by Bulock, Lynn
How common was a blue Vespa? I didn’t want to call the police if this was somebody else’s motor scooter. I could only imagine how Ray would react if several black-and-whites screamed up to this house only to find some poor, unsuspecting scooter owner. The gate stood slightly ajar, so I wasn’t really trespassing by walking through, was I? A touch of the scooter told me it was still warm. If it wasn’t Matt’s, then somebody else had been out for a ride on a similar scooter.
I heard a woman’s voice from the back of the house. She was yelling at someone. “Frankie, no! Where did you get that? Put it down.” The name was familiar and so was the voice. When I looked around the corner of the house, Tracy Collins stood over the prone form of Matt Seavers. Between them on the ground lay a silver aluminum baseball bat. That frightened me, but what was even more frightening was Frankie, a gun in his hand, pointing it at his own mother.
Before anyone saw me I pulled back to the side of the house. For once I decided to follow Ray’s advice. I pulled out my cell phone and called 911. It was only when the operator answered that I realized I didn’t know the street address. Praying that it was on the front of the house, I got there as quickly and quietly as I could. One of the faded metal numbers hung by only one nail, but they were all there. I gave the address to the operator and told her to relay the message to Ray as well. I hadn’t ever memorized his phone number, something that I promised myself I’d do at the next opportunity.
Going back to the corner of the house, the tableaux in front of me hadn’t changed. Matt lay stretched on the concrete, not moving. Tracy, talking feverishly, stood very still while her son pointed a gun at her.
Frankie interrupted her. “You hit him with that bat before he even said anything, Mom. Why? What’s going on?”
“I was protecting you and your sisters. Just like I have been all along. He’s a bad man, Frankie. He’s the one who killed your father.”
“Is that why you called him on the phone and told him he had to come here or you’d turn him in to the police?” Frankie’s slender shoulders trembled so that I could see the movement from twenty feet away. “I heard you call. And I heard the other call to Uncle Mike, the one where you told him that with Dad’s insurance you could send all of us through college. I don’t think he killed Dad, not unless you paid him to do it.” Frankie choked out the last few words on the ragged note of a kid whose voice was changing almost as fast as his world.
“That’s ridiculous. He’s the one the police arrested. Either shoot him or put down the gun.” Tracy took a step toward her son, who waved the gun at her and gave a strangled cry.
I could hear the slight sound of well-tuned cars on the street in front, and several car doors opening. Then the gate squealed open and I pressed my back against the rough stucco of the house to let three uniformed officers past. They were all shouting as they rounded the corner. “Police. Put the gun down. Don’t shoot.” Ray charged just steps behind them and I held my breath.
“Thank heavens you’re here,” I heard Tracy say in a loud voice. “This man tried to attack me and my family. He said something about finishing what he started. He was like a maniac.”
“That’s not true!” Frankie shouted. “He didn’t say anything. You hit him with a bat. You killed him!”
“Whatever happened, holding that gun in front of four armed police officers won’t help anything, son. We’ll sort things out. You just put the gun down.” Ray’s voice was amazingly even and calm. I couldn’t bear to look around the corner and see what was happening. Instead I prayed, fervently, for everybody involved. “Come on now. Put your arm down and take your finger away from the trigger. Nobody wants to shoot or get shot here.”
A clatter of something heavy on concrete relieved me so much I couldn’t stand upright any more. The RV pad felt cool beneath me as I sat there long enough to draw several breaths. Then I got up on shaky legs and finally looked to see what was going on. Tracy, protesting loudly, was being restrained by one of the officers, while Frankie had been dragged away from where the gun lay on the pavement and pressed against the back wall of the house by another officer.
“Why are you doing this? I’m the victim here,” Tracy shrieked. “My son is hysterical. He doesn’t understand what he’s saying. That man threatened to kill us!”
“That’s not what happened,” I said. “At least it isn’t what Frankie said he heard and saw.”
