“She’s probably just found some uniquely Emily way to deal with this situation, I’m sure she’s fine. But I think you ought to call the police.”
“If you think she’s fine, why should I call the police?” Brian said, the worry evident in every syllable he spoke.
“People don’t get two flat tires at once just by accident.”
That remark prompted both men to get a close look at the two tires on the front end of Emily’s car, the end that was closest to the wall of the garage. Their examination showed neat one inch cuts in the tires, obviously not caused by tacks or glass in the road.
Fear is only a short leap away from worry, and even a man who limps can make the jump easily with the right provocation. Brian went back into the library and dialed 911. Explaining the situation to the dispatcher, he realized that unless a person knew Emily, he would not realize that this was a genuine emergency. She was at this point two hours late for a dinner engagement, and someone had vandalized her car, but those two things only added up to crisis if you figured in the personality. You had to know that Emily was shy, easily frightened, and inexperienced in handling things like flat tires. You had to know what a fragile person she was.
The policeman who came twenty long minutes later seemed unimpressed by the seriousness of the situation. He asked the routine questions about the name and address of the vehicle owner, name and address of the person reporting the incident. It was plain to Brian that the policeman was investigating a case of vandalism, not a missing person.
“It’s not the car that I’m worried about, officer, it’s Miss Stone.”
“Sir, we don’t usually investigate missing persons until they’ve been missing for twenty-four hours. Let me talk to my supervisor and see.” He returned to his squad car and spoke into his radio microphone. He then returned to the two men. “He says he’s coming down himself,” his tone indicating that there was just no telling what might come into the head of a superior officer to do.
The second police car was unmarked, and the officer was in plain clothes. The uniformed officer reported, “The missing lady,” and he consulted his notes, “Miss Emily Stone, left the library where she is employed at five o’clock. She was scheduled to meet these gentlemen, Dr. McClellan and Dr. Lawrence, for dinner at six thirty but she didn’t show. They came looking for her, and found her car with two tires flat, apparently slashed. She doesn’t answer a page in the building.”
The senior officer introduced himself as Detective Hoffstedter. His appearance suggested a sort of abruptness, and from his bearing you expected him to be taller than his five feet six. He was heavy set and squarely built. He had small piercing eyes that seemed to penetrate right through people. He opened a small notebook and began asking questions.
“What does Miss Stone look like?”
Brian answered, “She’s five feet four, has blue eyes, shoulder length brown hair. I guess she weighs about a hundred and twenty pounds.”
“What was she wearing today?”
“I don’t know, I haven’t seen her today.”
At this point, Hoffstdter sent the uniformed patrolman into the building with orders to look for anybody who saw Miss Stone today. He was also told to check her office for anything that looked unusual.
“I assume, Dr. McClellan, that you’ve already been to her home?”
“Yes, she’s not there, her mail was still on the floor. She’s not the kind of person to miss an appointment without a good reason. She’s very responsible. When she came out here and found two flat tires, the first thing she would have done if she could have would have been to call me. I think something has happened to her.” Brian was more scared now, having said it aloud.
The detective seemed to be digesting everything Brian said. He finally spoke. “When was the last time you saw her?”
“Last night at my house.”
“Was she in good spirits, did she seem upset about anything?”
“She was fine. We’re getting married in a week and a half, and she...” At this point the tension of an already long evening caught up with him and his voice got shaky. He took a deep breath and said simply, “She was fine.”
“Do you have a picture of her?”
Brian pulled out his wallet and took out the small photograph, the only one he knew to be in existence of the camera shy librarian.
The uniformed officer returned and made his report, “Several people saw her leave at five o’clock, and she hasn’t been seen since. They had a wedding shower for her today, and she was carrying two bags of gifts when she left. There are no signs of anything unusual in her office.”
At this the detective addressed himself to Brian, “Doctor, I’m going to have the men from the lab go over the car. I’ll put out a description of Miss Stone with all the patrol units, I’ll have the cab companies contacted. I sincerely hope it’s all a waste of time and she turns up, but in the meantime, I’m looking at this as a possible crime scene. I recommend you go home and let us know if you hear from her. I’ll keep in touch.”
Paul and Brian spoke very little on the way to Brian’s house. There seemed nothing to say. It was after nine when they pulled up to the dark house. Paul let Brian out and then said, “I’m going to my place and see if she made it there. I’ll be back.”
And so the wait began. He tried to convince himself that any minute she would call with some wild tale that only Emily could come up with for what had happened. Recalling her absence of the summer before, he went out onto the front porch and looked all around for a note that she might have taped to the door which had been blown off. But he knew that this was different. Emily would know how much he would worry and would call if she could. “One of the dearest things about her is her consideration of other people’s feelings. She would remember how her note had been lost the last time, and she wouldn’t take the chance. She would call.” This thought kept coming back to him.
He recalled the detective’s questions about Emily’s state of mind. She really had seemed cheerful, but what if the reality of the upcoming marriage hadn’t really sunk in to her yet? What if she had cold feet? What if she had changed her mind and was too scared to face him? Might she have just run away rather than deal with it? There was a time, he knew, when she might have, but not now.
