Beginnings: A Kate Martinelli novella

by King, Laurie R.

  To my shock, the very same woman looked up from behind the counter—but no, this was not time travel. Her blue eyes and greying red hair were also on the framed photograph on the wall behind her. This would be the next generation of bakers. Who was watching me dubiously as I stood in the doorway, grinning like a lunatic.

  “I used to come here when I was a kid,” I explained. “Is that your mother’s picture?”

  Her face relaxed. “It is. She retired a few years ago, though she still comes in when things are busy.”

  “Well, tell her an old customer said hi. Can I have a coffee, and maybe one of those?”

  The object was a softball-sized muffin with nuts on top, which barely fit on the plate she put onto a tray with the coffee. Before she rang it up, I asked if she could arrange a thank-you box of cookies to be sent across to the police department, and she said sure, as if it were a regular occurrence.

  She even gave me a price break on everything, being the end of the day.

  ​ The bakery’s seats had changed, but the new owner had kept the banquette seating along the sides, and I slid into roughly the same place that I’d treasured as a child—though with very different reading material.

  The accident-report form was as bland as they come, with time of day, condition of road, vehicle involved, and so on. As I’d imagined (remembered?) it was an old car, which probably meant worn tires and loose steering.

  The road sketch was hand-drawn rather than computer-generated, but it was clear enough. Because this crash involved a fatality, it received greater follow-up than a mere injury or property damage. Someone had even closed the road long enough to measure and photograph the skid marks by daylight. I suspected that a number of the photos in the file—which the clerk had made in color, then fastened together with a big clip—would be of the road itself, but I left those for the moment.

  It appeared that Patty had been driving along Pipeline Road just before midnight, going at least fifty mph, which was twenty over the posted limit. Just before one of the road’s gentle left-hand curves, she jerked the wheel to the right, then an instant later, slammed on the brakes and yanked the wheel back to the left. The tires, whose tread someone had bothered to measure, were perfectly serviceable, but not good enough to hang onto the road. The vehicle was travelling sideways when it hit one of those massive eucalyptus trees, its point of impact halfway along the passenger side. Both windows on that side exploded outward. The car’s steel frame actually bent several degrees around the tree.

  The written report that followed gave greater detail. The car was fifteen years old, and belonged to a classmate of Patty’s, a Junior named Tony Cardone. In his interview, he referred to it as a classic, which he’d bought as a project to restore. That explained why a kid from north-town was driving a clunker. He and Patty had both been at a party that night and she’d more or less helped herself to his keys, saying she wanted some air and that she’d be back in an hour. And he was drunk enough to say sure.

  Tony was adamant that he and his car were not to blame. The steering was fine, headlight bulbs new, tires okay. Some previous owner had even upgraded to shoulder-belts in the front. It wasn’t his fault. And he’d thought she had a license. The report ended with the note that he had been crying during most of the interview.

  The statement answered my earlier question: yes, the car had seat belts—and not just lap belts, but the modern three-point kind. Patty was not wearing hers. The report stated that the mechanism had been tested, and apparently all of them, while somewhat loose in their retractors, had functional clasps. Patty was across the car from the point of impact. If she’d been wearing her belt, she might have survived. Instead, the force had ripped her hands off the steering wheel and thrown her along the bench seat into the tree. The rescue crew had to cut off her shoe to free her right foot from a fold of metal.

  But by then, she was long dead.

  Emergency crews were on the scene within ten minutes, since the noise of the crash woke up the farmer half a mile down the road. Joseph Weber’s statement was the next document in the file, written in his own hand two days after the accident—though I thought the last three sentences felt like afterthoughts, added when the investigator asked for clarification.

  My wife heard the sound just before midnight. We’d been asleep for a couple hours when something woke us up, and I said, Was that a crash? And she said she thought there had been a screech of brakes though I didn’t hear that. And she said should I call 911? And I said maybe I should go see first, but when we looked out the window we could see lights down the road a ways. They weren’t moving. So I put on my pants and boots and got the big flashlight, but she said she wasn’t going to wait, what if there was somebody hurt.

  When I got there I could see it was a real mess. There was glass all over the road and closer up I could hear dripping. I kept back until I could shine my light under the car, but when I saw it was the radiator leaking and not gas, I went up and looked through the missing window.

  There was a girl in there, sitting on the passenger side but stretched out across the seat like she was reaching for the driver’s door. I couldn’t see her face, just the back of her hair, but there was blood in it and she was lying real still. I was going to reach inside to feel her wrist, but just then I heard the first sirens coming so I figured it was better to wait til the ambulance came, to be sure.

  I got there probably six or seven minutes after we heard the crash. The cops were there a couple minutes later.

  I didn’t smell any alcohol or drugs, just the hot engine and the radiator fluid.

  I had one of the dogs with me, on a lead so I could keep him out of trouble, and when we were waiting for the sirens he started barking off at the fields. I remembered it the next day, and I took my dog back in case the girl had hit a deer or something, but if so it must have got away since my dog didn’t find it.

  The next thing in the file was the autopsy.

  No way I wanted to look at that. No way I could avoid it.

