by Ninie Hammon
Eddie hadn’t been much calmer. When they’d gotten up to $1,000 he’d started laughing, giggling like a girl.
There was no way either one of them would be able to act like nothing had happened that day—go home, eat supper, take a bath and go to bed without anybody guessing something was profoundly different about them. Adam figured Maggie Mae would blurt it out as soon as she walked in the door.
So they hadn’t even talked about dividing it up and hiding it. They’d just put it all in the box, marched into Eddie’s kitchen and set the box down on the table. And then the whole world had turned upside down—policemen and then reporters and even a television news crew! It had been the single most exciting thing that had ever happened to any of them.
The police had explained to the children how long the money would remain in trust, waiting for somebody to claim it before it could be returned to them as “finders keepers.” It was something like a year, so far in the future that Adam couldn’t manage to stay excited about it. The thought of the money hadn’t even entered his head in weeks.
“You need to get her to hush up, now,” the fat man said, almost nice.
“If she don’t shut up, we’re gonna have to hurt her.” The skinny guy didn’t sound nice at all. He sounded like he meant it.
Adam turned to his little sister, put his arm around her and whispered in her ear. He told her everything would be Ok, that he’d take care of her, that he wouldn’t let anybody hurt her. She slowly stopped sobbing, just sat there sniveling and hiccupping, staring with wide, terrified eyes at the two men in the back of the van.
Donnie pulled off the highway onto a gravel road that wound into the woods. He went about 50 yards down it and stopped. They had picked this spot because even though there were houses fairly close by, you couldn’t see the van from the highway. And they couldn’t go very far. One of those kids was going to have to go to wherever they’d hidden the money and bring it back.
Jimmy Dan cut to the chase. He’d been designated “bad cop.” Doodlebug was “good cop.”
“I’m not talking about the $5,000 you turned in,” he said. “I’m talking about the rest of it, the other $30,000. You got it hidden somewhere and we want it back!”
The children exchanged a confused look.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, mister,” Adam said. “We found that money in a box by the side of the road and—”
“You didn’t find no money in a box,” Doodlebug cut him off. “You found it in that shed in the woods. We know, ’cause we put it there. It’s our money, not yours, and we want it back. Now, where did you hide the rest of it?”
“There isn’t any more,” Adam said. He looked at the other two children. “Is there?” They both shook their heads frantically from side to side. “We found the money on the floor in that shed, gathered it up and put it in a box. Then we took it home and counted it and turned it in. That’s all there was.”
Not once in all their careful planning did it ever occur to the three men that the kids might deny they had the money. That they might try to hold onto it, to keep it. It threw them totally off balance.
Donnie turned around in the driver’s seat so he could see and yelled at Adam. “Don’t you lie to us, son!”
“There was another $30,000 in that shed,” Jimmy Dan snarled. He’d started getting edgy as soon as he got into the back of the van. He hated cramped places with no windows; the growing menace in his voice was genuine. “What did you do with the rest of the money?”
“I’m not lying,” Adam said. “There wasn’t any more money.”
Eddie spoke up for the first and only time, his voice high and reedy. “We looked.”
Listening to those snot-nosed little brats talk back to him made Jimmy Dan’s head pound. A sudden, blinding pain pierced his temples like an ice pick, then shot down his neck into his shoulders. There were too many people jammed in here and not enough air! He reached his hand behind him and pulled out a .25 caliber pistol, its broken hand grip held together with a mound of dirty duct tape. When he’d stuck the gun down in his pants, he’d had to cinch his jeans tight with a belt to keep it from falling through.
Doodlebug was just as stunned to see the gun as the kids were.
“Hey, we said there wasn’t going to be any rough stuff,” Doodlebug began.
“Put that away, J.D.,” Donnie said.
Jimmy Dan ignored them both. He pointed the gun at Maggie Mae. “Tell us where that money is or I’m going to put a bullet in you.”
