Make Haste Slowly

by Amy K Rognlie

  Tina, the secretary, was nowhere to be seen. She had probably stepped out for lunch, but I could hear the sheriff’s gravelly voice from somewhere down the short hallway. Should I walk back there? I wanted answers.

  I spotted a pad of sticky-notes on Tina’s desk, and decided I’d leave Tina a note to call me to schedule an appointment to see Earl. I reached for the pad, then froze. Why was my name written across the top of that file folder?

  I glanced toward the hallway. Would it be wrong to pick the folder up and—

  Sheriff Earl blustered into the room, one of the EMT guys at his side. “And that nosy woman from Ohio—”

  “Hello, Sheriff.” I gave him a sweet smile.

  He glared at me.

  “I was hoping you could give me an update on the investigation of the murder on my property.”

  “Can’t ya listen to the news?” He spat into his Styrofoam cup. “It wasn’t a murder, ma’am. Homeless dude named Roger got in a little trouble.”

  Really. Why was I finding it difficult to believe this man?

  “Well, have you been able to determine the circumstances surrounding the, uh, event? It’s a bit unnerving to have something like this happen right in the middle of town.”

  He shrugged and shot a sly glance toward the EMT. “Me and Vic, here, are on it, ma’am. Takes some time, ya know?”

  Clearly, I wasn’t going to get anything else from him today. I turned and walked to the door.

  “Don’t worry, Miss Willie. You’re perfectly safe.”

  Willie, again, instead of Callie. The man was mocking me, and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. Yet.

  In a rare display of bad temper, I stomped on the gas pedal and whipped out of the gravel parking lot, determined to put the whole weird thing out of my mind, at least for now. The “body” was Roger, and he was recovering well. And the gift bag was probably someone’s idea of a practical joke for my birthday, which was now only two days away. And I had a wedding to do.

  I backed my minivan up to the church as close as I could so the flowers would be exposed to the humid heat for no longer than a minute or two. The church secretary had said she’d leave the side door unlocked for me and to come right in. Juggling my purse and the box of orange boutonnieres in one hand, I pulled open the heavy glass door with the other. A welcome whoosh of air conditioning met me as I braced the door open with my foot. With my other foot, I tried in vain to reach the large rock that was apparently used for a doorstop.

  This isn’t working. With a sigh, I shoved my purse and the flowers on top of a small table, then turned to wedge the door open, this time with both hands and feet free.

  Odd. Somehow, the door had closed behind me, and the doorstop rock was nowhere to be seen. The slightest prickle of apprehension warned me a second before something hard connected with my head.

  I came to slowly. My head felt like it was about to explode, and my eyes didn’t want to open. Why was I lying on the floor? The carpet felt scratchy under my cheek, and there seemed to be an odd silence around me. I forced myself to slit my eyes open to see where I was. Oh, thank God. Still in the side foyer of the Methodist church.

  But was I alone?

  I lay there for long minutes, my entire body rigid, my pulse beating in my ears, my neck. I could hear nothing but my own breathing.

  Finally, I made the barest movement with my hand; chanced a quick peek around.

  Nothing.

  With effort, I pulled myself to a sitting position against the wall. When my head stopped whirling again, I opened my eyes, fully this time.

  I was definitely alone.

  The contents of my purse were strewn around me; my delivery van still idling outside of the glass door. I reached a tentative hand up to my head, and felt a bump that must have been about the size of a bowling ball. When I pulled my fingers away, they were sticky with blood, but there wasn’t much of it, thank God.

  What just happened? I tried to think, but my mind felt muddled. Jesus. I couldn’t think of anything else. Just His name. Jesus, help me.

  “Callie!” Mona’s horrified voice jerked me out of my stupor. “What happened to you?”

  I tried to focus my eyes on my friend. “I’m not...sure.” Where were my glasses?

  Mona poked furiously at her phone screen, then plunked down on the floor next to me and wrapped her plump arms around me tightly. Her perfume nearly knocked me out again.

  “The EMTs are on their way.” She pulled away from me and looked into my eyes. “You need to stay awake, Callie. Where are you hurt? Can you tell me what happened?”

