Dawn's Light

by Terri Blackstock

  Now he saw those metal towers with all those unsightly transmission lines and all the machinery inside the fence with the words “Keep Out — High Voltage” on it as miraculous. And the workers milling around inside, with knowledge he didn’t have, seemed like heroes.

  They didn’t return the admiration, however. He felt in their way, even though he paid their salaries.

  As he got back into his car, hope and pride welled up inside him. Hope that it might not take as long as he thought to get the power restored. Pride that he’d had something to do with it.

  He drove back through town, honking at pedestrians and bike riders in his way, wishing they’d get a clue that cars were back on the road. He longed for an air conditioner, but most of these old cars didn’t have them, and even if he’d had one, he didn’t have enough gas to use it. So he kept his windows down, hoping the warm wind would somehow stop the sweat from drenching his dress clothes.

  AS THEY CAME OUT OF THE CONVERSION PLANT, MARK SAW Craig’s car pulling into the recovery team’s parking lot. He hadn’t been there when Deni had taken off, so he probably hadn’t got word yet about Beth’s attack.

  He glanced at Wheaton. “Looks like Craig Martin’s over there. I should go tell him about Beth.”

  Wheaton nodded. “We can take a minute to do that.”

  They pulled up behind Craig as he was getting out of his car. It did Mark’s heart good to see Craig’s dress shirt marked with huge sweat rings.

  Craig got out and shot him a look. “You guys come to apply for a job?” he asked in that smug voice of his. “We pay better than the county does.”

  Mark bristled. “Everybody pays better than the county does.”

  He reached to shake Craig’s hand. His nemesis took it grudgingly.

  “I thought you might not have heard about Beth.”

  Craig reached into his car and got a towel, began blotting his face. “What about her?”

  “She was attacked earlier today. Deni’s with her at the hospital.”

  “Attacked? By whom?”

  “By some guy in a park. We’re trying to find him now. She has a severe head injury. She was in surgery when I left the hospital.”

  The full force of the news finally registered on Craig’s face. “Which hospital?”

  “Crockett Medical Center.”

  “How is Deni?”

  Mark’s jaw popped. Was he giving secrets to the enemy? “She’s pretty upset.”

  “I’ll get right over there. Thanks for telling me.”

  Mark had a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach as he walked back to the van. Craig would be there comforting Deni while Mark was out trying to find the killer. But it couldn’t be helped. Clay Tharpe had to be caught. He just prayed that Craig didn’t make any headway while Deni was especially vulnerable.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  THE SURGERY HAD BEEN GOING ON FOR FOUR HOURS, AND Kay was going to jump out of her skin if she didn’t hear something soon. Two hours ago, Judith had come to tell her that Beth was still alive and stable, but that was all she knew.

  Finally, Kay heard their names called.

  “Branning family? Is there a Branning family in here?”

  “Here we are!” she shouted, and almost tripped over someone’s feet as she tried to get to the door. The family was on her heels.

  “Your daughter’s out of surgery, Mrs. Branning. Dr. Overton would like to see you in the conference room.”

  “Is she still alive?” Kay choked.

  “Yes, she is.”

  “What’s her condition?” Doug asked.

  “Dr. Overton would prefer to explain that to you.”

  Kay covered her mouth and sobbed into her hand. It was bad. If it weren’t, the nurse would have been smiling, and she would have said that everything went well and that Beth would be waking up soon.

  That’s what they’d said when Deni had her tonsils out at age seven and when Jeff had tubes in his ears as a baby.

  Doug put his arm around her. She felt him shaking, and she realized the same thoughts were going through his mind. Deni, Jeff, and Logan were quiet as they followed them down the hallway and back into the conference room where they’d prayed earlier. They filed in and sat around the table, stiff and silent.

  Dr. Overton came in wearing a white coat over his green scrubs. He gave them a halfhearted smile, then closed the door.

  “How is Beth?” Doug demanded before he’d even sat down.

  Dr. Overton sighed as he sat down and opened her chart. “We did all we could to stop the bleeding,” he said. “Her skull has multiple fractures from some sort of blunt-force trauma. From the shape of the posterior part of her skull, I think she was slammed against something.” He looked across the table at Doug. “Do you know what that could have been?”