Maggie Mae screamed at the top of her lungs. The shrieking, so loud in that small, metal space, set Jimmy Dan’s teeth on edge; his eyes darted back and forth between the children, rage building so fast you could see it, like watching blue fire spread across the lighter fluid in a charcoal grill.
Doodlebug knew the gun wasn’t loaded, but he didn’t think scaring the kids to death was the best way to get them to talk. He reached over and picked Maggie Mae up off the floor and set her in his lap, meaning to calm her down. But the gesture had the opposite effect on the child. She began to kick and scream and fight, so he wrapped his arms around her and put his hand over her mouth to shut her up.
Twisting her head back and forth to get his hand off her face, Maggie Mae managed to get one of his fingers into her mouth. And she bit down with all the might of a terrified 8-year-old, all the way to the bone. Blood squirted out of the wound and Doodlebug roared in pain.
Adam lunged for the gun, grabbed the barrel and tried to wrench it out of Jimmy Dan’s hand. Seeing Maggie Mae fight back, draw blood, he knew she was creating a diversion so Jim Phelps could—
BAM!
The gunshot sounded like the explosion of a cannon in that confined space, reverberating against the metal walls. Stunned, everybody froze in shocked surprise.
Nobody moved, except Maggie Mae. She slumped forward in Doodlebug’s arms with a flower of crimson on the front of her dress that grew bigger and bigger and bigger.
Jimmy Dan held the gun out in front of him like a dead fish on a stick, his face white, staring in horror at the child in Doodlebug’s arms.
Eddie jumped up, hit the handle and shoved open the back door. He leapt out of the van and started running down the gravel road toward the highway, trailing a wild, eerie wail behind him as he ran.
Jimmy Dan turned and knocked Adam out of the way as he dived out the back door behind Eddie and took off running through the woods.
Donnie fumbled for the key in the ignition and tried to start the van, pumping frantically on the accelerator in panic. Within seconds the motor was flooded. The starter turned it over and over but nothing happened.
Banging his fists on the steering wheel two or three times in terror and frustration, Donnie took a deep sobbing breath, turned and looked into Doodlebug’s eyes. He was crying. “The gun was loaded!”
After he choked out the words, he opened the van door, leapt to the ground and ran.
Adam had been sprawled on his back on the van floor where Jimmy Dan had knocked him down. He got slowly to his feet, his eyes huge.
“Go get help,” Doodlebug whispered. That was as much sound as he was able to make. “Go on now, son. Go get somebody to come help your little sister.”
Adam stared at Maggie Mae for a heartbeat longer, turned and jumped out the back door of the van and was gone.
Then it was quiet. Not a sound but the wind in the trees, blowing a handful of dry leaves across the gravel road. Doodlebug sat in the back of the van holding the little red-haired girl in his arms, rocking her gently back and forth as she bled out. It didn’t take very long at all.
Chapter 15
Yellow Police Line tape sealed off an area 50 yards wide all around the Burkett Brothers Garage van, parked down a gravel road off Bishop’s Lane.
Sarabeth arrived as Sonny was putting Doodlebug into his cruiser. The whole front of the fat man’s shirt and pants was soaked in blood, the same color as the bright red Callison County Rescue Squad truck park
ed beside the sheriff’s vehicle. An ambulance, the blue light on top slowly spinning around and around, sat beside the van. If Sarabeth had understood the codes on her police scanner correctly, it was long past too late for the rescue squad or the ambulance.
A crowd of people had gathered on the outside of the perimeter, not gawkers but sympathizers—friends and neighbors. They had not come to revel in suffering; they had come to share it. Most of the women were crying softly. Some of the men were, too.
Sarabeth ducked under the tape and approached the sheriff. His mouth was set in a tight line. She could see he was holding his professional detachment in a white-knuckled grip, which helped her to hold onto hers.
She drew her notepad out of the front pocket of the camera bag that hung on her shoulder and asked him quietly, “What’s going on?”
“Killed a little girl, 8 years old.” he said through clenched teeth.
“What happened?”
