Down by the Riverside

by Jackie Lynn

  I slid my chair away from the table. “Maybe I should go see,” I said, thinking of Jolie and Clara, wondering if the little girl had returned to the campground and then run into some trouble. “Maybe I can help.”

  He agreed and we both hurried from his kitchen, grabbing shoes and shirts and throwing things on. I headed out the door, planning to run down his path, but Tom called to me and led me around the rear of his trailer where a motorcycle was parked. Quickly, he got on and I followed, jumping on behind him. He cranked it and turned it in the direction of the campground. We looked down at the river sites, but nothing seemed out of place. No one was standing outside. Janice’s van was gone and their camper looked locked-up.

  We drove on around the driveway and we were at the office in less than five minutes, speeding across the gravel path, arriving a few minutes before the ambulance.

  Mary was standing outside in the road. We could hear the sirens getting closer.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked as I hopped off the motorcycle and ran toward her.

  She turned to us and for a moment looked at me and then at Tom, noticing the familiar way we stood near each other. Then she answered with a frantic tone, “Ms. Lou Ellen, she fell beside the desk. I think she broke her leg.”

  Tom and I ran inside. The older woman was slouched against the wall by the desk. I hurried around the counter. I immediately checked for a pulse. It was weak and fast. Her skin felt moist and cool.

  “I’ve missed my poker game,” she said, trying to sound un-bothered and without pain.

  “What did you do?” I asked, noticing the angle of her right leg, the hard way it twisted behind her. I knew not to try and move her until the ambulance arrived.

  “I got tangled up in the phone line,” she said in a bit of a labored voice and then added, “I came tumbling down like the walls of Jericho.”

  I could see by the position of her legs that she had probably broken a bone. She was pale, breathing very shallow, and I told Tom to get her a blanket or coat to cover her with. He hurried outside to find Mary while I gently slid her down the wall to a flat position and unbuttoned the top buttons down the front of her blouse, loosening her clothes.

  Ms. Lou Ellen followed him with her eyes and then she glanced at me and smiled slightly.

  By the time he returned with a blanket, the ambulance had arrived and the attendants hurried through the front door followed by Rhonda and Lucas, who were both flushed and wild-eyed. They had gone into town for groceries when Mary had called them on their cell phone.

  “Mama!” Rhonda moved past the emergency medical technicians and knelt beside me.

  “Darling, I’m fine,” she responded weakly. “Just a little crooked.”

  The ambulance attendants, the same ones I remembered from having seen at the riverside, young people, one man and one woman, stepped beside Rhonda and me, and I moved away from the desk to the front of the counter. I watched as they asked her questions, took her vital signs, and retrieved a small tank of oxygen. Then following thirty minutes of assessment, they slowly and carefully placed the older woman on the stretcher they had brought in with them.

  “Mr. Boyd, if we keep having to come out here every week, I may just get me a camper.”

  The young man was wrapping a sheet around Ms. Lou Ellen while the woman was filling out the necessary forms. Rhonda was answering her questions. The nameplate on his uniform read Cliff Roberts.

  “Son, you’re welcome here any time,” Lucas replied, holding open the door for the attendants and his mother-in-law. And then since the EMT had mentioned it, added, “At least this time, it doesn’t seem to be such a grave finding.”

  I realized then from the conversation between the two men that they were talking about the earlier visit to the area, about Mr. Franklin and finding his body down below the campground.

  “That’s the truth,” the man replied, standing at the foot of the stretcher waiting for the woman to finish the paperwork. He leaned slightly against the door jamb.

  “That one was a mess by the time we got to him. He’d been in the water a couple of days, hardly recognized him. Sheriff Montgomery seemed to know who it was right away though.”

  His partner jerked up and looked in his direction with a disapproving glance. “I think you should radio in the information,” she said sharply.

  The young man shrugged his shoulders and walked outside. I could hear him talking to the hospital on the ambulance radio.

