At 3:14 PM on the rainy Saturday afternoon of the fundraising bike ride, at the junction of Farm to Market 1924 and State Highway 116, Becca’s bike was hit by a panel van delivering packages tied up in brown paper from all over the country. Becca died at the scene. Her small but energetic body no match for the truck’s steel and the inertia of undelivered packages. It was an accident in the truest sense of the word. The driver hadn’t been drinking, he hadn’t been speeding, he had a long record as a safe deliveryman — he just hadn’t seen the little bicyclist pumping hard for her friend. He had kids of his own and had to be restrained by onlookers as he tried to lift the large truck off the small child all by himself — his life forever changed.
Betsy arrived at the hospital only to identify a small, crushed little girl now hidden under a single white sheet. Betsy’s world had ended.
Two weeks later, the news of Alison Montgomery’s crimes and evil life had become the main story on the evening news. Betsy came to know that her daughter had died in vain. At the time of her daughter’s death, a cure was already known though suppressed by the murder of Montgomery’s lead researcher, a man named Dr. Briggs, a doctor Montgomery had murdered for money. The same doctor who had seen Connie in New York. Montgomery hadn’t needed Becca’s help. Becca’s death, all the more senseless. Montgomery was an evil person, whose greed had killed her daughter.
Betsy quit her job keeping books for the grain silo company in town. Her boss, old Mr. Kincaid, told her to come back after she had some time to think. She would always have a place at Wilkerson Silo and Grain. Betsy knew she was leaving for good, that soon others would not let her come back.
She had done her homework. She had studied the Montgomery trials and followed the news of her incarceration. Betsy applied to work at the same correctional facility on the plains of Nebraska over a thousand miles from the home she had kept with pride. Betsy had no experience in law enforcement, so the only position that she could apply for was in the infirmary as a very-part-time orderly and most-of-the-time cleaning woman. She had been on the job for the last three weeks and had unpacked only one of the two suitcases in the second-floor room that she rented by the week.
Betsy worked the 4 PM till 1 AM shift. The full-time nurse worked only days, and the doctor visited only on Mondays and Thursdays. Betsy was mostly alone and filled her evenings remembering her daughter while sharpening a piece of metal strap that she had pried off of a bunk in the small medical ward. She couldn’t take home the steel strap that was soon to be a blade, as the metal detectors would find it. For a first-time prison shank maker, she had done a very credible job, scraping the metal back and forth over the rough concrete floor forming a two-inch long blade with a sharp point. She had finished the knife earlier today. Tonight she would put it to work. Sitting up behind the admitting desk, she watched down the corridor. Her patience was soon rewarded. Just as she had almost every evening since Betsy had arrived, Alison Montgomery, her face devoid of emotion, walked past her to the showers. Montgomery never noticed or acknowledged her. It was if Betsy was just another inmate, her office just another cell locking in just another tormented soul. Betsy would have agreed with the description.
Betsy stepped out in the corridor and with a smile on her face, the first in months, quietly followed Alison Montgomery. The shank was hidden in her shirt. The cool metal against her skin a comfort to a mother whose heart had been needlessly broken. Broken by one who almost was the death of a cure.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
For more than twenty-five years Steve Jackson has worked as a management and technology consultant assisting organizations of all sizes with the evaluation and assimilation of new technology and the outsourcing of non-core competencies. As an internationally recognized expert in several areas of high technology and their marketplaces, Mr. Jackson has provided business leaders with the insight necessary to acquire and integrate complementary technology and its supporting organization. He has also assisted Fortune 100 companies in the analysis of emerging technologies helping them to make strategic decisions.
He continues to advise industry in both a consulting capacity and as an authority on strategic growth through acquisition, divestiture, and outsourcing both domestically and abroad.
Mr. Jackson lives with his wife in Florida, where he is currently working on his next Thomas Briggs novel.
Visit his website at http://www.stevenhjackson.com
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