The Vanishing Violinist

by Sara Hoskinson Frommer

  The paramedics were loading Pruitt into the ambulance now, with a backboard under him, an oxygen mask over his face, a brace around his neck, and a blanket covering the rest of him.

  “How’s he doing?” Fred asked.

  “He might make it to the hospital,” the man who had gone to school with Pruitt said. He climbed into the back of the ambulance with the stretcher. When the other paramedic slammed the doors and climbed into the driver’s seat, and the siren wailed, the students dispersed quickly and silently, leaving Root standing alone on the curb.

  “I can’t believe it,” she said. “Kyle. He’s so young.” She turned her face away for a moment, and then faced Fred, her eyes shining. “Sir, I’d like to go to the hospital.”

  “As soon as Ketcham arrives.” Heading back to the unit she had driven, Fred quickly scanned the street for skid marks. Nothing. The driver hadn’t even tried to stop. It wasn’t dusk yet. No way the creep wouldn’t have seen the heavy, redheaded Pruitt.

  Three units pulled up. Fred quickly filled Johnny Ketcham in on the little they had. “Only witnesses might be those kids, but I’ll give you odds they didn’t see it happen.” He left the investigation of the scene in Ketcham’s competent hands. It didn’t look as if he’d find much, but you never could tell.

  “Okay, Root, let’s move it,” he told her, deliberately keeping it brisk. Was she emotionally involved with Kyle? He had no idea. “I’m afraid Pruitt’s going to be the only one who can tell us who hit him.” If he lives.

  In the hospital’s limited emergency room, it quickly became apparent that they weren’t going to get anywhere near Kyle Pruitt for some time. A soft-spoken, middle-aged nurse, whose ankles bulged over the tops of her white oxfords, told them he was alive, but still unconscious. They were welcome to sit in the waiting room. Fred pulled rank on her.

  “I want Officer Root closer than that, in case he regains consciousness,” he told her. “She won’t get in your way, but I want her to hear anything he says, even if it doesn’t seem to make sense. It’s important. Sergeant Pruitt is the victim of a hit-and-run driver.”

  The nurse sighed. “I don’t think it’s going to do any good,” she said. “But you can stay if you want to, honey,” she told Jill Root. “We’ll give you a chair where you’ll hear him if he makes any noise. You want some coffee?”

  “Maybe later,” Root said. “Thanks.”

  “You know his family?” the nurse asked her. “We’re going to need someone to sign the forms.”

  “I’ll tell them,” Fred answered. “You let me know if anything happens, good or bad.”

  The nurse was opening her mouth to respond when Root said, “Yes, sir.”

  “And you take it easy,” Fred told Root. “This could be a long night. I’ll send another officer to let you go for some supper.”

  “I’ll be all right.”

  “I know you will. But you won’t do us any good if you fall asleep.”

  “Maybe I’d better have some of that coffee, after all.” She looked uncertain.

  Fred nodded, and left. He stopped in at the station to get the Pruitts’ address and fill the others in, especially Captain Warren Altschuler, his chief of detectives. They’d already heard some of it from the dispatcher. With a wave of his hand, Altschuler okayed whatever overtime was needed.

  “Keep me informed,” he said.

  “Okay if I go with you?” Detective Chuck Terry said, his brown face grim and his voice even huskier than usual. “Kyle’s dad was my Scout leader.”

  “I’d appreciate it, and I’m sure they will.” Times like these made Fred feel more than ever how much a stranger he still was in Oliver.

  Kyle Pruitt, pushing forty, though he looked younger, still lived with his parents in the modest frame house in which he had grown up. The Hoosier bungalow was L-shaped, with a long porch inside the L and two doors from the porch, one into a room with a double bed visible through the window, the other into what looked like a living room. Terry knocked on the living room door.

  It was opened by a short, round, graying woman whose smile showed teeth too perfect to be her own. She was wearing a full-length flowered apron not unlike the demin one Fred wore for serious baking. Wiping her fingers on it, she took Terry by the hand.

