I jerked my glove off and tossed it aside, then put two fingers against the cool skin at her carotid. No pulse. I readjusted my fingers to try again. They were already as cold as her neck. I’d never seen a dead person up close, but I’d seen plenty of dead animals closer than I’d liked. Despite my love of target shooting, it didn’t translate to hunting. Dad took me one time, and I’ll never forget the young pronghorn antelope’s eyes as the light faded from them. It had chilled me to the bone. They’d looked like Ivanka’s did, and hers were having the same effect on me now.
Suddenly I felt very exposed, and I jumped up, looking around me. The blinds on the back windows were closed. I still didn’t see any lights on. I could see in the kitchen through the glass half of the door, but when I pressed my face to the glass for a better look, I couldn’t see anyone inside. I tried the back door. Unlocked. I hesitated. I had no business in there, and there was a woman out here I might be able to save. I released the knob. Quickly, I scanned the backyard. It was covered in a blanket of crisp unbroken white. No trees. No shrubs. No furniture. Just weathered boards jutting up to a puffy gray sky. I didn’t see anyone, not even any tracks save my own, but that didn’t make the vulnerable, watched feeling go away.
I dialed my phone. It went to Jack’s voice mail. “Call me. I went to visit a friend of Nadine’s, and she’s dead in her backyard. Oh, and it’s Ivanka from Love’s last week, the dancer.”
I hung up and dialed 911.
A woman answered in a drawl. “9-1-1, what’s your emergency?”
“I’ve found a woman in her backyard at 1000 Shasta. She’s not breathing. Please send help.” I dropped the phone and kneeled beside Ivanka. At close range, her cheap perfume nearly knocked me over, and I breathed through my mouth to avoid it. I tilted her head back, listened for the breath I knew wasn’t there and started CPR.
***
A bundled-up female police officer arrived five minutes later. I was still doing chest compressions and life breaths with Ivanka, and I didn’t catch the woman’s name. I didn’t even get much of a look at her before she took over the CPR. By the time the ambulance arrived, five minutes after the officer, it was clear nothing would help Ivanka, or Beth, or whatever her real name was. In the meantime, I had slowly but surely nearly frozen to death. I moved as close as I could to the house, out of the howling wind and pelting ice, and wrapped my arms around myself.
A second officer arrived, this one male but equally bundled. He conferred with the female officer for a moment out of my earshot. Her back was to me, but I saw her motion my way.
He walked over to me. “I’m Officer Jones. I’d like to ask you a few questions. We could talk here, or we could sit in my car where it’s warmer.”
My teeth chattered. “Emily Bernal. C-c-c-car.”
As we walked around to the front of the house, my phone rang.
“Do you need to get that?” the officer asked.
Probably. “No.” I let it go to voice mail.
We reached the squad car. Officer Jones, who looked roughly my age somewhere peeking out from all the winter clothing on his face, head, neck, hands, and body, opened the rear door for me, giving me an unwelcome surge of déjà vu. I frowned. To think I’d gone my whole life without getting in a cop car and was now being put in the backseat of one for the second time in a week.
He must have understood the look on my face, because he said, “Would you rather sit in front?”
“I would, thank you, if that’s all right.”
He shut the back door and opened the driver’s door, got in, and then opened the passenger door for me from the inside. I slipped in, too. He pulled off all his outerwear except his coat, and underneath I saw that not only was he about my age, but he looked like Channing Tatum. Definitely the hottest police officer I’d seen in Amarillo. Scratch that. That I’d seen, ever, anywhere.
He picked up a clipboard that was between us on the seat and clicked a ballpoint pen. “Just a few questions.”
“Absolutely.”
“Your full name, address, and birthdate?”
I told him.
“How did you know the deceased?”
“I didn’t.”
He glanced up from his paper. “How did you come to be in her backyard?”
Lately I’d had far too much need to use the coaching I’d heard Jack give his clients. He always stressed to volunteer as little information as possible to the cops, so I spoke judiciously. “One of her coworkers introduced us virtually, and she asked me to come by.”
