Ashes To Ashes

by Gwen Hunter

  Charged with a crime. The thought slithered into my mind with a dry, scaly sound.

  I had killed a man.

  I closed my eyes.

  I had invited a guest into my home and then killed him. Mother would be mortified, I thought stupidly. What a dreadful lapse of manners. My nausea increased and subsided, moving through me like ocean waves.

  Bret pushed me gently back to the floor and wrapped a tourniquet around my arm. I started shivering.

  "Bret McDermott, my granddaughter’s cold."

  "Yes, ma’am, I know, but—"

  "Well, warm up one of those blankets in the microwave and wrap her up in it," Nana said.

  "I’ll do it," Mick said softly, exchanging a glance with Bret. Family members who interfered with lifesaving activities were the bane of emergency workers everywhere, but no one in his right mind would disagree with my Nana.

  A uniformed EMT took his place. "You guys got here quick," he said.

  "Heard it on the scanner," Mick said, from somewhere out of sight. "Recognized the address. I just live a couple miles up the road. And Ash is an old buddy, right, Ash?"

  Old buddy?

  A quick stabbing pain plunged into my left hand. "Ouch!"

  "Sorry, Ash."

  "BP’s eighty over sixty. A little low."

  "I usually run one-o-five over seventy," I said. It all seemed so normal, I thought. So medically correct. And only feet away lay Alan Mathison, dead. I had killed him.

  "Ash."

  I looked up. It was Wicked, without his camera, bending over me. "It wasn’t Senator Waldrop," I said, in an instant of clear and coherent thought. "But he said he worked with Monica. So . . . So . . . Jerel Taylor is . . . I mean . . ." I went blank. What had I been saying? My shivering worsened. It was bewildering. The voices rose and dropped, a babble of confusion. Individual words picked out of the chaos around me only made the confusion worse.

  ". . . thirty eight. . . ."

  ". . . no exit wound. . . ."

  ". . . three chambers empty. . . ."

  ". . . same weapon . . . ?"

  The words flowed in an irregular rhythm, rough and uncertain, like a car engine in need of a tune-up. The people moved in similar fashion, jerky and coarse.

  "Jerel Taylor?" Wicked asked.

  "Jerel?" I repeated. I shook my head, the threads of the conversation coming back to me. "I don’t . . . No. Monica. And Alan. He said something about his briefcase. And a file. Ouch!" I yelped again, trying to pull my right hand away. A second IV needle was being inserted there. I had forgotten how badly an eighteen gauge Jelco could hurt. A hot blanket was wrapped around me, the heat a blessing from heaven. I smiled at Mick, feeling the shivers instantly subside.

  "A briefcase?" Bret sat down beside me on the kitchen floor. "Oh, Ashlee, it’s my fault."

  "How’s that, Bret?" Wicked squatted beside him, glancing over at Sheriff Gaskin and the cops. They were busily collecting evidence in small plastic and paper bags, ignoring us entirely.

  "At the accident last month. At Magnet Hole Creek, you remember?" Bret asked softly.

  I watched the men nod. The motions were vaguely sickening. Someone tucked a second hot blanket around me. Precious sensation of heat.

  Nana pulled a chair up and sat. Aunt Mosetta was talking to the cops, pointing out a bit of straw they had missed.

  Bret took a deep breath, guilt a distinct emotion on his face. Why would Bret be guilty? I wondered. "Alan had a briefcase when we found him," he said. "Ash took it away and pushed it through the mud to us."

  "Wait a minute, Bret McDermott. Are you saying that man over there is the same one Ashlee saved?" Nana asked. "Did anyone tell me that?"

  "Yes, ma’am. Same guy." Bret took my hand, his eyes on mine. Under ordinary circumstances I didn’t think I would like Bret holding my hand. His grip was too intimate and too tight, but his fingers were warm and brought a hint of life to my cold skin, so I said nothing. "The briefcase was open papers inside, files of government papers and permits for Davenport Hills."

  "The missing files," Macon said softly, kneeling beside me. I looked like an indolent queen with her lazy sycophants relaxing around her. Someone moved my leg. I gasped and retched as pain spiraled up.

