“Still cold?” David asked, tightening the blanket, touching Jill’s cheek.
“Freezing. The stars are pretty.”
“We’ll go back soon.”
Kerri and Alex had rushed to check on them. Now were inside the brick structure behind them, examining Reid’s body, and Deborah’s.
Blood. So much blood in there. On the floor, the walls, splattered on flowers…a hideous, heart-wrenching sight. Jill shivered. Another few minutes to wait until the police could drive them back, which was good. The wait would be good. Deep breaths, deep breaths…they needed this. In a way, watching the police and EMTs and CSU people helped. They were life, rushing around, no drama, just doing their jobs.
David’s hand went under Jill’s blanket to her wrist. Felt her pulse. “One hundred,” he murmured. “Better.”
“Getting there,” she said. “Think I can turn my phone off now?”
He snickered. She’d forgotten it.
She felt his hand slide under her parka to her breast pocket, and remove her phone. He held it up, way up to the sky, and flicked on their baby app. There, bright and surrounded by stars, was Jesse sleeping in his crib. A warm, happy, innocent little child, knowing he was loved, hugging his Fawzie.
“There’s our star.” David nuzzled Jill with his phone arm still up. She felt her eyes fill, let out a delighted aww…
He flicked for a close-up. Jesse sucking happily on his thumb.
Loving little squeals from Jill.
He lowered the phone.
“Keep it up. It’s so beautiful.”
“My arm’s aching, sweetheart.”
They were still huddled over Jesse in Jill’s phone when a clatter sounded, and two gurneys carrying body bags were pushed from the brick structure. Reid and Deborah. They barely looked up; didn’t want to. Didn’t want to hear the crunch over gravel as the gurneys bumped away. Re-lost themselves flicking through the comfort of precious baby pictures, barely hearing a voice call to them.
“Huh?” David looked up as Kerri bent to them.
“You okay?” She smiled and patted Jill’s shoulder. “Recovering?”
“We’re okay.” Jill glanced at the tops of their blood-soaked scrubs and parkas. “Hot showers will help.”
“We’ll need you to give statements. Will you be available or are you going to crash?”
“We’ll be available.” David checked the time, sharing his surprise that it was only 9:24. Astonishingly, they’d been gone barely two hours. “We’re on call,” he said, cracking a faint smile. “Can you beat that?”
Kerri was surprised. “Can you handle that?”
Oh yes, they assured her. They needed to be back, to calm in their usual routine with friends and normal fatigue and happy events.
Alex came out the door feet away. “Findings so far,” he said, snapping off his gloves, bending to them next to Kerri. “Looks like Deborah shot Robin first. Reid chased her into their Shangri-La where she shot him too. Just blasted him, no sign of a struggle.”
Grim, unconscious nods. A long, thoughtful moment. People can be so crazy, wreck their own lives.
Jill turned and craned at the lit arch above them. The CSU was busy in there. Voices. Plants and Reid’s tools getting shoved around. Clank! Technicians giving off their familiar racket.
She turned back and gave a shudder. “Death I’ve seen in the hospital, but that was a first for me.”
They looked at her.
“Someone shot to death, dying before my eyes. Horrible.” She shook her head. “Four people,” she murmured as if not quite believing. “Deborah killed four people.”
“Five, including herself,” David said quietly.
Kerri gave a huge sigh and rose, looking tiredly back to the lit dome of busy cops and three gurneys getting wheeled away.
“Welcome to our world,” she shrugged, and went to join them. Alex retreated too, back inside to confer with the crime scene people.
And Jill noticed a star. Twinkling and shining brightly as if elated. She gazed up at it.
“Think that star is Jody?” she asked, pointing.
David found it. Hugged her and said, “Mm-m, could be.”
“Shine on, Silver Girl,” Jill breathed, feeling her heart ache.
The star twinkled and twinkled.
It didn’t help. Didn’t ease the hole in Jill’s heart. Jody, she thought. Celie. Young, eager lives, destroyed.
It was over, all of it, and she wanted to weep again.
She felt David see her expression. His arm tightened around her, and his free hand squeezed hers. I feel the same, he seemed to be saying. Cry for both of us.
Then a sweet-faced young cop named Ricky came to drive them back.
By five after ten, showered and in new scrubs, they were ducking into a labor room. Woody stopped palpating the patient’s belly, piped something to a nurse, and rushed into the hall with them.
“You’re safe,” he spewed emotionally, looking drained. “It was on the news, shot fired, cops in the street outside their place. We’ve been calling and calling the cops. Ray Zienuc told Tricia to stop calling, it was tying them up, and she burst into tears.”
