No Bad Deed

by Heather Chavez

  “At least the rain’s let up, right?” Detective Rico said.

  My jeans were soaked through, and I could feel my feet pruning in my sneakers. “Good thing.”

  He turned on a recorder and flipped open his notepad. He held a sheet of paper, too, though I couldn’t see what was on it. “Walk me through what happened.”

  When I finished my story, Rico acknowledged its end with a curt nod. “That was really—brave of you, to get out of your car.” I thought he may have been about to say stupid. I wouldn’t have disagreed.

  “Anyone would’ve done the same.”

  “I don’t know about that.” Rico consulted his notebook. “You didn’t know him, though, right?”

  “No.”

  “Not a patient, or the parent of one of your kids’ friends?” When I shook my head, he asked, “You’re sure?”

  I remembered the man’s face, twisted in anger, the casual way he had tossed the woman down the hill. “I’ve never seen him before.”

  “Would you be able to identify him?”

  When I nodded, Rico held out the paper he was holding, facedown at first. “I’m going to show you some photographs.”

  He flipped the sheet over. On it were the photos of six men, all white, all bald or balding, all in their late forties to late fifties.

  “The suspect might not be in this group,” Rico said, his tone neutral. “So you’re under no obligation to identify anyone.”

  I brushed a damp lock of hair away from my eyes, and my heart seized. It couldn’t have been clearer if the photo had been ringed with fire. There, in the middle row, was the man with the ropy scar along his jaw and the once-broken nose.

  “That’s him.” The finger I pointed shook nearly as much as my voice.

  “You sure?”

  “Completely.”

  Rico held out a pen and asked me to sign the photo I had identified. He left for a moment, and when he returned, he asked: “Recognize the name Natalie Robinson?”

  I shook my head. “Is that the victim’s name?”

  The detective’s eyes were twin chips of granite. “How about Anne Jackson?”

  “No. Who’s Anne Jackson?”

  Rico didn’t answer. He nodded and jotted something in his notebook, then gestured toward my arm. “Tell me again how you got cut.”

  At the mention of the wound, I became aware of its throbbing. “He tried to stab her, but he got me instead. It’s just a scratch.”

  “Carver Sweet’s a big guy.”

  My heart pummeled my ribs. “You know who he is?”

  “Now that you’ve identified him, we do.” His expression remained stony. “So, Carver’s a big guy, and he had a knife. You have kids, and you’d already called 911. Why risk a confrontation?”

  I remembered how my sneakers lost purchase on the hillside, the brush grabbing at my knees, rocks and sticks threatening to twist my ankles. How breakable I had felt when I had slammed against him. “I slipped.”

  “You slipped?”

  “I’m clumsy, and the ground was wet.”

  Rico stared at me, letting the pause stretch. It reminded me of the times I had talked to clients who brought animals in with unexplained injuries or signs of malnourishment. It was the way you talked to someone you thought might be lying.

  Rico consulted his notebook again, the creases under his eyes deepening. “You said Carver Sweet may have had blood on his shirt. At what point did you notice that?”

  “Near the end.”

  “So when did you notice the victim was bleeding?”

  The detective’s question made me second-guess all I had done to save the woman. Had I waited thirty seconds too long to call 911? After her attacker fled, had I stanched her bleeding quickly enough? With the police, had I forgotten a detail that would lead to Carver Sweet’s arrest? I forced these concerns aside, but when I saw Rico’s face, a new one dawned: Would my delay in answering be misconstrued as calculation?

  “I noticed her bleeding after he threw her down the slope. Her nose.” Had there been other injuries? I strained to remember.

  “So when you first pulled over, she wasn’t bleeding?”

  “I don’t think she was.”

  “You don’t think she was?”

  “She wasn’t.” Was she? My certainty ebbed the longer the questioning continued, and I wondered if Rico intended to throw me off balance.

  “He hadn’t taken out the knife yet? When they were standing on the trail?”

  “No.” But even as I answered, I was suddenly sure there was an injury I had missed, something that might cast doubt on the rest of my story. Rico’s scribbling took several seconds, the scratch of pen on paper unnerving me.