  I took another swallow of the now-cold coffee, wishing it was something a lot stronger, but before I could start that dark task, I was interrupted by a wave of happy young voices.

  I looked up in surprise as half a dozen school-age girls came tumbling into the bakery, phones in hand and backpacks over shoulders. They greeted the red-haired woman with the kind of cheerful politeness used for a friend’s mother—and since one of the girls had hair that same red color, it wasn’t hard to pick out which. The mom handed out drinks and substantial muffins without ringing anything up, which confirmed matters.

  They were younger than Nora, maybe thirteen. Hence the backpacks—those would disappear in high school, when the girls suddenly became too cool to admit to homework and textbooks.

  They hung around in front of the display case, giggling and exclaiming over some incident at school, then took their whipped cream-laden drinks to a nearby table. Closing the file cover over the photographs, and checking to make sure no curious eyes could see the pages, I opened the autopsy report and started reading, accompanied by the kind of conversation you might expect from a group of heterosexual thirteen-year-old girls.

  Meanwhile, the brutal print phrases flowed past my eyes: “soft tissue hemorrhage” and “considerable bruising” and “fractures of the two external metatarsals”; the broken nose, thumb, and collarbone; the fact that she was not a virgin, and that she was not pregnant.

  Immediate cause of death, the coroner found, was suffocation, possibly due to her lying face-down and unconscious against the seat. At least two other injuries were severe enough to have been life-threatening.

  A note under Distinguishing Marks caught my eye: she’d had a tattoo. A daisy, just above her left ankle.

  Thirty years ago, tattoos were a clear declaration of rebellion and wickedness—but a daisy? Oh, Patty.

  The coroner’s sketched figures (I lifted that page up from the table, to be sure no innocent gaze fell on it) gave details of her injur
ies: mostly, as one might expect, on the right side of her body, from trapped foot to cracked skull. But her nose was broken as well. I looked back at the written description, and saw that yes, assuming I remembered the difference between temporal and parietal bones, the chief impact was just above and behind her right ear. Something else had hit her face as she was thrown around. The combination of swollen nose and a jaw shoved closed against the seat meant that once unconscious, she had no air.

  I braced myself, and reached back into the folder for the photos.

  These were arranged in the order the police photographer had shot them, although this had to be a selection from several rolls of film. The first was taken through the open door, and showed Patty sprawled across the car’s old fashioned bench-style seat. As Joseph Weber had said, her left arm was stretched toward the camera, fingers just touching the edge of the upholstery. Her face was pressed into the seat, but her right hand, which should have slumped to the floor, was stretched back as if reaching behind her. It was hard to tell, but it looked as if she was wearing that heavy cuff bracelet she liked, and it had caught on the strap of the seat belt. But she’d been driving. Why was her arm through that side’s belt?

  I stared out the window for a while, constructing an explanation in my mind’s eye. Worn retractors on the belts. Left hand one way, right hand the other.

  She’d had one split second of knowing: the car was going into that tree. She threw up her right arm in reaction, but her body must have been swiveling as well in that last instant. Instead of her braced arm meeting the tree, it was swinging forward, just enough to slip inside the loosely hanging passenger belt. She hit, then fell sideways onto the seat, leaving her wrist caught on the strap.

  I pulled my eyes away from the all-too-clear figure to look at the rest of what the camera had caught. The flash washed out the door-frame, but there were marks in the paint. I squinted, then turned back to the report to check.

  Yes: the first police responder had to pry the driver’s door open, using a crow-bar from his trunk kit that left gouges on the frame. When the paramedics arrived, they’d made no attempt at removal or resuscitation, merely confirmed her dead and stood back to let the police take over.

  The photos were puzzling, parts of a story that failed to come together. Her left arm bothered me, stretched out along the seat. I’d have guessed it was pulled out from underneath her, yet both Joseph Weber and the paramedics stated it was that way when they first saw her. So unless Weber lied… But why would he? No one could blame him for trying to help an injured girl.

  I replayed the motions in my mind, trying to find a sequence that would leave her in that position. If her left arm, after her hands were torn from the steering wheel in the skid, was rigid and outstretched when she hit the tree, it could have remained in that position. Although a person would think that if she’d been instantly knocked out, her arm would have been trapped under her slumping body.

  Unless Patty was not knocked out. I had a brief, queasy vision of my dying, blood-drenched sister using her last conscious thought to claw her fingers along the glass-strewn seat toward the door… and I quickly turned to the next photograph.

  This shot showed her trapped right foot, taken before the crew cut into her shoe. Next came a pair of awkward photographs, with the camera held against the roof of the car, aiming down. Overlapping the two gave the entire front seat up to the window. It showed how even the comparatively massive sixties steel frame hadn’t kept the tree from shoving into the body of the car, moving the seat-back forward a few inches. Patty lay tucked beneath the forward-leaning seatback, her jeans, shoulders, and hair glittering with crumbles of glass. Her face was hidden, for which I was grateful. The autopsy’s description of the amount of glass embedded in her right cheek was vivid enough for my mind’s eye.

