Dangerous Habits

by Susan Hunter

  Stiff and groggy, I got out of the car to stretch and pull on my oversized hoodie. The area was deserted. A scattering of puddles in the parking lot and a few clouds overhead were the only evidence of the storm. I stood there in a post-sleep stupor, yawning, and staring blankly out across the river.

  Gradually, a movement near the edge of the bluff caught my eye. Squinting in the dim light, I saw something that made my mouth go dry and my heart contract with quick thumping beats. At the spot where Sister Mattea had fallen something—or someone—was rising up over the ground.

  I ran toward the edge of the cliff, my feet pounding the trail. I blinked my eyes to make the shape take form in the gloom as it moved slowly side-to-side. When I came within yards of the edge, I saw it clearly.

  My heart slowed down considerably as I realized that the “ghost” of Sister Mattea was actually a Mylar balloon, one of those that had been on sale at the Fun Run. Some kid had probably let it go, but instead of soaring off into the stratosphere, its long string got tangled on one of the bushes that jutted out beneath the overhang of the bluff. It had just enough play to let the balloon rise up and float in the air, embodying in my fevered imagination the spirit of Sister Mattea.

  I shook my head at my idiocy and then walked over to the edge myself. I looked down at the river running fast and deep more than 70 feet below and said a silent prayer for her. A light breeze tickled the back of my neck and carried the scent of spring with it, grassy and fresh. I inhaled deeply and closed my eyes. They flew open as a strong thump in the middle of my back threw me off balance and sent me hurtling over the edge.

  Twenty-Three

  I plummeted in a terrifying tumble down the sandstone bluff, flailing out to latch onto a jutting rock, a tree, a bush, anything to stop my relentless downward plunge. It happened in seconds that seemed to last hours. I was going to die just like Sister Mattea, and I didn’t know why. Halfway down I felt a sharp yank on my neck and shoulders. My body swung out away from the bluff, then slammed back into the welcoming arms of a scraggly tree.

  My baggy hoodie had snagged on a branch. That beautiful scratchy outgrowth was just tenacious enough to hold on and pull me into its rough embrace. I burrowed into the small tree, heedless of the nips and scratches inflicted by the bristly limbs. I stayed there motionless until my heart slowed, my ragged breathing returned to normal, and I could think clearly enough to assess my situation.

  “Well, this is another fine mess you’ve gotten us into,” I said out loud. I looked up and could see I had fallen maybe 30 or 40 feet. I didn’t let myself look down. My only option was to try and climb back up, using whatever hand and footholds I could find.

  It took everything I had to force myself to let go of the scrappy little limb I clung to. I put a tentative hand up, stretching my arm as far as it would extend. My fingers found a medium-sized handhold large enough for me to grab. I swung my body to the right to adjust my center of gravity, then pushed up and away from the security of my rescue tree. Thank you, ex-boyfriend Josh, for making me go to the climbing wall at the gym with you every Saturday for three months.

  I found a toehold with my left foot and pulled up, then reached out again, fingers twitching and fumbling as they found a hold that let me insert them an inch or so. I moved methodically, feeling for the next outcropping or tiny crevice that would give me enough of a hold to move upward. It was a lot easier doing it on the climbing wall. With a safety harness. But I was making slow progress. I was almost up to another tree. I felt a surge of confidence.

  I reached out and pushed off, but one leg slipped out from under me and scraped against something sharp. I scrambled to get my balance, throwing my body forward into the face of the bluff. All my weight rested on my right leg as my left foot kicked up and down, searching for something to land on. By the barest of inches, I found a tiny ledge under my foot and got my toes on it. I was splayed out on the side of the bluff, both arms outstretched, afraid to breathe let alone move. Involuntary tears sprang to my eyes, and I felt panic rising.

  How could I possibly do this? A self-pitying sniffle snuck up on me. I snuffled it back and heard my mom saying, “Leah, you might not win by trying, but you’ll always lose by giving up.” Easy for her to say, she wasn’t clinging like a bug 50 feet above rocks and a rushing river.

