Echoes (Book 1): Echoes

by Caplan, A. M.

  Walking back to the ambulance, Hannah scribbled her signature on a form she didn’t read, allowed the EMTs to draw a plastic tube of blood, then resigned herself to sitting helplessly on the back bumper, shivering under the scratchy blanket someone had thrown over her bare shoulders.

  She was still sitting there when they started to kill the lights. Time had crawled by, and the sun had pushed a pale glowing line over the top edge of the trees. It seemed impossible, but they still hadn’t found him. One by one the tall lights winked out. When the last noisy diesel engine died there was an odd silence broken only by murmured conversation.

  Hannah looked to where the sheriff was kneeling by her crumpled car. He was deep in conversation with one of his deputies and an officer from the state police. They gave Hannah a sidelong glance before the sheriff heaved himself to his feet, dusting off his hands on his pants.

  “Couldn’t someone have come and picked him up?” he asked her for the tenth time. The answer was still no.

  “There’s no way. I left him for less than a minute. I was only gone long enough to flag you down, you watched me. If there was another car I would’ve seen it,” she said. “And the ambulance came from the other direction, straight from town. They said they didn’t pass a single car on the way.” Hannah rotated her shoulders painfully. She’d grown stiff and sore sitting for hours in the open back of the ambulance.

  “And you’re sure he was really hurt as bad as all that?” The sheriff looked back at the front end of her car. It had obviously been damaged by something, an object big and solid enough to destroy the grill and crumple the hood.

  “Look at the car. There’s no way he wasn’t hurt that bad. I’ve told you all this before.”

  “Couldn’t a been a deer, could it? Or maybe a bear? It’s around that time of year, when they’re getting ready to den up, and the dent, it’s about that big. A black bear can look a lot like a man standing up, you know, and it was pretty overcast last night. Hard to really see anything for sure.”

  “It wasn’t a bear, for god’s sake. I hit a man. He was lying right there. I didn’t just see him, I touched him. I started to give him CPR when you showed up. It was a man, and he’s got to be here somewhere.”

  The sheriff looked her over with an expression she couldn’t quite place, then took off his stiff hat and scratched absently at his scalp. “And this man, he didn’t just up and walk away without you seeing him?”

  Hannah shook her head. He couldn’t have. She couldn’t believe he’d even moved—he hadn’t been breathing, she was sure of it—except he must have, because he was gone. She’d held his shattered face and felt his blood on her hands. Very real, sticky, hot, blood. The memory of her palm sinking into the pool of blood on his chest made her stomach squirm.

  “No,” she said, “I’m telling you for the last time. I didn’t hit a deer or a bear. I hit a man, and he just…”

  “He just what?”

  “He just…disappeared.”

  The sheriff flicked a speck off the brim of his hat and placed it squarely back on his head before he looked at Hannah, one eyebrow cocked.

  “And he was naked?” he said. Hannah couldn’t help but look away when she nodded.

  “Well then, if that’s the case, what I am now is thoroughly confused. And I’m not the only one. So is that state police investigator over there and anybody else who took a look at the scene.”

  She narrowed her eyes. What was there to be confused about?

  “Thing is,” he said, “there’s a great big dent in your car, that’s clear enough. But they didn’t find a thing on it, or anywhere around it, except for two little bitty patches of blood on the ground. From what you told me about what happened, I’m gonna guess those came from you.” He pointed down at her pants, which had been cut off at the knees by the EMTs, white bandages peeking out underneath the raggedy edge of the denim.

  “And for as much blood as you claim this naked man was losing, what with you trying to help him and give him CPR and all that, you don’t have a whole lot on you either, except what came from your forehead and nose.”

  He motioned toward the road. “And then there’s that.” Just in front of the car was the sweater she’d wadded up under the man’s bleeding head. It was lying there like an unseasonable patch of snow in the middle of the road, her now-dead cell phone still lying beside it. It should have been sodden with blood. There wasn’t a drop of blood on it.

