by J. A. Jance
Paralyzed with a combination of dread and indecision, Enid stood for several moments longer, watching and waiting. Her pursuer had crossed one lane of pavement and was within a matter of feet of reaching her when Enid finally sprang to action. Instead of obeying, intent on nothing other than making her escape, she wheeled away from him and ran, sprinting toward what she hoped would be the relative safety of the gas station. She never made it. She never saw or heard the vehicle approaching her from behind; never saw the blinking turn signal that indicated the driver was starting to slow in order to turn into the gas station. Unfortunately, he hadn’t slowed enough.
She heard the squeal of brakes. A sharp pain shot through her body as the front bumper caught her hip and tossed her skyward. For what seemed like forever, she flew through air. When she came back to earth, she landed hard enough to knock the wind out of her before momentum sent her tumbling over and over across the pavement. For a long time after she came to rest, there was nothing but darkness. Then, from very far away she heard a single voice calling out to her through her pain.
“Oh my God! Are you all right? I didn’t see you at all. You ran out onto the road right in front of me. I tried to stop, but there wasn’t time.”
This was a man’s voice—a young man’s voice—filled with concern and anguish. He was leaning over her. Enid could feel his warm breath on her face and his hand touching her shoulder. Her first instinct was to caution him that he shouldn’t use the Lord’s name in vain. If he was back home with The Family, Aunt Edith would cane him if she heard that, and so would Bishop Lowell. She opened her eyes briefly. Searching his chest, she was relieved to see no sign of the badge she thought she had seen earlier. It wasn’t there. The man leaning over her wasn’t the one who had called to her from across the road—the one sent to bring her back home.
The pain was astonishing. Enid closed her eyes, trying to blot it out. When she opened them again, the man was gone—he had disappeared completely from her line of vision. She thought for a moment that he had abandoned her and left her alone to die or else that he had gone away, leaving her at the mercy of the man wearing the badge. But then the young man’s face suddenly reappeared, and she felt the comforting weight of a heavy blanket settle over her.
She was out again briefly. When she returned to consciousness the next time, she heard more voices gathered around her—urgent voices, frightened voices, questioning ones. She struggled to make them out, trying to tell if there was a familiar one among them, but there wasn’t. The people who surrounded her now and who were coming to her aid weren’t from The Family. They were strangers, Outsiders.
“She’s hurt.” She recognized the young man’s voice, yelling urgently to someone behind him. “Hurt bad. Call 911. We need an aid car. Now!” Then he turned back to Enid. “Are you there?” he asked. “Can you hear me?”
With superhuman effort, Enid forced her eyes to open and her head to nod. At least she thought she nodded.
“Thank God,” he whispered. “You’re alive. The guy from the station is calling an ambulance. Stay with me now. What’s your name?”
He’d done it again—used the Lord’s name in vain. Enid tried to move her lips, to tell him her name, but they didn’t work properly. She said Enid, but he must have heard something else.
“Okay, Edith,” he said. “Don’t move. The guy from the station is putting out flares. We’ll wait right here for the ambulance, okay?”
She wanted to tell him that Edith wasn’t her name. Edith was someone else entirely, but all she could manage was a single word. “Okay,” she whispered.
“What the hell were you doing out here in the dark?” he demanded. He sounded angry now—angry and accusatory. “You ran out right in front of me. By the time I saw you, there was no way to stop. I barely had time enough to step on the brake.”
She wanted to tell him the whole story, but she couldn’t. It was too complicated. It was too hard to talk; too hard to keep the pieces straight in her head. The world around her was turning fuzzy.
“My baby . . .” she whispered.
“What baby?” he asked. Turning his gaze away from her face, he appeared to look down at the rest of her body for the first time. His eyes stopped and widened when they focused on the bulge in her stomach.
“Oh my God, you’re pregnant! I’m sorry! I’m so sorry, but it wasn’t my fault.”