  I leaned out more carefully this time, moving my leg, poking gently for another toehold, searching for any way to get purchase. Finally, when I extended my leg to the farthest reaches of my tendons, I found it. A shallow crevice I could wedge my foot against to give me leverage. I looked up, and in the faint light of the rising moon, I could see what I had to do. I shoved off with my leg and prayed for a sprinkling of fairy dust to fly me up to the swaying branch of a small tree. I stretched up, swung my body over and clung as the limb bent and creaked, but held. I twisted and wriggled and shinnied myself far enough up to reach the sturdier central trunk.

  Once again, I found myself in a one-sided relationship with a tree. I gave a half-sob of relief and let out the breath I’d been unconsciously holding. I wrapped both arms around the tree and pressed my back into the crevice from which it sprung. My feet rested on a small outcropping. Then I felt something warm running down my leg. I looked and saw that my jeans had ripped and an ugly gash on my thigh was bleeding profusely. Now that the adrenalin jolt had departed, it hurt. The sweat I’d worked up was evaporating, leaving me chilled and shivering.

  “Damn, damn, damn!” I yelled, just to hear a human voice. It rang out into the night, but what did it matter? There was no one to listen. I yelled it again even louder.

  Then a voice called my name through the darkness.

  “Leah? Leah? Leeeeaaaaahhhhh!!!”

  Was it God? If so, He had a distinctive Latin lilt to his voice.

  “Leah, chica, where are you?”

  “Here, down here, Miguel, down here. Miguel! Miguel! Miguel!” I screamed as loud as I could, and the voice came closer.

  “Leah!”

  “Down here! Down the bluff!” The beam of a flashlight shone over my head, then on my face.

  “Are you all right?”

  The look on Miguel’s face didn’t make me feel any better than the involuntary “ay mierde” he uttered when he took in my predicament.

  “Yeah, sure, I’m fine. Well, no, actually. I can’t get up any farther. And my leg hurts kind of bad.”

  “Hold on, chica. Hold on. I’m calling 911. Hold on, hold on.” He swung the flashlight away, and I was surprised by how much I didn’t want to be alone in the dark as I heard him give directions and urge the operator to hurry.

  He hung up and focused the beam of light on me again. “What happened?”

  “Somebody pushed me.”

  “What? Who? Why?”

  “I don’t know, I—Miguel—” An unwelcome thought popped into my head. “Be careful up there. Whoever pushed me could still be around.”

  I was starting to feel a little woozy. The breeze that had been playing around the rocks was on its way to becoming a full-fledged wind. It was getting harder to maintain my balance with my bad leg, and I tried to press myself further back into the rock.

  “Leah, hang on. I can hear the siren. Just a minute, chica. Just hang on. You can do it. Look at me, chica, just look up here. We can do this. You can do this.”

  I looked up again, and I could see Miguel had laid down on his belly so he could lean over the bluff. His face was directly above mine as he shone the flashlight for me. “You’re like Cat Woman. Like Wonder Woman. Just another minute. You OK? You’re OK.”

  “Great, I’m great,” I croaked in a voice that sounded nothing like my own. The branch I was leaning on so heavily swayed. My bad leg slipped. My arms wrenched as my body dropped. I was treading air. Above me, Miguel shouted.

  “Chica, listen, you just gotta swing to the left. Come on now. Just swing in, get back on the ledge. You can do it, I know you can.”

  “I—I’m so tired.” My arms were burning, and I was
hanging just like I did the instant before I fell from the hand-over-hands and broke my wrist—but that drop was only a few feet, not 50.

  “You are not letting go, you are not letting go. You hold on. Escúchame! You hold on!” Miguel shouted. “Miráme! Look at me! I can hear the sirens. The rescue team, it’s here. It’s here. You will not let go,” he said.

  I looked up at him, and from that distance our eyes locked. And I held on. And I tried once more to swing to the left, and this time my toes landed, and I threw my weight forward and wriggled back into the tree and willed myself to stay there.

  And then I heard a truck come roaring up, and the blackness lit up with headlights and floodlights, and someone barked orders and then hours later, or so it seemed, when I just couldn’t hold on one minute longer, I felt arms wrap around me and a voice said, “There you go, sweetheart. Let go. It’s all right. I’ve got you. You can let go now.”