Paul returned and reported that he had swung by Emily’s place again and that there had been a police car there. He went to make a pot of coffee. As they sat at the kitchen table drinking it, Brian asked, “Have you gotten any sense from Emily that she was having second thoughts about getting married?”
Paul shook his head vehemently. “Absolutely not. For a while there she seemed a little overwhelmed by the process, but she seemed really eager about the prospect.” After a pause, he continued, “She wouldn’t run off and not tell you. If she had a problem, she would come to you.”
“So you think something’s happened to her?”
Paul realized that by trying to be reassuring in one area, he had made the situation worse. The truth was that he could imagine no way that Emily would refrain from getting in touch with Brian if she could. All he said was, “I don’t know.”
It was a long, cruel time of waiting. They drank coffee, spoke in low tones when they spoke at all, and let the passing minutes age them. At one o’clock in the morning, the phone rang and Brian jumped to answer it. It was Detective Hoffstedter. He recounted the various standard procedures which had been implemented with no positive results. There were no signs of foul play at her apartment or in the car. The trunk had contained only the gifts which she had presumably been given at the wedding shower. She was not in any of the local hospitals. None of the cab companies had picked up a fare at the library any time after four that afternoon. The investigation would continue.
For about another hour they waited, and then Paul said, “You really ought to try and get some sleep, Brian. They’ll call you if they know anything. You want me to stay?”
“No, thanks, I’ll call you in the morn
ing.” His voice sounded exhausted.
When he was alone with his fear, Brian sought solace in prayer. He was unsure of what to say. He thought, “God knows how I feel, He knows what I want. What can I ask but that she be found safe?” His prayer was very simply a reflection of the fear within. He wanted her back, and that was all he could pray. He spent the rest of the long night trying desperately to focus his mind on that one prayer, God bring her back, and found little comfort in it.
Daylight brought no respite. He called the police station, but found there was nothing new to report. He called Emily’s number to find her answering machine had been turned off and there was no answer. He assumed correctly that this had been done by the police. He called the hospital to say he would not be in. He was dozing on the couch when the doorbell rang.
Detective Hoffstedter was apologetic. “I’m sorry to bother you so early, but I figured you’d be up. I just have a few questions I need to ask.”
As Brian invited him in he offered to make a fresh pot of coffee, but the detective declined. They sat down together in the great room.
“How long have you known Miss Stone, Dr. McClellan?”
“About sixteen months.”
“Have you ever known her to take off like this and not tell anyone where she was going?”
Brian explained about Emily’s trip to Raleigh the previous summer and about the lost note. He added, “She would never do that again, she would call if she were going somewhere.”
“Does she have any friends that you know of that she might have gone to see?”
“No. Emily is a very shy person, she hasn’t got very many friends. The ladies at the library are her only friends that I know of beyond Paul and me.” Somehow, that sounded odd, as if he was painting her as anti-social in some way. He wasn’t sure he had put it very well.
“Does Miss Stone drink anything more than socially?”
Brian almost smiled. “Miss Stone doesn’t drink at all. She’s very conservative.”
“You said last night that Miss Stone’s family all live out of town. Do you know where any of her relatives live?”
“She has two brothers and two sisters, and I think they all live in Raleigh. She doesn’t have much contact with them.”
With that remark, Brian remembered the phone calls from Bob Stone. He told the detective about them, being careful to make clear that Emily had not seemed to be overly concerned about the threat that her brother had made. “I understand he drinks heavily,” he added.
The policeman looked thoughtful and made a note in his notebook. “We’ll look into it. Did she ever mention anybody following her or bothering her in any way?”
“No, she didn’t, and I think if there had been anything like that she would have said something.”
“Do you know of any old boy friends who might live in the city?”
“In all honesty, I don’t think Emily dated anyone other than me. I think she went out some in college, but not much since then.”
“Does Miss Stone wear any jewelry?”
“She wears an engagement ring,” and Brian described the diamond and the setting, adding, “It’s engraved with her first name.” He added that he had recently had the ring appraised for insurance purposes and that the appraiser could probably give a very detailed description of it.
“Well, Doctor, I’ve got men assigned to the library, they’ll start asking questions first thing when it opens. The description and photograph are being circulated, and we’re doing everything we can to find her.”
After the detective left, Brian found it impossible to sit still. He paced around the house, mindlessly tidying things, re-arranging things, and killing time. He thought perhaps he should eat something, but the idea made him sick. He tried to read, but the words made no sense. There was nothing he could do to take his mind away from the horrible speculations. Every minute that passed seemed to add to the likelihood that she was hurt or dead. And worst of all for Brian were his attempts to pray. For the first time in his experience since becoming re-born, he had the sense when he prayed that no one was listening. Despite Emily’s philosophy, despite her prized assurance, Brian felt that he was very much alone.