He looked ready to cry too. Jill and David hugged him. The nurse called, David grinned and gave him an affectionate little shove, and he ducked back into the labor room.
They’d already called frantic Sam and Tricia, scrubbing in for surgery, and Charlie, Gary and Ramu, who’d just run down to the ER. Hearts were gladdened, hearts were heavy. The hospital had lost such a good, sweet friend. As for the Wylies, Charlie had asked…how could two people have so much and be so miserable?
“How much blood?” Sam had said over the phone.
“A lot,” David told him. Jill had comforted Tricia over her phone, seeing a nurse give her and David double-takes. They were both still wet-haired and dripping from their fastest showers ever, but their bodies – alive and warm, 98.6! – would dry their scrubs in no time.
Minutes after seeing Woody, they were called.
And delivered a healthy, squalling little boy. Jill’s eyes welled up in joy. She kissed the new mom, and David hugged the new dad, gowned and in there with them.
“Wow, a whole new beginning!” the new dad kept saying, so excited he knocked over an instrument table. Forceps, clamps, scissors, suture material, and sterile gauze pads went crashing to the floor. “Oh! Sorry, sorry!” He was so embarrassed.
They grinned and told him, It’s nothing. May you always have just small stuff.
By eleven-thirty they were draped over Jesse’s crib, loving him, wanting so to hug him. Surprise: he must have sensed them, because he stirred and woke up. “Mammy. Dayee.” His little face looked up. He grinned sleepily.
“How’d he know we were here?” David murmured, picking him up.
“Radar? Our child has radar?”
“I’m getting that feeling.”
They held him between them for long, joyful moments, then put him back in his crib.
“Pretty soon he’ll be climbing out,” David sighed, watching Jesse snuggle back to sleep with Fawzie.
Jill rolled her eyes and laughed.
They went to their on call room, to grab whatever sleep they could before getting called again.
“Stay in bed!” Gary Phipps told them over the phone. “We’ll take the next one. Sleep!”
So they squirmed and mashed pillows and got comfortable, under a blanket on their two gurney mattresses pushed together.
David started complaining. “Perfect would have been to sleep at home, in our own bed.”
“Nah,” Jill whispered, her breath warm on his face. “Home is where you are.”
EPILOGUE:
SIX MONTHS LATER, EARLY OCTOBER
“A two-year-old with scissors,” Tricia sniffed reprovingly. “It’s a crime. I’m gonna tell.”
“It was Kerri’s idea,” David reminded her, kneeling on the rug with his arms around Jesse. Who stood, straight-kneed and determined in his
tiny toddler jeans, wearing a look of almost comic concentration as David showed him a two-handed approach to wielding the big scissors. His little fingers under David’s grasped each orange scissor loop, and opened and closed the long blades. Snap! He did it again. Snap!
“Awesome,” Jill hooted, sprawled four feet away on their rug, holding the end of a long red ribbon tied to a chair.
“Awthum!” Jesse repeated, or something close to it. He grinned around at everyone like the happiest little pumpkin.
“Now to use it.” Sam screwed his face. Like two fretful grannies, he and Tricia both left their places on the couch and knelt closer on the rug. “You sure this is a good idea?”
“No, they’ve lost their minds.” Woody was already on the rug, hovering and annoying and getting in David’s way, ready to grab the scissors.
As if sensing their skepticism, Jesse stepped determinedly up to the ribbon, his hands under David’s who carefully helped him open the long blades, then close them over the ribbon, and then slowly squeeze.
The two ends of ribbon dropped to the rug. He’d done it. On his third try. He gave a little hoot and hopped around, grinning a mile wide. “Awthum, awthum!”
“Can I breathe now?” Tricia whooped, elated and hugging him, releasing him to go running for hugs from the others.
Jill and David had reassured them that scissors were kept on the highest shelves, in the highest drawers, and that Jesse had been told that such sharp things were only for adults. Yesterday, David told them, one of his playgroup teachers had used a scissor, and he’d shaken his little finger at her, saying, “Nooo, mammy an’ dayee!”
But today and Kerri’s idea were too special. Jesse was going to make it even more special. Special wasn’t even the word for what they were all feeling…
“Another child’s going to help him with the scissors?” Woody asked, getting to his feet.
“Yup,” Jill answered, getting up too. “She’s older…five.”
“Oh well then,” Sam said.
