carefully everywhere descending

by L. B. Bedford

  My dad starts toward him with a curse, and he visibly flinches back.

  “Hey. Hey!” shouts the officer near them. “Don’t move! Sir! Do not move!”

  Two more cops appear on the scene, and Scarlett’s asking about an ambulance again, and one of the new officers says, “Oh my God, Senator Grant!” and all the attention zooms to the senator, whose eyes start darting around madly.

  “Holy—” says another officer.

  I suddenly realize I’m rather splayed out on the floor in the midst of all of this in my too-tight skirt and curl into Scarlett in embarrassment, tucking my legs under me. I feel overwhelmed tears pricking my eyes in humiliation. She tightens her grip on me.

  “It’s okay,” she says. “I’ve got you.”

  “Here,” says an officer, handing us a blanket covered in dog hair, probably from the back of a police car.

  Scarlett takes it with one hand, barely moving away from me. “Thank you.” She arranges it around my legs and over my shoulders as best she can without pulling us apart. I jerk when she accidentally brushes the bite mark.

  The police officers have separated my dad and the senator, patted them down, and are trying to talk to them both, but both seem more intent on arguing with each other about the way things played out than responding to the police. Another officer has fanned out and is searching this room and the adjoining one Grant tried to drag me to. My thoughts are a little hazy. There was something I need to do; something I need to tell the police… I spot it on the floor of the kitchen, just in sight, where I waited to release it from my grip. My mind clears.

  “My phone!” I start to get to my feet. Scarlett helps me up.

  The officers don’t stop me as I practically run to it, the blanket clutched in front of me. I scoop it up and exhale. The call is still connected to 9-1-1. I put it to my ear.

  “Hello?” I ask. “Are you still there?”

  “Yes, miss, we are still here,” says the voice of the infernally calm operator.

  I turn toward the room and hold out the phone. “I called 9-1-1. The whole thing has been recorded on their system.”

  Senator Grant’s face morphs into a heart-stopping rictus of fury.

  “You—” He takes a step toward me, hands reaching for my throat to throttle me again. Scarlett leaps in front of me, keeping one hand wrapped around my wrist; my dad starts for Grant and is restrained by a police officer; several other cops obstruct the path and start shouting at the senator to put his hands down and to stop moving.

  The next few minutes are controlled chaos, with lots of people talking over each other, voices buzzing through walkie-talkies, and the officers putting up tape. They’ve actually got yellow tape out, like you see in movies. I’m mostly aware of Scarlett, glued to my side, and the flashing lights of the cop cars against the walls as a female officer leads us into the kitchen, away from the others. Another officer is also organizing people to restrict access to the house and preserve the crime scene. I can’t believe I was just involved in something that resulted in a crime scene.

  I glance outside before we disappear from view. Every single house on our street has emptied its occupants to gawk at what’s happening. And… a news van? How on earth did they get here so fast?

  The police officer flicks on the overhead light and the tiny kitchen floods in fluorescence. She directs me to sit on one of the small Formica chairs at the wobbly table.

  “Miss, I’m Officer Goldberg. You’re safe now. I’m going to make sure of that,” says the officer with a soothing voice. She ducks down so she’s level with me and can make eye contact. “I know you’ve been through a lot tonight, and I think you’re handling yourself very well. Would you like something to drink?” I shake my head. “Can you tell me your name?”

  “Audrey Anderson.”

  “Audrey, would you like your father here for this?”

  “No, that’s okay.” I imagine he’s busy being belligerent to whatever poor cop has to take his statement.

  “Can you describe for me what happened in just a couple of sentences? We’ll conduct a full interview after you’re taken care of by the medics.” She looks at Scarlett. I quickly wrap my hand around hers to keep her next to me. She responds instantly, tightening her hold in a reassuring squeeze.

  I swallow. I feel like I barely know what happened. “I was coming to bring my neighbor cookies for accidentally breaking his ceramic rooster. I’d been trying to meet him and welcome him to the neighborhood for a while, and I guess he thought I was being nosy. And I guess I was, because I couldn’t shake the feeling something was off about him. When I knocked at the door, he grabbed me and yanked me inside. He wanted to know what it would take to keep me quiet. Like, not talk about who he was, but I didn’t know who he was until later.”