  I started to shake my head, but almost blacked out again. “A rock,” I croaked.

  “The lock?” Mona glanced at the door, then back at me. “It’s not locked, Callie.”

  “No, a rock,” I said. I could hear my own words coming out of my mouth as if from a distance, but I couldn’t seem to keep my thoughts straight. “It smelled weird.”

  She peered at me and shook her head. Her earrings jingled, and I stared at them. They looked like sunbursts. Or flowers. Flowers!

  “I have to get the flowers,” I murmured. “The flowers for the rocks. The wedding rocks. The flowers…”

  Mona looked panicked. “Maybe you should stop talking after all, honey. Here, let me wipe the blood off your fingers.”

  The volunteer firefighters came to my rescue for the second time in three days. A little while later, I was feeling a mite better with an icepack on my head and some extra-strength Tylenol on board.

  I looked up at the guys from where I still sat on the floor. “I guess I owe y’all some brisket.”

  Y’all? I must have been woozier than I thought I was.

  Captain Todd Whitney grinned at me, and I somehow noticed that his eyes were actually dark blue, not brown as I had supposed.

  “Now you’re talkin’.” He reached to help me up. “Earl’ll need to question you again, of course. Let’s get you loaded up.”

  What?

  “We have to take you to the hospital, Callie.” He held his hand up to forestall my objections. “You took quite a knock on the head, and I suspect you have a concussion. Any nausea?”

  Well, now that he mentioned it…

  I shuddered as the guys rolled a sheet-draped gurney into the foyer. It was probably the same one that the...the body—

  When I came to again, I was in the back of the ambulance. The only other time I had been in this end of an ambulance was when Marleigh…oh, no. I couldn’t go there right now. I squeezed my eyes closed against the sounds, the smells, the images—

  “Hang in there, ma’am. We’ll be there in a minute.” One of the younger EMTs sat pressed up next to my side in the small space, his eyes on the monitor above my head. He patted my hand soothingly.

  Jesus. Jesus, help me. I couldn’t relive that day. Not now. Not after I had come so far…had overcome so much…

  Fighting against the panic rising in my chest, I focused on the tattoo on the guy’s forearm. I could only see a small part of it where his sleeve had pulled up slightly. I couldn’t tell what it was exactly. Of course, I was probably looking at it upside down, and besides, my brain still felt fuzzy. I thought it was a...a snake with words intertwined, maybe? Or perhaps a dragon? The image blurred, and I closed my eyes wearily.

  I somehow managed to make it to the hospital without completely losing it. Mona met me at the door, clutching my purse.

  “I unloaded all of your flowers, Callie.” She kept stride with the gurney as I was wheeled into a cubicle in the ER. “The bride arrived right after you left in the ambulance, so she didn’t even know anything happened, and the wedding coordinator—what’s her name? Evelyn? said she would take it from there and not to worry about a thing, okay?

  I started to nod, then thought better of it. I hadn’t intended to stay for the wedding anyway. “Thanks, Mona. Did you grab my phone, too?”

  “Earl wouldn’t let me touch anything until he took pictures.” She rolled her
eyes. “Then I gathered up everything I could find. Your phone was all the way under that little table. And here are your glasses.”

  The Tylenol must be helping. “What happened?” I asked Mona.

  “Somebody clobbered you a good one. That’s what happened.” Sheriff Earl ambled into the room. He came to a stop by my bedside and hitched his pants up. “Found a big ol’ rock out there by your van.”

  The doorstop rock. I remembered now. But why—

  He squinted at me. “Seems like you got something someone else wants.”

  What?

  “I took a picture of it.” He shoved his phone into my face. “Here. See?”

  I looked at his phone screen. The doorstop rock, lying on the pavement by my van. A piece of paper under the rock. I enlarged the picture so I could read the words written on the paper: “GIVE IT BACK.”

  I passed the phone to Mona, too dumbfounded to speak. Give what back? To whom?