Paul stopped in at noon. It was apparent from his face that he hadn’t done much more sleeping than Brian had. He had tried to get some work done at the hospital, but it was a chore to drag himself around, being professionally calm and even-tempered. He told Brian, “I spent the morning fighting back the impulse to yell at people.” He had to go back in the afternoon for a brief time to attend to some critical things, and then he promised to be back. Brian was instructed to let him know the minute he heard anything.
As the afternoon wore on, time became at once Brian’s best friend and his bitterest enemy. Every minute that the phone didn’t ring was one more minute that he could assume that she was still alive; but every minute that passed without hearing anything was one more that she could be somewhere suffering. He had just fallen into a fitful sleep when the phone rang.
“Dr. McClellan? This is Detective Hoffstedter.”
“Yes?” Brian could hear a different tone in the policeman’s voice, an officiousness that spoke of someone with something definitive to say.
“At two thirty this afternoon a sheriff’s deputy found an injured woman matching Miss Stone’s description in a wooded area outside the city. She was unconscious, and there was no identification. He sent for an ambulance, and the woman was taken to the county hospital. I’m there now, and I have tentatively identified the woman as Emily Stone based on the photograph you gave me. She’s alive, but still unconscious. I don’t know anything else about her condition. She’s with the doctors now.”
Brian was breathing hard, trying to stay calm and rational. He spoke quickly, “I’m on my way.”
The emergency room admitting desk is one of the most difficult areas of the hospital for employees. They deal with people who are generally at their worst. They see more than their fair share of erratic behavior from the drug addicts who are high on chemicals to the frantic parents of injured children. Gang members come in to check on the condition of their colleagues who have been in gun fights. The nurse who addressed herself to answer Brian’s inquiry was impressed by his calmness.
“I understand you have an unidentified female patient brought in by the sheriff’s department. I’d like to see her.”
“Are you a relative, sir?” she asked rather inanely.
Through clenched teeth, Brian answered, “That’s what I’m trying to find out. The police told me to...”
At this point Detective Hoffstedter approached him from down a corridor. “This way, Dr. McClellan.”
There was a doctor waiting in a corridor. The detective introduced the two men. The attending physician, Dr. Michaels, spoke very carefully. “You realize, Doctor, that this woman may not be Miss Stone. We need to get her to x-ray, so we can only give you a minute.” With that, he escorted Brian into the room.
She lay on a gurney covered by a sheet that matched the whiteness of her face. One of her eyes was blackened and swollen, as if to announce in a stereotypical way that this was a victim of violence. It didn’t seem real, he thought, as he stood over her, that she should look like this, so broken, so abused. As tears clouded his eyes, he wondered how anyone could hit a face so sweet. She was not on oxygen, which Brian found encouraging. He was looking for things to find encouraging, and there wasn’t much. She seemed so small, so frail. They rolled the gurney away and he went back into the corridor.
“That’s Emily,” he told the two men standing there. The detective immediately went to make phone calls, and Doctor Michaels invited Brian to come to his office down the hall. When the two men were alone and seated, he spoke, choosing his words carefully, recognizing that while this was a fellow physician, it was also a man whose fiancé was in pretty bad shape. “We feel fairly certain there’s a skull fracture and multiple fractures of the left arm. There’s evidence of some internal injuries, we�
��ll be doing tests. Almost certainly some ribs are broken. When we get the pictures, we’ll know more.”
Brian’s work in pathology had included many patients with similar injuries, and he knew the questions that needed to be asked. “Any puncture wounds, any lacerations?” Seeing the other man’s head shake, he spoke again. The words of Brian’s statement seemed calm and reasoned, his only gesture was a thoughtful rubbing of his temple, but the voice itself gave away the tremendous emotions that were being held in check only with strong effort. “You’re telling me that somebody beat her repeatedly with a club or something of that nature.”
“That would be my considered opinion.”
Brian’s breathing was audibly uneven. His voice, when it came, was so low, the other man could hardly hear it. “Was she raped?”
“We’ve done the standard kit, but we don’t have the results yet.”
Brian looked at the fellow physician with a piercing stare, “I’m sure you can answer my question. This is the woman I’m going to marry. Are there signs of sexual assault?”
“Yes.”
There was nothing more to be said for the moment. Dr. Michaels went to attend to a patient, promising Brian that he would report back as soon as he had more information. Brian spent a few minutes waiting for the room to stop spinning, waiting for his breath to come back , waiting to wake up from a nightmare that had gone on for more than long enough already. Then he went into the corridor where he found the detective waiting for him.
Hoffstedter spoke as carefully as Dr. Michaels had. “Now that we have an idea of what happened, we have to find the person responsible. I’m going to assign someone here so that when Miss Stone is able to, she can tell us what she knows. In the meantime, our investigation will continue at the crime scene. We’ll be circulating a description of Miss Stone’s ring to all the pawn shops, so if anyone tries to sell it, we’ll have him.”
“Tell me how she was found.” It was information Brian didn’t want to ask for, but had to know.
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