Hometown Hero (Locust Point Mystery Book 4)

by Libby Howard

  I couldn’t see. There was a crunch, the shriek of rubber on pavement. The seatbelt locked, holding me in place. I blinked, my hands tightly gripping the wheel as I took a much-needed breath. My car was stopped in my lane. I didn’t have a deflated airbag in my face, so I must not have hit anything. Looking around I saw the oncoming car in a ditch, headlights pointing past me down the road. The pickup was nowhere to be seen.

  That jerk in the pickup had caused an accident and fled the scene. My blood boiled at the thought.

  With a shaking hand, I put my car in park and opened my door, making my way over to the car in the ditch. I could see the airbag had inflated. Before I’d even crossed the median, I had my cell phone out and dialed 911.

  “I need an ambulance at Jones Road just east of Route 2. There’s a car that’s been in an accident with a hit-and-run. I don’t know how badly the driver is injured, or if there are any passengers.”

  It was amazing how calm and detailed I could be when my brain was scrambled and my emotions were going into overdrive. There was some part of me that took control, and of that I was grateful because the other part of my brain kept seeing another car, mangled beyond recognition in a police impound lot where they’d towed it, and Eli in a hospital bed with tubes and monitors beeping and making horrible rhythmic suction noises.

  I heard the dispatch operator talking in the background, the super-speed typing as well as her assurance that she was on the phone with me, ready to guide me through any emergency medical attention I needed to provide.

  I didn’t want to do this. I wanted to get in my car and drive away far from all the horrible memories this was bringing back. But someone had stopped for Eli, and that had made all the difference in the world. It meant my husband had continued to live for ten additional years. He might have not been the same man he’d been before. He might not have always been happy that he’d not died at the scene of that accident. He might have been frustrated with the hand that God had dealt him, but he’d lived.

  I would be forever grateful to that unnamed person who’d called in the accident, who’d shouted their panic into the phone about the blood and the man wedged tight in his mangled car. Who’d waited by his side until the ambulance arrived. If Eli had died there by the side of the road, I would have wanted there to be another person nearby, just in case he’d opened his eyes and needed that reassurance that someone cared while he breathed his last.

  I got to the car door and nearly fainted in relief when it easily opened.

  “Are you okay?”

  The man in the driver’s seat turned a wide-eyed expression my way and nodded. His face was red and splotchy. I wasn’t sure what was from the airbag and from any more serious injury.

  “I called for an ambulance. They’ll be here soon. Where do you hurt?”

  The woman from 911 was like a bee buzzing in my ear, asking me to check this and check that, but everything seemed to be moving in slow motion. I didn’t want to grab this guy and yank him out of the car or paw him when I didn’t know what kind of injuries he might have suffered.

  “Chest hurts,” he gasped. “And my face. Think I might have broke my nose.”

  ‘Chest hurts’ was what worried me the most. “Can you get out of the car? If I release your seatbelt, do you think you can get out?”

  The woman in my ear was saying something about checking his pulse and keeping him calm and still because of shock or something. I had no idea. She was like background noise as I looked into this man’s dark brown eyes and wondered if he had a wife waiting at home for him, or kids expecting pancakes for breakfast.

  I unbuckled the seatbelt and put my arm into the car for the man to grasp. He was strong and not exactly a lightweight but I was able to get him out of the vehicle. Somehow I managed and the man stood, leaning against the side of his car, breathing heavily.

  “I swerved to avoid that truck,” he told me. “Managed not to hit him head on, but we scraped pretty bad along the driver’s side.”

  “It wasn’t your fault. I was behind him and he swerved over the center line. It was a blind corner and he was in your lane. He was totally in the wrong, and the jerk left the scene.”

  “Probably drunk,” the man told me. He swayed and I grabbed his shoulders, easing him down the side of his car so he sat on the grass.

  “How is your chest feeling now? Keep talking to me. I need you to keep talking to me.”

