With his arm from the elbow down dangling out the open window of the truck, Cliff Palmeroy’s head was tipped at a backward angle to the left, his cap bill low over his eyes. “See? Stupid. Let’s not disturb him.”
“He might not be asleep. Could be a coronary or a stroke or a diabetic—” Abruptly he stepped in front of her, putting his back to the truck and turning her around, her back to him, calm but urgently saying, “Call 911.”
“What? Why?” Her hands shook as she went for her phone. “What is it?”
“Don’t turn around, Sophie.”
But even as she dialed the ominous number, she turned and asked, “Why? What’s happened? Is he ill?” And putting the cell to her ear, she finally looked up and took a step closer to see if she could help. “Oh, Jesus!”
She saw the man’s gaping mouth, the dark bib of blood, thick and wide, down the front of his T-shirt; the explosion of splatter that spotted the driver’s window casing and dripped down the door panel—she caught the scent of feces and rusty nails, and the wide-open look of horror in his eyes before she could turn away again.
“What’s happened to him? Yes, hello. Hello? Yes. There’s blood . . .” She took a deep breath—swallowed several times to keep the salt and bile in the back of her throat. “A man’s been injured. We’re on Poplar Street, a few blocks down from the hospital. I can’t see an address, but we’re across from Jesse Halleron’s bed-and-breakfast. He’s in a truck. There’s a doctor here but he’s going to need help. There’s a lot of blood. What? His name? Dr. McCarren? Oh, the man’s name. Cliff . . . something.”
“Palmeroy.”
“Cliff Palmeroy. Well, I don’t—” She half turned but didn’t look at Drew. Her hands were shaking—she trembled as if she was standing inside her own personal earthquake. “Is he . . . ?”
“Yes. He’s dead,” he said directly behind her, reaching to take the phone—which she gave up willingly. He put an arm around her shoulders, no doubt an automatic thing for someone like him but she didn’t care; she leaned into him before the shivering took her to her knees. “Drew McCarren. We’re going to need the police, too, and someone from the coroner’s office will want to see this. Thanks. No, I’ll stay. I can hear them already.”
Her stomach pitched like waves in a storm—up and down and up again. Salty saliva pooled in her throat again and her mind raced in no specific direction.
Sirens had started to whine in the distance. Closer, far off down the street, they could see red lights flashing as an ambulance sped to their aide.
“Why don’t you go back to Jesse’s? You don’t need to be here. The cops’ll want to talk to you, too, but it’ll be a while and I’ll tell them where you are.”
“Are you sure? I’m not as wimpy as I must seem right now. I wasn’t expecting . . . it’s a shock is all. I can stay. You shouldn’t have to deal with this alone.”
“There’s isn’t anything for me to deal with. Once the cops get here, they’ll handle it. Go ahead. I’ll be along in a few minutes.”
There was no point arguing—she’d rather be the full-time poop scooper at Kaufman Dog Park and the vomit monitor during flu season at her school than contend with the huge strew of blood.
“And you’re sure you’ve never seen the victim before this morning?” This was the third time Sheriff Murphy posed the same question. He was a tall, sandy-haired man in his midforties—very serious and awfully intimidating in his efforts to be thorough.
“Yes. I’m positive.” But that was all she was sure of. Her ankles and the tips of her fingers were numb—and vomiting again was not out of the question.
“And you’re certain it was the same man because you recognized the truck?”
“Yes. Well, and the green hat.”
“So seeing a man in a blue truck, wearing a green hat convinced you that he was watching you?”
“For crying out loud, Freddy!” A disconcerted Jesse sprang from her chair to begin pacing again. “Pay attention!”
“Mom,” Mike said, but she ignored him.