  Skepticism—that was the look on the sheriff’s face, the one Hannah hadn’t quite been able to place earlier. But despite any misgivings, he ordered them to widen the search area and had the volunteers walking an expanded spiral outward from the scene. A pair of hounds on loan from the next county had arrived, but they were nosing fruitlessly around the front of her car, unable to catch a scent. Hannah could hear the low drone of the fire department’s rescue boat making passes up and down the nearby river, though only faintly; almost everything was drowned out by the chatter of the Methodist Ladies Auxiliary. As soon as it was properly daylight they’d set up shop and started serving breakfast and hot coffee. One of them consoled the owner of the local newspaper with a donut after Hannah swatted at him and his camera, irritated at him for snapping away in front of her face.

  “Thank you, ma’am.” The sheriff accepted a donut from a blue-haired lady and took an outsized bite. A spurt of jelly shot out the other side, landing on the ground like a slick red blood clot. He kicked a puff of dirt over it before he walked over to Hannah.

  “I’m recalling the ambulance,” he said. He waved her down out of it, and when Hannah slid off the bumper, the bored, tired EMTs moved to shut the doors the second she was clear. A spatter of gravel peppered the back of her legs as they tore away.

  “I’ll give you a ride home,” the sheriff said, waving the cloud of dust away from his face. “Even if it’d start, your car’s not going anywhere, least not until the crime scene guy the staties called in finally shows up. Taking him damn long enough.” He turned around and started to walk away, muttering something under his breath about wasted time and tax dollars. When Hannah didn’t make a move to follow, he turned around. The sheriff looked at her for a long moment.

  “We’re gonna keep looking—for the time being. But you’re not gonna be helping, least not now. If it turns out there actually is a man out there like you say, then this is a crime scene, and you of all people can’t be roaming around it. Come on now, while the offer of a lift still involves riding in the front.”

  A short, silent ride later Hannah was sliding down from the front seat of Sheriff Morgan’s old green and tan work truck, deposited unceremoniously at the end of her driveway.

  “I’ll let you know if anything turns up or if I think of any more questions,” he said. She watched him nod and pull away, heading back the way they’d come.

  When he was out of sight she took a few steps the way he’d gone, then stopped. Hannah was thinking about walking back to the scene and slipping into the search party. It was only a couple miles away as the crow flies—she could shortcut it though the woods in a couple places and trim off some distance—but she decided against it. She was sure she could make it, lingering wobbliness and all, but the thought of running into the sheriff stopped her. If he had to drag her right back here, it would just waste time he could be using to find the missing man. Hannah turned around and slogged her way down the long driveway and into the house.

  Inside, she shot the dead bolt and leaned against the door, the glass pane cold and soothing against the back of her skull. She’d been awake for nearly thirty hours, and between the exhaustion and the collision, her head felt like a loosely tethered balloon. Sleep probably should have been her first order of business, but Hannah couldn’t bring herself to go to bed, not without knowing what was going on.

  Maybe they’d found him the minute she left the scene. The man could be on the way to the hospital—or the morgue—right now. Hannah took a deep breath and tried to process that possibility. Sh
e had almost certainly killed a man; he’d been close to dead after the collision, and every moment that had passed while he’d remained undiscovered made it more and more likely. The thought made burning tears well up in her eyes. But with her phone still lying in the middle of the road, she had no way of knowing for sure, so she put on a pot of coffee and opened up her laptop. The best she could do was to constantly refresh the local news website for information.

  Her heart skipped a little when a small blurb about the accident finally popped up, but her hopes deflated quickly: one-car collision, ongoing search for the missing victim, and a picture of the scene, her sitting in the ambulance in the background. That was all, which was exactly no more information than she already had and no consolation whatsoever.

  3

  A flash of light-colored hair and pale skin, an angular face with a wide-eyed expression, followed by a sickening thud. That brief moment was still burned behind her eyelids like a polaroid picture when the car stalled out and rolled to a halt.