  The rims of Doug’s eyes reddened. “There was blood on a tree near where we found her.”

  Kay hadn’t even seen it. She’d been so focused on Beth on the ground.

  “Yes, that would be consistent with what we found. The fractures may be serving her well at this point. It’s giving her brain some room to swell, reducing the pressure.”

  “Oh, dear God,” Kay whispered. She’d never believed that a fractured skull would be a blessing. She couldn’t believe it now.

  “She was also strangled. She has bruising and swelling on her neck, which is making it difficult for her to breathe. There was no arterial damage, but her airways were compromised. We have her on a ventilator for now, with a tube that will help keep her airways open.”

  “Strangled!” Though Doug had used the word strangulation earlier, Kay couldn’t get her mind around the cruelty that entailed. She covered her face now and sucked in a sob. “Who would do this to a child?”

  The doctor looked down, and Kay wondered if he’d spent time asking the same questions. After a moment, he went on. “We do have generator power for certain important areas of the hospital, but we’re limited in the things we can plug in. We will use generator-powered electricity for the ventilator, but we can’t use it for other things, like the compression stockings that we would normally put on her to keep blood clots from forming because of inactivity. We will give her some graduated compression socks to help with that, but it would be a good idea to massage her legs and feet when you think about it to keep the blood circulating.”

  Kay could do that. It might be all she could do, but she could do that.

  “Her Glasgow Coma Score was three.”

  “What’s that?” Deni asked.

  “It’s the scale we use to evaluate a patient’s neurological response on a scale of one to ten. Three indicates no response. Unfortunately, she’s still unresponsive.”

  “But she’s going to pull through, right?” Jeff asked.

  The doctor studied the chart a little longer, but Kay had the sense that he was just buying time to frame his answer. “I’m afraid we can’t say that for sure. She’s in critical condition. We tried to stop the bleeding in her brain, but we have no guarantees that we got it all. And without the usual diagnostic and monitoring tools, it’s almost impossible to tell for sure. With injuries like this, we usually put them on IV steroids and antiseizure medications. Unfortunately, we’re having trouble getting those medications. It’s a terrible time to have this kind of injury.”

  Kay frowned. “So . . . what? We just sit here and wait? If she dies, we know you didn’t get all the bleeding, and if she lives, we know you did?”

  “No, it’s not that cut and dried. There are things we’re watching that will indicate whether she’s bleeding. We’ll have her in the surgical ICU for a while, and we’ll be monitoring her to make sure she’s stable. We’ve put a drain in her head, and we anticipate some bleeding. If it becomes excessive, that’ll be a sign that she’s bleeding somewhere else. We’ve also put in a feeding tube.”

  “Is she going to have brain damage?” Doug asked.

  “We’re hoping the damage to her brain was minimal. But she was without oxyge
n for several minutes until Doug started the mouth-to-mouth. That saved her life and may have minimized the brain damage from the strangulation. The blow to the head did cause significant damage, but it’ll be a while before we can measure how much. Even if she recovers fully, it could take up to eighteen months for her to be completely back to normal.”

  “Is there even a possibility that she could wake up and be perfectly normal?” Kay asked.

  “It’s possible, but unlikely. Usually that improvement is gradual.”

  Kay sank back.

  “What are the chances she’ll pull through?” Deni asked.

  The doctor shook his head. “I don’t like to give percentages, because I don’t know. There are a lot of factors that figure in to this kind of thing. As advanced as we are in medical science, we can’t account for miracles of healing. Are you people of faith?”

  “Yes,” Doug said. “We are. We’re Christians.”

  “Good,” Dr. Overton said. “So am I. And you should know that your daughter was bathed in prayer before I ever started operating on her today.”

  Kay felt new tears rushing up to her eyes. “Thank you, Doctor.”

  “I believe that prayer often changes things. But I want you to know that she’s in a very dangerous position, and it could go either way.”

