travis returned. “The ambulance is three minutes away. No sense my moving her. They’ll have a long board.”
Tom sat on his knees in the snow. He touched Bree’s neck, her forehead, her cheek, wanting to do something and feeling hamstrung. He brushed snow from her hood, for what good that did. She had been at the wrong place at the wrong time. So had he.
Desperate for someone to blame, he looked skyward. The clouds were a dense night gray, still heavy with snow. “It’s October, for Christ’s sake. When’s this supposed to stop?”
Carl, who continued to hold his flashlight on Bree, said, “Weatherman says morning.”
“Yeah, like he said this was gonna be rain.”
“Difference of a few degrees, is all.”
Tom might have said what he thought of that if the ambulance hadn’t circled the town green just then. Its engine was all business, giving it away even before it pulled around the corner, red and white lights flashing, and ground to a halt.
Leaning over Bree, Tom felt a fast relief, a sharp fear, and something almost proprietary. He talked softly, telling her that help had come, that she was going to be all right, that she shouldn’t worry about anything. He wasn’t pleased when the ambulance crew hustled him aside, or when one of them threw a blanket around him and poked at his face. He was most bothered when they wouldn’t let him ride with Bree.
“I’m all she has right now,” he argued, acutely aware of the “right now.” Bree might not have family, but she had friends. He had seen the way she had with people. Flash would be only the start. Once word spread that she was hurt, friends would rush to her bedside, and he would be the outsider, the villain of the piece.
The grasp Eliot Bonner took of his arm said it was happening already. “We need to talk, you and me. We’ll follow in the cruiser. Unless,” he added dryly, “you were a doctor back in the city.” The ambulance doors closed. “You never did say what you were.”
Soon after Tom had come to town, the police chief had stopped by. “Offering a welcome,” he had said, with a too wide smile, and a welcome might have been part of it. Tom wasn’t so untrusting as to deny that. But the bottom line had been curiosity about Panama’s newest resident.
In the ten minutes that they had spent talking on the front walk, Tom had been vague. More than anything, he had wanted anonymity, and he still wanted it. But having been involved in an accident in which one of Panama’s own was badly hurt, he was in a precarious position. He might have a history of lying to friends and family—worse, of lying to himself—but he knew better than to lie to the law.
“I’m a writer,” he said.
Bonner sighed. “Ah, jeez. Another writer. Searching for inspiration, am I right?”
“Not really.” There was so much else for him to seek before he sought that.
“Then what?”
Tom didn’t answer. He had come to Panama to distance himself from the arrogant, self-absorbed man he’d become. He had wanted time alone to think, to soul-search, to look inside and see what bits of decency were left—all of which was self-indulgent, none of it remotely relevant to what had happened that night.
For the first time, watching the ambulance pull away, he felt cold. There was some comfort in the thought that Bree had his jacket—though he wondered if they had tossed it aside to work on her. He pictured her in a neck brace, strapped flat, being hooked up to monitors and IVs. He prayed she was holding her own.
The chief ushered him toward the Blazer. “You’re shaking. Not goin’ into shock on me, are you? Better get in.”
The offer was for the passenger’s side, rather than the backseat, which was the good news. The bad news was that shaking was the least of it. Climbing in was a challenge. Tom’s body was starting to hurt.
Bonner eyed him from behind the wheel. “You okay?”
“I’m okay.” The paramedic had given him gauze for his cheek. Pressing it there, Tom waved Bonner on after the ambulance. It was already out of sight, gone too fast with Bree.
The Blazer took up a slow, safe, frustrating pace through the snow. “So. What happened?”
The shaking increased, radiating outward from his belly.
“Gates?”
Tom forced himself to think back, but things were fuzzy. “I was coming up the hill toward the green.”
“Slippin’ around, were you?”
He didn’t remember slipping around. “Not particularly. The Jeep holds the road.”
“Why were you out?”
There hadn’t been any special reason. He had been restless, even lonely. He had been thinking how different his life was, at that moment, from what had gone before. There had surely been regret, surely self-pity. “I just felt like being out.”
“Were you drinking?”
Tom slid the man a long look. “You leaned in close when you reached the scene. Did you smell booze on my breath?”
Bonner smirked. “Nope. Just coffee.”
“You saw me at the diner. I had one beer with my chicken. Bree asked if I wanted another. I didn’t. LeeAnn poured the coffee. I had two cups.” The wipers pushed snowflakes from side to side. Peering out between them, Tom envisioned himself in a tunnel of light formed by the Blazer’s headlights. The eeriness of it gave him a chill. “Where’s the ambulance?”
“Up a ways. So. You had your coffee, then you left. What time was that?”
“Eight, give or take.” His left side ached. He changed position to ease it, still he felt the Blazer’s every shift. “I went home, stayed half an hour, then left.”
“To go joyriding in the snow.”
“Not joyriding.” He hadn’t felt any joy, hadn’t felt any joy in too long to remember. “Just riding.”
“Where?”
“Around town. Out toward Lowell. Into Montgomery. Like I said, the
Jeep holds the road.”
“So you wanted to see how good it was in the snow?”
“If you’re asking whether I was pushing to see how fast I could go before spinning out, I wasn’t. Come on, Bonner. You looked at tire tracks back there. Did it look like I was weaving coming up the hill?”
“Nope.”
“As soon as the truck hit, I was gone. It was like being at the wrong end of a bulldozer, pushed sideways into the wall.”
“When did you first see the truck?”
Tom took a deep breath and swallowed it fast when he felt pain. Bruised ribs, he guessed, plus cuts on his hands from fleeing the Jeep, plus God only knew what up and down his left side, where the truck had hit him hard. But all that was nothing compared to what had happened to Bree.
“Gates?”
Squeezing his eyes shut, he struggled to re-create those lost seconds. Finally, he sighed and looked up. “All I remember is the headlights closing in.”
“What kind of truck was it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Color?”
Again he tried to recall. “It wasn’t a big truck. More likely a pickup. Color? Black, maybe? Hell, I couldn’t see much in the glare of the lights. Take a look at my Jeep, though. It’ll have paint in the scrapes.”
“I looked. The truck was maroon.”
“What about the tires?”
“Consistent with a pickup, but bald. When did you first see Bree?”
“I didn’t see her. Not directly. I was aware of passing a dark shape just before the truck came around the corner, but it didn’t register as anything more than a shadow, maybe a lamppost. I didn’t know it was a person until I heard the thud. Felt the thud.” He felt it again, and again, and again. He doubted he would live long enough to forget it. It raised the hair on the back of his neck. “How much longer till we’re there?”
“Not long. So you don’t have any idea who was driving the truck?”
Tom expelled a frustrated breath. “If I knew, don’t you think I’d say?”
“Beats me. I don’t know you much.”
“Trust me. I’d say.”
Three Wishes Page 3