  She peeled her face off the steering wheel and shouldered open the door. There was a trickle of blood from somewhere on her forehead making its way down into her eyes, and she smeared it away with the back of her hand so she could see.

  “Oh my god. Oh no.” Hannah skidded to her knees on the gravel where her car had thrown the man. “Please no.”

  He was still as a statue; a broken statue, with legs splayed out strangely and one arm pinned awkwardly underneath him. It was horrifying, the broken shape of his body, yet his face was worse. It had been utterly destroyed.

  Hannah reached down and put a hand on either side of it, helplessly cupping it in her hands. One of his eyes was deflated like a popped balloon, the eyeball tugged out and lost somewhere in the deep gouge that started in his eyebrow and ran down through his lips, disappearing over his chin. There was slick, pink bone showing between the chewed-up edges of the skin on either side of the gouge, a light colored streak from his cheek to his jaw.

  Everything around that pale length of bone was quickly turning black with blood. There was just so much blood—how could there be so much of it, from one face?—and it ran out from between her fingers in streams while she tried to hold the sides of his face together.

  “Help. Help us!” she screamed, hearing the echo of her voice thrown back to her. But screaming was pointless. Out here, she could yell herself hoarse and pray another car would come past, but the chances were next to nothing.

  When the sound of her voice died away it was dead silent and completely still, except for the weak movement of the man’s heart forcing hot spurts of blood into her hands and over her wrists. It trickled downward, cooling as it went, until it puddled, cold and gluey, in her sleeves at the elbows.

  “Wake up. Come on, mister, wake up.”

  She jerked upright with a start, sending a wave of cold coffee into her lap. Reaching up to touch her forehead, she winced when her hand met her newest injury, a knob growing above her eyebrow next to the butterfly bandage. She’d fallen asleep sitting up, waking when her forehead bounced off the kitchen table.

  How she’d dreamed—and so deeply in the brief period before she hit—was a mystery. Even more strange, the accident had replayed with better definition than she remembered with her eyes open. She’d seen the man’s face in sharper detail, noticing the slight furrow in his forehead, the faintest shadow of stubble across his jaw, and the shape of his light-colored eyebrows. His eyes were not as eerily pale as she first thought, more slate colored or even a steely blue. Of course that was before. Her stomach soured when she thought about what came next, his face after, one eye missing, the other not opening—maybe ever again—the torn lips hanging open, the teeth behind them dyed red.

  The soundtrack had been more complete in her sleep too; Hannah didn’t remember ever dreaming with such clear sound, in distinct noises she would never forget. The thud of his body meeting the metal of her car, the screech and crunch of the hood giving and compressing, and the delicate tinkle of the shattered windshield. It was the softer, closing notes of the falling glass that stood out the most, so incongruous and inappropriate, like someone laughing out loud at a funeral.

  Rubbing her forehead—the off-center lump felt like she was sprouting a horn— Hannah slid out of her coffee-stained, chopped-off pants and left them on the floor, then dragged herself up the narrow stairs to her bedroom. Giving the bed a wistful look, she pulled on fresh clothes and left the room, shutting the door behind her with a clap. Sleep could wait a little while longer, especially at the risk of a repeat of that dream.

  “Come down to the station this afternoon.” Hannah jumped when Sheriff Morgan spoke over her shoulder. Hannah had put on her hiking boots and made her way back to the scene, fuzzy-headed but functional. Her tight muscles and aches had worked themselves out on the way, and she felt surprisingly fine physically, except for a lingering trickle of blood from her sinuses that ran down the back of her throat. It had a coppery, spoiled taste—like a rotting tooth—a taste that wouldn’t swallow completely away. She kept stopping to do some unladylike spitting as she walked.

  At the scene she’d settled for uncomfortably swallowing the blood; Hannah didn’t want to draw any more attention than necessary, just to slip in and see if they’d found the man, preferably without the sheriff noticing she was there. Ignoring a couple sidelong glances, she looked around, her heart sinking. The search was still going on. They hadn’t found him then. They were still looking for the missing man, though clearly without quite the same level of urgency.