  “Well, hello, Chuck,” she said, apparently not at all alarmed to see two police officers standing together on her front porch. She stood back and held the door wide. “Come on in. Kyle’s out, but I expect him back any minute. He’s late for supper now, and he knew I was fixing fried chicken and biscuits. It’s all ready. Can you stay?” Her warm smile included Fred. “You always loved my biscuits, Chuck.”

  “Yes, ma’am, I do,” Terry said, and stepped inside, with Fred following. “Is Mr. Pruitt at home?”

  “Well, sure. Sam, come see who’s here!”

  The man who came into the living room was Kyle, aged by twenty years or so. The red hair was faded with gray, and flab had turned to downright fat. But Fred would have recognized that wide grin even out of context. He hated what had to come next. At least they would hear it together.

  “Mrs. Pruitt, Mr. Pruitt, I’m Detective Lieutenant Fred Lundquist,” he said. And before they could glad-hand him, “We have some bad news.” He paused, and saw the fear enter their eyes. They were as ready as they were going to be.

  “About Kyle?” His father tightened his lips.

  “Yes, sir. He was hit by a car this afternoon.”

  Mrs. Pruitt gasped. “Is he—”

  “No, ma’am. He was still alive when I left the hospital, but it’s very serious.”

  “We’ll take you over there,” Terry said. “Let’s just turn off your stove.” He ducked past them into the next room as if he were a member of the family, and Mrs. Pruitt hurried after him, untying her apron behind her back.

  “What happened?” Sam Pruitt asked. “It was that bike, wasn’t it? He did some damnfool stunt on that bike.”

  “No, sir,” Fred said. “He wasn’t on his bike.”

  “I ought to know if my son was riding a bike,” Pruitt said, his tone increasingly angry.

  “There wasn’t any bike when I saw him,” Fred said carefully, but he didn’t doubt Mr. Pruitt. What had happened to Kyle’s bicycle? It certainly explained a lot. Most of his injuries had been to his leg, low on his body. And the force of his fall made more sense if it had started from the seat of a bicycle.

  “Whaddya mean, when you saw him? There sure as hell was when he rode off on it. Did you ask the guy who hit him?”

  “No, sir, we couldn’t. The driver didn’t stop.”

  “Didn’t stop! Oh, my God.” Pruitt’s face crumpled. “Did you hear that, Barbara?” he asked Mrs. Pruitt as she came back into the room with Terry. “He didn’t stop. Hit our boy and didn’t even stop.” He reached out to her blindly. Shorter by inches, she pulled his head down to her shoulder and held him while he wept.

  11

  At breakfast the next morning, Joan learned what Fred had been doing the night before. OLIVER POLICE OFFICER NEAR DEATH the local headline screamed, and beneath it, HIT & RUN DRIVER SOUGHT, with a fresh-faced, serious picture of Kyle Pruitt at the ceremony when he was promoted to sergeant and another of him looking even younger, as smiling Officer Friendly, surrounded by big-eyed children at the elementary school. In a third, Fred and Charles Terry, the tall black detective who had interviewed the Gilbert and Sullivan pit orchestra last summer, were escorting Sergeant Pruitt’s parents into the hospital.

  The accompanying story emphasized the gravity of his injuries. It quoted Fred as saying that the police were searching for clues to the driver, and asking anyone with any information about the accident to contact the Oliver Police Department immediately. They urgently needed to find the bicycle Sergeant Pruitt had been riding, for the evidence it might yield about the automobile whose driver had left the scene after hitting him. And especially, they hoped to talk to two boys who had called in the accident, but not left their names.

&nb
sp; “Turn on the radio,” Joan said to Andrew. “I want to hear the news.” But the Oliver College station provided no more information. The downed officer was still fighting for his life, the young announcer said. His comrades in the Oliver Police Department were still baffled by the accident and by the disappearance of Sergeant Pruitt’s bicycle, a blue Schwinn ten-speed. Joan wondered whether Pruitt was part of Oliver’s bicycle patrol. Would they use a sergeant for that?

  “Did you know him?” Andrew asked.

  “Not really. I met him a couple of times. Oh, Andrew, I feel so sorry for his parents! I know how I’d feel if it happened to you.” She felt her eyes begin to fill up.

