Ever So Silent

by Christopher Little

  “Let’s stop playing games—”

  “You call Smith & Wesson a game?” Georgia cried.

  Emma pressed on. “What about Sophie? Let’s talk about her. You must have known Joe Henderson intended her harm. Why didn’t you try to protect her? She’s your goddaughter, for heaven’s sake.”

  “I said, shut up, you useless blob of Play-Doh.”

  Keeping her eye on the S&W’s muzzle, Emma continued as calmly as she could. Although she was barely dressed, she felt sweat begin to run. She hoped Georgia didn’t notice. “But you loved Sophie. Why let Joe take advantage of her?”

  Georgia’s eye began to spasm, but, incongruously, she smiled. Yet hers was a demonic smile. “I never cared a lick about Sophie. She only served me as a companion when I got lonely.”

  Omigod, Emma thought. But she bore on, hoping for an opportunity to overpower Georgia. “You once said to me that ‘Sophie being rescued from abduction was a life-changing event.’ What did you mean by that?”

  Georgia giggled. “That’s what gave me the whole idea. But you were too stupid to understand the ingenious web I spun. You’re always bragging about your crossword puzzle expertise. But you couldn’t solve my puzzle, could you?”

  “What about Ethan Jackson then?”

  “He was just to prove to everyone what a worthless police chief you were.” Her hand covered her mouth. The lunatic was laughing.

  “One more question: why point the finger at Will? Particularly since you already had him locked up.”

  “I don’t want to talk about Will!” she shouted.

  “I do,” Emma said steadily.

  “You are so idiotic. Don’t you see that by implicating Will with the Sharpie letters everything would point to you. That’s why I had to kill Stella. Don’t you see?”

  “No, I don’t, and you know what? Your brand of insanity disgusts me. You don’t even understand what you’ve done. You are worthless!”

  Emma readied herself. She’d pushed Georgia to the limit, and Georgia’s left eye told the story.

  Georgia leapt to her feet. Emma watched her carefully, tensing her knees. When the revolver briefly pointed at the ceiling, she dove forward. The force of her lunge drove Georgia back over the top of the chair in which she had been sitting. They landed on the floor with Emma on top. But Georgia managed to keep the revolver in her hand.

  The struggle continued on the floor.

  They rolled back and forth. Emma tried to wrestle the gun away from Georgia. While Georgia tried to aim the gun in the direction of any part of Emma. Amid the grunts and groans, Emma felt the muzzle of the revolver pressed against her thigh.

  Not proudly, Emma drove her free fist into Georgia’s broken arm.

  Georgia screamed.

  The revolver discharged.

  72

  “How may I help you?”

  Emma was hit. A white-hot poker had entered her body. In agony, she rolled onto her back. Seemingly indestructible, Georgia got to her knees, then to her feet. She clutched her arm with the wrist of her gun hand. She still had control of the weapon.

  Each time her heart beat, Emma watched bright-red blood spurt from her thigh. Knowing that if she didn’t stop her bleeding she would die, Emma couldn’t even look at Georgia.

  But she could hear her.

  “Look at me!” Georgia shouted. “Look at what you have wrought! You have destroyed all that is dear to me. My God, who will feed my fish?” Her face was contorted with pain. “And now you must pay.” Her left eye spasmed in hatred. She shifted the gun to the hand which emerged from the sling, because she needed to support that arm with her other hand. Still, she was able to aim at Emma’s head.

  “Anything to say, Emma dear?”

  Emma was sure she was seconds from death. She had her right hand over her thigh wound, pressing as hard as she could, but the bleeding wouldn’t stop. She struggled to speak. Before she could say anything, she saw a flash out of the corner of her eye.

  It was not a muzzle flash. It was a fur flash.

  Pepper sailed over Emma’s body and seized both Georgia’s wrists in her jaws. The gun discharged again.

  Emma gasped.

  This time the discharge missed. Georgia went down screaming, and she couldn’t stop.

  Emma tried to lift herself to one elbow to see what was happening and to see where the gun was. The latter had skittered across the floor, out of reach.