  Only I couldn’t. The fireman who had rappelled down in his harness had to pry my hands loose from the branch. When he did, I started to shake convulsively.

  “Too much caffeine,” I said weakly. He wasn’t listening. He concentrated on getting us to the top. As soon as we were on firm ground, he got me on a gurney and under a warm blanket. An EMT did some preliminary poking and prodding, and then Miguel was beside me, his eyes suspiciously bright.

  “Oh, chica, you scared me so bad.”

  “And you saved me so good,” I said, reaching up weakly and ruffling his hair, perfect even in life and death circumstances.

  “All right, sir, you’ll have to step back,” said the EMT, but then a familiar voice reached me.

  “What the hell, Leah?” Coop came striding toward me, a mix of concern and exasperation on his face. Miguel stepped forward and started talking

  “She was here alone up on the bluff and some—”

  I interrupted before he could finish, giving him a look that I hoped said, We speak not of this.

  “Coop! I’m OK, just had a little fall. Miguel found me and called 911. It’s fine.”

  “What were you doing out here in the dark? Alone?”

  “It’s no big deal,” I croaked, trying to sit up. It’s hard to make your case lying down.

  “What happened? Did you trip? Is the ground soft there? Damn it, there should be a guardrail.” I tried to answer, but instead sank back down on the gurney.

  “I was waiting for her at the paper so we could put together a story for the web edition on the Fun Run. When she didn’t come, I thought she maybe had car trouble. I knew she didn’t have her phone. I came looking for her. When I got here, I saw the car but no Leah. I started walking around, and then I heard someone shouting and swearing and I found her.”

  “Leah, you know how lucky you are, right? This is where Sister Mattea fell. You realize that?” The EMT who had stepped aside in deference to Coop asserted himself at that moment.

  “Sorry, Lieutenant. We need to get her to the hospital.”

  “Wait a minute. I don’t need to lie down. I don’t need a stretcher. I don’t want to go to the hospital. I just need to go home.” I felt like I was talking really loud, but no one seemed to hear me. And it suddenly seemed like a really good idea to just be quiet. Before I knew it, we were on our way and the EMT—Phil, I read on his name tag—was expertly hooking me up to an IV.

  “Phil, why?”

  “Don’t talk, Leah. You’ll be fine. We just want to get some fluids in you, keep you warm, get that heart rate stabilized at a nice steady pace. It’s a cold night for climbing, and you’ve got a nasty cut on your leg. Just lie quiet.”

  And I did. Just to be polite.

  At the hospital, there were x-rays and blood work and stitches and a tetanus shot, which actually hurt more than anything else they did, before I was released to go home. In the waiting area, my mother gasped as they wheeled me in. I was surprised to see Miguel and Coop still there, and Karen had shown up as well.

  “Mom! It’s OK. Just protocol. See, I’m standing. I can take it from here. Thanks,” I said to the aide who had pushed me out in a wheelchair. “Hospital rules are—” She saw the expression on my face, shrugged, and left me with my posse.

  “You guys shouldn’t have waited. Except for you, Mom. I think that falls under other duties as assigned in the mother job description. It’s after midnight, Karen, geez, Mom shouldn’t have called.”

  “She didn’t. I was on my way home from dinner in Omico, and I saw the ambulance pulling away from the county park. Then I saw Coop’s car. And then Miguel’s. I stopped one of the deputies, and he told me what happened. Don’t be so full of yourself. I’m here to take care of your mother, not you,” she said, but with a smile.

  “Chica, of course we stayed. We had to make sure you were OK. Especialmente with—”

  He caught himself and stopped, but Coop had heard it.

  “Especially with what?”

  “Nothing, especially with a cut so deep, you know.”

  Coop looked about to pursue it, but Karen said, “All right, enough talking. Time to catch up tomorrow. Right now, I’m driving Carol and Leah home.”

  At home my mother fussed around making me tea and cinnamon toast, while Karen hovered over me as I changed from the scrubs the hospital had given me in place of my torn and bloody clothes. I pulled a long-sleeved T-shirt and a pair of sweats out of the closet, and was surprised at how good their worn and soft fabric felt against my bruised body. I winced as I wiggled the top over my head and didn’t object when Karen helped me with it as though I were a toddler.

