Accidental Eyewitness

by Michelle Karl

  “Has your doctor talked to you about it? Have you told anyone about these moments when the memories come back to you?”

  She swallowed, her throat moving delicately. She took a long pause before responding, and when she did, her voice was quiet. “No.”

  “These things you’re describing, these flashes of memory that come to you—triggered by a sound or a smell or a specific visual cue—it’s a classic example of PTSD.”

  “But I’m not a soldier or a foreign aid worker.” She laughed bitterly. “I’m just a woman who cleans houses for rich people.”

  He shook his head and took her hands again. “You’re not ‘just’ anything, Ellen. And it’s not only soldiers who have PTSD. Anyone who has experienced severe trauma of any kind can develop it, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. There’s treatment and support, and there are tried-and-true coping mechanisms that can help so that you don’t go through life wondering when the next attack is going to hit.”

  He thought back to the time they’d spent together these past couple of days. There’d been moments when she’d seemed to space out, to go someplace else in her mind—and other times when she’d almost mechanically pushed forward, robotic and cold. “Have you had these moments during our time together? Like when you needed to be alone in the diner washroom?”

  She nodded, but didn’t speak. Her shoulders began to creep toward her ears, full of tension.

  He squeezed her hands. “It’s all right. We’re going to get through this and get you the help you need to get better, or at least learn how to cope in a way that has a lesser effect on your quality of life.” A suggestion sprang to mind but he tried to shove it aside, certain that she’d be upset with him for bringing it up. “I know you probably don’t want to hear about solutions right now, not when there’s something bigger to worry about, but trust me when I say that it will make a difference. If you try to go back to work after this—especially to the Fosters’ to clean—I’m worried that you’ll be triggered when no one is around to help bring you back down.”

  Her next inhale was shaky and uncertain. “I’m going to end up like my mother, aren’t I?” It wasn’t a question but a statement. As if she’d thought a lot about it.

  “What? Of course not. What makes you say that?”

  She met his gaze. “I can’t handle reality. You want to put me on pills. I can see where this is going.”

  “You’re not your mother. You control your life. You make the decisions, medical or otherwise, and you have a brother who’s looking out for you. He’d love to help you in any way he can, I’m sure of it.”

  Her face fell at the mention of Jamie, and the tears began to flow a second time. “Leo...will you... I can’t believe I’m saying this. But will you pray for me?”

  Guilt sliced through Leo’s insides. He’d felt the urge to pray for her but had been afraid she’d get angry at him—but when God had a plan, He made it happen regardless of human fallacy. Forgive me, Lord. “Of course I will.”

  “And will you—” she inhaled through her tears, the wetness causing her to cough “—ask why He abandoned us?”

  Leo felt taken aback. “Abandoned you? God hasn’t abandoned you, Ellen.”

  “Yes, He has. He took my dad away. I begged Him not to take away my mom and it happened, anyway. I asked God every single day to help my mom get better, but she only got worse. God doesn’t care. I went to church from a baby until eighteen, as faithful as anyone, but it wasn’t enough. He lets terrible things happen to good people, and then He throws them away like garbage. I didn’t matter enough, and my family didn’t matter enough. My mom didn’t matter enough.”

  “Ellen, bad things happen to good people because we live in a broken world. Look around. All you have to do is read the news on any given morning to see how messed up things are, but it’s not that God doesn’t care. It’s that He gave humanity free will, and that means the choice to turn the world into a trash fire as much as it does to do good. On a more personal level, we don’t always know why bad things happen. It’s hard to understand, especially in the depths of pain. But I do believe that God can use bad things for good. He can make beauty out of tragedy, though we can’t always see, understand or be ready to accept that when we’re in the midst of the situation.”

  She sniffed. “I feel like I’ve been in the midst of the situation for a solid fifteen years. Almost twenty, if you count losing my father.”

  Leo shifted closer to her. “I’ll pray for you now, if you like.” She nodded and closed her eyes, and Leo followed suit. He offered up a brief but sincere prayer that touched on her concerns, but also asked for safety and protection in their current crisis. He opened his eyes after speaking “amen” to find Ellen’s tears pouring down her face again. He held up the box of tissues, but it was empty. “Uh-oh. All out. Should I grab a towel from the bathroom?”

  Ellen nodded, but didn’t speak—and that was when he noticed the pace of her breathing had sped up and her eyes had gone slightly unfocused. Sweat broke out along her forehead.

  “Ellen?”

  She didn’t respond and instead hunched over like she’d lost control of her core muscles.

  Leo could have kicked himself. In the process of speaking about PTSD triggers, they’d gone ahead and triggered an attack—he should have known better.

  He scooped her up without another moment’s hesitation and carried her into the washroom, then set her down on the wide lip of the bathtub. He pulled down a towel, mopped the sweat off her brow and then poured cold water over a washcloth. He wrung it out and pressed it against her forehead. She swayed where she sat, and he thought back to his RCMP crisis training. Firm pressure on the body, much like a thunder shirt for anxious dogs, worked on humans, too, to bring down the cortisol levels and stop the adrenal glands from releasing constant waves of stress hormones.

