Brink of Death

by Brandilyn Collins

  Refusing to try? That was below the belt. “Jenna, I can’t help! I can’t pull some hidden face out of somebody’s mind.

  Especially a traumatized child’s. I’ve never done anything like that. It takes special training and I don’t have it.”

  “Try it anyway. Under the circumstances, what have you got to lose? What do any of us have to lose?”

  “Plenty.” I dug my fingers into the roots of my hair. “Look.

  I’d probably draw a totally wrong face. Then all those detectives would be searching for someone who didn’t exist. Talk about hurting the investigation!”

  Jenna sighed. “Annie, that’s dumb and you know it. If you draw the face wrong, Erin won’t recognize it. End of story, and nothing lost for trying. But if you happen to do it right, there’s a whole lot gained.”

  I smacked the faucet on and scrubbed a fork. Why couldn’t my sister see that what she was asking was out of the question? The search for Lisa Willit’s killer ending up on my shoulders? When the detectives themselves hadn’t managed to get anywhere? How absurd! So I’d drawn some half-decent pictures in the courtroom. That didn’t involve one hundredth of the kind of responsibility she was trying to heap on me now.

  Jenna watched me scrub in silence. The fork was long clean. I opened the dishwasher, stuck it inside, then reached for a plate.

  “I know what you’re thinking, Annie. You’re just afraid to fail. You think everything else that’s happened to you is all your fault, and you can’t bear to add one more piece of guilt.”

  The accusation pierced. These were feelings too personal—and too on-target—to be spoken. Jenna had uncovered my deepest insecurity, like excavating a mummy from a tomb. She had no right.

  The kitchen fell silent. Jenna shook her head and crossed to the table for more dirty plates, exasperation oozing out of her. Well, let her stew. Just because she could take on anything.

  She hadn’t been dumped by a husband. She hadn’t been the child confidante of our mother, who’d despaired time and again over our dad’s infidelities. Everything about life had built Jenna up, up, up. Successful job, one boyfriend after another, beauty. While so much had just beat me down.

  Jenna set the plates on the counter, then faced me, a hand on her hip. I didn’t need to look at her to know that two spots of color sat high on her cheeks. Or that her lips were pressed yet turned up at the corners. If ever a person could look at me with a mixture of devotion and pique, it was Jenna.

  “You can do this.”

  I painstakingly rinsed another plate. “Detective Chetterling won’t want me to. After all, I am Trent Gerralon’s daughter.”

  “You’re right. We’re both tainted.” The sarcasm in her voice could be cut with a knife. “So he’ll say no. Then you will be off the hook.” She gave her head a disgusted shake.

  I could find no reply.

  “Play Nike for once, Annie, and just do it. If you don’t make the call, I will.”

  I closed my eyes, wavering. I would hate myself if I did this. No doubt it would turn out badly. “Jenna, please. I won’t be able to help, don’t you see? Everyone will count on me, and then I’ll feel so bad that I couldn’t do it.”

  She tilted her head. “Well, Annie, you’ve finally admitted the bottom line. Lisa Willit is dead. The entire neighborhood is terrorized. And here you are, one of the most giving people I know, holding back something that could help. Why?

  Because you’re the most important person around here, and you don’t want to look bad.”

  I froze, struck to the core. The last thing I’d ever think was that I was more important than anyone else. Is that the way my fear looked to her? I turned to slide a plate into the dishwasher, my fingers trembling.

  “Well?”

  I stared at the white lip of the porcelain sink, searching for some way to turn back this tide. “Jenna, if I let Dave down, if I made Erin go through another session like last night’s for nothing, I’d never forgive myself.”

  “So what else is new, Annie? Go ahead, add one more thing to your guilt list.” She crossed the kitchen, fetched the phone, and plucked Chetterling’s card off the refrigerator.

  “Call him.”

  I scraped the bottom of the barrel for argument. “My hands are wet.”

  She set down the phone and card with infinite patience, ripped a paper towel off the holder, and handed it to me.