  Where Emma had felt guilty about attacking Georgia’s broken wrist, Pepper hadn’t had the same inhibition. Pepper stood over Georgia, guarding. Tied to her collar was a hank of chewed-through rope.

  Against the background noise of Georgia’s shrieking, Emma tried to control her own cries of pain. Using her good leg to propel her, she slowly slid into the kitchen on her back. Her kitchen wall-phone had an extra-long coiled cord which she was able to reach from the floor. She flicked the cord until the handset popped off the switch hook and crashed to the tile floor.

  She heard Georgia shouting from the next room, “Emma help me! I can’t stand the pain!”

  Next, she slid one of her kitchen stools over and, holding it upside down, tried to press the 911 buttons with its leg. After multiple, frustrating attempts, she dropped the stool. It landed painfully on her shoulder. She’d hit some buttons but not the right ones.

  Pepper padded into the kitchen, her face a mixture of confusion and concern. She sniffed the blood coming from Emma’s wound and sat down next to her.

  After resting for a moment, Emma angled the chair leg so that she could pull the switch hook down and start again. She didn’t know if dialing zero still worked, but, this time, she only tried for the zero. She succeeded in pushing in the button on the fourth try.

  In Hampshire, Connecticut, dialing zero still connected one with a live human operator.

  A man answered the phone. His “How may I help you?” might have been the sweetest words she ever heard.

  73

  No and No

  Very quickly, an invasion force of state troopers, Hampshire cops, and two ambulances arrived at Emma’s house. The EMTs loaded Emma into the first ambulance after applying a tourniquet to her thigh. They marked her forehead with a T and the time, 0243. They used a Sharpie.

  In the ambulance, the paramedic on call administered morphine. She quickly felt relief. Enough to reflect on what had happened. She appreciated the irony that she and Pepper had sustained nearly identical gunshot wounds. Somehow that made her feel better that Pepper had already taken a bullet for her.

  The paramedic directed that the crew proceed to a Level 1 Trauma Center. Lt. Skip Munro rode in the rig with her to Hartford Hospital, the closest one to Hampshire. They had plenty of time to talk, thanks to the analgesic and the fifty-minute drive.

  Her first question was about Will. “Is my husband going to live?”

  Skip was silent for so long that Emma felt she already had her answer.

  “I need to know, Skip,” she said. “No bullshit.”

  “Will made it through surgery, but he is currently on life-support. That is honestly all I can tell you. At least, you’ll be in the same hospital. You’ll be able to see him.”

  Emma was quiet as she absorbed the news. Archie had always told her not to worry about the future until she had reason to do so. Nonetheless, her mind raced ahead to a dead Will ... or a brain-dead Will.

  She sighed deeply enough to make Skip ask if she was okay.

  “Let’s talk about the case,” she said suddenly.

  “You sure?”

  “I keep trying to wrap my head around Georgia hating me so much to kill my two best friends and possibly her own twin brother. Ethan almost seems like an afterthought … a forethought, actually. Faking his suicide is almost the craziest part of her plan—”

  “So, you’re convinced it was Georgia and not Joe?”

  “Yes, I am,” she said unequivocally. “She spun a fatal web, which in her deranged mind made logical sense.”

  “You accu
sed her,” Skip said, “I assume?”

  “Yup. She did it.”

  Angrily, Skip said, “We still have no proof—no forensics, no witnesses, no other evidence—nothing.”

  “We have two bits I can think of. Neither will convict her in court, but ... the first is her fish. Surely, some expert can trace the neurotoxins Dr. Mittendorf found to her fish.”

  “That works for me.”

  “The second,” Emma said, “is her AmEx bill.”

  “Huh?”

  “Georgia showed us her AmEx bill while we were still prisoners in her cell. It purportedly proved that she was in Dallas over the weekend Vanessa disappeared. Can you subpoena her AmEx records?”

  “I don’t think I’ll have to. It’s a murder investigation. I’m sure they’ll provide copies.”

  “Great, but it still won’t give us the ammo to send her away for a life sentence … times four.”