  Mona stared at it, her face turning as red as the blouse she was wearing. She whirled on the sheriff. “Earl, I sure hope y’all catch whoever did this to Callie. You need to spend every waking minute until this…this person is caught. I can’t believe something like this happened in Short Creek! And right after the dead guy in her yard, too! If you have to go back to the ironing board and get extra detectives in from somewhere, y’all need to—”

  “I already told your friend here, Mona, that guy doesn’t have anything to do with this!” Earl’s face was even redder than Mona’s.

  Go back to the ironing board? I groaned. Earl would need to do more than go back to the drawing board to solve this mystery. And he most certainly had not told me anything about the dead body that I didn’t already know. I closed my eyes, my head throbbing. I couldn’t deal with this right now. Maybe things would make more sense tomorrow.

  But they didn’t. Make sense, that is. Nothing had been stolen from my purse. Not my phone, not my debit card. Not even the twenty-three dollars I had in cash. Nothing.

  And I certainly hadn’t taken anything from anyone, so how could I give it back? And did this skull-cracking incident have something to do with The Gift and Roger, the crepe myrtle man? I had been at the hospital yesterday, but not to see him as I had planned. I would have to go back as soon as I felt better and try to talk to him in person. After all, I was the “nosy woman from Ohio.” I might as well live up to that, since I certainly wasn’t going to get any answers from the sheriff.

  My head started to throb just thinking about it. I hauled Purl up into my lap as I sat at the kitchen table. She settled in with a sigh, folding her legs up under her plump little body. I stroked her soft head as Intarsia stared at me forlornly from her pug bed.

  A female cardinal lighted on my window feeder, and I admired her reddish-brown feathers and comical little Mohawk. The females were more timid than the males, so I didn’t see them as often. I grabbed my binoculars and trained them on her, hoping to study her markings more clearly. Instead, I got an up-close view of Sherm’s side yard, where a bikini-clad young woman lay stretched out on a rickety chaise lounge.

  “Yikes,” I muttered. Who is that?

  Usually, my view consisted of Sherm’s chain-link fence and air-conditioning unit, which I was hoping my newly-planted Confederate Jasmine would soon hide. So it was a bit of a shock to see—Oh, Sherm’s granddaughter. Of course. He mentioned her proudly almost every time we had a conversation. Nicole, I think he said her name was. She was beautiful, there was no doubt about that. Her black hair was long and silky-straight, and her legs would make any man drool. But I couldn’t get past the tattoos. That, and the fact that she was pregnant. Very pregnant.

  I laid the binoculars down on the table and turned back to my cup of tea. Definitely none of my business. I guess this is what happens when one sits around at home on a Thursday morning, but as Aunt Dot would say, my “get up and go got up and went.” I sighed. It had been a long time since I felt so…shaky.

  But I couldn’t sit at home all day stewing about things. Lonnie had texted me last night to see if I’d do the flowers for her daughter’s wedding. She and Jenna would be coming into the shop tomorrow at 11:00 for us to go over ideas and prices, so I might as well start thinking about doing another wedding. I sure hope Jenna had better taste than this last bride.

  I didn’t know Jenna very well. She had been away at college when I moved here, so I had only met her when she came home at Christmas break. She was home for the summer now, and had been singing with the praise and worship team at church. She seemed to be a lovely person, exactly like her mother.

  The wedding was set for September, which was autumn elsewhere in the country, but not in Central Texas. I wondered idly what kind of flowers Jenna would choose. She seemed like a classic roses-and-baby’s-breath kind of girl. But if it were my wedding, I’d choose something with sunflowers and—my wedding? What was I thinking? Someone knocked on the front door, but before I could scooch Purl off of my lap, Mona popped her head in.

  “Anybody home?” she called.

  “Come on in, Mona,” I said. “I’m in the kitchen, but watch out for the bump!”

  I loved this old house with all its lumps and scars, where Aunt Dot and Uncle Garth had lived for as long as I could remember. After Uncle Garth died, Aunt Dot had paid to keep it in good repair, but most everything was outdated. I had all kinds of ideas for remodeling, but so far, I had spent most of my time and energy on getting C. Willikers up and running.