Enid felt something wet fall on her face. At first she thought it was a drifting snowflake, but then she realized it was a tear—a single tear. The young man was weeping—crying for her. She wanted to reach out and comfort him—to tell him it was all right, but a sudden surge of pain, a shocking brand-new pain, rocketed through her body, robbing her of the ability to speak. As suddenly as it had come, the pain subsided. Feeling the wetness between her legs, Enid knew exactly what it was.
In The Family, that’s what women and girls were supposed to do—have babies, lots of them. As a consequence, that was something they talked about—having babies and about the banes of pregnancy—the unrelenting nausea of morning sickness, the swollen ankles and aching backs of the final months and weeks before the baby came, and the realities and indignity of having your water break and then going into labor. That was what had just happened to Enid—her water had broken. The baby was coming.
With a strength she didn’t know she had, she somehow reached out from under the blanket and grasped the young man’s hand in hers, grinding his fingers together in something close to a death grip.
“Help me, please,” she whispered. “My baby’s coming.”
“Your baby’s coming now?” he groaned. “You’ve got to be kidding! Please, God, this can’t be happening. Please.”
“It is happening,” Enid insisted. “She’s coming. Don’t let them take me back home. Don’t let them take her there,” she urged. “Please, whatever you do, don’t let them take us back.”
Just then another labor pain roared through her, silencing her ability to speak. Her whisper turned into a howl of agony. When the contraction passed, Enid lay breathless and spent on the cold, hard pavement. She was covered by a Navajo blanket and comforted only by the grip of that one strong hand—a hand that belonged to the weeping young man—the Outsider—who knelt beside her.
For a brief moment, Enid longed to be back home in The Encampment’s birthing room. There, at least, she would have been warm and covered with a clean sheet. Dr. Johnson would have been there with her. Her bed would have been surrounded by the comfort of familiar faces.
The image passed as quickly as it came, taking everything else with it—the pain, the sounds of concerned voices in the distance, and close up, the man—the Outsider—who was now sobbing brokenly beside her. Before the next contraction hit, Enid had drifted into blessed unconsciousness.
8
Ali was sleeping soundly when she heard the distinctive chirp of Sister Anselm’s ringtone. The clock said it was one o’clock in the morning. Her first instinct was to roll over and go back to sleep. When she heard the guest room shower come on, she realized Sister Anselm was up and on the move. Crawling out of bed, Ali donned her robe. With Bella at her heels, she headed for the kitchen to start coffee. Slipping on a pair of clogs, she took Bella outside. The four inches of snow on the ground was deep enough that the dog came back in with her belly covered with snow. Since Bella had spent most of her life in snow-free Las Vegas, snow wasn’t something she enjoyed in the least. She shook it off before going back inside.
Sister Anselm emerged from her room with suitcase in hand and purse slung over her shoulder. By then, Ali was waiting at the end of the hall with a cup of coffee already loaded into a vacuum-sealed metal coffee mug that was more thermos than cup.
“Sorry,” Sister Anselm apologized. “I meant to sneak out without disturbing anybody. I’ve just been called out to St. Jerome’s Hospital in Flagstaff. Someone got run over on a highway north of there. Te
ll Mr. Brooks that I’ve already stripped the sheets. Is it still snowing?”
“It’s stopped now,” Ali said, handing over the cup. “I didn’t know which way you were going, but I checked road conditions on the Department of Transportation website in both directions. This is a weird storm. The worst of it came straight in from the west. The roads from here down to Phoenix are in worse shape than they are going north to Flag. It may be tricky getting down the hill from here to the main drag, but from there on, everything should be plowed, sanded, or both.”
“I’ll be careful,” Sister Anselm assured her. “I won’t be much help to anyone else if I’m laid up in the hospital, too.”
“Humor me, though,” Ali said. “No lead foot, and call me when you get there. I seem to remember that you and that ‘arrest-me-red’ MINI Cooper of yours have been pulled over more than once.”
Sister Anselm nodded grudgingly. “You’re almost as bad as the reverend mother,” she said.