  Andrew reached across Grandma Zimmerman’s old oak kitchen table and patted her hand.

  “Mom, it’s okay. I’m right here, honest.”

  Blinking back tears, she said, “I know. It just got to me all of a sudden.”

  “Guess you won’t be seeing much of Fred for a while,” he said matter-of-factly, and buttered his toast.

  “Guess not.” This is the part I’ve already lived through, except that Ken would have been comforting the family instead of going after some drunk. “Unless they catch the driver right away.”

  “Fat chance,” Andrew said. He poured her a second cup of coffee. “Did you read the story?”

  “Most of it. Why?”

  “They don’t have any witnesses at all. Even the kids who called 911 disappeared. You think they stole Pruitt’s bike?”

  “Maybe,” she said thoughtfully. “But it doesn’t fit with calling 911. Maybe the driver stopped long enough to remove the only thing he could have left any evidence on.”

  “And left a cop dying in the gutter?”

  “They don’t say he was in uniform, Andrew. He was out riding his bike. Some people have it in for bikers. And I’ll bet he looked dead. The driver thought he was dead, and then he thought, why stop? Why ruin my life? What difference can it make?” She was warming to it. “But if I’m the driver, and I stop to pick up the bike, I must have something to put it in. So I’m driving something big—a station wagon, or a van, or a pickup.”

  “Yeah, or a Winnebago.”

  “Or a moving van. Or a car pulling a trailer.”

  Andrew’s eyes lit up. “Or a Honda with a bike rack.”

  “I suppose. And you may be right about the kids, too. Or somebody else could have ridden off on it while they were calling 911.”

  “I’ll bet Fred’s really looking for those kids,” he said. “So, Mom, tell me about Bruce. You haven’t said anything about yesterday.”

  That’s right, Joan thought. And there was nothing in the news about Camila, either. Are they keeping that quiet for a reason? Or did she show up, after all? Or did the news about Pruitt bump what was already of scant interest to Oliver?

  “I think he’s all right, but things keep happening up there. Last night they couldn’t find Camila. The police came over to the Osbornes, and I didn’t get home until late.”

  “So, is she back?” Andrew didn’t volunteer where he’d been that late, and Joan didn’t ask. The only reason she had any idea of his schedule was that they were saving the cost of a dorm room by having him live at home. He was a good kid. She didn’t want to cramp his style just because her budget was tight.

  “I don’t know. Kyle Pruitt’s bigger news in Oliver. But they’ll tell me at the Senior Citizens’ Center if it made the news up there.” Most of the old folks, Joan knew, watched the TV news out of Indianapolis as faithfully as they checked the obituaries in the local paper. Quickly, she scanned page two, glad to see that none of her old regulars had died over the weekend. She stashed her lunch in her shoulder bag and set off on foot for work.

  As usual, she cut through the park that separated her street from Oliver’s tiny downtown, but nothing about the park was usual anymore. Few trees remained standing since the tornado that had torn through the park last summer. Instead, huge piles of firewood the town had cut from the stricken trees would fuel the handsome limestone fireplace in the new picnic shelter for many years to come, and excess wood had been offered to townspeople with fireplaces and woodstoves, as well. Memorial donations were being sought for new trees. Joan had given money for a sycamore in memory of her parents, and she was touched when Andrew and Rebecca together donated a maple in memory of their dad. It would be a good twenty years before these saplings provided much shade, though. She’d be almost old enough then to attend the Senior Citizens’ Center for her own sake. Meanwhile, the sun beat down on her when she walked to and from work. July and August had been scorchers, but she rejoiced in September’s relative cool; today she was hardly perspiring when she arrived at the center.

  “Welcome back, Joanie,” old Annie Jordan greeted her. Annie was already ensconced in her usual seat by the window, with her knitting needles flying. Four needles today, and a tube of bright red worsted yarn hanging below them, one of many new mittens Annie supplied her grandchildren every year. When Annie pulled out one needle and turned the mitten to start knitting on the next, Joan saw a cable already twisting its way up the back of the mitten.

  “You weren’t sick, I hope,” said Margaret Duffy, the old teacher who had helped her get the job as director of the center. “We worried about you.”

