Love the Sinner

by Lynn Bulock

“You’re right. Once you all head off I’ll get into my jammies and take what the doctor ordered.”

  “Good. See that she actually does it, will you?” Linnette said to Heather, back to being her organized self. “I’ll see you about ten-fifteen tomorrow morning at Dodd and Sons, then.” She gathered up her stuff, as did everybody but Heather, and they made their goodbyes and left. It had been good to have them here, and almost as good for them to head home and let things wind down.

  Heather looked almost as tired as I felt. “How about we see what the clean sheet situation is in the guest room, and call it a night?” I asked her. “We can always deal with whatever else there is to do in the kitchen when we get up in the morning.”

  “Works for me. Just don’t forget that sleeping pill, Gracie Lee, or Linnette will be on my case for days.”

  “I won’t forget.” I really thought that as worn out as I was, I could probably do without it, but if I did that, I’d be staring at the ceiling about 3:00 a.m. So I went around the main part of the house with Heather, checking doors to make sure they were locked and lights were turned off, just like my regular routine. It was nice to have someone else to do it with me.

  The guest room, which was really Edna’s sewing room with a twin bed tucked in a corner, had clean sheets on the bed, but presented a little problem when I looked at it and compared the width of that twin bed with Heather’s midsection. It was hard to imagine somebody close to her ninth month of pregnancy getting comfortable in that bed.

  “Tell you what,” I told her. “How about we put clean sheets on the queen bed in my room and you take that one?”

  “I can’t take your bed,” she said halfheartedly, looking at that narrow one with its soft mattress.

  “Sure you can. I’d even rather you did tonight. To tell the truth, after all the revelations earlier, I’m not looking forward to being in there alone. Switching this way will benefit both of us. You’ll get enough room to toss and turn, and I can be someplace that doesn’t remind me of Dennis tonight.”

  She smiled. “Once you put it that way, I don’t feel bad about taking your bed. Let’s get it made up so we can both go to sleep. For a change I’m plenty ready.”

  “Not sleeping well?”

  “Just fitfully. I’ve started getting up to go to the bathroom or walk off leg cramps once or twice most nights. Guess that’s to get me ready to get up two or three times a night soon, huh?”

  “Hey, maybe you’ll get lucky. Maybe your baby will be the one who sleeps through the night at three or four weeks.”

  Her eyes widened. “Does that really happen?”

  “I’ve heard it said. Not by me, but I’ve heard it said. You could ask the rest of the group at Christian Friends sometime.”

  I headed toward the linen closet in the hall and got the clean sheets for my bed. With two of us working, the bed was made in no time, and we were each in one of the bathrooms getting ready for bed. Once Heather came out of the hall bath I ducked in there long enough to grab a sleeping pill. Even with taking one, I suspected that it would be difficult to get to sleep in the narrow, lumpy guest room bed.

  I suspected wrong. I didn’t even get all my evening prayers said, given everybody I wanted to bless, before I drifted off. It wasn’t a deep sleep, but the medication pulled me under to a point where even when I heard something moving around deep in the night, I didn’t get up.

  Instead, I remembered Heather saying that she was up frequently, and said a quick prayer for her leg cramps or whatever was keeping her from sleeping as soundly as I was, and drifted back off. When I woke up the next time it was morning, or at least almost morning. It wasn’t quite full daylight yet, but the sky outside the thin curtains in the guest room was lightening up. Like most February mornings, the heat had kicked on and I could hear the growling hum of the blower pushing warm air through the house.

  The furnace seemed louder than usual, or deeper or something. And as I began to sit up I noticed that my head ached and I felt like I was coming down with something. Great. Of all days, why today? The last thing I needed today was some kind of virus. Maybe it was just all the crying last night. I didn’t usually do anything like that, and it could have been that kind of trauma that made me feel queasy and slow this morning.

  I really hoped it wasn’t catching, whatever was making me feel like this. I felt bad waking up this morning, but I’d feel even worse if I’d given all the Christian Friends some kind of nasty virus and they had to come to Dennis’s funeral feeling like I felt now. At this point the prospect of going myself didn’t sound too great.

  I sat on the edge of the bed trying to figure out what would help the most. A cold drink was what I needed first to ease this scratchy throat, if I could keep anything down. I got up and caught myself against the chair Edna kept next to her sewing machine. Why was I staggering?

  I thought I’d remembered closing the door when I went to bed, but it was open now. Going out into the hall, everything looked blurry or funny. And it smelled even worse. I had no idea what was going on, but it wasn’t good. This had to be the worst virus or whatever I’d had in a long time. Maybe taking the sleeping pill had been a very bad idea. I’d slept deeply, but waking up feeling this putrid wasn’t worth it.

  When I switched the bathroom light on I was shocked by how awful I looked to go along with the awful way I felt. My face was flushed and blotchy, what I could see of it. There was a blur about everything, and my hands were shaking as I tried to get the water glass under the tap to get a drink. Along with the aching there were alarms going off in my brain now, telling me that something was wrong, something more serious than just a twenty-four-hour bug.