  Then she settled me on the couch with an afghan tucked round me and my comfort food and drink next to me on the end table. She and my mother both brought their cups of tea into the living room and watched as I devoured the toast, and then sipped slowly on my tea, letting the heat from the mug send a pleasant warmth through my hands.

  My mother sat in the rocker across from me, and Karen occupied the wingback chair next to her. She drew her long legs up under her chin, wrapped her arms around them, and looked at me intently.

  “All right. Now tell me. What happened tonight?”

  “Like I said before, I was just out for a walk and—”

  “OK, I’m cutting you some slack because you almost killed yourself tonight, but do not treat us like we’re doddering idiots. Why were you teetering on the edge of a precipice alone in the dark?”

  “It’s not a precipice. It’s just an overlook,” I said crossly.

  “Leah, stop it. Karen is right. There’s something you’re not telling.”

  I heaved a sigh. Then, my guard down from post-shock, the warmth of home, and a really effective painkiller that was kicking in, I went for broke.

  “I fell asleep in the car during the storm. When I woke up, I thought I saw Sister Mattea. I ran over toward the bluff, and it turned out to be a stupid balloon. I was just standing there when someone pushed me off that bluff. I think it may have been Miller Caldwell.”

  “Leah! That’s it. It’s either the drugs talking, or you are certifiable.”

  Karen put a hand on my mother’s arm to stem the flood. “Carol, let’s let her talk.”

  I went through the evidence step by step—at least it seemed like I did. The pleasant haze I felt may have made me less cogent than I wanted to be, but my mom and Karen seemed to get the drift. I pointed out how much time Lacey spent with the Caldwells, then her abrupt cut-off of contact, Georgia’s hostility and her insinuation that Lacey had seduced Miller.

  I highlighted Delite’s vague recollection that Lacey said “some big shot” had abused her, Miller’s out-of-the-blue meeting with me, and his fishing expedition to discover what I knew. Then I told them about Mary Beth Delaney’s admission that Miller had funded Lacey’s memorial site, and about the quotation that appeared every year on the site, the one that mirrored what Miller had said to me when we spoke. Finally, I pointed out Miller’s lack of an alibi the night Lacey disappeared.

  “It all adds up. He saw
me at the park today. Maybe it was just chance that he came back and found me, or maybe he was waiting somewhere and watching. Either way, when I walked out by the bluff, it was the perfect opportunity. And I think he did the same thing to Sister Mattea.” They were both quiet, but then it was Karen who spoke.

  “Leah, I know how hard you’ve been working to find out what really happened to Lacey. And I have to give you credit. You’ve turned up a lot of things the sheriff’s department overlooked or ignored.”

  I was liking how this was going. Karen was the first person other than Miguel to concede that I was on to something.

  “But think for a minute. None of it is really evidence. It’s circumstantial, it’s speculation and, kiddo, it’s not actionable. Leah, hon, you’ve got no proof that Lacey was abused, let alone that she was killed. No evidence that Sister Mattea knew anything about it, and no hard data that supports your theory that Miller was her abuser and possibly even her murderer.”

  “But what about her behavior changes? What about the money Lacey supposedly stole? What about the missing data on the phone? And Sister Julianna is hiding something. I could tell when I talked to her today. Maybe she’s protecting Miller Caldwell. He’s on the board, and he’s got a lot of power. Maybe she even knows what really happened to Lacey.” I heard a pleading note creep into my voice and willed it away.

  Then my mother spoke.

  “Leah, you’ve run yourself ragged since Sister Mattea died. You’re not eating, you’re not sleeping, you’ve put so much pressure on yourself. You carry the weight of the world on your shoulders—you always have. Look what happened today—you fell asleep for four hours in your car. That’s how exhausted you are. No one can blame you if your judgment is skewed, but you can’t, you just can’t, accuse Miller of trying to kill you.”

  “Why would he risk killing you when he’s not in any real danger? You don’t have any evidence that he did anything to Lacey, and you haven’t found any connection between Lacey and Sister Mattea. I’m sorry, hon, but there are alternate explanations for everything you’ve found,” Karen said.