  Skip said, “Well, assuming the gun recovered from your house is the same one she used to shoot Will, we have her for attempted murder. That’s a start—”

  “It’s not enough for me,” Emma said fiercely. “I want her for everything.”

  “There has to be something to nail her with—”

  “Wait one second! Did you guys ever run the fingerprint from the button I gave Caroline Stoner?”

  “What button?”

  “The one I found next to Vanessa in the woods!”

  “She never gave it to us.”

  “I left it outside her apartment … the night of the ambush ... the night Pepper was shot.”

  “I’m sure it wasn’t intentional on her part.”

  “I hope not,” Emma said. “But what if Georgia’s fingerprint is on that button? Wouldn’t that fry her big ass?”

  Skip chuckled. “I suppose so.”

  After surgery, Emma remained in the hospital for five days. On her first evening, she telephoned Mark Byrne to make sure Pepper was being looked after. Emma knew that Mark had developed a crush on her. She felt for him. She was grateful for his loyalty and friendship, but Will was her man.

  Hartford Hospital provided Patient Advocates. Emma had informed hers that she did not wish to receive any visitors. It took Emma one post-op day to recognize the extreme stress that Will’s critical status was causing and that the full Ms. Sharpie investigation had engendered. And she thought of other matters, as well. Emma was doing a lot of thinking. More than anything else, she thought about the possibility (likelihood?) of going forward without Will. She thought, too, about Deb and Vanessa and what a void they left in her life. You don’t make new friends much better than the ones you loved in high school. Both of their families had opted for memorial services at the end of the summer instead of funerals. She didn’t look forward to those. She also thought about Archie. What would he have thought?

  On the second day, an orderly wheel-chaired her into the ICU. Will was hooked up to a million contraptions—most importantly the ventilator which was keeping him alive. It was a shocking sight. Emma was filled with despair. She couldn’t help but worry that a life-or-death decision might soon devolve to her. For the moment she shook that out of her mind.

  On the third day, a doctor, whom she had never seen before, knocked on her door.

  “May I come in?” he said.

  “More prodding?” she asked, feigning lightheartedness.

  “No, not that,” he said. “I am your husband’s neurosurgeon. I’ve come to tell you that Will went into cardiac arrest this morning. We were unable to resuscitate him. I’m truly sorry.”

  Emma blinked and stared.

  “Is there anything I can do, any questions I can answer, anyone I should call?”

  Emma fought back her tears until she was able to speak. “If you had been able to resuscitate him and get him off the ventilator, would he have been … normal?”

  “I believe that the answer is no. The bullet damaged the temporal lobe of his cerebrum. That is the part of the brain associated with perception and recognition of auditory stimuli, emotions, and language functions, among other important processes.”

  “Thank you, doctor,” she said.

  Will, she knew, would rather have died than be what he would have called a vegetable. That thought didn’t provide much solace.

  After the doctor closed the door behind him, Emma gave full voice to her grief. By nightfall, she had cried herself out. That Will hadn’t written that hurtful nineteen-word text—obviously Georgia had—did give her a measure of relief. So did the catharsis of knowing that the man she loved was not a serial killer. Admittedly, she had let other people’s doubts affect her, but she had always, deep inside, believed in him.

  Lastly, she was humbled that Will—despite his chronic depression, despite Georgia, despite all he had suffered—had sacrificed his life to protect hers.

  On the fourth day, Emma awoke to a morning thunderstorm. She realized for the first time since Georgia’s bullet had torpedoed her thigh, that she didn’t have as much pain. The loud claps of thunder didn’t bother her in the slightest. It was July 14th. Four days had passed since the arrests of Georgia and Joe. Bastille Day, she remembered.

  Her cell phone, which Mark Byrne had dropped off, had rung nonstop since she’d been in hospital. She had been in bunker mode and had liked it that way. The messages, all un-played, had piled up.

  Today, though, she felt different. Will’s death made her feel ready.