  “Better.” The man took a careful breath and looked down the road in the direction he’d come from. I was beginning to hear the faint sound of sirens, growing louder as they neared. The shrill noise cut off abruptly as a beam of headlights came around the corner. The narrow illumination brought the heavily wooded shoulders into soft focus, and I saw crushed saplings, trees with fresh scars gleaming white against their brown bark. A shadow darkened a patch of briars even in the lights of the oncoming vehicle. I shivered, knowing how many accidents this sharp corner had seen over the decades, how many fatalities this stretch of road had chalked up. It seemed a car or truck lost control on this curve every few months, and once every year or so, someone lost their life here. Just last fall a dump truck had rolled over right where the injured trees stood. The driver had lived, but they’d needed to call in a helicopter to rush him to the trauma center.

  This man seemed to have been lucky. Many weren’t. Eli hadn’t been. It had been before dawn when he was on his way to prep for an early surgery. An icy road. An oncoming truck crossing the center line. I closed my eyes and envisioned what I supposed had happened based on what I’d seen of our car and read in the police report. The truck had clipped our sedan, sending it into a spin into the woods where it had rolled over several times, slamming the driver’s side into a tree. It had taken paramedics half an hour to free Eli from the twisted metal.

  When I opened my eyes, I saw the ghost. “Eli?” I whispered, taking a step forward. The shadowy figures I saw were visually almost identical, but I knew right away this one wasn’t Eli. I swallowed hard, wondering which of the many people who had lost their lives on this road this was, then turned back to the injured man.

  The fire department arrived on the scene, and I stood apart as they spoke to the man, shining a light in his eyes and asking him questions. I knew these guys. They were volunteers, and I’d seen them often enough at their annual donation drive and various fundraisers.

  A police car pulled up, and again I saw the shadowy figure in the beam of the headlights. The light illuminated the woods, and I frowned. The scarred trees were too raw, their injuries too recent to have been from that dump truck rollover. Locust Point was a small town, and this road close to our city limits. Any accident that caused this much damage wouldn’t have gone unreported.

  And that shadow…it didn’t feel like Eli or that elderly woman who had died two years ago. This was a man. Young. Angry. Furious that his life had been cut short just when everything he’d ever wanted had been in his hands.

  I hadn’t seen the pickup truck drive off. Yes, there was a curve in the road, but I’d been blinded by headlights and distracted, trying to avoid the accident taking place right before me. I’d watched the pickup veer across the center line, then overcorrect. I’d slammed on my brakes, seen the oncoming car swerve then careen toward the ditch on the side of the road. I’d heard a crash, the sound of metal against metal, against wood, of brush mowed down. I hadn’t seen anything else. I hadn’t seen the truck that had been in front of me actually negotiate the curve.

  Could it….? My heart pounded in my chest as I walked past the sheriff’s deputy climbing out of his car. Feeling numb, I pulled my cell phone back out of my pocket and turned on the flashlight app. There were no skid marks in the road beyond the ones belonging to the car in the ditch. There was nothing beyond the churned-up dirt, the flattened bushes, the gashes in the tree trunks to indicate someone had failed to navigate the turn. I turned my light down the embankment and into the woods, again noticing the dark shadowy figure. Slowly I made my way pas
t the ghost to perch at the edge of the road, looking through the broken woods.

  There, hidden by the trees, the brush, the slope of the embankment, and the moonless night was the pickup truck that had been in front of me. It was a twisted chunk of metal and broken glass, covered in mud and broken branches as it lay on its side.

  I immediately remembered our sedan in the impound lot, still muddy, the upholstery, the dashboard, and the windshield still stained with blood. So many nights I’d envisioned Eli’s accident as if I’d been on the side of the road watching it, or as if I’d been in the passenger seat. Right now, I was doing the same thing with this truck.

  “Guys?” I croaked out. “Officer?”

  Nothing could make me go down there. Nothing. I didn’t want to see it. It had taken me nearly a decade to get over the nightmares after Eli’s accident. I couldn’t go through that again.

  “Officer!” Somehow I managed to find my voice and shout. “The truck that was in front of me is down here. It’s…it’s bad.”

