Da Silva stressed the urgency of his request by poking me slightly. I looked at the neighboring houses to see if anyone was watching. The drapes were all drawn, and there wasn’t a soul outside on the entire block. The drone of central-air units filled the night. Everybody had their doors and windows shut tight to keep in the cool air. For once in her life, Mrs. Testino wasn’t peeking through her living room curtains to gather dirt on the neighbors.
Just my luck.
Da Silva took hold of my arm. “Now start walking, or I’ll gut you like a fish,” he whispered.
I knew he meant business and did exactly as I was told. I hoped to buy some time to figure out a way to escape. Even in the now-dark parking lot, I knew Stanley was leading me to the concession stand next to the little jogging path that had become the most dangerous spot in Tranquil Harbor.
I dragged my feet and wracked my brain as we walked down the path. I knew I could never outrun Da Silva—even with his bony, blown-out knee. I was slow, clumsy, and way too short. I certainly couldn’t out-muscle him.
I stepped on a branch and made it crack in two. Da Silva stopped abruptly, startled by the sound, but he waited only a second before nudging me forward. The full moon failed to penetrate the dense tree canopy. Stanley had to feel his way down the path.
Dry pine needles crackled beneath our feet, so many that I had a good mental picture of our location. We were close to the spot where I had tripped over Jason Whitley’s body only a few months ago. Several young saplings had sprung up at the edges of the path—pliant growth with a whole lot of give. Their thin, low branches had the elasticity of a slingshot. I grabbed one and bent it back as far as it would go.
“You have to feel for the trees,” I said, then ducked and let go. I heard rather than saw the branch that whipped against Stanley’s face and made him yelp.
The knife fell as Da Silva reached for his face with both hands. I took advantage of the opportunity. I turned and kicked out as hard as I could, connecting with Da Silva’s bad knee.
“Eeeek!” Stanley screamed—a strangled falsetto that gave a good indication of the excruciating pain he must have felt.
He hit the ground hard, and I scampered past the ailing killer. But pain or no pain, Da Silva wasn’t about to cave so easily. He reached out and grabbed at my ankle, which tripped me up and sent me flying. I landed hard on my left leg and heard a sickening snap, followed by a flash of white-hot agony.
Behind me, Stanley moved closer. I half-dragged, half-crawled along the path, grasping at tree roots and young saplings to pull myself faster toward the parking lot. My arms ached, and my leg was on fire. Still, it was either him or me—and I had two kids. It knew it would have to be him.
Though I was familiar with the path, the blessed sound of police sirens helped guide me back to the Little League parking lot. I crawled out from the woods and onto blacktop, near smelly garbage bins and the splintered picnic tables. The parking lot was ablaze with the glow of high beams and the lovely, flashing lights atop the Tranquil Harbor squad cars. A young, uniformed cop ran toward me. He dropped down on his knees and gently helped me to sit up.
“Are you okay, Mrs. Caruso?” he asked.
I was beginning to grow very fond of the familiar face. “Officer O’Reilly. How nice to see you again. I think I broke my leg, but other than that, I’m fine. Just fine.”
Then I passed out.
24
Ron Haver winced as the doctor maneuvered my leg in the ankle-to-thigh splint.
“Ow! That must smart. Lucky for you that old lady saw Da Silva take you into the woods. This could have been much, much worse.”
I sat upright on an examination table in Harbor Medical Center’s emergency room, afraid to move a muscle for fear a fresh wave of pain would shoot up my leg.
“I still can’t figure out how Mrs. Testino saw the whole thing and called the police,” I said. “I looked directly at her house, and she wasn’t in her usual spot at the window. The entire block was shut up tight, and there wasn’t a soul around anywhere. Absolutely no one.”
“But Mrs. Testino saw everything. That snoopy old woman actually uses binoculars to spy on everybody in the neighborhood. She was upstairs with the lights off, peeking out her bathroom window. You couldn’t have seen her, but she saw plenty.”
“No wonder she knows so much about what’s happening in town. Binoculars! Who would have … Oh my God !”
“I told you not to move. I will give you a Dilaudid injection for the pain, but it would hurt much less if you stay still,” the small Indian doctor told me in precise English. “You moved, Madam.”
“Right,” I said.
“Da Silva said you knew all along what was in Jason Whitley’s briefcase. He said you figured out he was replacing standardized tests.”
“Yeah, the briefcase you never told me about,” I reminded him.
“This is my investigation, not yours. We started to question Da Silva, but he lawyered up. I don’t know how much he’ll admit to. I guess it doesn’t make much difference right now. We have some DNA and, of course, your testimony.”
The doctor gave me a shot, and I waited for the pain meds to kick in before speaking. “So Whitley found the real tests in the recycling bins at the high school and tried to blackmail Da Silva?”
“We don’t think Whitley was interested in blackmailing him. He was furious with Da Silva for passing students who shouldn’t have passed. He was going to expose him,” Haver told me.
I tried to move my leg, and the doctor ordered me to keep still while he tightened the straps on the splint.
“You mean you knew all about the tests and everything?” I asked.
“We found out Whitley had been complaining for the past two years about getting students from Da Silva’s Algebra I classes who couldn’t do the work.”
I thought about my daughter and her terrible Algebra II grades. Betty Vernon said Sara simply didn’t have a head for algebra, while I insisted my child was brilliant. Sara had been one of Da Silva’s past students.
“Did Betty Vernon know about this?” I asked.
“She knew some of it, but not everything.”
“I just don’t understand,” I said. “I know there would be a scandal if the story got out, but I can’t imagine killing someone over a few fudged test scores.”