  I wiped my hands until they’d never been dryer. Then with a deep sigh I picked up the phone and punched in Chetterling’s number.

  Chapter 9

  Tick-tock.

  Four-thirty.

  Now I’d really done it.

  As I perched in my father’s leather chair behind the desk in his office, strangling my sister was not beyond imagination.

  The familiar feeling of a sketchpad in my hand only increased my anxiety. The blank and waiting page mocked me, the pencil in my fingers like a scalpel in a faux surgeon’s grasp.

  I faced a worn and leery Erin, who sat off to my right, slumped on one of two matching chairs pulled out from their usual place against the wall. Dave sat next to her. Every minute or so he would take a deep breath, as if he couldn’t fill the cavity in his chest. Detective Chetterling had suggested we meet in my father’s office, where Erin would feel more at ease. The room, about twenty feet square, had a fourteen-foot ceiling and plenty of light coming in from the front windows. It was located on the main floor between the master suite and great room. My father had worked here on weekends.

  The door was closed so our voices would not filter into the great room.

  “Okay, Erin.” I gave her a little smile, as if I did this kind of thing every day. “Like Detective Chetterling told your dad, we’re trying this because we thought it might be easier than looking at noses and mouths on the computer. If it doesn’t work, we’ll stop. But it’s important that we give it a try. You ready?”

  “I guess.” Erin obviously wanted to be anywhere but in that chair.

  A pained look crossed Dave’s face as he gave her leg a squeeze. Chetterling had advised him not to stay. The success of the interview depended upon as little distraction as possible. “I’m going to leave you now and go…home.”

  The word seemed to chill on Dave’s lips. The detectives had finished in his house, saying he could return on his own.

  His tour through the crime scene had yielded no clues, and so, desperate for some answers, for anything, he and Detective Chetterling had taken me up on my reluctant offer.

  “Just do the best you can, Erin,” Dave soothed his daughter. “Maybe by the time you’re done, your Uncle Barry and Aunt Sara will be here.”

  “‘Kay.”

  Thank you, Dave mouthed to me as he left the room. I waited until the door clicked shut.

  I hope you’ll have something to thank me for.

  Nervously I glanced at the soft-leaded pencil in my hand.

  I would switch to colored pencils if I first managed to get down some of the basic features. Chetterling and I had discussed whether or not to work in color, as was my habit in the courtroom. Most composites were drawn in black and white for various reasons, one being that they were cheaper to copy for distribution. Still, Erin’s quickest and strongest memories were of color—yellow-blond hair, bright-blue eyes.

  Chetterling had thought it wise to make the most of those details.

  “All right.” Where to begin? “Try to picture his face, Erin.

  Do you remember the basic shape of it?”

  Erin focused on her knees. “I don’t know how I can explain it. I see it in my head, but…”

  Heat flushed through me. I hadn’t the slightest idea of this interview process. A forensic artist’s abilities seemed as incomprehensible to me as the power that created the universe. How did someone gather the nebulae within a victim’s mind and shape them into form?

  “Maybe if you just close your eyes… . Remember him as he stood and looked at you. You saw him well. You even noticed his eye color.�
��

  “That was easy. The blue was so bright.”

  “Okay. Maybe other things will come to you, too.”

  Erin pinned both hands between her legs and closed her eyes. A slight frown knit her forehead as she concentrated. A minute passed. Her breaths shallowed.

  “His face is long. And pudgy around the…here.” She ran knuckles along her jaw.

  I poised the pencil over my drawing paper, still stymied.

  Long and pudgy made sense, proportionally speaking, but when you couldn’t see the rest of the picture…

  “Okay.” My heart fluttered. I was about to put Erin through these terrible memories again for nothing.

  “And, um, his eyes were kind of big. That’s how I could see the color, you know?”

  I hesitated, then sketched a rough outline of a long face.

  Added some sag in the jowls. Then outlined large eyes.

  Erin’s eyes remained closed, her fingers wrapping around the arm of her chair. “There was one thing. He’s looking at me.” She swallowed. The freckles across her nose seemed to darken, as though to remind me of her fragility and youth.