  “Will she be all right?” I asked.

  The detective looked up, his brow wrinkled and eyes hooded. “The woman he attacked?”

  “Of course.” Who else would I be asking about?

  “I don’t know.” He flipped to a new page in his notebook. “Did you notice any vehicles alongside the road?” When I shook my head, he explained, “We found two vehicles just off the road half a mile up. Crashed. If you’d driven a little farther, you would’ve seen them.”

  “If he forced her off the road, it wasn’t random.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  The attacker’s question was fresh in my mind: Who do you love? And then, among his last words: Let her die, and I’ll let you live.

  “It seemed personal.”

  Rico considered this. “I arrested a guy for beating another motorist with a bat,” he said. “Then he started in on the man’s kid. All over a fender bender with less than a thousand dollars in damages. See, the guy with the bat lost his job the day before, and then some Lexus cuts him off at a stoplight. The boss who fired him had a Lexus.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Every crime is personal, even the random ones.” Rico’s mouth settled into a grim line. “You say you didn’t know the man, but did you know his victim?”

  “I’ve never seen either of them before.” It was only after I answered that the first two words registered: You say. As if he doubted what I said was true.

  “So you say you were coming from work?”

  There it was again. “Yes.”

  “And you left at what time?”

  “Just after ten.”

  “Anyone able to verify that?”

  “I was alone for the last hour, but before that, certainly.”

  “Any surveillance cameras at your clinic?”

  “No.”

  The rain that had soaked my clothes had wicked into the borrowed sweatshirt, the chill finally seeping into my skin. I shivered.

  “The number three mean anything to you?” he asked.

  I studied his face, but he hid his thoughts well. “No. Why?”

  “Just something one of the officers found. Probably nothing.”

  Rico jotted something in his notebook, and he attempted a smile.

  “Looks like someone may have spotted your vehicle in a grocery store parking lot, so we’ll know more soon,” he said. Then the smile disappeared and his eyes grew heavy. “Earlier, I said that Carver Sweet’s not getting anywhere near your house, and I meant that. But you need to be careful. You’re a threat to him.”

  The detective handed me his card, then called Officer Willis over to drive me home. When Rico walked away, he wiped his palms on his slacks, as if trying to rid them of something unpleasant.

  3

  We lived in a three-bedroom ranch-style house in Lomita Heights, a neighborhood that dated back to the early 1960s. Our family had moved in sixteen years before when I was pregnant with Leo. Back then, I would walk, stomach near bursting, along the gently sloping hill. Once, I had fallen on my backside on the sidewalk.

  Okay, maybe more than once.

  My legs didn’t feel much steadier now, and as I walked toward the house, I realized I didn’t have my keys.

  After escorting me home, Officer Wil
lis watched as I walked toward the door. Leo’s face was already wedged between the slats of the blinds, hair disheveled, eyes bleary, mouth frozen in a scowl. Despite the fact that, at fifteen, he now had half a foot on me, he was still that bundle I had carried up and down that hill. Like then, the weight of being his mom threw me off balance.

  He opened the front door. “What the heck, Mom?” A rumpled blanket on the couch suggested he had waited up for me. I knew he lingered more out of curiosity than concern, but I hugged him fiercely nonetheless. “The police came and talked to Dad, and now a cop brought you home? Where’s the van?”

  “Stolen.”

  “Really? Do they know who took it?”

  “They do. I’ll get it back soon.” I trotted out my fail-safe distraction, “You hungry?”

  Leo had eaten only an hour before, so of course he wanted a sandwich. I made two: turkey for him, veggie for me. Nerves roiled my stomach, but I forced down half the sandwich before grabbing a handful of batteries from the junk drawer and slipping them in my pocket. After Leo ate and returned to bed, and after I tested the lock on his window, I checked on a sleeping Audrey. Her bangs were plastered to her forehead. As usual, my first grader had insisted on falling asleep under a pile of blankets. I removed all but one and kissed her on her sweaty cheek, then felt her forehead. Damp, but not feverish. She hadn’t yet caught her father’s flu.