  The woman turned back to Ms. Lou Ellen and was listening to her heart.

  “I guess he’s talking about Mr. Franklin, the man you pulled out of the river,” I noted. “I saw you there,” I added.

  She seemed to be trying to figure out who I was. “We’re not supposed to talk about the investigation,” she answered.

  I heard the caution in her voice.

  “It’s being handled by the sheriff’s office.”

  I nodded. I wondered if she had gotten in trouble in the past for discussing cases or if somebody had told her not to talk about this particular one. She turned away and continued listening to Ms. Lou Ellen’s heart.

  “How are her vitals?” I asked.

  The EMT looked at me. She seemed surprised by my question. I could read her badge then and noticed that her name was Becky Kunar. She was pretty, blond, petite, and you could tell she was serious about her work.

  “Are you staying here at Shady Grove?” she asked.

  “I’m a nurse,” I said. “She seemed a little shocky when I came in.”

  “We’ll take her to Baptist,” she replied, softening a bit.

  “Looks like a broken hip.” Then she relaxed a little more. “Blood pressure is ninety over fifty, pulse is thready and one hundred and ten. I think we should hurry.”

  They put the oxygen mask on her and gently slid the stretcher into the back of the ambulance. Tom agreed to stay in the office and Mary, Lucas, Rhonda, and I jumped into Rhonda’s truck and followed them up the campground road, right on the new loop, and straight up Interstate 55 to the hospital in downtown Memphis.

  When we arrived, Rhonda immediately ran to the front desk at the emergency room and registered her mother, who was taken to a room from the ambulance bay. Mary, Lucas, and I headed to the waiting room and sat down together.

  “She’ll be fine,” I said to the two of them as they glanced around nervously.

  “The hip is probably broken and that means they’ll have to do surgery, but Ms. Lou Ellen is strong and young enough.” I leaned back against the sofa. “She’ll have to stay in the hospital awhile, but she’ll be okay.” I was simply making small talk as a means of comfort.

  “I tell her every day, slow down, you walk too fast back there. You going to slip.”

  Mary was upset. I could tell she was worried. “I should have kept her out of office today.”

  “Mary.” Lucas reached over and patted her on the leg. “Dear sister, you and I both know you can’t tell Ms. Lou Ellen anything. You couldn’t have stopped her from work even if you had known this was going to happen.”

  Then he sat back and threw his big tattooed arm around her. “This wasn’t your fault.”

  Mary blew out a breath, sliding down next to her friend.

  We waited a few minutes and Rhonda joined us. Then she and Lucas went into the emergency department to be with her mother while they continued her care. Mary and I sat alone on the sofa. There were several folks in the waiting area. The television was tuned to a morning news show.

  “How long have you been at Shady Grove?” I asked, realizing that I didn’t know much about Mary.

  “Twelve years now,” she answered, glancing up at the television. They were reporting a story about a big wreck near Fort Smith.

  “My husband knew Lucas from a long time before.” She hesitated, appearing to think about what she was sharing. “They in prison together.”

  “Oh,” I answered, hearing for the first time about Lucas’s criminal past, but not being too surprised by
it.

  “Lucas try to help my husband.” She crossed her ankles. “Get him off drugs.” She paused.

  “Lucas try to help lots of people. Lets them stay at Shady Grove until they find permanent place to live, lets them work for him until he can find them good job.

  “He a righteous man. He and Rhonda let me live with them when my husband got picked up again.”

  Several people walked in through the front doors. A young boy had a bloody rag held against his head. They hurried to the front desk. We watched them.

  “I had nowhere else. Roger got killed in prison. Lucas and Rhonda been like family to me.” She folded her hands in her lap.

  “Ms. Lou Ellen like family, too,” she added. “I can’t explain it. I have brothers and sisters in Vietnam, where I’m from, but I never feel such love even from them.” She paused. “Shady Grove is my home.”

  A nurse called out a name and two women stood up from their seats and walked to the desk. One was holding her arm gingerly.