  I left the glass of water on the bathroom countertop and went back out into the hall. The humming noise I heard was much louder than just the furnace running, and it seemed to be coming from the laundry room. Stumbling in the dark, I fumbled for the light switch in the narrow space. When I reached it, I stood there blinking. The door to the garage was open, and the noise was coming from there.

  Edna’s blue car was in its usual spot. That should have made me very happy under normal circumstances. Standing in the doorway, the source of the noise finally dawned on me. Not only was Edna’s car there, it was still running in the closed garage, and probably had been for some time. And the door to the house had been left open.

  I was coughing now, about to choke. My responses were so slow. I knew I should do something about all this, because a running car in a closed space wasn’t good. Reaching out my left hand, I hit the garage door opener mounted on the wall and the door swung slowly open, letting cool, blessed fresh air into the garage.

  With the extra light, I could see that there was someone sitting in the driver’s seat of the car. My balance was still off, and I lurched more than ran over to the driver’s side of the car. The window was open and I reached in, turning off the ignition. “Edna?” Calling her came out as a croak. It was her in the front seat, but she wasn’t moving. I shook her shoulder and she slumped toward the other side of the car. I couldn’t see or feel her breathing, and one more thing finally got into my foggy brain. Heather was still inside the house.

  Reeling away from the car, I went back inside. The door to my bedroom was open, too, and Heather was half on the bed, half on the floor, as if she’d tried to get out of bed but lost the effort. “Come on, we have to get you out of here,” I said, trying to get her roused enough to help me walk her outside.

  Partly dragging her, partly coaxing her up to walk, we headed to the patio at the back of the house, as far from the garage as I could get. The cool, fresh air seemed to revive her a little and I left Heather in a chair, coughing and threatening to throw up.

  Going back into the house for as little time as possible I grabbed a phone and called 911. Somehow I had the presence of mind to tell the person I reached on the other end of the line that we needed the sheriff’s department, as well as the fire and ambulance service. I even thought to mention Ray’s name.r />
  Then, even though it was the last thing I wanted to do, I went back to the garage to wait for the sirens and trucks, and to keep Edna company one last time.

  12

  The paramedics—two men and a woman—came first, rolling up in an ambulance. I pointed them toward Edna and in a few short moments they confirmed quickly what I already knew. Pulling her out of the car, they went through the motions, but it didn’t take long for them to give up on trying to get her breathing again. Once I saw that, I started shaking harder than I had been before.

  Edna had been gone for a while, and she’d nearly taken Heather and me with her. I’d always expected her to come home eventually, but certainly not like this. Once they’d ascertained that they couldn’t do anything for her, they turned their attention to me. “Were you inside that house?” the taller of the two men asked. He looked like a surfer dude grown up a little, dark tan, streaked blond hair and broad shoulders in his navy blue uniform. The crow’s feet around his eyes could have been from squinting into the sun or from his actual age.

  I nodded. “The door between the garage and the house was open, too. And I have no idea how long the car was in this closed garage.” It hurt a little to talk, and I was afraid I was going to start coughing again, or throwing up.

  “If we get the stretcher out, can we get you to lay down on it while somebody takes your vitals?” the guy asked. I noticed that the writing above the pocket of his uniform shirt said Steve.

  “If there’s only one stretcher, there’s somebody who needs it more,” I said, and he cut me off.

  “I’m afraid not, ma’am. She’s…uh…not going to need the stretcher. Was she your mother?”

  I shook my head, which was a mistake. The movement made my whole head throb, and the pain got me even more nauseated. It really made me want to find someplace to sit down, and fast. “No. My motherin-law, but we can talk about her later. I had a friend staying the night. She’s on the back patio, and she’s not feeling well. And she’s pregnant. Her name is Heather,” I called out as the other two rushed around the corner of the house.

  They were still in the backyard and I was still arguing with Steve a few minutes later about whether or not I was going to the hospital, when Ray Fernandez showed up. He and Steve went nose to nose for a while in a heated discussion about crime scene damage versus taking care of live people and those originally thought to be alive. While they were still making their individual points very loudly, the other two paramedics came around the corner of the house with the gurney, or whatever you called the stretcher on wheels they were pushing between them. Heather, looking flushed and blotchy under an oxygen mask, was strapped into it.

  “Is she okay?” the detective asked, taking his attention off Steve for a moment.

  “I think so,” the female paramedic said, giving him a telegraphed message with her eyes that said even to me, as a stranger, that she wasn’t going to say anything else in front of Heather. Whether or not she was okay, Heather was definitely conscious and able to hear.

  Fernandez looked back at Steve. “Look, I know you had to do what you had to do for the people who were still alive. But I’ll need a full statement from you and the rest of the crew once you’re done transporting the first patient to the hospital. And I’ll need prints, just to rule yours out on all the surfaces we’ll have to print. Do you think Ms. Harris here is in okay shape to give me a statement first and go to the hospital second?”

  I started to protest that I wasn’t going to the hospital at all, but the detective wasn’t taking any arguments. He was paying attention only to Steve now, who admitted that I would probably be all right long enough to stay here and give him a statement. Unfortunately he also told the detective that I was eventually going to the hospital. At this point I didn’t really have the strength to argue with him.