  The Methodist Ladies Auxiliary had ceded their territory to the League of Baptist Women, and a fresh gaggle of church ladies were handing out soggy egg salad sandwiches and bottles of water, though they didn’t have as many takers as their predecessors. The volunteers had mostly left, and the few that remained were slipping away as soon as they’d eaten.

  The sheriff didn’t look upset to see her there, or even surprised. She followed his eyes to where he had turned to watch the tow truck trundling in to clear her car from the road. He pulled something out of his jacket and handed it to Hannah; her cell phone and sweater in a plastic evidence bag. He gave her a long look as he did.

  “Stop by the sheriff’s department, but not too late now. If it’s after five then the deputy that knows how to use the composite program thing will be gone for the day, and then it’ll have to wait till tomorrow. He’ll put together a picture of the victim and take your statement for the accident report.” He opened his mouth to say something else, then decided against it, clamping his mouth shut like a trout. Turning away, the sheriff tugged his stiff felt hat over his thinning hair and started to walk away, motioning to the driver of the tow truck.

  “You’re stopping? You can’t. He’s out here somewhere. He could still be alive.”

  Turning back to her, the sheriff waved an arm at the now sparsely populated scene.

  “I’m calling it. We’ve been over every inch of ground for a mile in every direction and haven’t found so much as a foot print. They’ve dragged the river from here to the narrows four times and haven’t brought up a thing.” He pointed at the dogs sitting on their haunches, eyeing the lunch their handler was eating. “Those hounds can pick up a scent that’s months old and follow it a hundred thirty miles, and they haven’t been able to pick up a single thing from your car, human or otherwise.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “You remember anything different? Maybe want to change your story?”

  “No. I told you exactly what happened.” Hannah’s voice had erupted in a shout, and the couple people still milling around turned to stare. The sheriff gave her a hard look, his shoulders raised and tight. He looked ready to shout back, but then let a breath go with a whoosh and took a step closer, bending in and speaking softly.

  “I know what the evidence is saying and I know what we’ve found, which is exactly jack. But I also called and had them replay that 911 call, and I saw you when I rolled up here, so
while I’m letting my tired staff that’s been in these woods all night go home for a couple hours, I’m also telling you to come into the station this afternoon and put together a sketch.”

  He leaned back, shook his head tiredly, then turned and walked away. Soon Hannah was left with no one but two old ladies trying to wedge an unwilling plastic folding table into the back of a station wagon.

  Hannah shifted in her seat, leaning closer to the nervous young deputy in the sheriff’s department. He fumbled his way through another set of screens in the program that created composite images, and she shook her head.

  “No, not like that one. Seriously, nobody has a cleft in their chin like that. And less round.” She considered the jaw. “Oh, come on, that’s too square. That looks like a robot. Who comes up with these choices?” She thought she heard the deputy sigh, but to his credit, he did a good job hiding it and flipped through some more choices.

  She’d gone though one option after another, of face shapes, eyebrows, lips, ears, and noses. As they scrolled by they had been selected or dismissed, then those choices had been tweaked and altered a hundred times. Little by little the image grew closer to the face she remembered.

  “Is this him?” the deputy asked wearily.

  Closing her eyes, Hannah pictured the man in the second before she struck him, then opened them, satisfied that what was in front of her was a dead ringer for the original. Or a not-dead ringer, she held out a faint hope.

  “Yes. That’s him.”

  She saw the relief on the deputy’s face. “I’ll send this over to the news and to the Crier and Shopper.” He handed her a copy from the sheaf spilling out of the printer and scooted away before she could change her mind.

  The process had taken hours, and now that her attention was off the screen she could feel the eyes of the people in the room on her, behind her back and over her shoulder. Hannah heard the abrupt halt in background conversation when she walked through to the sheriff’s office. Clutching her printout, she waited impatiently outside the glass door while he finished a phone call.