“How many times does the girl need to tell you? This morning, at the hospital, was the first time she’d ever seen him in her life. He stared at her from across the street and then drove off. She thought it was weird but didn’t put too much stock in it. She was here with me the rest of the day until Drew showed up for their date. They left the house and she saw him, for the second time in her life, parked up the street in front of the Levy’s house. She mentioned both encounters to Drew, who decided to go say hello to Cliff and find out why he was watching Sophie. And that’s when they found him dead in his truck and . . . my God, who would do such a thing? I know lots of us have wanted to at one time or another—he was a miserable excuse for a man but . . . who would do it? I saw Carla at the grocery store the day before yesterday. Poor thing’s so flighty . . . if there’d been anything amiss at home she’d have been a wreck. But she was as calm as she ever gets, the kids were with her— Who would do this?” She stopped to glare at the sheriff. “Don’t make me sorry I voted for you, Freddy. If you accuse Sophie again I’ll . . . I’ll run for sheriff myself next time. And I won’t need a badge to see when someone is so obviously innocent.”
Sheriff Murphy glared back. “First off, Ms. Halleron, I’m not accusing anyone of anything,” he said, walking toward her. And when he was close enough, he muttered under his breath, “You call me Freddy again and I’ll arrest you.” He turned back to Sophie and Drew, sitting on the couch. “And secondly: sometimes, if a witness repeats what happened more than once, they can recall additional facts like: Did he speak to anyone this morning or did he seem agitated; could there have been anyone with him, in the truck bed maybe, or . . .”
He looked into the foyer when the front door opened and a deputy walked in holding a camera sealed in a plastic bag.
“Hey, Mike,” Jesse said.
“Jesse.” He nodded, approaching the sheriff. He glanced at Sophie. “Ma’am.”
“How’s it going out there?” Drew asked, having seen the officer earlier.
“It’ll be a while yet.” He looked to his boss. “I thought you should see this right away. I noticed it was still on when I bagged it. I meant to turn it off—to save the battery—but this first picture showed up on the screen. I looked at the others. Sorry.”
When the sheriff was close enough, they stood, heads together, over the view screen—the sheriff’s brow lowering a bit more with each new picture. When he looked up, his gaze went straight to Sophie.
“Are you sure you’ve never met Cliff Palmeroy?”
“Oh, for the love of heaven!” Jesse plopped down in a chair, shaking her head, but she said no more.
“Yes. To my knowledge, I’ve never met the man.”
“Okay. Can you explain these pictures to me, then?”
He motioned with his head for his deputy to hand her the camera—he also demonstrated how to slide through the pictures . . .
Of her.
“Look.” She swung the camera in Drew’s direction; she needed someone else to see what she was seeing. “It’s me. Coming out of the dress shop this morning.” Jesse joined them on the couch, straining her upper body to look, too. Mike stood behind the sofa, silent, peering down over their shoulders. Her head began to throb at the temples. “And walking back to my car. This one, too. Oh. Jesse. You and I on the porch this afternoon. And . . . is this . . . that’s my car, my license plate.” Fear and frustration made her eyes water as she looked back at the sheriff. “I can’t. Explain these pictures. I don’t understand any of this.”
Deputy Martin took back the camera and the air in the room became brittle and still, all eyes focused on the sheriff. In time, he provided a loud, baffled sigh and they all relaxed—sort of.
“Truth be told, there aren’t that many murders committed here in Turchin County, Ms. Shepard. An accident now and again, naturally, but murder? Not so much. It’s hard to hide little things, like a murder, in a town this size. Somebody will hav
e seen something and then we’ll get to the bottom of this.”
“Stop looking at her as if she’s the something. Fred.” Jesse squished Sophie tighter between her and Drew. “Go out and find the somebody who witnessed this. No one here did anything to Cliff Palmeroy.”
“Jesus, Jesse, I’m not saying any of you did!”
“We know, Fred.” Drew’s voice was clear and calming. “We, all of us, are shook up and,” a quick glance at Jesse, “not quite ourselves right now. I know you have a lot to do tonight, so if you’re done with us, maybe we can call it a night and let you get back to work. I’m sure if Sophie remembers anything else she’ll let you know.”
“I will. I promise. I don’t . . . Those pictures, I have no idea why he’d be taking pictures of me but I’ll call you—if I think of anything else. Or remember. Or if I can do . . . Well, maybe you should call me if there’s anything I can do. I—”
Jesse curved an arm over Sophie’s chest, saying, “shhh, shhh,” as if to comfort her. And pulling her into a hug, she whispered in her ear. “Don’t be too helpful, honey. The most cooperative person is almost always the bad guy on TV—especially when it’s the special guest star.”