  I heard them radioing in for additional help, felt someone push past me and skid down the hill, sliding partway down on his hip. The deputy yanked on the mangled door, grabbing the flashlight off his utility belt and adding that much stronger beam to the one from my cell phone.

  The shadow edged up next to me and I shivered, folding my arms across my chest. From the rush of paramedics scrambling down to the truck, the crack of them wrenching the door off with their equipment, I assumed that someone in there had a chance. The ghost hovered near my shoulder telling me otherwise. Either there were two people, or more, in the truck or the first responders yanking the door off were fighting a battle they’d already lost.

  They gently eased someone from the passenger seat onto a board then there was a flurry of activity. I caught myself on the edge of hyperventilation and edged back onto the road where I couldn’t see what was happening down the embankment.

  The other man was sitting in the opening of the ambulance, a blood pressure cuff on his arm. He looked better. He looked like he was fine, but I wasn’t sure if my perception was off because of what I was imagining in the other vehicle.

  Another ambulance arrived. The paramedics brought a girl up on the stretcher. She had blood on her face and hair and what I could see of her clothing. I recognized her, even with the blood. Peony Smith. No, it couldn’t be Peony Smith, not at two o’clock in the morning. Peony Smith was only fifteen years old. No, it had to be her older sister, Violet.

  Suddenly it was hard for me to breathe. Violet. The smart girl who had struggled to pull herself out of poverty, who’d managed to get her degree with need-based scholarships, loans, and whatever jobs she could find. I hoped she was okay. I hoped more than anything that a girl who’d done all the right things didn’t die at twenty-two, or end up like Eli. Life couldn’t be that cruel to do that to a young girl, even if they’d done it to a middle-aged doctor.

  They loaded her into the ambulance and I turned to see the other stretcher come up, this one with a zippered body bag.

  The deputy approached me, notepad out, ready for my statement. I gave him a shaky smile, recognizing Miles Pickford from the times he’d been in to see J.T.

  “Sorry Kay. I didn’t mean for you to wait this long, or…” he grimaced. “Or for you to see that. That girl owes her life to you, though. She’s gonna make it and that’s because you saw that truck down there.”

  “Is it Violet Smith?” My gaze was drawn to the ambulance once again.

  “I don’t know, she’s unconscious. Did you recognize her? I’m sure her purse and ID are somewhere in the truck.” Miles gave me a sympathetic pat on my shoulder. I’d always liked him, young and enthusiastic with his buzz-cut hair, broad shoulders, and kind brown eyes.

  “Do you need to sit down?” He steered me to the passenger seat of his car, swinging the door open and taking my elbow as I sank onto the cushion.

  “Thanks.” I leaned against the seat back, collecting my thoughts for a moment. “I was driving back from Mick’s—we’d gone there after bingo at the VFW. The truck passed me about a quarter mile back and when I came around the first turn, I saw it swerve into the other lane.”

  “Drunk?”

  “I don’t know.” I closed my eyes to remember exactly what happened. “No, he wasn’t drifting over the line like he was drunk or falling asleep. It was like he’d lost control of the car, like someone was trying to grab the wheel from him, or he was on icy pavement, or something happened to his steering.”

  “Probably drunk and the girl tried to grab the wheel when he drifted into the other lane,” Miles commented as he wrote.

  I went to protest, but decided against it. He’d probably seen far more accidents, and far more drunk drivers, than I had. Maybe I was wrong.

  “Either way, when the oncoming car came around the turn, he was still in the wrong lane. These curves are really sharp, and with the trees it’s hard to see the lights from an oncoming car until they’re almost around the corner.”

  “Mmm hmm,” he mumbled. “Didn’t look like a head-on though.”

  “No. Both vehicles swerved and I was blinded by the headlights, but I heard a crash and once I got stopped and looked, I saw the car in the ditch. I didn’t see the truck anywhere, so I thought they made the turn and kept going—a hit-and-run.” I shook my head. “If I hadn’t been looking in that direction when the lights of your cruiser came around the corner and noticed the fresh damage on the trees…”

  “Mr. Coleman told us he thought it was a hit-and-run as well.”