  Steve gave an assessing look into the laundry room. “And don’t let her go back inside the house and stay there for any length of time until it’s aired out for a while, at least half an hour. Longer would be better.”

  “Can I go in long enough to get a robe and slippers?” I asked.

  “Sure. But have him follow you around so if you get woozy again, he can catch you. And only stay long enough to get that stuff, and open a couple windows,” Steve instructed. Then he turned his attention to the ambulance, where the other two were loading Heather into the back, the oxygen mask still on her face. In a moment, they were gone.

  I went into the house, the detective trailing me at a close distance. He followed me into my bedroom, where my slippers were in a corner. I slid them on my feet, only now aware of the awful old flannel pajamas I’d been wearing. I didn’t have to worry about modesty in them, as they had long pants and long sleeves, and fortunately still had all their buttons. The fabric was worn, but there weren’t any holes anyplace. They’d faded from their original bright red plaid to paler shades resembling cold tomato soup and concrete gray, and were probably the rattiest thing I owned besides the robe I was about to put on over them, an old blue number I’d been wearing since before Ben was born. It had great sentimental value, was warm and looked hideous.

  Suddenly I felt the overwhelming need to comb my hair, among other things. When the detective kept following me as I left the room, I stopped him in the hallway. “You’re not going where I end up next. And I promise you can look inside first to prove the window isn’t large enough for me to escape, even if I open it all the way. How about you open the windows in the rest of the house, and I’ll meet you back here in two minutes?”

  “Only two minutes,” he said, looking solemn. “And I have a second hand on my watch.”

  Ten minutes later we were sitting out on the patio where Heather had been while I called 911. “You could have died in there,” Fernandez pointed out, still looking as solemn as he had most of the morning. Once he’d opened all the windows in the house, he’d made me come sit here on the patio with a glass of water, and excused himself to go close the garage and put a note on it for the crime scene technicians to meet him in the back of the house.

  “I know that. And I’m even more worried about Heather, because I’m the one who talked her into staying the night with me. If she or the baby is hurt by this—” My throat tightened and I had to stop talking while I coughed.

  “I shouldn’t push you. We can do this statement later. How about I call another ambulance now?” Fernandez looked more worried than I’d seen him so far, which was saying something.

  “I’ll be okay. Let’s just get this over with. And I have to make a couple phone calls.” The worst notification couldn’t be made by phone, and I hoped I’d have no part of it. “Will you be talking to Becca and her mother? Becca would be Edna’s next of kin now.”

  “Yeah, that will be my job. And I’ll need to do it pretty quickly, which is going to be a problem working this crime scene at the same time. I may call first just to tell them that the funeral won’t be happening this morning due to an emergency, so they don’t start the drive up here from the Valley.”

  I hadn’t really thought through the logistics of what this was going to do to the funeral arrangements today. Guess that showed how little of my brain was functioning right now. “Wow. Scott Dodd is going to think this is the most dysfunctional family on the planet.”

  “He’s seen as bad, I’m sure. In any case, it’s not unusual for one death to follow another, even though this isn’t the way it usually happens. And if he gives you any trouble about postponing the funeral, tell him that official sheriff’s department business intervened and give him to me.”

  It was a kindness he didn’t have to show me and I was touched. “What time is it?” I didn’t have any clue, other than to know it was fully light now, which meant it was after seven.

  Ray looked at his watch. “Seven-thirty. That means you have enough time to tell me about what happened, and make those few calls you need to make before we take you to the hospital. Why don’t we start with you telling me what you noticed, a
nd when?”

  First I explained briefly why Heather was staying the night. Then I had to tell him straight off that my reactions had been dulled by the sleeping pill. The detective winced a little, but didn’t seem totally phased by my admission. As I ran through events in my mind, one thing came back to me. “I heard someone moving around the house last night. It had to be some time after two, but before it got light. At the time I thought it was Heather, because she said she got leg cramps and to expect her up at night.”

  “But it could have been your motherin-law?”

  “It could have. And one other thing. I was sure that I had closed my bedroom door last night where I slept, in the guest room, but when I got up this morning it was open.”

  Now he looked grim. “Letting as much fumes as possible into the room.” His statement made me shudder again. “What else did you notice when you got up?”

  “Mostly how bad I felt. I figured it was the flu or something at first, then I looked in the bathroom mirror and everything seemed off. And there was the noise coming from the garage.”

  “So the car was still running?”

  Nodding to answer him made my head ache worse. I was going to have to stop doing that. “Ouch. Yes. I turned it off by reaching in the window, so my prints will be on the key and the ignition.”

  “Where else are we likely to find them?” He was writing in his notebook now as he listened.

  “On the door leading from the laundry room to the garage, which was open, by the way, just like my bedroom. And on the door of the car where the window was open, and on Edna herself.”

  He gave a grim half grin. “Despite what you see on TV, we don’t usually print human skin or clothing unless we have no other choice. If there are other surfaces we can print, we go with those.”

  “Oh. Okay.” I tried to think about where else he’d find prints. “The garage door opener on the wall will have my prints on it. But then my prints would be all over that anyway, along with Edna’s. Probably even some of Dennis’s if prints last that long.”