  “Thank you, Margaret, but I was fine. Had a little family business to attend to.”

  Margaret nodded, folding her hands in her ample lap. It was hard to imagine Margaret really worried. She was one of the calmest people Joan knew. Always had been, even when dealing with thirty sixth-graders.

  “You take off to see Rebecca’s fiddler?” Annie asked. Rebecca had made a big hit with the women of the center when she’d come to Oliver for the quilt show and had helped them finish the quilt the orchestra raffled off.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, I did.”

  “You think he’s good enough for our girl? We don’t want her mixed up with anyone who won’t treat her right.”

  “He seems like a fine young man.” She wasn’t about to tell them the police had practically accused Bruce of doing away with the competition.

  “Well, then, I hope he beats the pants off all the rest of ’em.” Pulling a cable needle out of her topknot, Annie turned another twist in the red cable.

  “Me, too.” Joan smiled at Annie and sat down at her desk to work through the mail. As others began arriving for the day’s programs, it became clear that the unscheduled topic of the day would be Kyle Pruitt and his parents, whom these folks clearly knew well.

  “Sam and Barbara are dear people,” one woman said. “I hate to see them have to go through something like this.”

  “Salt of the earth,” a man answered her. “I used to work for old George Pruitt, before he gave up the family farm. He expected to hand it down to Sam, but Sam never took to the farm. Had his heart set on being a mechanic. And he’s a good’un.”

  “I wouldn’t trust my Buick to anyone else,” another man said.

  “Barbara’s such a homebody,” the first woman said. “All she ever wanted was a house full of children, but she never had but Kyle, and him late in life.”

  “That’s mighty risky,” Annie Jordan put in. “Could have been a Down’s baby, you know.”

  “That’s what the doctor told her, but she was bound and determined to have him, and then that was the end of their family.”

  “Probably decided they’d better stop while they were ahead,” Annie said.

  “All I know is she’s been scared something would happen to him ever since he joined the police force. It’ll half kill her if he doesn’t make it.”

  Poor woman, Joan thought. A new worry crept into her mind. I’m getting awfully old to have a baby. Do I have the right to risk another one at my age? Still, if Fred wants children of his own … they’d do amniocentesis, of course. But could I bring myself to act on it, if we got bad news? Is there nothing simple about this whole business?

  “You’re a million miles away,” Annie said, and Joan jerk
ed herself back.

  “I’m sorry, Annie.”

  “You thinking about all the fuss and feathers up there in Indianapolis?” Margaret asked.

  Relieved to change the subject, Joan asked, “What did you hear?”

  “You know, about that missing violin. Why, is there more?”

  She never missed anything in school, either, Joan thought. “Well, I don’t know, exactly,” she said. “Last night they couldn’t find the violinist who owned it. I listened to the local news this morning, but it was all about Sergeant Pruitt.” So maybe Camila did show up, after all.

  “Brazilian, isn’t she?” asked Alvin Hannauer, the retired professor of anthropology who had known Joan’s father when he was visiting faculty at Oliver College all those years ago. Like Margaret, Alvin was a member of the center’s board of directors.

  “Yes,” Joan said. “Camila’s from Rio de Janeiro.” She pronounced the Rs as she always had, not with the Portuguese H sound that had entranced Andrew—though, of course, it was really Camila who had entranced Andrew.

  “Those Brazilians are an impulsive lot,” said a trim retired army officer who played at bridge and worked at charming the ladies several days a week. “Like as not, she threw up her hands and took the first plane home.”

  As she had at the Osbornes’ house, Joan felt oddly obliged to stand up for Camila. “I can’t believe that. Bruce—that’s my daughter’s fiancé—said she was all broken up when she discovered the violin was missing, but she came out on the stage and played on a borrowed instrument so beautifully that if the audience had been voting, the whole competition would have been over right then and there. I can’t believe she’d throw all that away.”

  “I heard she was a millionaire banker’s daughter,” the retired officer said. “Why would a girl like that care about winning a rinky-dink Hoosier fiddling contest? Let her daddy snap his fingers, and she’d hop on a plane just like that.”