Ray knelt beside Matt’s body where the young man still lay in the same position I’d seen him in ten minutes ago. He looked up at Tracy. “We’ll know soon enough what really happened here. Seavers is still alive, even though somebody tried to brain him with this baseball bat. Once he’s treated at the hospital we’ll know who’s telling the truth.”
The officer who wasn’t restraining anybody pulled a crackling radio off her belt and called for an ambulance. Tracy sat in an Adirondack chair on the patio, breathing hard and glaring at everyone now. Ray took a step closer to her. “I don’t know whose story is true here, but you can help things by telling me the truth on one issue, Ms. Collins. When Seavers got here, was he alone?”
At first Tracy said nothing. She seemed to be weighing her options. “Of course he was alone,” she spat out finally. “What would you expect from somebody threatening a defenseless woman and three little kids?”
“I’m no little kid,” Frankie said. “And I know what I heard. That guy didn’t threaten anybody.”
He and his mother stayed silent after that, their energies spent. In a few minutes an ambulance crew was in the driveway, and minutes later Matt’s inert form got loaded on a gurney and the crew left with the siren wailing.
Once they left Ray looked over and seemed to really see me for the first time. “I should find something to charge you with over this. I told you to go straight home.”
“Yes, and if I had Matt Seavers would be dead right now and no one would ever know that he didn’t kill Frank Collins.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure of that last part. You haven’t been privy to the whole investigation here, Ms. Harris. No matter what, we still have one big problem.”
“Lucy’s still missing.”
“Still missing, probably in bad shape physically, and nobody seems to have a clue where she could be.”
“Not necessarily. After the last hour and seeing everything I’ve seen, I have an idea where she might be.”
Ray looked at me with more skepticism than I’d seen him display in weeks. “Then you’re coming with me. And if by some chance you’re actually right, I’ll forget what I said about charges.”
“I hope so. Can you drive to where we’re going? I don’t think I’m capable yet.” Ray barked a couple of orders at the uniformed officers and led me to his car in a less-than-gentle fashion.
When I told him where to go, he shook his head. “And I had such high hopes we could still be friends,” he said.
“Just get there,” I told him, getting into the car and fastening my seat belt. I hadn’t ever ridden with Fernandez, but I suspected it would be a bumpy ride.
The lot at Conejo Community Chapel looked nearly deserted. Even Pastor George’s parking spot was empty. Ray pulled up close to the church and looked at me. “Are you sure about this?”
“Not certain, but it just feels right. Let’s go in and see.”
The door to the hallway between the church itself and the classrooms was unlocked. In the hallway bright children’s drawings of mangers and shepherds and angels festooned with glitter lined the walls, reminding me of what season it was. My throat tightened as I walked toward the church, silently praying that my intuition was right.
“I don’t think—” Ray began when I grabbed his arm to silence him. Maybe he couldn’t hear it, but I could hear the high, thin wail of a very young baby and it seemed to be coming from the sanctuary. As a mother I’d have to say that no matter how long it’s been since you’ve heard that sound it demands your attention when you hear it again. How anybody can ignore that urgency is beyo
nd my understanding.
When I pushed open the back door of the sanctuary it was easy to hear that it was truly a baby crying that I’d heard. From down the hallway I could convince myself that it might be an older child somewhere with his or her mom, but in this large open space the sound was unmistakable. Standing in the center aisle between the rows of chairs was Lucy Perez, holding a blanket-wrapped bundle. Even though it was what I’d hoped for, the sight stunned me enough to root me to the spot for over a minute, watching her awkwardly jiggle the wailing newborn.
“We don’t want to startle her,” Ray said in a voice not much louder than a whisper. I nodded, walking up the aisle quietly.
A few feet up I called Lucy’s name just loudly enough for her to hear me over the infant’s cries. She turned to me, and her dark eyes appeared clouded with confusion. “Hi. You’re Candace’s mom’s friend.”
