Erin fumbled for her keys, having difficulty finding them in her purse in the dimness of the garage. She should have had the security guard shine his flashlight on them before he left. She put her maps on top of the car so that she would have both hands free to look for the keys, and eventually managed to tease them out and juggle them to find the car key.
“There you are,” she said softly, and fit it into the lock.
Suddenly she was struck with a blinding pain in the back of her skull and fell forward against the car. She tried to hold herself up, but her knees buckled and she hit the pavement. Erin tried to sort out the sensations.
A shape beside her.
The purse being yanked off of her shoulder.
And then running footsteps.
Chapter Thirteen
E
rin closed her eyes, the world spinning around her. What had just happened?
It was dark and cold on the ground. She had a splitting headache. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t seem to get to her feet, even holding on to the car. The lighting of the garage, which had previously seemed dim, had grown blindingly bright. She reached up the car door, feeling for her keys. Had whoever had taken her purse taken the keys too? They hadn’t taken the car, at least.
Erin’s fingers touched the keys. She pulled the key out of the lock and felt the fob for the panic alarm. She had set it off by accident more than once, but now that she needed it, the key fob felt foreign in her fingers. Erin concentrated, running her nail over it, feeling for the cracks of the buttons. One of them had braille over it, but that wasn’t the alarm key. She couldn’t remember the layout of the buttons. Erin mashed her thumb down, catching all of the buttons at the same time, and held them all down until the car alarm started to shriek.
She sat leaning against the car. It was a long time before anyone came around to check on the alarm. People were too accustomed to hearing car alarms ringing for no reason. They just tuned them out. Erin knew she usually did. When she noticed a car alarm, it wasn’t usually with any sort of concern, but with irritation that someone hadn’t turned it off.
Then there was a man standing over her, calling to her. “Ma’am? Ma’am, are you okay?”
Erin groaned. “Does it look like it?”
“I’m calling for help. Just hang in there.”
What else was she supposed to do?
“Sure,” Erin muttered.
He talked on his radio to his dispatcher, relaying their location.
“Did you fall down?” he asked her. “What happened? Does it hurt anywhere?”
“My head. Someone stole my purse. I think they hit me on the head.”
He muttered a curse and crouched down beside her, pulling her head back gently from the car to have a look at it. “Oh, yeah. He hit you.”
There was a stabbing pain and the spinning sensation increased. Erin moaned. “Don’t do that.”
He released her head slowly, letting it rest back against the car again, where she was sitting propped up.
“Did you see him? The person who did this?”
“No. I don’t have eyes in the back of my head.”
“Of course not,” he agreed. He checked in on his radio again, asking for an ETA on the paramedics. “They’re coming,” he reported back. “Hang in there.”
She thought he might be the same guard who had walked her into the parking garage.
Time was fuzzy. She didn’t know how long she waited there, the man talking to her occasionally, before she finally heard the ambulance siren. Had they actually dispatched it from somewhere else? They were at the hospital, but no one could just come out to help her?
The man waved down the ambulance and reported Erin’s condition to her as he walked them over. Erin listened to him describe the injury to her head and her state of responsiveness. The paramedics came over and had a look for themselves.
“Yep, pretty good blow to the head,” one of them confirmed. “How are you doing, ma’am? Are you in a lot of pain?”
“Yes.”
He worked over her, evaluating her as they talked, checking her pulse and her eyes.
“Can you stand up if we help you?”
Erin avoided shaking her head. “No.”
“Okay, we’ll get the gurney over here and get you onto it. How long ago did this happen, do you know? Do you know what day it is?”
Erin cleared her throat. Too many questions too fast. “Just give me something for the pain.”
“We’ll let the hospital do that once we get you stabilized. Can you tell me what day it is?”
“I don’t know. Wednesday. Not the weekend.”
“Can you tell me your first and last name?”
“Erin. Uh. Erin Price. Price.”
“What were you doing here today, Erin?”
“My friend… her brother got shot. I brought her over and was sitting with her.”
“Ouch. Don’t like to hear that. Was he okay?”
“Yeah. Okay. They said he’d be fine.”
“Good. Let’s get that gurney over here and get you onto it. How’s your neck? Feeling okay?”
“Yeah.”
They prepared to move Erin. She looked at her car shining softly in the lighting of the parking garage and wondered what she was doing there.
“I need to get home,” she told the paramedic preparing to lift her.
He looked down at her and raised one eyebrow. “You’ll get home, but we need to take care of you first. I don’t think you’re going to be going anywhere tonight.”
“But I have to get to the bakery in the morning. I need to go home and get some sleep.”
“You’ll be able to sleep here. Let’s see how you feel when you wake up in the morning, huh?”
That seemed to make some kind of sense. Erin nodded, which made her feel drunk.
“Okay.”
“Okay, honey. Now let’s get you moving.”
The two of them managed to lift her up onto the gurney, and they rolled her inside the ambulance. Erin looked around. She couldn’t remember ever being in an ambulance before.