“You’d never met her?”
My mind flashed to Ivanka’s face under the fluorescent lights in the Love’s parking lot, snow falling around us, her sashay as she took Wallace’s arm. Had she introduced herself to me? She had not. So I answered truthfully, if incompletely. “No.”
“Do you know what she wanted with you?”
I’d thought about this question long and hard while I gave Ivanka the breath of life. No way was I telling a random cop that Ivanka and I both held low opinions of some of their brethren. “Um, I work for a criminal attorney. My understanding was that she had run into some trouble and needed advice.”
He nodded. “You mentioned her coworker. Where did they work?”
“The Polo Club.”
“Ah.” He looked up at me, like he was trying to figure out if I was hiding a secret life as a dancer, too.
“I don’t work there.”
He pinned his eyes back to his clipboard. “Did you see anybody else when you got here?”
“No.”
“How’d you end up in the backyard?”
“I knocked on the front door but there was no answer. I knew she expected me, so I went around back in case she hadn’t heard me.”
He looked at me sideways without turning his head, his eyes narrowed to slits. “Do you always go into people’s backyards if they don’t answer the front door?”
Truthfully? Usually. “No,” I said.
He stopped writing. “And this time you did, because why?”
“It was freezing outside. I didn’t want to leave unless I’d tried every way I could think of to keep our appointment, but if she wasn’t there, I wanted to get back in the car with the heater on. And not have to come back later.”
He twirled the pen through his fingers, appearing to be lost in thought.
My phone rang again. I ignored it.
“Was there anything at all that you saw that led you to form an opinion as to how”—he glanced at and tapped a display screen mounted on his dashboard and facing him—“Beth McIntosh died?”
Other than ice? A hard concrete patio? Again, I stuck to the minimum responsive answer to his question. “No.”
“All right, we’re nearly done here, Ms. Bernal, if you’ll give me a few more minutes.”
“Sure.”
He began typing into the keypad of the device on his dashboard; I checked my voice mail. Two messages. The first was from Jack. Returning my call. Did I need him to come? Was I okay? I texted my response: No. Yes. But thanks.
The second one was Ava. Her phone was dead. She was calling from a pay phone at the bus station for a ride, and, from the sound of her voice, she was extremely cold. If my phone rang again, I would have to answer it. No fair leaving her standing out there dialing me over and over.
Officer Jones said, “So, this isn’t the first dead body you’ve found for us?”
“What?”
“It says here that we responded to a 911 call over the murder of Maria—”
“I didn’t make that call, and I never saw a dead body. I was unconscious on the floor. The person that murdered her almost got me, too.”
“Hmm. And last week you were brought in—”
“As a form of harassment.”
He read some more, and his lips moved.
“Listen, I have a friend who is expecting me to pick her up at the bus station. Hence my ringing phone. She’s waiting for me out in the cold. I hadn’t really antici
pated finding a dead person today. I want to help, I really do, but if we’re done, I do need to go.”
His eyes moved back and forth as he stared at the display. Acting as if he didn’t hear me, he said, almost fearfully, “You filed a complaint against Samson and Burrows?”
“I did, but it doesn’t have anything to do with”—I waved my hand in the general direction of Ivanka’s backyard—“this.”
He pursed his lips, nodding slowly, staring again at the screen. “Yeah, you’re probably right.” He pressed a button and the slight glow from his screen disappeared. “Someone will call you if we have any more questions, but this case looks like a pretty simple slip and fall. We get those in this kind of weather. Thank you, Ms. Bernal.”
“You’re welcome.”
I opened the door and got out, then leaned back in. “Merry Christmas, Officer Jones.”
“Merry Christmas to you, too.”
I walked to the Mustang, which was now frigid inside. I turned it on, with heater and defrost on full icy blast, Wallace’s comment to me earlier be damned. Only an hour or so had passed, yet a layer of ice covered my windshield. My phone made one of its inexplicable noises. I turned it over.
Laura: We are ALL looking forward to seeing you tomorrow. She ended with a smiley face.