“That’s right. My name’s Gracie Lee. Who do you have there?” Lucy still wore her usual somewhat-shapeless velour sweats, but now she looked more slender than she had the last time I saw her.
“I don’t know her name. I’m not even sure where she came from. Estella took me home with her because I was real sick. Once I got to her house I felt worse. My back hurt and I had a tummy ache and I felt like throwing up.”
That all sounded like a bad case of the flu or a normal course of labor. I tried to keep my voice level while I talked to Lucy, who wasn’t paying any attention to Ray standing at the back doors of the sanctuary. “Then what happened?”
“She gave me something that made me…sleepy.” Lucy looked like that wasn’t really the word to describe what she’d felt. She wasn’t quite weaving on her feet, but she didn’t look far from it. “What day is it?”
“Wednesday.” She looked ready to wilt and I had to do something. “Do you want to hand the baby to me? Maybe I can get her to stop crying.”
The baby in my arms was very new. Red and wrinkled with eyes squinched tightly shut as she cried, she couldn’t be more than a day old. She had good healthy lungs, though. “How did you get here, Lucy?”
“I walked. Estella’s house is close to here.”
I marveled at her ability to get from one place to another drugged and in such difficult circumstances. “So what made you take a walk with the baby?”
Lucy looked as if she was still piecing that together for herself. “I woke up and nobody was there except me. And this baby. That was a problem.”
“Yes, I guess it was. So you decided to find somebody to help you with the problem?” My jiggling the infant wasn’t having a real calming effect on her. I thought of the baby as “her” because Lucy said she was. The wails were a little quieter now, but definitely not stopped.
“Sort of.” Lucy had a faint smile that made her look even more otherworldly than she had before. “I thought about what Candace said. I remembered about Jesus and problems, so I took her here. Maybe Jesus can help find her mommy.”
The baby latched on to the knuckle I stroked across her tiny mouth, quieting while she sucked furiously. The pressure was incredible and stirred something deep inside me. “Lucy, this may be hard for you to understand, but I think this is your baby.”
Her eyes got huge. “I can’t have a baby. I’m not married. Only married people have babies.”
Something more dawned on me then. “Is that why you said you were like Candace and couldn’t have babies? Because you aren’t married?”
She still looked hazy, but she nodded in answer. “Sure. Frank was married. He could have a baby. Do you think because he was married and he did stuff to me I could have this baby?”
This wasn’t the time to go into the complexities of all this with Lucy, but I had to give her some answer.
“That could be what happened.” The baby started to wail again and I knew we needed help that Jesus couldn’t provide alone. Ray must have recognized that, too, because it was only a few minutes before I saw my second ambulance crew of the day.
One of the paramedics that responded looked familiar to me. Her dark blue shirt said “Anna” on the front, and I was pretty sure she’d been on at least one of the runs that had taken me from Edna’s house to the nearest hospital last spring. While the ambulance units didn’t carry baby formula as a matter of procedure, they did apparently carry glucose solution and soon the baby was working on a bottle of that.
I tried to explain what I knew to Anna and her partner in as quiet a voice as possible. The other crewman, whose shirt said “Dave” on the front and EMT on the back, had talked Lucy into lying on a gurney they’d rolled into the sanctuary. Ray’s 911 call had apparently gotten a little garbled and these two responded to what they thought was a birth happening in the Conejo Community Chapel sanctuary.
Anna looked relieved that she didn’t have to help deliver a baby. She seemed at a loss listening to Lucy.
“Estella always tells me when she goes someplace. But today I woke up and she was gone. And there was this baby.” She looked down at the bottle Anna had given her and the blanket-wrapped babe in her arms sucking at the bottle. “Gracie Lee said I might be her mommy. Do you think that’s true?”
This presented another challenge for Anna. “It sure looks like it. Don’t you remember having her?”