“From what I know about your reverend mother,” Ali replied, “I’ll take that as high praise.”
“By the way, all I ever got was warnings.”
“That’s because young cops look at you—a sweet old nun—and figure they’ll go to hell if they write you up.”
Sister Anselm grinned and shrugged. “True enough,” she said, “and I’m always careful not to disabuse them of that notion.”
The two friends were still laughing about that as Ali ushered Sister Anselm out to the car. She drove away as it was coming up on one-thirty. Ali considered going back to bed, but after a moment, she glanced at her watch. It had two faces on it—a big one for her, and a second smaller one that she used to keep track of B.’s current time zone. Using a second watch was far easier than adding and subtracting time zones in her head. In this case, it was just past eight-thirty A.M. in Zurich. Time enough for B. to be up and dressed, but a couple of hours short of his having to head for the airport.
Ali went back to the kitchen. The giant-sized traveler cup she had poured for Sister Anselm had taken almost half of the small pot Leland kept on the kitchen counter. She poured the remainder of the coffee into a large mug and then made her way back to her favorite spot in the house—one of the easy chairs in the library. After turning on the gas-log fire, she pulled out her phone.
“It’s the middle of the night where you are,” B. observed. “What are you doing up at this hour?”
“Sister Anselm was staying over, but she just got called to look after an accident victim in Flagstaff. I thought I’d give you a call before your flight. I poured myself some of the coffee I brewed for her, and now I’m all yours.”
B. heaved a relieved sigh as the worry in his voice changed to genuine pleasure. “With a call coming from you in the middle of the night like that, I was afraid it was bad news. Hang on a sec. I’ll pour a new cup of coffee for me, too. It’s not the most conventional way for a newly married couple to have morning coffee together, but I’ll take it.” He was off the line for only a moment. When he returned, he added, “I was just talking on the phone to Stu about the situation in Bemidji.”
Ali laughed. “What a surprise. One of these days, if Stuart ever gets a life of his own, he won’t be able to time his waking and sleeping according to where you happen to be on the planet.”
“That’s true,” B. agreed, “but right now he is, and his early morning briefings are invaluable.”
“What about Bemidji?” Ali asked.
“I think his idea of sending Joe out to assess the situation is the right one.”
“Joe would be the guy from Minneapolis?”
“Yes,” B. said. “His name’s Joe Friday. We’ve used him before. Stuart said he’d clear it with you later today. I don’t think either one of us thought you’d be up and about this early.”
“Joe Friday?” Ali repeated. “Are you kidding? Like the ‘just-the-facts’ guy from that old Dragnet series?”
B. laughed. “That’s the one. We went over all that when I first met the guy. He said his granddad was a big fan of the show. Since he had to miss the broadcast the night his son was born, and because their last name was already Friday, he said that was the only way to get even with the kid. When the son’s first child came along, the name got passed along again, so this Joe Friday is actually a second-generation Joe Friday.”
“Right,” Ali observed dryly. “Whatever generation, I’m sure he appreciates being asked about his name the same way I appreciate being asked if I know about that New York Yankees pitcher from Tulsa, Oklahoma. At least that’s a married name. My parents didn’t do that to me on purpose.”
“Joe gets a big kick out of it, actually,” B. replied. “Names aside, he’s designed this slick motion-activated video network, one he can install in places where no one will ever notice. It’s a smart system that will send out an alert whenever someone’s in the house.”
“Is this something Betsy will have to turn off and on whenever she’s home?” Ali asked. “That’s why she didn’t have the alarm engaged the other night. Every time she lets her dog in or out, she has to turn it off. And what about the dog? If Betsy isn’t home and the dog is, won’t that set off an alarm, too?”
“For one thing, the alert doesn’t sound where Betsy is. It operates on her Wi-Fi system and sends the alert to the desk of one of our round-the-clock monitoring centers. She does have Wi-Fi, right?” B. asked.
“That’s what Athena told me. It’s probably not hooked up right now, but Stuart says it will be.”