  It wasn’t. “I hate this road,” I told Miles, my voice wavering. “I hate it.”

  “Me too, Kay.” He finished his notes and stuffed the pad into his back pocket. “I wish they’d widen it, or buy up a bunch of this land and straighten it out. Too many accidents happen here.”

  I shivered, thinking of Eli, of whoever had been in the truck with Violet Smith. Looking over at the black body bag, I saw a shadowy figure hovering next to it. The ambulance was just pulling away with the girl, another was arriving to take away the other occupant of the truck—the one who hadn’t been so lucky.

  One night, and two lives changed forever. Three lives changed, because I was never ever going to drive this road again. Never.

  Chapter 11

  It was close to four in the morning when I got home. The first thing I did was sit in the driveway and call in sick to work. It wasn’t just that I’d be going in on three hours’ sleep, I truly couldn’t manage to deal with skip traces and bail bond requests right now. I wasn’t in any state of mind to do research or write reports. Maybe I should have gone. Maybe it would have helped me snap out of the panic and horror if I’d gotten a shower and headed in as if nothing had happened, but I couldn’t. All I wanted to do was curl up on the couch with Taco and a blanket and sleep it all away.

  Well aware that everyone else in my house was sound asleep, I carefully opened the door and tiptoed across the creaky wooden floors.

  The soft sounds of drawers opening and closing, the rustle of clothes being put on, the quiet creak of socked feet on the old floors. “Love you. See you soon.”

  I wrapped my arms around my chest and bent at the middle, squeezing hard to push the pain away and keep myself from collapsing to the floor. Taco broke the spell, trotting up with a sharp ‘meow’, and rising to brush himself against my leg. I bent down to pick him up, and he pushed his head into my hands, purring loudly.

  “Someone died tonight,” I told the cat. “Someone died ten years ago, too.” I buried my face in his fur. “A part of me died, that morning ten years ago, and I think that me is gone forever.”

  I left my car in the ambulance bay with the keys on the seat, too hurried to search for a parking spot, not caring if they towed it. I ran through the front lobby, down the halls, taking the stairs because I couldn’t wait for the elevator. Tears blurred everything into a soft watercolor of white and beige and I choked back sobs as I raced past the nurses at the ICU
desk. Their eyes followed, but they didn’t stop me because they knew—they knew that I had to hurry before it was too late.

  I love you. Don’t leave me; I love you.

  Taco rumbled against my chest, my fingers deep in the soft fur, stoking and accepting what comfort he could give. I couldn’t go to bed, not with all these memories bubbling to the surface. Bed is where I’d seen him last before the accident. It’s where I’d been when I’d gotten the call. It’s where we’d laid side-by-side in sleep, not bothering to make love that night because we were tired and Eli had to get up early and we had the rest of our lives to make love to each other. Love you. See you soon.

  Instead of the bed, I sat on the couch and cried until Taco’s fur was wet with my tears, until a hint of gray tinged the dark sky. Then I got up and put some quiet music on Henry’s entertainment console, wrapped myself in a huge blanket, and fell asleep on the couch with Taco purring in my arms.

  They were whispering. They were whispering because they didn’t want me to hear. But I didn’t need to hear what they were saying because I knew. The body in the bed didn’t even look like Eli. There were monitors and tubes. They’d made an effort to straighten his limbs, but were obviously holding off on surgery until he was stable.

  He wasn’t stable. And from the whispers I knew they were expecting the shriek of those monitors any minute. Grief slid over me, oily and fetid, then something lit like a spark in my chest. This couldn’t happen—not to Eli and not to me. We were too young. We were good people. He’d had a patient prepped for surgery this morning. What had happened to his patient? Eli would be so distressed that his patient would be waiting. He never kept his patients waiting, said it was rude and disrespectful, that their time was just as important as his and if he couldn’t manage his schedule then he was a poor excuse for a doctor.