“I don’t remember anything after yesterday afternoon. Estella said I was real sick. She gave me stuff that made me sleepy. I kind of remember hurting a lot.” Lucy paused to watch the baby, then looked up again.
“Do you know where Matt is? He called me at my house and said he got out of jail. But then Estella took me with her and he didn’t call anymore, and he didn’t come visit me.”
Ray sighed. “Maybe we can find your sister and Matt for you. Before that, I think you need to go to the hospital so they can see how sick you are.” He patted her shoulder farthest from the baby and looked over at Anna. “Okay, she’s all yours now. I’ll call in later to see how she is.”
“Fine. I think she’s basically all right but we’ll leave the final decision on that to the docs.” Anna called to her partner and they carefully started the process of getting Lucy and the baby into the ambulance.
As they rolled down the main aisle of the church, Helen came into the sanctuary. “What on earth is happening here? We just got back from lunch and there’s an ambulance in the parking lot.”
“Do you want to tell her, or should I? Either way we’ve both got plenty to do.”
Ray smiled for the first time this afternoon. “You tell her and I’ll go get in my car. Somebody has to call Estella and follow that ambulance to the hospital.”
Halfway through explaining the convoluted afternoon to Helen, interrupted by Pastor George coming in and needing explanation as well, I realized I needed a favor from one of them. My car was still on the street in front of Frank Collins’s house. And I needed to get home to have Christmas with Ben. He would never believe how I spent my afternoon.
Chapter Twenty
Ben and I ended up having carryout pizza for our Christmas celebration dinner and opened our presents about eleven that evening. He reacted every bit as badly to my stories of the afternoon as I expected him to. “Are you sure I can leave you on your own and go to Tennessee?” he asked after I told him what happened, sounding more like the parent than the college kid. It made me glad I hadn’t talked to my mother yet.
“I’m sure. All the excitement is over now and I won’t get into any more trouble. If you like I’ll call and check in with you every afternoon at three.”
He grinned at me then. “You don’t need to do that, Mom. You can just e-mail every day and report. I’m bringing my laptop and Dad has a wireless network.”
“Good thing. If he didn’t those phone bills from Memphis to Newbury Park would add up in a week’s time.” He didn’t bother arguing with me on that point. Maybe the kid really is maturing.
LAX the next morning was an absolute zoo. It’s what I expected the week before Christmas, but expecting that kind of mass of humanity and experie
ncing it are two different things. I insisted on finding a space in the parking garage and walking Ben as far into the terminal as possible, which wasn’t very far. He used one of the self-serve machines to get his boarding pass, shouldered his luggage and there he was, ready to go through security. I wondered how he could really pack for a week in a backpack and a small duffel, but he had been old enough to manage his own packing for quite a few years now, so I didn’t ask.
The lump in my throat from hugging him goodbye and watching him go lasted at least back to the 101. That’s saying something, because the interchange of the 405 freeway and the 101 is a place where I’ve never seen a clear stretch of road, even the time I drove it at two in the morning. Los Angeles’s love affair with cars means there is always traffic on the major roadways.
Things thinned out considerably when I got closer to Rancho Conejo. By the time I crossed the Ventura County line I could go fifty miles an hour instead of crawling at twenty. When I had almost reached the exit to turn off for home my cell phone rang. “You up for lunch at Mi Familia?” a familiar voice asked. “I want to talk about yesterday some more.”
“Sure, as long as you agree to keep your word about not hitting me with charges,” I told Fernandez.
“Gracie Lee, have I ever lied to you?”
“Depends on what you call lying. You certainly haven’t told the full truth every time we’ve talked.”
There was a sigh on the other end of the phone. “Let’s postpone that argument until we’re face-to-face. Eleven forty-five okay? I want to beat the rush.”
I agreed on the time and went home to touch up my makeup and add a light cotton Christmas sweater over my jeans and shirt. Driving Ben to LAX and lunching with Ray Fernandez required two rather different “looks” as far as I was concerned.