  Bret talked through my agony as if he didn’t know I was dying right here on my kitchen floor. "There was a Corps of Engineers report about Prosperity Creek. I have it in my car. It was strange finding it there, to say the least. Until you started seeing Alan, and then . . ." Bret’s words trickled away. I wanted to roll to one side as nausea bubbled up inside me. I had no idea what Bret was talking about. All I wanted was for them all to go away and let me throw up in peace.

  "I’m not following this, son," Nana said. "But I have a feeling that this discussion is for family and not the general public. You other boys step outside for a few minutes and give us some privacy," she ordered, her voice stern.

  Yeah. Make them go away so I can be sick in peace.

  "Mick, go on, now. Skedaddle. Ashlee’ll be fine. Bret here can take care of her, and Wallace is on the way. Don’t look at me like that, young man. Do what I say or I’ll tell your mother you were disobedient to an elder."

  "No shit, Mrs. Hamilton. It’s policy that we can’t leave a patient."

  "You don’t want your mouth washed out with soap, you’ll get like I told you. And take these others with you," Nana snapped. I had a sudden vision of Mick bent over the sink, Nana’s hand on the back of his neck and a bar of Ivory in his mouth. Nana would do it, too.

  Mick puffed out an irritated breath. One of the EMTs was standing at an angle where I could finally see him. I struggled with his name until it came to me. Dusty Lowell, so named for the dusting of freckles across his skin.

  "I need a smoke," he said wryly. "She’s stable, I reckon, and someone should check out our other patient. Bret, you holler if there’s a change."

  Surprisingly, they left, leaving only family around me. I wondered why they didn’t put me on a stretcher first. The floor was cold and hard and my leg was a steady beat of pain like the constant pounding of a bass drum. But then, no one was paying that much attention to me. I was actually incidental to all this. Perhaps I always had been. An incidental victim in Jack’s life and Jack’s problems. Tears started at the corners of my eyes. Fresh waves of nausea rolled over me. I closed my eyes against the pain. Its rhythm was a steady thrum, matching the beat of my heart.

  "Now. Start over. And make sense this time," Nana commanded. "Layman’s terms, so I can follow."

  "The report on top of the file was a Corps of Engineers report on the parcel of property that eventually became Davenport Hills. It said there were numerous watershed problems at Prosperity Creek. And yet I knew Jack had gotten an approval. Nothing made sense." Bret shook his head and squeezed my hand. His Citadel ring cut into my flesh. I tried to pull away, but had no strength against his grip. The pain in my hand helped take my mind off the nausea swirling through me, but did nothing to ease the pain in my leg. "I didn’t know why this guy had DavInc’s papers, but I didn’t like the look of the report, considering the obvious drainage problems at Davenport Hills. I knew Jack, ah . . . walked a thin line in some of his business dealings, and it crossed my mind that, well, that there had been some—"

  "You thought Ashlee’s husband had broken the law, cheated on the Corps report," Nana said, her voice gruff.

  "Yes. I was wrong. I have some contacts in Washington through Senator Waldrop. He made a few calls the day after the accident at Magnet Hole Creek and discovered the truth."

  Nana rolled her eyes and muttered under her breath. It sounded something like, "Fools grow without watering."

  Macon simply blinked and looked at me again. Senator Waldrop knew about the Corps report the day he came to the house. The day I stuffed cookies into his mouth. He had known I was in some kind of trouble about Davenport Hills even then. He had been trying to be nice.

  "There was no problem with the report. A second inspec
tor went over everything. Even came out to Davenport Hills to see about any problems. I guess Jack worked it all out somehow. I’ve been trying to get the report and the permits back to Ashlee for days, but I can’t seem to get any time alone with her."

  "The turkey-shoot," I said softly. "That’s what you meant at the turkey-shoot when you said something about seeing me."

  Bret smiled his professional banker’s smile and met my eyes again. The smile changed, becoming almost forlorn. "Well, that too. But then I realized you were seeing Alan Mathison and thought you must have known that he had the permits and the report. I knew then that I wasn’t doing you a favor to keep them. I’ve been trying to get them back to you ever since."

  He put a heavy emphasis on the word seeing, turning it into dating by his tone. I shook my head, moving slowly to avoid worsening the nausea. "I wasn’t dating him," I said.

  "But you were having dinner with him at Miccah’s, and the reports and the maps were scattered all over the table . . ." His voice trailed off. "You weren’t trying to . . . I mean, you weren’t—"

  "No," I said. "I wasn’t." The nausea rolled again, writhing up toward my mouth. I moaned softly in warning and put out a hand.