  She nods calmly while I talk. I swallow again, and then again.

  “He grabbed me by the throat, but I managed to get away and lock myself in the laundry room and call 9-1-1…. This is more than a couple of sentences, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” she soothes. “Take your time.”

  “So… I called 9-1-1 from the laundry room”—I point to it with its bashed-in door—“and he broke down the door and grabbed me again. I struggled….”

  All of a sudden, I really don’t want to talk anymore.

  “Can this wait until later?”

  “Sure, Audrey,” Officer Goldberg says. “With your permission, I’d like to take some photographs of your injuries.”

  I nod. She glances at Scarlett again.

  “She can stay,” I say. “They aren’t anywhere… private. Except my shoulder, I guess.”

  “Your shoulder?” she says, pulling out a slim digital camera.

  “He bit me,” I explain. I let the blanket drop and use my free hand to pull aside my green shirt, which dots of blood have soaked through, to show the wound. The shirt catches a little in the indents. Scarlett’s hand tightens almost painfully. I don’t mind it, though; it’s actually nice. Her hand is so warm. Mine feels like ice. “I should probably get a tetanus shot. Can they do that at the ambulance? I don’t want to go to a hospital.”

  “I’ll let you talk to the medics about that, Audrey,” says Officer Goldberg, snapping a few shots of the bite. She asks me to show how he strangled me and takes more photos after I place my hands lightly against my neck to demonstrate. She takes pictures of my cheek and neck, and my hands and fingernails. She asks if the blood under them is mine, and I say I don’t think so; I scratched his arm when he had me by the throat against the door. She tells me not to touch anything and goes to get something to collect the DNA under my nails. A CSI technician scrapes them and bags the evidence, and then swipes the inside of my mouth for a reference DNA sample. She’s very gentle with everything she does, but I don’t like that I have to let go of Scarlett’s hand for a few minutes while it all happens. Her face is still colorless, and I hate seeing her this way.

  After that, Officer Goldberg and a medic walk us to an ambulance so the police can comb through the kitchen. Scarlett positions herself in front of me as a physical barrier to the cameras, multiplied by newly arrived news outfits. They seat me in the back of the ambulance, the open doors providing additional privacy against the flashes of light. The police have also rigged up some bright bulbs around to illuminate the scene. It’s blowing my mind this has exploded into what it has, but I guess that’s what happens with an assault case involving a formerly dead, prostitute-visiting state senator and a teenage girl.

  The medic flashes a light in my eyes while Officer Goldberg scrutinizes Scarlett, but not in a suspicious way.

  “What is your name?”

  “Scarlett West.”

  “You’re obviously close to Audrey, Scarlett. Can you tell me how you came to be here this evening?”

  “Yeah, sure.” She seems glad to contribute. “Audrey and I were going to go for dinner at sixish. I’ve got our text exchange on my phone,” she says on a burst of inspiration. Her f
ree hand starts to go to her back pocket. “Do you need to see them?”

  “Not right now,” she says with a little smile. I get the feeling she likes Scarlett. Most people do immediately. The medic is still taking my vital signs, and I turn to watch him instead of Scarlett and Officer Goldberg. “Please continue.”

  “Okay. Well, she said she was going to run to her neighbor’s, but it wouldn’t take long. I got to her house and she wasn’t there, so I hung out with her brothers. After about ten minutes, I started getting worried. Audrey’s very punctual. I waited five more minutes and then I thought something was wrong.”

  “Really? People can be late.”

  “Yeah, but not Audrey. Plus, she had said she was going to her ‘possibly a serial killer’ neighbor’s so I had in my head from the start that this was not good.”

  “Why did you say that?” she asks me.

  “He was very weird about not coming out or talking to other people. I would try to say hi, and he would run away. It started as a joke between myself and my friend, Amber. I didn’t realize that he was actually….” I trail off. The medic is taking my blood pressure now, and the viselike pressure on my upper arm reminds me of Grant holding me earlier. I break out into a sweat. The medic looks at me in concern.