  From Audrey’s closet, I pulled out her old baby monitor, coated with several years’ worth of dust, and switched out the batteries with the ones in my pocket. It still worked. I took the receiver with me.

  Finally, in the hallway outside the master, I took a breath, bracing for an argument, and pushed open the door. Sam was waiting in his pajama bottoms on the end of the bed. My husband had the wiry build of an academic, and his nose was ruddy against pale skin. He was also beautiful. You weren’t supposed to say that about a man, but he was: dimpled smirk, messed hair that invited fingers, thick lashes that, thankfully, our children had inherited. My own eyes were fringed with stubby lashes visible only through the magic of volumizing mascara.

  “I would’ve come out, but it seemed like you needed some time with Leo,” he said. I read judgment in his comment. He seemed to sense this, because he paused, then softened his voice when he continued. “Tell me what happened.”

  I placed the receiver on the dresser next to a bottle of cold medicine and told him everything—almost. I described coming upon the couple and about the casual way the man had tossed the woman over the embankment. I told him about my interview with the detective and how I sensed Rico was withholding some key piece of information. But I didn’t tell Sam about my panic attack in the van, and omitted from my story the details that made me seem most reckless. I didn’t want to hear those four words again: I love you, but . . .

  I love you, but you should’ve been more careful.

  As I talked, I removed my clothes, which were streaked with mud, and slipped on a sleeping shirt, one of Sam’s. He watched me, and the nerves buzzed beneath my skin. I blamed it on the stress hormones.

  When I stopped speaking, Sam sighed, his chest rattling with the effort. “Cassie.” Part accusation, part concern.

  He climbed off the bed, disappeared into the bathroom, and returned with the first aid kit. He switched on the light before sitting beside me on the bed.

  “Give it here,” he said, gesturing toward my arm. It was barely a scratch, but I extended my arm anyway. When he squinted to get a better look, I handed him his glasses from the nightstand.

  “I’m a little irked with you right now,” he said, the virus making his voice husky. He placed a pillow on my lap and gently rested my arm on it, then set to cleaning the wound with an antiseptic wipe.

  “Irked, are you?”

  He pulled a foil packet of antibiotic ointment from the kit. “Yes, irked. Why did you risk your life like that?” He gently dabbed the ointment on my arm. “The kids—”

  I recoiled as if pushed. “I was thinking of the kids,” I said. Every choice I made, every day, was viewed through the lens of motherhood. “What kind of mother would I be if I let someone else’s daughter be victimized? Besides, you would have done the same.”

  When Sam looked up from his task, his blue eyes intense inside the black frames of his glasses, my breath caught in my throat. “It’s not just the kids.”

  “I know.”

  He covered my cut with an adhesive bandage, then placed the first aid kit and his glasses on the nightstand. “The next time you see a man with a knife, don’t get out of the car.”

  “You sound like the dispatcher.”

  “Promise me.” His voice vibrated with more urgency than I had come to expect after seventeen years of marriage.

  “I can’t imagine it’ll happen again.” When he scowled, I hastily added, “But I promise.”

  Sam’s lips parted as if he were about to speak, but instead, he stretched past me to switch off the light.

  We climbed into bed. In the dark, his breathing rasped, and I mimicked his rhythms to steady my own. Reaching for him, my fingers grazed his back just as he turned away from me, toward the wall. The cold medicine dragged him into sleep within minutes.

  There will be other nights, I thought, with the certainty of a long-married wife.

  As I lay there, listening to the monitor with the blackness pressing in, the quiet that usually settled me instead seemed a presence, waiting, watching. Later, I would wonder if it was my intuition warning me of what was to come—of what, in fact, already had begun.

  4

  Having dreamed of large insects, even larger men, and bassinets filled with mud, I awoke groggy and with a headache. When I reached across the bed, the sheets on Sam’s side were cold.

  I fumbled for my phone on the nightstand and groaned when I saw the time. After a fitful night, it seemed I had nodded off just in time to oversleep. Setting an alarm hadn’t been a priority the night before.