She must have been in one after the accident that took her parents’ lives. It had been just the three of them, and they were all taken to the hospital. But Erin couldn’t remember the details. Maybe she had been unconscious. Or maybe it had just been too traumatic or was too long ago.
“Do you think I’ll remember this time?” she asked the paramedic who climbed in beside her.
“Remember what, sweetheart?”
“That I rode in an ambulance.”
“Hmm. Maybe, maybe not. I think you’re pretty shaken up.”
“Yeah.”
“Just rest for a bit. Even though we’re already at the hospital, this is still going to take a while.”
“Okay.”
But Erin didn’t like the way the world spun even faster when she closed her eyes, so she kept them open, watching everything sway around her as the ambulance made its way back around the hospital to the emergency entrance. Around, and around, and around. She couldn’t seem to get away from the hospital.
“The Hotel California,” Erin murmured.
The paramedic grinned at her but didn’t say anything.
They went back around to the ambulance loading bay, and the paramedics took her into the hospital. There, Erin was expected to answer their questions all over again, but they didn’t seem inclined to answer any of hers.
“When can I go home?” Erin demanded. “I need to get home.”
“You need to just rest and let us help you,” a large black nurse told her sternly.
Erin was cowed by her and tried to stay quiet. But she was confused by everything going on around her. “Is Jeremy okay?”
“Jeremy? Who is Jeremy?”
“He was shot. He was here earlier.”
“Oh, the GSW that came in on the last shift? I don’t know. Sounded like he was doing okay. We don’t really hear back after they go to surgery.”
&n
bsp; “The doctor said he was okay.”
“Then you don’t need to worry about him, do you? Can you tell me your birth date?”
Erin had a hard time dredging it out of her memory.
“How about your social security number?”
Erin gave her head a tiny shake. “No, I could never remember it. My purse…”
The nurse looked around. “I don’t think you were brought in with one.”
“Someone stole it.”
“Oh, dear. Is that how you got hit on the head? You poor thing.”
There was a red light blinking on a camera in the corner of the room, and Erin wondered if they were going to show her a video. She did her best to stay focused on what they were saying around her, but she was getting very tired and the nausea and vertigo were not helping.
“Can I go to sleep?”
“You can,” one nurse said, patting her hand, “but someone will probably wake you up again. Just be warned.”
“Okay.”
Erin closed her eyes and drifted off.
There were doctors and nurses coming and going in a sort of a blur, but when she woke up fully the next time, it was to Terry shaking her arm. Erin startled and looked at him.
“What time is it? I’m going to be late opening the bakery!”
“It’s okay,” he assured her. “Don’t worry about the bakery. What happened? I called you and you didn’t answer. I was afraid you fell asleep at the wheel and went off the road.”
“I didn’t fall asleep,” Erin said. “I didn’t go to sleep until I was here, and the nurse said it was okay. I asked.”
“What happened?”
“Someone stole my purse. They hit me on the head. I was in the garage.”
“You were mugged?”
“Yes.”
“You really are a magnet for trouble.” Terry stroked her chin gently with the backs of his fingers. “My poor girl.”
Erin closed her eyes. “That feels good.”
“I shouldn’t have let you walk to your car alone. I didn’t even think about the danger… It’s so dark and lonely at night…”
“I didn’t walk alone. I had a security guard.”
“You did? You had someone escort you to your car?”
“Yeah. Someone was following me. I was worried… I didn’t want anything to happen to me too, so I went back in and I asked.”
Terry nodded. “That was a smart thing to do. So, what happened? It wasn’t the guard who hurt you, was it?”
Erin thought about it. “No. He didn’t see anyone there… neither of us saw anybody… so he left. I just had to get into my car.”
“But there was someone there.”
“I never saw him coming. He just hit me.”
“You didn’t see who did it? Get a look at his face?” Terry asked.
“No. He hit me from behind. I didn’t even know there was anyone there until he hit me. I felt like I got hit by a truck.”
“Did you see him after? Running away?”
“No…” Erin thought about it. “I heard him. I might have seen a shape. Just a dark shape. But I didn’t ever see his face. He made sure of that.”
“His footsteps when he ran away, did they sound like he was tall or short?”
“I don’t know. Tall. Maybe.”
“And the person who scared you earlier, who you thought might be following you? Did you get a good look at him?”
“No, not close enough to even tell if it was a man or a woman. Actually, I’m sure it was a man, but I’m not sure how.”
“You might have been able to tell from his gait or his smell. His shape or the clothes he wore. It’s easy to be wrong, but if you had an impression, at least that’s something.”
“I guess.”
Erin thought about smell. She was usually good about smells. Was that what had suggested to her it was a man? A musky cologne or male body odor? Pheromones?
Had it been the same person who had followed her both times, or had it just been a coincidence? Had she made herself a target by looking too vulnerable?
“Erin?”
She realized that she had been drifting off. She tried to sit up. Terry readjusted her pillow, but it was flat and didn’t give her any lift. Erin wasn’t in a permanent bed yet and she didn’t know if they could raise the head of the bed. Or if she really wanted them to. She might just want to go back to sleep.