Leaning back between Jesse and Drew, she watched them exchange a scowl of supreme disbelief and a wide-eyed, silently emphatic dare to say different. But neither of them said another word.
“Fair enough.” Sheriff Murphy flipped his notepad closed and took two steps toward the door before turning back. He gave Jesse a droll eye. “Is this the part where the unbiased and remarkably tolerant sheriff warns everyone not to leave town without checking with him first?” She huffed and rolled her eyes as he grew sober. “Consider it said, people.”
He left but he didn’t take any of the stress with him.
Oddly, she became keenly aware of the breathing on both sides of her. Her mind filled with the anticipation of every rise and fall of her companions’ chests. At first she tried to synchronize her own respiratory rate with Drew’s, but his chest was broader and deeper and she got light-headed. And Jesse’s breaths were rapid and erratic—like the increasing tremors in her hands. On an impulse that was as selfish as it was caring, Sophie reached out to stop them; she couldn’t handle someone else’s anxiety until she’d dealt with her own—and at the moment it was all she could do to simply take in air.
Jesse stood and plumped all the sofa pillows she could get to.
“Maybe a stiff drink . . . anyone else? I might have a shot of bourbon but I have wine and beer, too.” Her voice faltered when she muttered, “Not nearly stiff enough, if you ask me.” She flicked invisible dust off the end table and put her back to them while she straightened a level picture of an old-time watermill on the wall. “Anyone?”
Swallowing presented itself as a more complicated concept than breathing, but she knew Jesse disliked drinking alone. “Sure. Water maybe? I’m not sure what my stomach can handle yet.”
“I’ll pass, thanks. I should get going.”
Yet he made no move to leave, which was fine by Sophie. No doubt, most any doctor would be clear thinking and self-possessed in a crisis. But it hadn’t been most any doctor out there beside the big blue truck with her. It was Drew, who knew what to do, who tried to protect her from seeing what no human should, who sent her to safety while he stayed, alone, until the police came. Self-centered, she knew it, but she was thinking he could stay as long as he wanted to. The longer the better.
She could feel him studying her and looked up to see concern in his eyes. She bowed her lips a bit to abate his worries—it made him scowl and say, “What are you smiling about? So far this has been, hands down, my worst first date ever.”
It surprised a giggle from her and then they both laughed softly.
“Attagirl.” He bumped his shoulder against hers. “Sheriff’s right, you know. By breakfast, everyone in town will be looking sideways at everyone else. Someone will slip up, make a mistake and the truth about whatever happened here tonight will come out. And it won’t have anything to do with you.”
“What about the pictures?”
He shrugged. “So Cliff had an eye for beautiful women, and you happen to be one. I don’t think they can arrest you for that.”
“Jesse didn’t like him. She made him sound like a not-so-nice guy.”
“Mm. I think they went to school about the same time. Seems he was one of those popular jock-slash-bully types who left his game in high school and lost his popularity shortly after that. Stayed a bully, though. And guys like that all seem to have a special talent of picking the weakest person out of a crowd to torment.
“Carla, his wife, is tiny and frail—a sweet, anxious woman who seems always to be sitting on the verge of a mental collapse. He also has two quiet, sullen teenage sons who seem well on their way to becoming just like him.” He paused. “Sometimes there are worse things a man can do to his family than beat them, you know?”
She nodded, but she didn’t know. Not in truth. At the moment she was almost ashamed to admit that the cruelest her parents ever got was to refuse her a Canadian ski trip with a friend—and his family!—in seventh grade. Well, and saying no to extending her curfew all through high school . . . and, to letting her get her ears pierced, not until she was sixteen. Still, it was hard to be sorry your childhood was simple and happy and as close to perfect as it ever got—especially in the face of someone else’s misery.
Another option occurred to her: “You don’t think . . . I mean, he probably wasn’t taking pictures of me to . . . you know, later on . . .” She knew what she was trying to say, just not how to say it. However, Drew knew both what and how and chose to simply watch with amusement as she struggled. “Stop that. You know what I mean.”