  “What are you thinking about, Audrey?” Officer Goldberg asks softly. I tell her. “That sounds painful. You’ve been through something very frightening. I’m sorry it happened to you.”

  For some reason it relieves me to hear her say it again. I’m not being crazy; it really was that scary. I swallow a couple of times and squeeze Scarlett’s hand. She folds her other one over top of mine and rubs the back.

  “So, Scarlett, you realized something was wrong, is that right?” Officer Goldberg gently prods her. She’s been taking notes the whole time, I suddenly realize, but she was so attentive I hadn’t noticed.

  “Yeah. So I asked her brother Sam which house she went to and walked over there. When I got to it, everything about it struck me as off. Then I saw all the cookies on the ground and figured something had happened to her. It wasn’t like they had been dropped, but like they’d been scattered. I don’t know how to explain the feeling I got. It was all just wrong.”

  “And then what did you do?”

  Scarlett continues to give her statement, but the medic moves on to my shoulder, and it’s weird, but I can barely pay attention to what’s happening around me anymore. The next thing I’m really aware of is my dad standing in front of me, grilling the medics about my condition.

  I don’t have to go to the hospital (sweet relief). My tetanus shots are up to date, and my clothing protected me enough that I don’t need stitches (even better), though I could do with a shot, if it wasn’t for the going-to-a-hospital thing. (I wouldn’t mind being inoculated against Grant.)

  Their biggest concern is my throat, which they massaged and felt and studied thoroughly. The medic says there are signs of swelling. No joke, I could have told you that. But there doesn’t seem to be internal hemorrhaging or any difficulty breathing, which, again, I could have told them. I may experience difficulty speaking for the next few days and should rest my voice. Seriously, not front page news. They’ve treated the bite for infection and apart from a “few bumps and scrapes and sore muscles,” I’m in relatively good shape.

  This apparently was the wrong thing for the poor medic, who was just doing his job, to say, because my dad swells up and starts laying into him.

  I’m beseeching him to calm down—there’s nothing like a little paternal public humiliation to drag one’s mind back to the present—when a commotion also arises by the crowd of spectators. The sound carries around the door of the ambulance.

  “…please, sir— Sir! Stay back. This is a crime scene.”

  “No kidding! You should really get something that has that in big letters and drape it all over the place. I recommend something in a bright color. Real attention-grabbing.”

  My eyes pop, and I hop down from the ambulance. “Mitchell!”

  I run around the side of the ambulance, and it’s like the sun explodes. Dozens of camera bulbs start flashing immediately with insectlike clicks. I wince and lift my blanketed-arm to cover my face like a vampire.

  I hear Scarlett call my name, and my dad start yelling at the reporters, telling them he’ll sue every single one who posts a picture of his underage daughter, but I quickly dart to the officer—one of the first on the scene—and Mitchell.

  “You can let him in. He’s a friend,” I tell the officer.

  The cop sighs and says, “Stay on the yard, away from the house.”

  I lead Mitchell back to our little enclave by the ambulance, before dropping the blanket and turning to him.

  “I can’t believe you’re here! How did you hear about this?”

  Mitchell is staring at me like he’s seen a ghost, his eyes traveling from my neck to my bandaged shoulder.

  “Are you all right?” he demands. “What am I saying? You’re in bandages. What did he do?”

  “He threw me around some and bit me. How did you hear about this?”

  “Bit…? It’s all over the news. Huge scandal. Philandering politician back from the dead, and something about an incident with a teen girl in this part of town, details still unfolding. Don’t worry, they don’t mention your name or anything,” he assures me at my horrified look. “One early program flashed a picture of you, and I happened to see it. You haven’t been back on since that I know. He bit you? Can I strangle him?”

  “Get in line,” says Scarlett darkly. Mitchell looks over at her.

  “Scarlett, this is Mitchell,” I introduce. “Mitchell, Scarlett. Mitchell, this is my dad. Dad, this is Mitchell. Dad, this is Scarlett. Scarlett, this is my dad. Um… I think I’ve covered everyone.”