  “Why is it that Rhonda and Lucas leave the campground so much?” I asked, remembering what Ledford had said when I first arrived in West Memphis and still trying to make up my mind about the couple.

  “They have lots of interest,” she answered. “See lots of people along the river.”

  We watched a family leave through the front door. A young woman was being pushed in a wheelchair out into the parking lot. I thought about Lucas’s past and how the constant movement sounded suspicious.

  “Rhonda can’t sleep except on the boat. She say the river calm her, rock her. She don’t like being on land, make her feel tight, closed in.”

  I leaned my head against the top of the sofa and thought about what Mary said. I put aside my doubts and considered that what she said made perfect sense to me even though I hadn’t sailed the river. Along the banks of the Mississippi, just to sit on the shore, just to feel the river wind, I had felt my heart expand, the tight strings in my mind loosen.

  I figured that a person would feel even more of that kind of experience if she actually floated on top of the water, pushed herself away from land. And I knew that a week before my arrival I wouldn’t have understood what Mary meant about Rhonda and about the river, but now I did. After only two days, I was just beginning to experience my own pull from those muddy waters.

  “You and Tom?” Mary asked, using just those words. She stared at me.

  I shrugged. “He’s a very nice man,” I answered, not knowing what else to say.

  She nodded. “Good man,” she replied. “He had hard time, too,” she said, raising some more questions in my mind, only this time they were about Tom.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “He just been through a lot, lost a lot.”

  “Lost what?” I asked.

  “All his money, all his family’s money. Tom been through tough days.”

  I stretched my neck in her direction, straining to hear more, but Mary just shook her head as if the stories were not hers to tell.

  I assumed the financial ruin was related to his addiction and I wanted to ask more questions, but when I glanced up at the front desk I saw the two ambulance attendants who had worked with Ms. Lou Ellen. I dismissed my doubts about Tom and waited until the woman, Becky, left, and then I excused myself from Mary and walked up to the young man.

  “Hello,” I said.

  He looked up and appeared a bit uncertain of who I was.

  “I’m Rose Franklin,” I introduced myself. “I just came from Shady Grove with Lucas and Rhonda, with Ms. Lou Ellen.”

  “Oh, right.” He nodded. “She’s fractured her hip, I’m pretty sure. It’ll probably mean surgery.”

  He signed a paper and placed it with his pen on the counter. “I’m Cliff.” He held out his hand.

  I shook it. “Yes, I read your nameplate,” I said, pointing to the upper right pocket of his shirt.

  He peered down. “Right.”

  “I wanted to ask about Mr. Franklin,” I said. “I was there when you brought him out of the river.”

  He glanced around behind me, looking for his partner, I presumed.

  “Do you know who first found him?” I asked.

  “Just some fisherman.”

  I nodded.

  “The body was badly decomposed,” he added.

  “You think he committed suicide?” I asked.

  “You family?” he responded.

  “Distant,” I answered.

  “But I’m acquainted with his good friend, Tom Sawyer. He’s really upset about the death and I just thought I’d try to get some answers for him.”

  He nodded as if he understood.

  “I don’t know if it’s suicide or not. It really isn’t my place to say. I just put his body in the ambulance. Truthfully though, I think it’ll be hard to tell. He had been in there three days. Something had eaten off his ear, he had a lot of cuts and his head had a really large bump on the back of it—”

  “Did you check his airways?” I interrupted. I asked this because I remembered working in an emergency room for a summer term in college.

  He seemed confused.

  “For foam?” I added. “In his mouth or in his nose?”

  A drowning victim was brought in and they were able to conclude that he was alive at the time of his drowning because the foam is considered to have formed due to the mixing of air with water. When we wiped it away, it kept returning. I later learned that this was not conclusive, but it still did present important clues to the cause of death.

  “Foam?” he replied, as if he didn’t really know what I was asking. “No, no foam. But after that much time in the river . . .” He paused.