I typed one-thumbed, keeping my other hand deep in my pocket as the temperature in the Mustang rose a nanodegree at a time. Me too!
I grabbed my ice scraper and hopped out again. I held my hand up and caught some precipitation. It was snow. Hallelujah. Winter driving in Amarillo and Lubbock, and some in Dallas, taught me to fear ice and respect snow. The weather forecast on the radio during the drive over here promised snow and freezing temps. Snow would improve the icy roads. Soon, anyway. Right now, I still had to contend with the exposed ice.
When I finished scraping, I did some shoulder shrugs and rolled my neck. The creepiness of finding Ivanka’s dead body was slowly dissipating, enough that I remembered my date with Jack and felt a flare of excitement. Then it hit me. I was picking up a houseguest for the evening. A handful of a houseguest. And then I was leaving for New Mexico in the morning. Ava and I would barely even get to talk. She’d think I was an incredibly rude and terrible hostess.
I couldn’t—I wouldn’t—cancel my first real date with Jack Holden. I supposed I could invite her to go with Jack and me tonight, but hopefully she’d be exhausted from traveling and want nothing but a soft bed and long winter’s night sleep. Ava liked men, liked them a whole lot, and they liked her back. I didn’t need that kind of pressure on my fledgling relationship. I sighed with a rising note of exasperation. I was being unfair. I’d cast Ava in a role, and she hadn’t even stepped onstage yet. I needed to chill. I would chill. Starting right now, I was chill.
I got back in the Mustang and put it in drive.
Chapter Twenty-three
I rolled well below the speed limit down Fourth toward Tyler and the Greyhound Bus Station. The station was only four blocks past the Maxor Building, where Jack and Snowflake would be doing whatever it was they did when the office functioned as their condo instead of workplace. The bus station itself occupied part of a block on the edge of Amarillo’s small downtown. It stood about two and a half stories high and had an art deco‑ish feel, with rounded corners and square blue tiles three-high around the bottom, sort of in the style of the restored Paramount Theater sign on Polk Street.
I turned right on Tyler. The bus station was just ahead, and I spotted Ava outside the front door but inside the recessed overhang. She wore an electric-blue jumpsuit and black leather coat, and she was stamping her feet in spike-heeled black boots. She didn’t exactly blend into the background, even if her outfit did match it. I coasted to a stop, threw the Mustang in park, and popped the trunk.
I climbed out and ran carefully to her. “Ava! What a fun surprise! Get in, you must be freezing.” I hugged her and grabbed her two suitcases, practically in the same motion.
“Yah, I freezing my bana, for true,” she said, her island lilt an odd sound here, like a scene from Cool Runnings. It took me a moment to remember “bana” was the West Indian word for “bottom,” too. “Thank you for coming for me.” In her accent, “thank” came out as “tank.”
“No problem.” I threw her bags in and slammed the trunk. I was back in my seat as fast as she was, but, then again, I was wearing retro moon boots I’d appropriated from my mom’s closet, not stilettos.
My phone made a weird noise from its perch on the console. A message from Nadine: How’d it go with Beth?
Oh God. She didn’t know about her friend yet. I typed: Call me.
Ava shut her door. “So, how you entertain an island girl in this town on Christmas Eve?”
As I groaned inwardly at Ava asking precisely the wrong question, the phone rang. It was Nadine, way faster than I’d hoped. I didn’t know which I dreaded more: telling Nadine about Beth, or telling Ava about my plans that evening. I decided to let Nadine go to voice mail. I’d call her back later.
Ava kept talking, leaving her first question behind us. “The weather here terrible,” she said. “How you stand it?”
“Most of the population isn’t familiar with the alternatives.”
“But you?”
I put the car in gear and coasted into motion on Tyler, then slowed at the corner. There was no traffic. I turned right onto Seventh Avenue. “I have no excuse, other than I’m broke.”
“Yah, Katie tell me your husband an anti-man.”
I opened my mouth then shut it.
“You got no idea what I talking about, do you?”