  The words echoed through Kay’s mind as he finished going over the details of Beth’s surgery. Kay’s mind raced. Beth could die. She might never wake up. Her last conscious thought would be one of stark terror — her last sight, the face of her killer.

  Kay had to get to her. She could coax her awake. She knew it. A doctor’s care didn’t hold a candle to a mother’s love.

  She would save her daughter through faith and sheer force of will. And if they tried to bar her from the ICU, she would beat down the doors until they let her stay with her child.

  Finally, Dr. Overton got up to leave. He stopped at the door. As if he’d heard her thoughts, he said, “We’ll allow two of you to stay in ICU with her at a time.”

  “Really?” Being kept from her daughter while she was in the ICU had been one of Kay’s worst fears. “All the time?”

  “With our technology limited and our monitoring equipment so lacking, we find that it helps to have a family member watching over the children. Another set of eyes and hands are helpful. But we ask that you wear a mask and gloves when you come into the ICU, and the scrubs we’ll give you before you enter. We don’t want any unnecessary germs being brought in there, and the precautions will help protect you against any bacteria in there, as well.”

  “Are they sterile paper scrubs?”

  “No,” he said. “We ran out of those a long time ago, and our shipments are few and far between. For now, we just wash the cloth ones with bleach. But as you can imagine, we don’t have enough for people to come in and out for short visits. You have to take them off when you leave the ICU and put new ones on when you come in. After they’re worn, they can’t be used by anyone else until they’re washed again. It’s very important that we keep the germs out.”

  “Yes, of course,” Kay said. “When can we see her?”

  “Shouldn’t be too long,” he said. “Go on back to the waiting room, and we’ll send a nurse to get you when we’ve moved her.”

  FIFTY-FIVE

  BETH LAY IN HER ROOM, SO SMALL AND BROKEN, WIRED UP like a robot being overhauled. Kay’s oversized scrubs rustled as she crossed the room to her daughter. Her face was swollen, her eyes shut. There was a mask over her mouth and nose where a ventilator helped her breathe.

  Kay wanted to tear them off, grab her up, and carry her out of this place. If she could turn back time for just a few hours, Beth would be back safe at home. Kay would never let her leave the house again. She would keep her daughter safe from killers. Hadn’t she done that for thirteen years? Beth had never had a broken arm, an infected wound, or a cough that hadn’t been doctored. Kay had seen to it.

  Yet here she was, her skin deathly white, her breathing controlled by the ventilator. The back of her head was shaved and stitched and her skull was misshapen. They had laid her on her side, with pillows tucked around her.

  Doug came around Kay and bent over Beth. The surgical mask they’d given him was soaked with his tears, and it looked like it would soon be useless. He pulled it down and kissed her cheek. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart,” he said, stroking what was left of her hair. “Daddy should have known.”

  Kay pulled back the covers and searched Beth’s body for other bruises. The marks on her neck were more visible now. She thought back to the day the Pulses stopped, when she’d come home and found Beth’s wet clothes on the floor. She’d had scrapes on her legs then. Kay should have understood that her daughter was suffering. What kind of mother was she?

  She kept looking down her arms, under her gown, her legs . . . They had given Kay embolism stockings to put on Beth. Kay clutched the white socks in her fist. Then she unrolled them and pulled the sheet back from her daughter’s icy feet. Her toes were turning blue.

  “These won’t work,” she said. She’d been in the hospital herself for a hysterectomy five years ago, and they’d put pneumatic compression stockings on her calves to keep her from getting a blood clot. Now they had these useless tight socks instead.

  Kay wrestled them onto her daughter’s feet, careful not to hurt Beth or move her too much. The stockings were so tight that Kay thought they might cut off Beth’s circulation rather than aiding in it. She struggled to pull the sock up to Beth’s knee, then checked to make sure it wasn’t cutting into her skin. Then she worked on the other one.

  Doug was oblivious to what she was doing. He kept his face by Beth’s. “Honey, can you hear me? You were injured, and we’ve got you in the hospital. They did an operation. You did good. You’re a real trouper. We need for you to wake up and talk to us.”