  She knew that there were a few things she would never know. As far as full closure went, she would never know if Stella had knowledge of Will’s imprisonment or of Georgia’s murderous rampage. She would probably never know whether Joe and Georgia had a sexual relationship, and, if they had, if Joe knew what Georgia was up to. And why, at different times, were they both wearing ballistic vests? Did that tie them together? Finally, if Will had recovered, would she have confronted him about his affair with his teaching assistant, Suzy Szarkowski? Probably not, she decided.

  It was time to listen to her messages.

  Sophie King had left three voicemails of the I’m-thinking-of-you sort. Emma had been thinking about her, too.

  Virginia Hobson was the winner of the persistence prize. She left four messages each containing similar content: “I am very anxious to get together with you for an interview with the Chronicle. Everybody in Hampshire is dying to hear your story.” That was never going to happen.

  Julian Jackson left an earnest and quite moving apology, which she appreciated.

  As for the messages from Caroline Stoner, Dick Wardlaw, and Dr. Mittendorf, Emma knew she had to reply to all three.

  She called Caroline first. Caroline’s cell went to voicemail. Emma left her a message telling her not to worry … that they would remain friends and that she bore no ill feelings. It wasn’t strictly true, but it needed to be said. Just as Emma was about to hang up, Caroline picked up. “Oh Jesus, Emma, I’m so sorry. What a cluster-fuck. I mean, what with your injuries and poor, poor Will. I don’t know what to say—”

  Emma needed to ask ... and she needed an answer. “Why didn’t you deliver the button I left outside your door to the lab, as you’d promised?”

  “Um ... I owe you an apology. More than one, I guess. Look, all I can say is I got swept along by the group. It’s no excuse, but it’s the truth. I’m sorry Emma that I doubted you. Can you forgive me?”

  If there would ever be any normality in Emma’s future, harboring grudges wouldn’t get her there.

  “Apology accepted.” She said it a little curtly, but she’d said it.

  She telephoned Dr. Mittendorf next. He said, “Emma, I gather you’re in some pain. I’m truly sorry about that. I hope you’re on the road to your future. What I called to say is that you’re Archie’s girl after all! Well done to you!”

  She replied, “You don’t know how much that means to me.”

  Lastly, Emma called Dick Wardlaw at home. Dick was not the sort to be in his office at eight o’clock in the morning.

&nbs
p; In fact, she could tell that she had roused him from sleep.

  A grumpy voice answered, “Dick Wardlaw. Who is this?”

  “Dick,” she said cheerily, “I hope I’m not disturbing you. It’s Emma Thorne returning your call.”

  He pulled himself together. “How are you? I am so relieved to hear from you. What a dreadful mess! But you are Hampshire’s heroine once again. I never doubted you for a minute. Locking up those two is nothing short of a triumph. Congratulations.”

  “But you fired me. Remember?”

  “Well, that was just because of the conflict of interest. What with Will being—”

  “Will’s dead.”

  “Oh.”

  She plowed ahead, “Why did you call me?”

  “To ask you to resume being my chief of police, of course! And to be my friend, too. What do you say?”

  Emma was barely able to contain her delight.

  She said, “I say no to being Hampshire’s chief of police, and I say a definite no to being your friend. Thanks for the call, Dick.”

  Click.

  Emma knew she hadn’t done the most bang-up job as a rookie chief, but she did have the arrests of a serial killer and a sex trafficker to her credit.

  That must count for something, she figured.

  She made one further call.

  As heavy rain pelted the windows of Hartford Hospital, she phoned Mark Byrne.

  He immediately said how sorry he was about Will. She thanked him. He didn’t sound himself.

  He stammered, “I, I—”

  His voice held none of his normal cockiness.

  “—I guess I’ve fallen in love with you. That’s stupid. I have fallen in love with you. And there’s something I need to get off my chest. I lied to you. When I told you that Will and Suzy Szarkowski had an affair, well, that wasn’t true.”

  Emma could tell that Mark was surprised when she said, “That’s wonderful news. Thanks for telling me. It makes me feel better. And thank you for all you’ve done for me and Pepper.”

  While Mark seemed at a loss for words, she said, “Speaking of which, would you hold the phone to Pepper’s ear? I need to thank her, too.”