  “And his mouth opens just a little, like he’s going to talk. But he doesn’t.”

  This was useless information, as far as I could see. But at least Erin was remembering. She shoved her heels together, lifting them off the wooden floor. Set them back down. Her shoulders drew in, as if she wanted to shrink to nothingness.

  “Erin? What do his lips look like?”

  “I don’t know. He’s looking at me, and they…The corners go down.”

  I squeezed the pencil. Then made an attempt at a downturned mouth.

  And then I made a terrible mistake. I looked at what I’d drawn. Immediately faces played upon the walls of my memory, like restless ghosts. Faces from my years in the courtroom—defendants, jury members, attorneys, and judges. The beginnings of this face reminded me of a certain policeman from a murder trial last year, or that jury foreman in the burglary trial. Wait, if the eyes were a little smaller, he’d look like the judge in the baby-napping case…

  I raked my eyes away from the drawing, anxiety pinging through me like the roller in a pinball machine. This was not a problem I’d expected. I would not be able to look at the drawing until it was done, or memories of my previous work would surely taint it. For all I knew, the sketch could end up as a variant of my own father.

  Did forensic artists encounter this? How in the world did they control it?

  Concentrate! On the individual parts, not the whole.

  “All right.” I cleared my throat. “What else, hon?”

  Tears seeped through Erin’s scrunched-up eyes.

  Should I stop the session? Might as well fail with minimum damage.

  At that moment a serendipitous scene caught my eye.

  Through the window, out of Erin’s sight, I saw a car pulling up to the Willits’ house. A man and woman got out. Dave Willit’s front door opened and he descended the steps, opening his arms. The woman fell into them, and their bodies shook with sobs. The scene spiraled through me, whisking together bits of resolve like grains of sand in a dust storm. By the time Dave and the woman parted, the landscape within me had been rearranged, blown from unending flatness to small hills I could climb and conquer.

  Yes. I closed my eyes, connecting with this new bit of confidence.

  I had to do this. For Dave. For Erin. For their extended family.

  So I pressed forward, pulling from myself instincts I didn’t know existed. Somehow I discovered what to say, how to begin filling in the details of the composite, as Erin’s ragged words brought it to life.

  “His hair,” Erin blurted ten minutes later. “It got messed up when he…when they fought, and when he looked at me, it had come down his forehead.”

  “What do you mean, come down his forehead?”

  “It, you know, the whole front part of it covered more of his forehead.”

  I hesitated. Should I draw the man’s hair the way it was before it “got messed up” or the way it looked when she best remembered him? “Was his hair thick or thin?”

  “Thick.”

  “What was it shaped like before it got messed up? Did it have a part in it?”

  “A part on the side.”

  “Which side?”

  “Um…here.” She drew a line with her finger down the right side of her head.

  Erin talked next about the eyebrows. She said they were bushy and the same color as his hair. The nose was wide. I prompted her through explanations of eye shape, size of nostrils, skin condition. What was his chin like? His ears? As Erin filled in details, I sketched more rapidly, still focusing on the individual parts. But as time went on, my narrow focus became more and more of a barrier. Without the ability to check one aspect proportionally against another, I had no idea what this face would look like when it was finished. I began to dread viewing the result.

  It’s going to be so wrong.

  Erin’s words ran out.

  Gripping the pencil, I asked if she could recall anything else. Surely the drawing lacked enough detail—even if it was accurate. I bit the inside of my cheek. Would I taint Erin’s memories if I showed her the sketch in this form? What would a real forensic artist do?

  What choice did I have? We’d reached a standstill.

  I turned the sketchpad over.

  “All right, hon.” I laid my pencil on the desk. “I’d like to show you what we have so far. Don’t worry if it doesn’t look very much like what you remember. Because we can talk more and fix it, okay? And I’ll add the color later.”

  Erin straightened her back, as if steeling herself. The air in the room grew heavy, like humid skies awaiting a storm. I attempted a smile. “Are you ready to see it?”

  Her gaze drifted to the floor. Some time passed before she gave a brief nod.