  Kay was sweating by the time she got the stockings in place. Now what? What did her daughter need? She had to do something.

  Water. She needed water. “Where can I get her some water?” she asked.

  Doug looked at her. “She doesn’t need water, honey. She’s on an IV and she has a tube in her throat.”

  Kay looked up at the bag that was dripping vital fluids into Beth’s veins. How could that help her? It wasn’t dripping fast enough. She went around the bed and checked to make sure it was working at all. What if it stopped? Beth could die. Any one of a million factors could fail, and they would lose their daughter. She touched the bag, watched the tube, saw a drip form and creep toward Beth’s arm. It wasn’t good enough, Kay thought. They should be doing more for her.

  Beth was barely a teenager. She was supposed to be leading her play rehearsal. She was supposed to be fussing over costumes and props. She was supposed to be singing the songs she’d written.

  She felt Doug’s hands on her shoulder, and she turned and fell against him. He touched her paper shower cap, held her close. The embrace brought Kay’s heart to her throat, threatening to choke her. Despair shivered through her body. “Where was he, Doug? Where was God when this happened?”

  She felt him sobbing into his mask, his shoulders shaking with each breath.

  He didn’t have the answer.

  DENI WAITED OUTSIDE THE ICU DOOR FOR ONE OF HER PARENTS to come out so she could go in. The waiting room was filling up with friends and neighbors who’d heard about Beth. Brad Caldwell was still here, along with the Huckabees, and Amber Rowe had come after getting a sitter for the children. Jimmy Scarbrough and his parents arrived with tears. His father, Ralph, the former sheriff of Jefferson County, had lost fifty pounds since his shooting, and his breath was shallow from the long walk up the hall. But it was clear he was on the mend.

  Other members of their church had drifted in to offer prayers and compassion.

  Where was Mark?

  Of course — he was out working, she told herself, trying to find Beth’s attacker. Maybe by now they knew who he was. They might even have him in custody.


  She hoped he’d be off the streets soon so he couldn’t harm anyone else. Then Mark could come to be with her.

  “Deni?”

  Jimmy Scarbrough got up from his seat and shoved his hands into his pockets. His father got up, too, with great effort, and set his hand on his son’s shoulder as they came toward her.

  “What, Jimmy?”

  He glanced at his dad, and Ralph nodded. Jimmy swallowed as he looked back at Deni. “I saw Beth at Magnolia Park a few days ago. I should have told you earlier but I didn’t know . . .”

  Her eyebrows lifted. “Did you talk to her?”

  “Yes. She was upset because of that lady with the missing husband. She was crying and I tried to get her to talk to me about it.”

  “Did she?”

  “Sort of. She told me she saw them in their driveway sometimes, and I guess she felt bad for them.”

  The former sheriff stroked his son’s hair. “Jimmy, tell them what she said about getting hurt.”

  Jimmy’s eyes rounded. “Yeah. At first, she said she couldn’t talk to me because somebody might get hurt. She wouldn’t tell me anything else about that. Then we got off the subject and she told me about the lady. I forgot what she said about getting hurt . . . until she did.”

  Deni’s chest tightened. Somebody might get hurt? Did Beth think she was protecting the Tomlin family? Or their own family?

  If only he had told them, maybe her parents would have pushed harder for Beth to tell them what was going on. “Did she say anything about witnessing a murder?”

  He shook his head. “No, nothing. I should have made her talk to me.” His eyes filled and the corners of his mouth edged down. “I wish I’d told your parents sooner.”

  Deni blew out a strong breath and pulled the kid into a hug. “You couldn’t have known how important that was, Jimmy. We all had signs that we didn’t pick up on. But I’ll be sure and tell my parents. They’ll want to talk to you about it.”

  He wiped his eyes, then went back to his seat. His father sat down next to him, his arm around him. She could see that Scarbrough’s shooting — a tragedy that had almost taken his life — had turned into a blessing for the boy, as it had drawn them closer. She was glad. Jimmy would need him to get through this. She thought of the Tomlin family who had broken Beth’s heart, mourning their loved one without even knowing he was dead. How long had she been watching them, carrying their pain?