They all pulled on their jackets, glad to be out of scrubs and in nice jeans – except for Jill, in a black skirt and high black boots, her hair spilling down over her gray turtleneck sweater. David looked handsome in his chambray shirt, and Tricia actually wore lipstick. They got Jesse into his little Mighty Mac parka as he squirmed, grabbing for the soft brush Jill was using to brush his hair. He complained just a little. Wanted to brush his own hair.
Out to the sunny, getting-chillier October day they went. The sky seemed bluer than Jill had ever seen it, the air from the crisping, browning leaves sweeter and cooler and more pure. Her hand was through David’s as he carried Jesse, yakking with the others as they covered the block to the hospital. There was a crowd gathered before a new side entrance. They bypassed it by ducking through the ambulance bay.
On the first floor, in a pretty Geriatrics meeting room, they found Edna Polsen. She was having fun, singing just a bit feebly and prancing – more like tottering - before a small, appreciative audience. “Forty million Frenchmen know a thing or twoooo…”
She stopped excitedly when she saw them. “My dear, dear friends,” she trilled emotionally, introducing each of the Group of Five to applause and glowing smiles. “Got me out of my rut after that terrible…tragedy last April.” Her crinkly eyes welled tears. “Got me involved here, and out, and oh my, doesn’t it feel good to be out?”
Thrilled nodding, tears and clapping. “Yes, yes!” And then a huge AWW… when she introduced Jesse.
Who gave a sweet two-year-old wave and ducked his face to David’s neck.
“Everybody ready?” Jill smiled and asked, scanning the faces.
They were. Some needed help with their jackets, which was warmly given – Sam flirted with a pretty eighty-year-old who blushed - then out the whole group went. Slowly, to accommodate those with walkers.
They were a little late. No problem, they’d only missed dignitaries giving windy speeches. They’d be in time for Willard Simpson, though.
The crowd was bigger than when they’d passed it. Fans, parents and children. And cops, smiling, including Kerri and Alex who pushed their way through to them for hugs and greetings. Photographers and TV vans were there too, and security people with earpieces because the mayor had spoken.
Now and last, Willard Simpson was at the podium, pink-cheeked and thrilled, welcoming all well wishers to this wonderful day.
“The Merrill Children’s Pavilion,” he intoned, waving his arm to the beautiful entry under a seemingly floating marquee. “Gift of a young friend who genuinely loved us, her gift matched by five corporations so far.” He smiled, found Jill and David holding Jesse, and his face brightened more behind his spectacles as he bent to his mike. “Our philanthropic goal is forty million, so continuing contributions are still important, no matter how big or small. Give with your whole hearts, people. The measure of a country is how we care for our children.”
“And now…” He waved his arm again, pointing to the Pavilion entrance and the tree-lined atrium inside. “We are thrilled to announce that – we’re open!”
Cheers and applause. One man in his nineties grinned and held up his walker.
“We, ahem, need a little help here.” Simpson’s gaze went from Jill, David, and beaming Edna at their side to another set of parents in the crowd. He smiled. “Can I call up some special friends to help cut the ribbon?”
They moved through the crowd with Edna, and set Jesse down. The second set of parents motioned their little girl next to Jesse, and she smiled at him. She was pretty, with a bright pink bow encircling her bald head. Then Edna – visibly emotional - and David carefully helped the children cut the red ribbon.
Wilder cheers, tears and applause. Photographers and every craning camera caught the picture. Caught too the picture of Jill hugging David, Jesse and Edna – “health for all!” Simpson intoned - and the picture of the little girl and Jesse hugging, and then the picture of David, lifting Jesse high in the air, grinning up to him, making him laugh.
The pictures would appear in the news the whole world over.
Author’s Note
Hello, and thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed the book. If you have the time to write a review, let me know and I will thank you from the bottom of my heart. Writing is so solitary! Your feedback would cheer me no end; also re-charge my batteries to keep going with the next book. Your review on Amazon or Goodreads would also help others decide if they would enjoy the book.
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~ Joyce
About the Author
J.A. (Joyce Anne) Schneider is a former staffer at Newsweek Magazine, a wife, mom, and book lover. Words and story ideas are always teeming in her head – “a colorful place!” she says. She loves thrillers…which may seem odd, since she was once a major in French Literature - wonderful but sometimes heavy stuff. Now, for years, she has become increasingly fascinated with medicine and forensic science. Decades of being married to a physician who loves explaining medical concepts and reliving his experiences means that there’ll be medical angles even in “regular” thrillers that she writes. She lives with her family in Connecticut.
EMBRYO 5: Silver Girl
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapte
r 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Epilogue
Author's Note
About the Author
EMBRYO 5: SILVER GIRL (EMBRYO: A Raney & Levine Thriller) Page 21