  He sat beside her and pulled her into his arms. His right arm reached around her back to keep the cold compress on her forehead.

  When her breathing sped up, he held her tighter. When she began to tilt sideways, he raised her head. And when she finally came back to him with a new wave of tears, he pressed his cheek against her in gratitude for God’s mercy, his own unbidden flood mixing with hers.

  Finally, she released a shaky, shuddering breath, and turned her head to look at him.

  He searched her face, seeking a sign of another attack, hoping that whatever he said next would be healing and not harmful. He should have known better than to engage her in talk about the past while they were still dealing with the danger of the present. He should have realized that what she needed from him was friendship and nothing more. He should have—

  “Leo?” She spoke in a hushed whisper, lips parting.

  He found that he could barely speak. “Yes?”

  “This might be the wrong time for this, but...I don’t know what’s going to happen next. I don’t know if we’ll make it out of this situation alive. There were too many close calls today.”

  His insides tightened at the sadness in her voice. “If I had my way, I’d take every single bullet for you. I’d rewind time so that I passed by the Fosters’ place five minutes earlier instead of dawdling along the road. And then I’d go back even farther to when we were younger, and...” He stopped himself before he said something he’d regret.

  Her brow furrowed. “And what?”

  “And...I’d be there for you sooner.”

  She frowned and leaned away from him, hands pressed against his chest. “Is that really what you were going to say?”

  How did she read him so well? “Would you believe me if I said yes?”

  “Not at all.”

  He sighed. “I can’t. It’s a discussion that needs to wait until later, okay? It can wait. And what did you mean, ‘it might be the wrong time for this’? Time for what?”

  The corner of her mouth turned up in a h
alf smile. “Time for what I suspect you’re stopping yourself from saying, and for what I’m going to say without speaking.”

  Well, that made no sense. Maybe he needed to get her medical help even sooner. “Ellen—”

  She placed one finger over his lips. “Shh. I’m trying to tell you something.”

  And then, silently, she removed her finger and pressed her mouth against his for an entire conversation without words.

  * * *

  Where she’d found the gumption to simply stop talking and kiss him, she had no idea. But she was both glad and relieved that she had. His arms tightened around her again, sliding up her back, but this time it had nothing to do with comforting her and everything to do with this moment of connection. Still, the distance between them seemed too great, and based on the way he responded in kind, she knew he felt the same way.

  This was no sisterly peck on the forehead, no side-arm hug of friendship. These were years of unrequited affection combined with the rush of the past few days. Two hearts, united in mutual respect and attraction, had finally come together in a sweet moment that took her breath away—but in a welcome manner, nothing like the drowning sensation she’d felt earlier that night when reality had come crashing across her shoulders like a steel beam.

  Finally, and all too soon, Leo pulled away. She saw joy and contentment and love reflected back at her, and she hoped he read the same thing on her face. But as he gazed into her eyes and they began to breathe easier, doubt slipped into his expression to replace the contentment. Worry gnawed at her insides.

  “Ellen, you have no idea how long I’ve wanted to do that.” His voice was soft, his words spoken with care. “But I promised your brother a long time ago that I wouldn’t pursue you. He, uh...”

  She knew where he was going with this—where Jamie had gone with it—and she didn’t like it one bit. “He thinks I have too much of my mother in me. Thinks that being with someone in the RCMP, with the risk that they could lose their life at any time, is too great. That I’d be shattered if it ever happened.” She kept her tone flat and matter-of-fact, trying not to betray the crushing disappointment that the joy of the moment had been stolen. When Leo looked away, she knew she’d spoken correctly. “We had this conversation not twenty minutes ago, didn’t we? And you said yourself that Jamie was wrong. And if you made this promise a long time ago, that was before I am who I am today. I’ve grown up an awful lot since being eighteen years old. As have you. As has my brother.”

  Leo nodded but still seemed hesitant. She understood his reluctance, though she didn’t have to like it. He respected her, but he respected his friend, too. And while she felt certain he’d agree that no one could tell her what to do with her life besides herself, she also recognized that Jamie’s overbearing request came from a place of love and concern.

  “Leo, if you don’t want this, I’ll understand. Just say the word. But if my brother is the one getting in the way...”

  He leaned in and kissed her on the nose, melting the small wall she’d begun to build since he’d brought someone else into the room with them, so to speak.

  “I do want this,” he finally said. “And I want to talk more about it in daylight, not alone in a motel bathroom after an exhausting day. I’d also appreciate the chance to speak to Jamie personally before we take this any further. Uh, whatever ‘this’ is.”

  “I can respect that. And I agree that it’s probably the courteous move to let him know privately that there’s something going on.”

  “Something that we’ll talk about in the morning once we’ve rested up and cleared our heads a bit.” His eyes widened as she frowned at him. “I don’t mean cleared our heads about each other! I have a feeling that what just happened was a long time coming for both of us. I’m referring to clearing our heads about who could be orchestrating the thefts and why. If it’s someone on the inside, there’s got to be a solid reason why, and if the guy who got arrested or Hogan hasn’t talked by the time the morning rolls around, we’ll need to start strategizing how we’re going to manage until the situation is resolved.”