  Everyone shakes hands and Dad sizes them both up. This is so surreal, outside in the almost-summer air by an ambulance with police cars and….

  Senator Grant, handcuffed and being walked to a cop car before the throng of reporters. He’s wearing a spare set of glasses over a taped nose. A short man next to him is running two steps for every one Grant and the cop take, talking frantically.

  “I’m telling you, James, we can spin this thing into gold. Are you ready for this? We turn you into a Christ-figure. It’s your comeback story: You died, and were reborn as a new man. A man who is dedicated to improving the lives of Americans. A messiah for the people.”

  Grant is nodding thoughtfully. “Yeah… yeah…. That could work.”

  He abruptly turns his head and finds my eyes across the yard, boring into them while the cop puts a hand on his head to push him into the police car. He doesn’t look away as the car slowly drives away, scattering onlookers. I shudder.

  “It probably will work too,” says Mitchell with a scowl. “Never underestimate the ability of the public to overlook the crimes of the powerful and popular. F—flipping politicians.”

  “You’re kidding,” exclaims Scarlett. “After what he did to Audrey?”

  “They didn’t see her, they didn’t know her, she’ll be nothing but a rumor to them,” he says. “But hey,” he says to me. “Don’t you worry. I know a good lawyer who wouldn’t dream of getting out of bed for anything less than eating that guy alive in court. She’ll take good care of you.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  IT FEELS like the night that never ends. We go back into the house, and I give my statement in full to Officer Goldberg and another officer, explaining in detail what happened while my dad and Mitchell stand behind me and Scarlett keeps her grip on my hand with no signs of tiring, though it must be practically dead from loss of circulation by now. Mine is.

  I hoarsely point out places as I remember them. The door where he half-strangled me. Where he threw me and I stopped sliding and spotted the laundry door, though I didn’t know where it went when I first saw it. Where I ran inside and called for help.

  I stop to examine the door frame and realize just how busted it is
from him breaking it open with his body, the hinges bent and the ancient wood cracked. That might have expended some of his energy and may have contributed to my ability to exhaust him later; though I add quickly that this is speculation and not strictly memory. My voice is rasping more and more as I talk, running slowly out like ink from a drying pen.

  I tell how he grabbed me and carried me back and how I fought, and that’s when he bit me, and how when I screamed and flailed, I dropped my phone and just hoped that it landed face up. What he said that led to the realization of who he was.

  “But you didn’t know before then?” clarifies the other cop.

  “No. I had just thought he was a strange neighbor, and when he grabbed me I thought he really was a serial killer like we had joked.”

  I point to the door where he was starting to drag me when the doorbell rang and stopped him.

  “Do you know where that leads to?”

  “No, I’m not sure.” But in a house this size, there are only so many possibilities, and I’m reluctant to voice the most obvious one.

  I tell how Scarlett came to the door, what she said, what the senator had said to me, and that I realized how my best course would be to stall for time….

  “How do you mean?”

  Well, I had immediately discounted any scenario that had Scarlett entering the house. Not only could she have been hurt, but it would have given the senator a chance to contain the situation. As soon as I understood who he was, I realized his biggest concern would be being found out. If both Scarlett and I were in the house, there was a chance he could subdue us both and talk away the police who were en route. After all, we don’t live in the best area, and domestic disturbance calls tend to happen. It wouldn’t take more than a quick disguise and a quicker excuse—TV noise, address error, whatever—for the call to be dismissed. And since I had no way of knowing that the line to 9-1-1 was uninterrupted, I had to assume it was.

  Therefore I had to get Scarlett, my one sure line to the outside world, out and spreading the word. I had overheard the police complaining the last time they had been called in on the Nelsons that the turn at the intersection by Vapiano’s fooled them, so I had to account for a delay in the police’s arrival. If Scarlett, with her athleticism and sharp eye for cars, could get to my security guard father and get him to the house, or at least make it back to the street, in under five minutes, there was virtually no chance the senator could get me into the car and out of the neighborhood unobserved.