  Mona stepped carefully over the odd bulge between the kitchen linoleum and the hardwood floor of the tiny living room, the smell of lasagna preceding her.

  “You need to get that fixed, Callie. That’s about the fifth time I’ve almost fallen on my face.”

  “I know. It’s on my to-do list,” I eyed the insulated bag she carried.

  “I brought you lunch. I’ll get Rob over here to look at the floor next time he’s home.” She set the bag on the table, then scooped up Intarsia and cuddled her like a baby. “How are you today, sweetie?” she crooned.

  “She’s better than I am, that’s for sure,” I said. “I still can’t believe someone chucked a rock at my head!”

  Mona put the dog down and came to inspect my head. “The lump doesn’t look as big this morning, at least.” She planted her fist on her ample hip. “Are you keeping ice on it? I told Rob about it, and he couldn’t believe it! Especially since I had already told him what happened on Monday.”

  “Do you want a cup of tea?” I asked, ignoring her question about ice. I was tired of holding an ice pack on my head. “When does Rob get back?”

  Rob was an over-the-road trucker, so he was often gone for two or three weeks at a time. Mona was used to it, but I knew by now that when he was home, Mona was practically glued to his side. I didn’t blame her.

  She plopped into the chair across from me, picking black pug hair off the front of her blouse, which I thought greatly resembled a Native American weaving of some sort. But at least her toenails matched it. Purple, green and black.

  “No, thanks. I’ve already had enough caffeine today. He’s still out for another week or so. Arkansas, I think.” She wrinkled her nose. “He was telling me last night about this training that he’s going to do, Callie. You know how we’ve been praying at church about human trafficking here in Texas?”

  I nodded. A few months ago, we’d had a guest speaker at Short Creek Community Church, who was with Traffick911, an organization dedicated to raising awareness of human trafficking and providing services to those rescued. I, along with everyone else, had been appalled to realize that the “Texas Triangle,” as it is called, was one of the major areas of human trafficking in the United States. And our little town of Short Creek was right in the middle of that triangle—from Dallas/Ft. Worth, to San Antonio, to Houston. As a church, we had made a commitment to pray about this heartbreaking situation, and to learn what we could do to help.

  “Rob found out about an organization called ‘Truckers Against Traf
ficking.’ He’s going to do the training for it.” Mona beamed.

  I smiled at her obvious admiration of her husband. Mona had had a disastrous first marriage, but after surrendering to Christ sometime in her thirties, she had met Rob at a church function. And according to her, Rob had hung the moon. And quite possibly several of the stars, as well.

  “I’ll pray for him,” I promised.

  And I would. I consciously tried not to promise I would pray for people unless I actually planned to do so. I disliked that a shallow “I’ll pray for you,” had become the standard Christian response to hearing someone else’s woes. To me, after being on the receiving end of prayers quite often in the last few years, I took it very seriously.

  There had been days in my life when about all I could muster was to say the name Jesus. Those were the times when I knew the prayers of others were carrying me through. The times when, though it felt like a knife was twisting in my heart, I had received the grace to make it one more day. The days when I could feel the comforting presence of the Holy Spirit, sustaining me and bearing me up, when I should have been a bawling mess on the floor.

  “I know you will.” She stood and began unpacking her bag. “Are you ready for some lasagna? I can’t eat it anymore, but I thought you would like it.”

  “You’re still doing the low-carb thing?”

  She nodded, looking mournful. “It’s so hard.”

  “I’m proud of you for sticking with it,” I said, taking time to notice her for the first time in the last few weeks. “Your face looks thinner.”

  She brightened. “Do you think so? I’ve lost almost ten pounds, but you’re the first one who’s mentioned anything about it. Rob will be so surprised when he sees me! I wish he was going to be here for the fireworks tonight.”

  Fireworks? Oh, yeah. I had forgotten that today was the Fourth of July. And the town always put on a display in the high school football stadium, well within earshot of my house.

  “Well, I’m certainly not going tonight,” I said. “In fact, I think I’ll dig out my earmuffs. All I need is fireworks to light up my headache.”