  “To tell you the truth, I didn’t really spend much time with the body. Sheriff Montgomery and a few of his men were already there and they just told us to take him to the morgue at the hospital in West Memphis. I only got a real close look at him when we got to the hospital and took him out of the body bag.”

  I heard his partner, Becky, yell for him from around the corner. Apparently, they had received another call.

  “How long was the sheriff there before the ambulance arrived?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure, but I think his deputy was with him.” He gathered the pen and notebook he had left on the counter.

  “So, you don’t know how long he had been there before you got the call?” I asked.

  He was anxious to get away. “No, but I think it was awhile. He had rolled the body out on the banks. It was a mess at the scene. There were newspeople there by the time we arrived.”

  He glanced around me.

  “One more thing,” I asked, knowing he was not going to talk with me much longer. “Did you find anything in his suit jacket when you found him?”

  I remembered that Clara saw him put something in his jacket the last time he was seen alive.

  Cliff thought for a second. “No, I don’t look through the belongings of patients, that’s somebody else’s job. But I don’t remember him wearing a jacket,” he said. “Was he wearing a suit?” he asked, seeming confused.

  I was just about to answer that I was certain I had seen the victim in a jacket when I saw him on the banks, but he stopped me.

  “Look, my partner’s through with her smoke break. Ever since she and Fisk got engaged a month or so ago, she’s been smoking a lot more than usual. And she rolls her own, takes forever,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Anyway, we got a call, but I saw that the pathologist from West Memphis is working here today. You could ask him about the foam. It’s Dr. Lehman.” He hurried past me.

  “Thank you,” I replied as he turned the corner. I watched as he joined his partner and wondered if he meant Deputy Fisk as the man Becky was engaged to. Then I walked away, deciding a marriage between an ambulance attendant and a lawman was none of my business.

  I was walking back to Mary in the waiting room when Rhonda and Lucas came around the corner. Ms. Lou Ellen had indeed fractured her hip and was on
her way to surgery. They were told that we could wait for her upstairs in another area.

  We quickly left the emergency department and went to the surgical waiting area. It was three hours before we got word that she was in the recovery room and was doing fine.

  THIRTEEN

  The surgery was a success. Since it was not a fracture of the femoral neck, but rather a break that occurred farther down, the doctor used a screw that extended across the fracture into the head of the leg bone. The screw was then attached to a plate that stretched down the bone to provide support. This surgery was slightly less complicated than the complete hip joint replacement, and her prognosis was very good that she would be able to return to her normal activities.

  Once we received the news, Mary waited for Ms. Lou Ellen in the room she had been assigned, Rhonda and Lucas went for lunch, and without fully understanding what I was doing, I made my way down to the hospital morgue to see if I could find Dr. Lehman, the medical examiner who had pronounced Mr. Franklin dead at the hospital in West Memphis. I wasn’t sure why I thought I needed to talk to the coroner, what I planned on asking him, but I sensed a leading from somewhere, a need to know that I decided to honor.

  It was a long, meandering hallway from the elevator to the morgue. Like most hospitals, the area where the dead are kept was dark, and cold, and unsettling. I followed signs and directions until I got to the office door of the hospital pathologist. I knocked.

  “Yes,” a male voice responded.

  “Hello,” I said as I opened the door.

  A man was sitting at the desk.

  “Dr. Lehman?” I asked, stepping in.

  “Uh-huh.” He was sorting through papers. He didn’t look up.

  “My name is Rose Franklin,” I said. “I wondered if I could ask you a couple of questions.”

  He raised his head. He was an older gentleman with thinning gray hair. He wore glasses and his face was red and splotchy.

  “I’m a nurse,” I said, thinking that my medical profession might take the edge off what I was going to ask.

  He didn’t respond.

  “A friend of mine, a family member, was brought into the hospital at West Memphis a couple of days ago.” I closed the door and moved a little closer to his desk.