I turned right onto Taylor. Suddenly, the connection occurred to me, and the translation of the island slang made perfect sense. Katie had told her Rich was gay. I laughed.
“It took me a minute, but I got it. Yes, Rich likes men, and his guy has expensive taste, so they ran through our cash before I even caught on. But my divorce is final, and I’m pretty much back on my feet.”
“You living with your mother?”
“I am.” And not wanting to talk about it. “Are you still living with Rashidi?” I referred to the gorgeous UVI professor she sometimes dated who was a mutual friend of Katie’s, but not the father of Ava’s daughter.
She waffled her hand. “Roommates still. For now.”
Rats. I had hoped she was in a serious relationship. “So, your gig got weathered out tonight, huh?”
“Yah, the organizer, Phil, he cool, though. He reschedule me, and he pay me half.”
“What kind of group has a Christmas Eve party anyway? Most of Amarillo will be at church.”
She laughed. “Phil see me when he visit St. Marcos, and he know everybody. Got me booked for two weeks at parties in three states. He tell me they all private. That they, uh, swingers.”
“Swingers?”
“Yah, you know, people who trade partners.”
“Yeah, I know, but we have a client named Phil who runs a swingers group.”
“Sound like the same guy.”
Phil, Phil, Phil. I wondered if Nadine had any idea what she was getting into, or if it would even matter to her. “What I really want to know is how are you, and how is your baby?”
“She good, I good, my mother—she save my life. Don’t even think about having a baby without a grandmother near you house, I tell you.”
The loss of my baby had left a cold, empty space in my heart, and my fear of losing Betsy tugged the edges wider and wider. I’d love to have a baby anywhere, anytime, now that I knew I couldn’t. Or most likely couldn’t. But maybe I could have a big girl, maybe I could have Betsy. If I could help Jack and Wallace keep her in the states long enough for it to happen, and keep the whereabouts of Greg and Farrah a secret.
But I kept all of that inside and instead said, “Good advice. I’ll remember that. Are you and the father, um—”
I merged onto 287 and quickly veered onto the I-40 entrance ramp, then negotiated another careful merge. These icy flyw
ays were tricky today.
“Lord no. He worthless. So if you know a man need a woman who look good on his arm when he out spending his cash, I the one for the job.”
My stomach lurched. That was exactly what I was afraid she’d say. We drove in silence for a few minutes. A dinging noise from my dashboard panel grabbed my attention. I glanced down. Low-gas light. I switched on my right turn signal to exit at Bell for gas.
At the station, Ava ran inside. I huddled in the car for warmth while the gas pumped. A huge army-green panel van backed to the pump station catty-corner in front of my car. It was the kind of van that construction crews use. Them, and serial killers. A man who looked vaguely familiar exited and worked at the pump. Of course, just about everyone in Amarillo looked familiar to me. I either went to elementary school with them or knew them from their kids or I’d seen them at United Supermarket a couple of thousand times or they were Jack’s clients or family or, God forbid, victims of Jack’s clients.
This guy looked a little older than me. He had a square face with a lot of graying facial hair and wore a cap with wool-lined ear flaps over his head. He took a few drags off a cigarette then crushed it under the toe of his boot. He went to the back of the van and opened one side of the doors—like the batwing gates in Judge Herring’s courtroom—and I couldn’t help watching, even if it was impolite. His body blocked most of my line of sight, so I leaned to the right for a better view.
“Ho ho ho, Merry Christmas, boys and girls,” a deep voice slurred, so loud I could hear him through my car window. A tall Santa lurched in front of my car, toward the back of the van. He was a little on the slim side for Santa, and even more on the drunk side, it appeared. He steadied himself with a hand on the open van door but still managed to knock the driver to the side and, from the looks of it, slosh half a bottle of something all over him, too. The bottle dropped to the ground and rolled away. Santa’s eyes tracked it, and he moaned. The driver righted himself and brushed liquid off his body, flicking his hands in exaggerated motions as he did.
Earth to Emily Page 18