  “Okay,” I said. “How about coming to stand by me.”

  She pushed to her feet and came to my side, where she stood like a puppet.

  “Whenever you’re ready, hon.”

  Erin swallowed, shifted her weight. Then nodded again.

  I turned the sketchpad over and held up the drawing, not looking at it. She pressed her lips together until they whitened, then lowered her eyes to the picture.

  Chapter 10

  Erin stared at the drawing, mute.

  In the great room the grandfather clock chimed. Forty-five minutes after the hour. Which hour, I could not say. Time was ticking, ticking away.

  “Does it look anything like him?”

  “Sort of.” Her voice sounded tinny, relief mixing with disappointment.

  “Can you tell me what parts aren’t quite right? Together we can fix them.”

  She pulled in her shoulders. “I don’t know.”

  Pain for her swept through me. Reaching up, I ran my hand down her cheek. “Do you need to stop, Erin?”

  “No. I just…don’t know if I can do it.”

  “Well, I don’t know if I can, either. But I’m willing to try if you are. It’s up to you.”

  “Okay.” She raised her head and inhaled a long, slow breath. “I want to finish it.”

  Her resolve amazed me. “Then we’ll do it,” I whispered.

  I set the drawing on the desk, facedown, and crossed over to fetch Erin’s chair, placing it beside mine. “Sit here at the desk and we’ll go over each part.”

  As she settled into her chair, sudden curiosity pulled my eyes to the sketchpad. Before I could stop myself, I turned it over. Looked at the sketch.

  Pinpricks danced across the back of my neck. Even in rough form, there was no denying the evil in those features.

  And yet…they seemed familiar. Once again I fought the fear of drawing someone I’d done before. My courtroom experience was hindering me rather than helping.

  Besides, wouldn’t Erin’s reaction be tainted as well? Her dread of recognition had poised her to react to the drawing even if it was only mildly accurate, as someone
creeping down a dark and frightening corridor might gasp at the merest touch.

  I was not going to help the investigation at all. I was going to hurt it. Badly.

  Sweat dampened my forehead. I wiped it away with the back of my hand.

  “Okay. Here goes.” I pulled a sheet of drawing paper from the bottom of the pad. “I’m going to hide everything but the part we’re working on, Erin.” I covered the bottom part of the face with the piece of paper. “First the eyes and eyebrows.

  Tell me what needs to be changed.”

  Piece by piece, we worked together, concentrating on details rather than the terrifying whole. The eyes were not quite so big, the eyebrows a little higher, the nose less wide.

  Too much sag in the jaw. Minutes fused into indiscernible time, our bodies shoulder to shoulder. Erin focused her energy upon that sheet of paper as if taking the most important test of her life. All sound fell away save that of our voices, our breathing, and the scratch of the pencil. The longer we worked, the more we seemed to become one entity, pouring everything we possessed into our task.

  We reached the chin. “It’s kind of…fatter.” Erin’s voice faltered. I knew she was tiring and could not take much more.

  I made a few changes. “That better?”

  “I…don’t know.” A veil draped over her face. She looked away at nothing. Falling back against my chair, I closed my eyes. Somewhere inside me existed the energy to finish this business.

  “Erin? I think we’re done with drawing. All I have to do now is add the color. I can do the skin and final touches later, but I want to get the color of his hair and eyes right, because you remembered them so well.”

  “Uh-huh.” Her gaze remained fixed across the room.

  “So. Can you just…help me do this last thing?”

  “Okay.”

  We leaned toward each other, resting our heads together as we gathered energy.

  “All right. Let’s do it.” I selected a blue pencil.

  Covering everything but the eyes, I began adding blue to the irises. Light blue first, then more and more color as Erin insisted they weren’t bright enough. When she was satisfied with the shade, the man’s eyes were stunning in their intensity. And cold. Like the bluest of lakes layered with ice. Had I seen them before? They seemed to bore a hole right through me, too powerful, too alive, to be a drawing. If I were to scramble away from the desk, they would surely follow me.