He chuckled. “I do. And while different guys get off on different things—shoes, elbows, middle-aged gap-toothed wives—I’d be willing to bet that Cliff Palmeroy’s bent was toward something a lot more salacious than those pictures of you.”
“Gross, man! There’s a child in the room.” They both turned to watch Mike unfold himself from the chair near Jesse’s office door, and then go wide-striding out of the room, saying, “If Mom knew that I knew what you two are talking about, she’d wash my brain out with soap.”
It was true—that old adage about laughter being the best medicine. Every half-laugh and giggle eased the tightness in her chest, dissolved the fuzz in her thoughts. Her smile faded as they returned to Cliff Palmeroy.
“Why did he take them? The pictures.”
“We don’t know that he did. Not for sure.”
“Who then? And how’d they end up in his truck?”
After a few seconds even his expression wilted. It disheartened her—made her chest ache heavily. She sought to lighten the mood again.
“What do you get off on?” The words slipped from her lips like drool from a Mastiff. She wasn’t even sure she’d uttered them out loud until his lips quirked and he cast a twinkling gaze her way. Once again she felt the heat rising up both sides of her neck, pooling her cheeks.
“Since you asked . . .” He turned to face her more directly. “Freckles. Not the average, run-of-the-mill round tan freckles that anyone can get. Or sunburn freckles that are bigger, darker, and jagged around the edges, which you, remarkably, have very few of—”
“We used to tease my mom about her silent partnership in Coppertone.”
“Smart woman.” He kept lowering his gaze away, briefly, but often enough to make her nose twitch and her lips tingle.
“Aha. I appreciate it more now than I used to.”
In slow motion he reached up and slid his index finger down the left side of her nose, featherlight and heart crumpling. “These are the ones I like. So tiny and faded, they probably aren’t even visible in the winter. But come summer they reappear, a reminder of summers gone by, of a wild little redhead running barefoot and happy in Ohio . . . slick as a fish lip, from her mother’s sunscreen.”
This time she snorted, an astonished
hoot that came all the way from her troubled soul.
“I’m also a sucker for a bright smile and a good laugh; the sound of it. Not those high cackling noises or the lifeless, fake-sounding kind. Like huhuhuhu.” Truly fake and lifeless and funny when he did it. “But a happy, healthy laugh. Like yours.”
She tipped her head, very conscious of her smile and that she hadn’t thought of the bloody dead man in the truck for the past three or four minutes and that he was deliberately making her forget.
Getting her first real taste of Drew McCarren was like stuffing her mouth full of Pop Rocks—unsettling at first, but instantly identified as something uncommon . . . and not to be missed.
“Are you like this with all your patients?”
“Depends,” he said easily, not bothering to pretend he didn’t know what she meant—that she was getting his best bedside manner.
“On what?”
“What they need from me.” He glanced down at her hand, softly fisted on her thigh. He slipped his fingers under hers, caressed them with his thumb, smoothing them out flat. “Most often they only need me to be honest with them. And specific. Sometimes I’m a medical dictionary, defining words they don’t understand. Once in a while they need me to be the asshole who forces them into reality—not my favorite role. From time to time I’m the relative stranger who’ll hold them while they cry because they feel the need to show their family a brave front. But generally, all they want is a few moments of normality, to not see sadness and sympathy in the eyes of the person standing beside their sickbed, to get out from under the seriousness of their condition, to forget for a few minutes and laugh . . . so then I’m a clown.”
She shook her head and flipped her hand palm up to meet his, curling her fingers over his. “No. That’s when you’re a good doctor. A fine friend.” When he looked up she added, “Thank you.”
He looked reluctant to accept her praise, as if it were just part of the job, but changed his mind. He didn’t seem to mind being either of those things in her eyes. Good doctor + fine friend = great start. Leaning forward he kissed the space between her brows as if to ward off troubled thoughts, saying, “Go knock a couple shots of water back with Jesse—or ginger ale. Stay hydrated. Try to get some sleep, okay?”
Something About Sophie Page 6