  Someone walked across the kitchen floor, boots clomping. Macon leaned into my line of vision and whispered. "Alan made a pass at you. You said no. And he got violent. Keep it simple until we can talk. Understand?"

  "Yes," I said, my voice slurred and my mouth was sickly wet. "But I’d give this left leg for a glass of ice water right now."

  "Ashlee, are you ready to give a statement or would you rather wait until a doctor’s had a chance to look you over?" Sheriff Gaskins asked from somewhere over my head.

  I rolled to the side and vomited all over Bret McDermott’s lap. At least he let go of my hand. The relief in my fingers was so great I couldn’t even summon up a feeling of shame for ruining his good banker’s black suit. "Jeeez Louise," Bret swore.

  Nana made a "tisking" sound.

  "Ashlee, you’ve always been more trouble than you’re worth. Excuse me, Sheriff, Macon." Wallace nudged his way in beside me, a task much easier now than only moments before when I had made the area around me a less-than-prime location.

  He opened his little black bag and pulled out a stethoscope. I had never seen him with the old fashioned doctor’s bag, more accustomed to the black briefcase he took to work.

  "I’m sick," I managed, as the world roiled around me. "And shot."

  "So I see. You guys carry phenergan?" he called out to the EMTs standing in the door, big grins on their faces. "I need a BP, pulse, and let’s transport ASAP."

  I smiled up at Wallace as the world darkened again around me. I was passing out, but before the darkness took me I said, "My cousin. My hero." The last thing I remembered was the sound of Wallace’s laughter. My next memory was the emergency room.

  It was a madhouse as usual, with a full code going on in the next room and a drunk shooting victim in the bed next to me, two fingers of one hand blown off by a .45. A flimsy, floral curtain separated us, and though I couldn’t see him, I could hear his fluent obscenities. It was the kind of language I had missed in the weeks of my leave of absence. From my vantage point on the stretcher—thank God for stretchers—I could see myriad tiny blood splatters in the weave of the privacy curtain. I could see the water spot in the ceiling panel over my head. It was new, still damp in the center and bowed down like it might fall through and land on me at any moment. Home Sweet Home.

  Wallace had given me something for the pain and Dr. Rameris, a surgeon, was sewing something up in my leg. The specifics didn’t seem important at the moment. I was bundled in warm blankets on a comfortable stretcher, the pain was a distant reality—all bleary around the edges and indistinct, like a dream monster, forgotten upon waking—and my nausea was eased, deposited all over Bret’s lap. All things considered, I felt amazingly content. Until in the hallway, I saw C.C. Gaskin, and heard the sheriff volunteer to go to the morgue with the coroner. My hazy feeling of comfort vanished. Tears leaked from my eyes.

  Macon appeared at my bedside. "Ash, are you awake?" my lawyer whispered.

  "The sheriff’s gone to see Alan, hasn’t he?" My mouth had turned dry and sour, and my tongue felt like a moldy hunk of old shoe leather someone had stuffed between my teeth. I wiped my eyes.

  "Weird as it seems, I think he’s trying to give us some time to talk before he takes your statement. But we don’t have long. Do you remember what happened?"

  "Yes," I said. I licked my lips and tasted blood. I hoped it was mine. Fresh nausea sloshed through me.

  "Good. Listen carefully. Thanks to Stinky Dixon’s partial confession, here’s what the sheriff thinks happened, and there’s enough evidence in Alan’s car to confirm if it matches your statement. Alan and Emory Beck had been business partners for years. They were conspiring to gain control of Davenport Hills. Alan was both romancing you and gathering information about the development. When you turned him down, and he had no way of getting his hands on the development, he snapped. Would that be about right?"

  There was something wrong with the scenario Macon had just painted, but I couldn’t think what it was. It had something to do with the soil samples in Jack’s safe. And the man who had died, Charles Whitmore. And then the name penetrated.

  "Emory. Monica’s husband. He killed . . . helped kill Charles Whitmore?"

  "Looks like it, Ash."