“I don’t have all the answers yet. When I do, you can come by my office and I’ll tell you the whole story.”
“Deal,” she said and put away her notepad.
When Sarabeth turned away from Sonny, she spotted Seth, standing beside the big red truck talking quietly with one of the other rescue squad members. He saw her and nodded a greeting. She nodded back and they stood, their eyes locked together in a glance for a few moments before she forcefully broke the connection and wandered over to the ambulance. The back double doors were open and a stretcher sat inside. The sheet was pulled all the way over the small lump in the middle of it. An EMT sat inside the ambulance beside the stretcher, doing nothing, just sitting. He looked absolutely devastated. Sarabeth knew the man. He was Harmony Pruitt’s fiancé. She’d met him a time or two in the office and she searched frantically through her mental Rolodex until she finally located his name.
“Rough call, huh, Pete.”
He looked up at her with anguished eyes. “There wasn’t nothing we could do. She was dead before we got here. Bled to death.” Pete put his head in his hands. “Not a thing we could do.”
Sarabeth’s heart went out to him. She climbed the two steps into the ambulance, sat down on the bench seat beside him and put her arm around his shoulders.
“I know you’d have saved her if you could.”
“Such a pretty little girl.” His voice was thick. “Just looks like she’s asleep.”
He reached over and picked up the end of the sheet covering the child, “Looks like at any minute she’ll wake up, climb down off this table and go play.” Then he pulled the sheet back to show Sarabeth the child’s peaceful face.
The sight hit Sarabeth with the force of an 18-wheeler flying down an interstate. She couldn’t move or breathe. If she’d been standing, her knees would have buckled out from under her and dumped her in a heap on the ground. She covered her mouth, had to hold the scream inside to keep it from roaring up her throat and out into the world.
The fantasy child Sarabeth had kept alive all these years, the 8-year-old little girl her daughter, Moriah, would have grown to be lay there on the stretcher before her. Moriah’s face, yet so pale the freckles stood out on it like ink blots, and her red pigtails clasped at the ends with barrettes.
Sarabeth couldn’t speak. She stood on shaking legs, stumbled out of the ambulance and around to the side of it facing the woods, away from the crowd. She leaned against the cool metal, sucked in huge gulps of air to keep from fainting. Her mind understood the little girl wasn’t really hers, but her heart knew different. Her heart knew that the child who formed such a small lump under the white sheet on the stretcher was Moriah. The little girl she’d already lost once was now gone again.
Seth came around the ambulance to where she stood.
“Are you all right?” One look answered his question. “What’s wrong?”
Tears flowed down her cheeks and she made no effort to wipe them away. She looked into Seth’s dark eyes and just blurted it out.
“I had a little girl and she … died.”
He moaned, a groan deep in his throat, then wordlessly wrapped his arms around her and drew her close, held her while she cried silently against his chest.
“My little girl, Moriah, would have been 8 this year.” The words came out between hitching sobs. “She was killed … ” She struggled to say more, but couldn’t seem to get the words out of her mouth.
“You don’t have to talk about it.”
“Yes, I do!” She pulled back and looked up at him, stunned by the fierce intensity of her own response. Suddenly, she did have to talk about it. It was a sorrow she had buried too deep, carried for too long. It had festered in the darkness and the sight of the little girl lying dead on the stretcher had lanced the boil.
He looked tenderly into her face. “I’m listening,” he said and folded her gently back into his embrace.
At the sound of his voice, it felt like someone reached out and turned down the volume on the world, hit the dimmer switch, too, so bright reality only existed in a puddle around the two of them—everything beyond was quiet and grayed out.
Once she got started, she was surprised by how easily the words flowed. She had never talked about what happened. It was like she had taken this detour out of her life for two years, met an incredible man, fell in love, got married, had a baby—and then it was all gone, popped with a little sparkle like a soap bubble and vanished.