“Those standardized tests are state, not local. Da Silva knew they’d be an intense cheating investigation and criminal charges. There’s school funding involved—and fraud. Da Silva would have been fired, lost his retirement, his teaching license, and possibly face jail time.”
I just shook my head.
“You must be very careful on this leg until an orthopedic surgeon can make an assessment,” the doctor interrupted. “You have no cast yet and you must avoid further injury.” His smooth, dark face was expressionless as he handed me my X-rays.
“Your sister’s outside in the waiting room,” Haver said.
“How about my mother? Does she know about this?”
“Kate told her. She’s out in the waiting room, too. They won’t let her in here. She’s kicking up quite a fuss.”
“I’ll bet.”
The doctor gave me a printed list of instructions for caring for a fracture.
“Did you happen to call Ken Rhodes, by any chance?” I asked Haver.
“He’s on his way.”
* * *
Rhodes sauntered into the emergency room like he owned the place. I noticed the staff didn’t stop him, but it was mostly a female staff.
“Feel up to working tonight?” Rhodes asked me.
“Work? You must be doing heavier drugs than I am. Don’t you see my leg? I could be crippled for life!”
“Just think, Colleen—a breaking story! I’ll call in the copy editor, and we can write it up tonight. If it goes to press before seven, we can bump something off the front page, and a firsthand account of your perilous adventures will be on every porch in three counties by tomorrow night.”
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“More like the hydrangea bushes if I know the Crier’s carriers. Besides, what about my leg? My nerves? Don’t you even care that I almost got killed tonight?”
“Is there any chance of lockjaw?” Rhodes asked the doctor.
“Not with this injury,” the doctor said. “I am very sorry.”
Ron laughed. I glared at the three of them. “I might be too distraught to do this!”
“You are a good actress, Mrs. Caruso, but you shall live,” the doctor told me. “I have already given you an injection, and I will write a script for painkillers.”
“So, I’ll do the typing then,” said Rhodes.
I waited.
“I’ll even share the byline,” he offered.
“Whose name goes first?” I asked.
He paused for moment, then smiled. “Your name, of course.”
* * *
Rhodes and my mother helped me down from the table and into a nearby wheelchair while the doctor went to find crutches.
“This is all Neil’s fault,” I told Rhodes as he pushed me into the waiting room. “If he left me the Lexus instead of the Escort, I wouldn’t have called Da Silva to look over his stupid car in the first place.”
“How do you figure that?” Rhodes asked. “You drove the Escort off a pier. If you had the Lexus, you would have done the exact same thing.”
“Not necessarily,” I said. “The Lexus has more pickup.”
“Speaking of cars,” Ron interrupted, “we think Da Silva’s Camry did a lot more than transport a corpse the night he killed Jason Whitley. This is off the record, of course.”
Rhodes mumbled something I couldn’t make out. Haver nodded.
“What about the car?” Rhodes asked.
“We think Da Silva hit the Fitzpatrick kid on his way to dump the body,” Haver told him.
“I saw two small dents in the front fender,” I remembered from the inspection I gave the car earlier in the evening. “I’ll bet one was from clipping that cart in the grocery store parking lot. The other one must have been from poor little Jeffrey Fitzpatrick. That awful excuse for a human being hit that kid and took off without even bothering to see if the boy was dead or alive.”
“Think about it,” Rhodes said. “He probably had Whitley’s body inside the car or stuffed in the trunk. If he stopped when he hit the kid, the police would have come. Suppose they wanted to search the car for drugs or whatever. Da Silva would have been caught red-handed.”
“The Fitzpatrick kid was nothing but a glitch in Da Silva’s plans,” Haver said.
“Well, we have a paper to put out, people,” Rhodes said. “Let’s get over to the office and hit that keyboard before we miss the new deadline.”
“Right,” I said. I hoped Rhodes would honor his promise and do all the typing himself.
The doctor came out, and I tried the crutches. He adjusted them to the right height, but I hated the thought of hobbling around on them for the next six weeks. I sat back down in the wheelchair and gave them to my mother to carry.
My mother, in turn, handed them to Ken. “I guess these should go to the office with her, though I can’t imagine how she’s going to get around on them. She’s the biggest klutz …”
“Mom, please!” I begged.
“I’ll keep an eye on her,” Rhodes said. “I’ll even drive her home when we’re done—whenever that will be.”
“Can the kids sleep at your house tonight, Mom?”
“Of course. Your father’s with them now. Don’t worry, Colleen. I’ll take care of everything, even the bill. I’ll bet Neil didn’t keep up with your hospitalization either.”
“The paper will foot the bill, Mrs. Fleming,” Rhodes told her.
My mother looked at him like he was Superman.
Ken bent down and whispered in my ear. “And I have another assignment to go over with you when you’re finished with the Da Silva story.”
“God knows I could use the money, but I don’t think I’ll be doing anything too physical for a while.”
“You don’t have to do a thing except sit back and enjoy the view!” he told me.
“What view?”
“The panoramic view of the ocean from the sky, Colleen. You’re doing a story on flying lessons. The instructor at Tranquil Harbor Airport is taking you and Willy Rojas up in a Cessna.”
“But I’m scared of heights and I hate flying,” I told him.
Ken stopped my chair and came around front to face me. He leaned down, eyes fixed on mine, then gently kissed me on the forehead. “Don’t be silly. You’re gonna love it. Trust me.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jo-Ann Lamon Reccoppa lives in New Jersey and draws on her experience as a freelance correspondent to create oddball characters and unusual scenarios. She has never tripped over a dead body while running in the woods, but eagerly awaits the day it will happen … if she should ever decide to take up jogging.
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