  Emory Beck. Monica Schoenfuss Beck’s husband was a murderer. Alan had said the Beck’s were his business partners. Monica, who had called and called and sent cards and tried to take me to lunch and actually acted like a friend. Monica, who had been known in high school as Cat Woman. Monica, who had acted as if she had no idea who Alan Mathison was at the symphony so long ago. Who had batted her eyes at him, and drawn attention to her bountiful cleavage, and who had more than likely slept with him if her reputation was even half deserved.

  Alan had given himself away the night of the concert, if I had even bothered to consider it. After my attack he had taken me up the back stairs to Monica’s bedroom. I hadn’t even known that there were back stairs until then. Had Monica planned for me to be attacked at the Patron’s Party? Had she helped set it up? Or had she been Emory’s dupe? I might never know. I wasn’t certain I wanted to. I closed my eyes and turned away.

  When I opened them again, Sheriff Gaskin was standing beside my bed. He gave a kindly smile as he bent over me. An investigator stood to the side with a less friendly expression on his face. I couldn’t remember the investigator’s name, but like so many of the details of this long night, it didn’t seem important.

  It was a frivolous observation, but the sheriff needed to clip his nose hair. It stuck out in long tangled masses from each nostril. I almost told him so, but the specter of my mother appeared in the doorway and my manners snapped back in place. "My baby!" the specter wailed.

  "Oh my God," I moaned. "It’s real."

  My mother nearly knocked over the investigator and shoved the sheriff to the side. Babbling and shrieking, she bent over me, careful not to touch my bloody skin or my bloody clothes and stain her immaculate apparel. I tried to envision this surgically correct, melodramatic woman as the lively, carefree girl described by Reverend Perry. I couldn’t.

  Mama gave a pretty good imitation of concern until I felt a wrench of pain and moaned, rolling my head over the side of the rails. At that point, she decided to have her case of hysterics elsewhere, someplace where the audience wouldn’t smear her new linen suit. As I watched her go, I felt sorry for her, for all the times she had missed out on being a mother over the years. And for the relationship we’d never had. I rolled back and the sheriff moved into my line of sight, his eyes following my mother. Her trim little backside and her long, lean legs did look enticing in the slim linen slacks. Liposuction, no doubt.

  "You wanted a statement," I said. My voice was weak and breathy. I had never been given the ice water I asked for. I could envisio
n the tall glass, covered with condensation, the droplets sliding slowly down the side of the glass.

  C.C. turned back, his "good cop" expression firmly in place. "If you’re up to it, Ashlee."

  "You realize my client is heavily sedated, Sheriff, and she may not be entirely lucid nor of sound mind," Macon said. He had come up on the other side and the sheriff jumped. He hadn’t known Macon was there. C.C. was trying to pull a fast one and question me outside the presence of my lawyer. Sneaky old bastard. "I will not have her badgered in this condition," Macon said.

  Neither lucid nor of sound mind, I thought. That’s me. I haven’t been lucid or of sound mind since Jack died. I was growing maudlin with the painkillers, and took a deep breath against threatening tears.

  "I understand that Mrs. Davenport is in no condition to make a formal statement. That can be handled at a later date, tomorrow or the next day at the Law Enforcement Center or at her house whichever is her preference." As the sheriff spoke, the scowling investigator stepped away. It wasn’t a good time to play good cop-bad cop. Not in front of a lawyer. "However, there are a few questions I need answered tonight."

  Macon watched the investigator step into the hallway, his face troubled, but I could handle C.C. Just like my Nana could. "Connie Carol."

  The sheriff’s mouth turned down in irritation. Every man has a weakness. C.C.’s female names were his. To C.C., being called Connie Carol was on par with being called a girl, or a pig.

  "Connie my friend, I intend to cooperate to the fullest. You want to know why Alan Mathison was at my house tonight, right?" C.C. nodded and pulled out a notebook.

  "He kissed me the night of the turkey-shoot." I licked my lips. They were still bloody. And the pain was suddenly no longer a bleary vision hovering at the edges of my mind. Now it was closer, sharper, crisper, as if it moved toward me with steady steps.

  "I told him no. I told him I wasn’t ready for anything . . . like that. Tonight he came back. Got a little too . . ." I searched for a word that Nana might have used; settled on one my mother might have used instead. "familiar. And when I told him no again, he got angry, started shouting about the business and Davenport Hills." Wasn’t that the story Macon wanted me to tell? And it was the truth, as far as I went with it.