  She couldn’t help the smile that spread across her face. Even with everything that had happened, even with the trauma of her distant and recent past replaying over and over in her mind tonight, she at least had this one beautiful thing to cling to. Plus, they were safe for the time being. No one knew where they were, and she felt ready to get some rest, certain her body would finally allow her to sleep.

  She heard a rumble outside, coming closer to the motel. It sounded like one of those big-rig trucks, probably a long-haul driver checking in for a few hours of shut-eye before his next eighteen-hour stint at the wheel.

  “I agree,” she said, returning his kiss on the nose. “Both about this being a long time coming and what we’ll need to do tomorrow. Guess I’d better head back to my room and try to sleep again, in case—”

  The rumbling drowned out her next words, and a fraction of a second later, the hotel room imploded.

  FOURTEEN

  Ellen screamed as the entire building shook. Leo dove to the floor, covering her with his body, but as quickly as it happened, the shaking stopped. She blinked as Leo sat up—and a second later, a chunk of ceiling collapsed into the tub, exposing the bathroom to the night sky. The walls around them remained standing, but her stomach churned with the anticipation of what she’d see when she looked out the bathroom door.

  From where they sat on the floor, the motel room looked mostly intact. But when Ellen rose to her feet to stumble to the doorway, she gasped and nearly fell over again.

  The cab of a semitruck sat hissing and rumbling inside the motel room. It had barreled directly into her room first, then Leo’s room, and plunged halfway through the next before its momentum stalled from all the impacts—though the engine still appeared to be running.

  Through the smoke and debris, she could make out several horrifying details. The motel bed was gone, either swept away or demolished by the truck, along with the side walls and most of the front wall.

  She swallowed down a wave of sickness that crept up the back of her throat at a stark realization. Every pair of family-style rooms in the motel mirrored each other—so the rooms could share the pipes in the bathroom, saving money on plumbing for the motel—which meant that, based on the truck’s trajectory, her bed had been the first thing destroyed when the truck smashed into the space where she was supposed to be sleeping.

  Reality sank in.

  “I was supposed to be in bed. Asleep. You would have been asleep in here.” She whirled around. Leo’s mouth hung open. He seemed just as shocked as she was—maybe more so. She’d never seen him at such a loss before. He looked utterly defeated. “Someone just tried to kill us by driving a semitruck into the motel. But no one is supposed to know we’re here.”

  She inhaled deeply, a preemptive measure to stave off any panic or darkness that might encroach, but the dust of the demolished walls still filled the air and made her cough.

  As she coughed, she thought she heard a new sound. A rustling, like soft steps from someone trying very hard not to be heard.

  She froze and whispered, “What was that? Please tell me it’s not what I think it is.”

  Leo bowed his head and closed his eyes for a moment before responding. “I thought I heard footsteps. I hope I’m wrong. But get ready.”

  “Ready? For what?” But he held his finger to his lips and tapped his ear.

  The truck engine died. Someone was definitely shuffling around out there. Possibly several people.

  “They’re checking,” he mouthed silently. “To make sure we’re dead.”

  Terror sliced through Ellen’s heart. She pointed at the hole in the ceiling. Could they climb up and escape across the remaining section of roof before someone found them? Leo followed her gaze, then nodded and pointed at the toilet and the sink. She understood. It was going
to be tricky to climb up without being seen or heard, and they’d have to move quickly, but they had the advantage of being in the back of the motel unit and mostly sheltered by the walls of the bathroom.

  God is looking out for us. The thought came swiftly and unexpectedly. But how else could she explain the fact that they’d both been sitting in the bathroom at the back of Leo’s motel room, arguably the most sheltered and secure part of the two-room structure, instead of asleep in their beds? She had to assume that the outer wall of her motel room, which opened onto the side of the parking lot, had been destroyed—so if they’d been in her bathroom to have their conversation instead of Leo’s, the people coming to check to make sure the truck had done its dirty work would have been able to look directly into the bathroom and see that they were still alive. Instead, they were facing away from any exterior wall, giving them a chance to escape.

  She climbed onto the closed toilet lid, then onto the sink. Reaching up, she was able to curl her fingers around the edge of the sheared-off ceiling. The rough construction of the wall dug into her skin, but she concentrated on hoisting herself up and onto the flat section of roof that remained over the bathroom. Smoke rose from the truck’s cab, obscuring the view toward the road. As Leo copied her movements and joined her on the roof, she thought she saw shadows moving around below.

  “Now what?” she whispered. “Do we drop to the ground at the back of the building and make a run for it?”

  Leo inched himself to the edge of the roof and looked down. “That’s going to be our best play. We should try to get to the tree line and pick our way back to town—though I’m not entirely sure which direction that is. I’m not super familiar with where this motel is located. You?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve never been here before, only driven past it a few times. I don’t usually take this road when getting around.”

  He grimaced. “So we’ll need to get to the main road first, figure out which direction we’re heading, and then use the tree line for cover to get to—Get down!”