  When I swung my feet onto the carpet, I caught the glint of copper on the edge of the bed frame. I reached down and picked up the object that had drawn my attention, not metal at all, but paper. I placed it in the center of my palm, studying it. It was an origami dog no bigger than a business card, which I guessed had fallen from the nightstand.

  The paper dog, with its folded ears and tiny legs, made me smile. It reminded me of the early days of my relationship with Sam, when he would leave gifts like this in unexpected places. A mosaic tile on the back porch. A sketch on my dashboard. Once, he had created a remarkably detailed landscape from coffee grounds spilled on the counter.

  It had been a while since Sam had created art for me, even something as simple as a dog of folded paper. Too busy, he said. We were both too busy—for art, for sex, for anything beyond the needs of our kids, his students, my patients.

  My smile faded. I put the origami dog on my nightstand. Then I got up, put a fresh bandage on my scratch, and followed the sound of chaos to the kitchen. I stopped in the doorway, watching, but had only a second before I was spotted. Leo, wearing earbuds and a scowl, stood quickly. “Dad said we needed to let you sleep.”

  Before he could say more, his backpack caught the edge of the bowl Sam had been using to scramble eggs. The plastic bowl clattered to the floor, its contents splattering the cabinets. Our Chihuahua mix, Boo, skittered over to investigate the puddle of slime, sneezing when he inhaled egg, and Sam nudged the dog aside with his foot.

  I grabbed a roll of paper towels off the counter and started sopping up the mess, while Sam retrieved a fresh bowl and eggs. I turned my attention to Audrey, seated on a stool at the counter. “Did you take your medicine, Peanut?”

  Before she could answer, Leo took out one of his earbuds. “I need to go to school.”

  “Agreed. School’s important.”

  Leo rolled his eyes. “I mean, like, now.”

  Audrey gasped, her eyes widening. “But you’re not dressed.”

  “I’m dressed.”

  “Nooooo
oo.” Audrey sighed as if her brother were the six-year-old. “You’re normal dressed, not Halloween dressed.”

  She hopped down from the stool and twirled, showing off her black cat costume. Judging by the wrinkles, Audrey had worn the costume all night beneath her pajamas.

  “See. I’m a princess cat, only not yet because my tiara’s still in my bedroom. What are you going to be?”

  “Late for my workout. Can’t someone drop me off and then come back?”

  “Yes, because that’s reasonable,” I said. “We’ll rearrange our schedules because you’ve changed your plans at the last minute. Besides, we only have one car for the time being, remember?”

  “So that’s a no?”

  I pointed at an empty stool. “That’s a ‘sit.’ I’ll take you after you eat.”

  Leo slumped back on a stool while I slid three slices of sourdough in the toaster.

  Sam’s eyebrows furrowed as he studied me. “How’re you doing? Get any sleep?”

  “Some.”

  “About the car, take mine. I’ll grab a rental and a new booster seat for Audrey, after I call the locksmith.”

  “You’re not going in?”

  “Think I’ll take another day.” Sam hadn’t missed work once the previous school year, but before I could think too hard on that, he said, “Audrey’s medication is running low. I was going to stop by the pharmacy, unless you’ve already refilled it?”

  I started to say that I had picked up the prescription the morning before, but then I remembered: my purse. Audrey’s medication was one more thing I needed to replace.

  “I can get it.” After I canceled my credit card and stopped by the DMV. My headache intensified.

  Sam slid scrambled eggs on three plates, and I added toast to each. He gestured—did I want eggs?—but I wrinkled my nose. I wasn’t big on breakfast, and that morning, I felt even less like eating than usual.

  As my family ate, I returned to the bedroom to get dressed. My hands trembled as I buttoned my shirt. Understandable, but still I sank to the edge of the bed. The night before, the man on the trail had been enraged. He hadn’t so much asked for my identity as spit out the question as if it were sour on his tongue. Worse, he had followed it with a warning: Let her die, and I’ll let you live. Had the woman survived? I didn’t know, but I had made every effort to save her, which I guessed would void his offer of mercy. And this man—rabid and merciless—had my address. My keys.