“The hail hit right before we got to Littlefield, this nowhere little town on the west Texas prairie,” her voice was distorted by the effort it took not to cry. “Aaron had wanted to spend the night in Lubbock. You could see the storm brewing in the west, huge, ugly green clouds. But I’d promised Mom we’d be back home in California by Ben’s birthday.”
She took a shaky breath and her voice sank to a whisper.
“The car skidded into a drainage ditch and we got out and tried to make it to this big pipe, but … ” The image formed so clear in her mind that goose bumps popped out all over her body. “I looked up and just for an instant I could see into the tornado. Greenish black and writhing, lightning dancing and sparking. It smelled like moldy dirt, a cemetery. Like death.”
Seth squeezed her tight against him, but she pulled back in his arms so she could look up into his face again. She barely noticed the tears in his eyes.
“I tried to hold onto her!” She dug her fingers into his big biceps, her voice an anguished rasp. “I tried! She was only 9 months old.” Her voice trailed off as she gazed into a past that she never allowed herself to revisit.
“But she was so little … I felt her being sucked out of my arms.” Sarabeth closed her eyes. “Moriah didn’t even cry. She was asleep, wrapped up in a blanket, and all the wind and rain—it didn’t even wake her up. I felt her go. Felt my arms empty … and then.” She let out a sigh. “I woke up in the hospital six days later.”
She let him pull her back against his chest and she rested there. Time passed—a minute, three days—before sound and color slowly began to return to the world. She felt so warm, so safe in his embrace that it took a wrenching effort to ease out of it. But she did, stepped back and leaned against the side of the ambulance again, surprised that when she spoke, her voice was steady.
“They never found her body. And by the time I came to, they’d already cremated Aaron. They were both just … gone, like they’d never existed at all.”
She took a deep breath, to finish it. To say it all, get it all out.
“So I had this fantasy that Moriah was alive, that she’d survived, that she was out there somewhere.” She looked up, saw tracks of tears on Seth’s face. “I always knew what she looked like—when she was 2 and 4—and 6 with missing teeth. I always knew.”
“And at 8 she’d have looked just like that little girl on the stretcher.” Seth’s voice was thick. “Of course she would—red hair and freckles! She’d have looked like Maggie Mae Davis.”
Maggie Mae Davis. Somehow knowing her name completed Sarabeth’s transition back to rea
lity, back to the world where Maggie Mae had a mother and a father, maybe brothers and sisters. A real family who were as devastated right now as she had been eight years ago, staggering under the weight of their loss.
“Has anybody told her parents?”
“They radioed the Brewster police chief and he’s gone to notify her mother, probably telling her right now. As I understand it, she’s a nurse at Callison County Hospital. I don’t know about the father, though. I think he’s been out of the picture for a long time.”
Picture. She should be taking pictures. But she was reluctant to move, to break the spell, to close the doors between her and Seth again. She pulled in a deep breath, let it out, reached up with both hands and wiped the remains of tears from her cheeks.
“Look, Seth, I—”
“Don’t,” he said quietly. Just the one word.
She had a sense of déjà vu, like they’d already had this conversation.
“Don’t thank me. I’m here for you anytime. Anytime at all.”
Sarabeth didn’t know what else to do, so she just nodded.
“I have to shoot this,” she said. Shifting gears was painful. “It’s my job.”
Taking pictures at a crime or accident scene was a dicey business. As soon as you put a camera around your neck and started firing, you instantly became the focus of everybody’s pent-up rage. You ceased to be Sarabeth Bingham and became “the press”—heartless exploiters who used blood-and-gore pictures to sell newspapers. She’d watched police officers, EMTs, people he’d known for years turn on her father at an accident scene, even though he had never once, not in 51 years, published a “body shot” in The Callison County Tribune.
“You sure you’re Ok?” Seth asked.
The tenderness in his voice made her want to cry again.
“I’m sure.”
“Then you need to get to work.” Perhaps he tried to smile, but it didn’t work. So he looked down at her and stroked her cheek with the backs of his fingers, then turned and headed back toward the rescue squad truck.