“Will they look for my purse?” she asked Terry. “I mean, after he’s got what he wants, he’ll just dump it, won’t he? I have other things in there I want back.”
“I’ll make sure they look. Actually, I might be able to track your phone. I can see where he is if he has it or where it is if he dumped it.”
“That would be good,” Erin agreed. She didn’t like the idea of someone else having her stuff. Or of their just dumping it like it was garbage. Having been a foster kid without any possessions of her own to speak of she grew attached to things. It was hard to let go.
“I need a notepad.”
Terry frowned. “A notepad? What for?”
“I just… I might want to write things down. And I need a notepad to write them in.”
Terry patted his clothes. He pulled a small spiral notepad out of his shirt pocket and tore a few sheets out. He put them on the small table beside her, putting a pencil on top to keep them from flying away when someone walked by and stirred the air. “It isn’t much, but it will do in a pinch,” he said. “I’ll get you something better if I can’t find your purse.”
Erin let out a sigh. Anyone else probably would have teased her or would have told her it wasn’t important and that she didn’t need to write anything down. But Terry knew how important it was for her to be able to get her thoughts down on paper to sort them out. He was a good man. “Thank you,” she told him, her eyes warm with tears.
“You’re welcome. Do you want me to stay here with you, or do you want me to see if I can find your phone and purse?”
“I think I’m just going to close my eyes for a while longer. Would you see if you can find them?”
“Sure.” Terry bent down and gave her a kiss on the forehead. “You have a good rest. I’ll be back in a little while.” He smiled. “Don’t you go getting into any other trouble while I’m gone.”
“I won’t.”
There was a lot of talking and commotion and people going back and forth holding discussions in loud voices, and Erin didn’t know how she was going to be able to shut them out and get any rest but, in a few minutes, she was asleep again, or at least in a half-asleep state, her mind jumping from one thing to another, not constrained by the real world.
A few doctors or nurses spoke to her. Erin wasn’t sure if she made any sense when she answered them, because she couldn’t remember the conversations afterward. There was another policeman who wasn’t Terry. Too many people coming and going.
She didn’t know what time it was when she was finally moved out of the emergency room into a ward where it was quieter and she could sleep for real. Or at least, she was moved into the hallway of a ward, which apparently didn’t have any free beds for her. But she was just glad to be out of the high-traffic emergency room.
It was much quieter and more peaceful. She closed her eyes and was able to get past the half-sleep state into a more restful sleep.
Chapter Fourteen
W
hen Erin woke up, Terry was asleep in a chair nearby, which he had apparently pulled from some other room in order to be close to her. K9 was lying on the floor at his feet, also asleep. Erin moved around restlessly, trying to find the comfortable position she had just been in, but her whole body ached and was insisting that she needed to move around and stretch her muscles. Any position she tried to settle into, she felt like she was lying on lumps and bruises.
There was something stuffed beside her on the bed, and when Erin craned her neck to see what it was, she saw her purse. She pulled it up onto her stomach and went through it to see what was there and wha
t was missing. Everything seemed to be accounted for other than her cash. Even her phone and credit cards were still there.
Her movements apparently woke K9, and he nudged Terry awake. Terry looked over at Erin and gave her a sleepy, concerned smile. The dimple in his cheek was just visible. “There’s my girl. Did you get some sleep?”
“A little.”
“Can you tell if anything is missing?” He nodded to her purse.
“Just my cash. Everything else still seems to be there.”
He shook his head. “Lazy muggers. If he’s going to go to all of the work of knocking someone down, he could at least try to make use of the credit cards and the phone.”
Erin chuckled. “I’m glad he didn’t. There wasn’t even that much cash in it. If he needs it that badly, then he’s welcome to it. I wish he’d asked instead of hitting me over the head.”
“I put your keys in there too, after checking out your car to make sure everything was undisturbed. It doesn’t look like he even opened the door.”
“No,” Erin agreed. “I was just unlocking it when he hit me, and he ran away without trying it. I guess I was lucky.”
“He might still have gone back once the paramedics took you away. Was there anything valuable in the car?”
“No. I don’t keep anything in there. I just…” Erin thought about her movements the night before, replaying it in her mind, feeling like she was missing something important. “No, I just…”
Terry studied her, waiting for her to work it out.
“I just put Willie’s maps on top of the car so that I could use both hands to get out my keys. Were they still there?”
He shook his head. “No, I didn’t see any maps. What were they for?”
“For the you-know-what.” Erin looked around to make sure no one was listening in. “Willie said to be careful about talking about it here. You know, the poem, and where it leads.”
“Oh.” Terry’s face cleared and he nodded. “I got it.”
Erin looked down at her purse again, frowning. She looked through the loose papers that she tried to keep organized with envelopes and paperclips but couldn’t find it.
Apple-achian Treasure (Auntie Clem's Bakery Book 8) Page 9