“Good,” B. replied. “What’s so slick about Joe’s system is that it uses facial and form recognition. When he goes there to set it up, he’ll create three-dimensional recognition files for both Betsy and the dog. When the camera spots one of them, no alerts are issued. As for anybody else? They’re all fair game.”
“It sounds as though you and Stuart have this in hand. Why does he need to clear it with me?”
“Because you asked him to do it, for one thing,” B. reminded her. “For another, we’re going to need you to talk Betsy into letting Joe into her house. She’ll need to create a convincing cover story for his visit, because the whole point is having the system installed without anyone else knowing it exists.”
“Because the dog didn’t bark?”
B. laughed. “That’s my girl,” he said, “and that’s it precisely. Whoever came into the house that night and turned on the gas most likely was someone the dog—Princess, I believe—wasn’t worried about even though she should have been. So we’re going to observe the movements of everyone who enters the house and see if we can spot any of them doing something suspicious.”
“This sounds expensive,” Ali observed, remembering she had given Stuart the go-ahead to spend whatever was needed.
“It is,” B. agreed, “but you get what you pay for. Besides, you weren’t planning on billing either Athena or her grandmother for this, were you?”
“No,” Ali admitted.
“That’s what I thought,” he said. “In that case, we’ll care enough to send the very best. By the time Stuart talks to you later this morning, he’ll have some idea of Joe’s availability. After that, it’s up to you to convince Betsy Peterson that this invasion of her privacy is in her best interest.”
“If there are going to be cameras everywhere in her house, how is she supposed to shower or take a bath without feeling like people are watching her every move? It sounds like there will be cameras in her bedroom and in her bathroom, too. Is that really necessary?”
“Yes, it is,” B. answered. “If someone were going to try to slip something into a bottle of prescription medication, for example, it’s important that the cameras record whoever might be messing with the medicine cabinet. But again, that’s where the smart part comes in. The system only records the movements of people who aren’t in the official 3-D recognition file.
“I’m suggesting th
at you recommend to Betsy that for now she and Princess be the only two entities with recognition files. Anyone else who enters the house will trigger an automatic alarm and record because the cameras will follow them everywhere. It’ll be easy enough to tell from the images if they’re on the up-and-up or if they’re not.”
“Betsy struck me as being a bit cantankerous,” Ali cautioned, “but she’s also provoked that the authorities back there aren’t taking any interest in what happened. In other words, I should be able to pull this off.”
“Of course, you will,” B. agreed. “I have complete faith in your powers of persuasion.”
With the pressing items of business out of the way, they talked for a while longer. By the time the call ended, Ali’s coffee cup was empty. She turned off the fire and went back to bed, thinking that with a caffeine high she’d be able to make great progress on Jane Austen. After a mere page or two, she put the book down on the bed, turned off the bedside lamp, and fell asleep. She did notice, though, that just as she dozed off, a little warm dog wormed her way under the covers and curled up next to her back.
9
Once on I-17, Sister Anselm was surprised that Ali’s weather report proved to be entirely correct. After leaving Sedona, the farther north she went, the less evidence she saw of the storm that was still wreaking havoc from Sedona through Prescott and Cordes Junction and all the way down to the northernmost outskirts of Phoenix. It was an odd kind of weather pattern, to be sure, although she doubted anyone would be able to ascribe the lack of new snow falling in Flagstaff to evidence of global warming or the newest catch-all label—climate change.
Driving north, Sister Anselm spent the time praying for her two, and as yet unknown, patients. An unidentified young woman, possibly a runaway, who was also pregnant, had been struck by a motor vehicle twenty miles north of Flagstaff on Highway 89. The woman, injured and unconscious, had gone into labor. Her infant, a girl thought to be six to eight weeks premature, had been delivered by EMTs in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. The baby was now being treated in a critical care nursery while the mother underwent multiple surgical procedures—one to remove her ruptured spleen and another to reduce pressure on her brain from injuries to the back of her skull.