  The rest of the pictures had been taken by daylight. The first showed the car in situ, after Patty was taken away. For it, the photographer had retreated across the road to get a bumper-to-bumper view. The door was not quite shut—I doubted the mechanism would latch any more—but showed what the car looked like when the first patrolman arrived. The photographer must have been more or less standing in the drainage ditch, putting the lens slightly below the level of the car’s roof. The wide picture showed the road covered with broken glass and the side of the car with its driver’s window missing. The window behind it was a spiderweb of cracks. In the background, blunt and monstrous, loomed the old tree.

  The next photograph was taken after the car was towed. Markers stood near the skid lines that swerved first one way, then the other, before dissolving into the chewed-up gravel at the side. The tree showed a pale chunk bitten out of it, just above the gouged earth and scraps of car. An old rag lay trodden under many feet. In the grass lay a shoe, the leather sawed down to the instep.

  Something about the glass seemed odd. And the rag—why did it look so naked? Not that it looked arranged there, or out of place, but… Then I saw it: most of the scenes I’d walked around were littered with the debris of paramedics, all kinds of blood-stained scraps and discarded wrappers testifying to their desperate attempts to staunch a wound, save a life.

  Not here.

  The girls finished their high-calorie coffee drinks (decaffeinated, if I judged the mother correctly) and dispersed with much hugging and exclaiming. The woman brought me a fresh coffee, by way of apology for the racket, glancing curiously at the pages that I’d taken care to cover completely as the pack drifted by.

  “Sorry if the girls disturbed your reading.”

  “Oh, no,” I assured her. “I’ve got one of my own just a little older—I always like it when she brings a gaggle of friends home.”

  “It’s a blessing when they don’t mind being under a mother’s eye.”

  “It is indeed.”

  When she was gone, I looked at the last two photographs in the stack. One showed a close-up of the driver’s window. Jagged reflections in the bottom track confirmed that the glass was broken out, not simply rolled down. A thin kink of thread descended from one corner. Greasy blotches stained the paint around the missing window.

  The final photograph showed the steering wheel and dash board. Having lived with crime scene investigations, I knew I was looking at fingerprint powder here, not dirt—then I flipped back to the previous shot, and decided that what I had taken for grease was the same black powder. Rural police, fingerprinting a car stolen by the person who died driving it? That seemed remarkably scrupulous. And the report said that most of the prints belonged to the deceased, Patricia Martinelli. Except, surely that was wrong? This wasn’t Patty’s car. Her prints should have been in the minority.

  I went back to the initial report, wondering if I’d missed something, but there was no explanation of why they’d decided to dust it for prints, or what conclusion they had reached. It did seem to me that the pattern of print powder on the wheel was a bit odd, but in the end, I shook my head.

  I’d worked in a big city force too long, where budget overruled most other considerations. Maybe the police here, faced with the death of a teenager, had automatically launched into the full spectrum of response before realizing that the only crime involved was theft of an old car—and not even that, once they found she’d had permission. Maybe they were bored. Or the chief took advantage of the crash as an exercise in evidence-gathering. Which clearly they needed, if those print-free areas on the paint and steering wheel had come about by uniforms carelessly rubbing against them.

  I couldn’t see that it mattered, one way or the other.

  It was nearly five, and the bakery’s owner had been cleaning up for some time. I used the restroom, thanked her for her table—and bought her last half-dozen cookies to take home with me.

  I sent Lee a text, then started the car.

  But instead of turning toward the freeway, I made a U-turn and headed back to Pipeline Road.

  This time, even though thirty years of growth had come between the photograph and the reali
ty, I had no trouble spotting the tree.

  I pulled over, turned off the engine, got out—and was shocked when the smell of death washed over me.

  An instant later, I realized it was not the actual smell of death, but the chest rub that cops use to smother the stench of decomp. Vicks smells like eucalyptus trees. (And yes, every time we treat our kids for colds, we wince.)

  Now that I’d seen the photographs, I knew which tree had killed her: the one just after the gap for access to the field. The wound in its massive trunk had long healed over, but the tree would never lose the scar.

  The air did not move. Cows grumbled in a distant field. A small plane passed overhead. If she’d swerved a split second earlier, she could have missed it entirely.

  Patty, what the hell were you doing down here? What made you jerk the wheel like that? The glow of a cat’s eyes? A flash of headlights from around the corner? Was someone walking along the pavement?

  With the sun going low and no breath of wind to stir the silvery leaves, the trees no longer seemed lovely. They towered above me, huge, silent rulers of everything in sight. Nothing grew around their bases. No birds sang from their branches. The stink of them rose up in my throat and made me gag.

  I wanted to take a chain saw to the fucker, to fell it with an earth-thundering crash. Cut it apart, burn it to ash, poison its roots and grind its stump to the ground, giving this small patch of roadside back to the native oaks and blackberries.

  I wanted that tree dead and gone. Instead, I got back behind the wheel and continued along the road, past the fences and the house whose mailbox still said Weber, down to the No Trespassing signs and the derelict quarry. There I turned and drove back up Pipeline Road, then through Diamond Lake to the freeway.

  If I never came back to this place, it would be too soon.