The Breathtaker

by Alice Blanchard

  Her cheeks were flushed. Her eyes were glazed. “I can’t believe I spun out,” she said.

  “Are you kidding? You were amazing.”

  She squeezed the steering wheel while lightning rippled across the slowly retreating wall of thunderheads, the spider-egg mammatus clouds glowing silver and gold in the afternoon sun, the storm gradually tapering off into calmness.

  “Now what?” he asked, his heart slowly regaining its regular rhythm.

  “Now we stop at some grease palace and analyze the data.” She looked at him and smiled in all her awkward beauty.

  He edged forward in his seat, thinking he might kiss her again, when all of a sudden a screaming emergency vehicle tore past them in the opposite direction. Without hesitation, Willa shifted gears, and they made a U-turn in the middle of the road.

  They dogged the flashing beacon down one lone country lane after another, until somewhere south of town, the emergency vehicle pulled over to the side of a poorly paved road and Charlie shot forward in his seat. Boone’s pickup truck was wrapped around a denuded oak, suction spots in the grass around the base of the tree where the tornado had left its devastating impact.

  They rocketed out of the car and jogged toward the scene, where two EMS personnel were already immobilizing Boone on a back board. He lay flat on his back with a dazed look in his eyes. The cowboy hat was gone, and his short black hair was laced with insulation dust. He appeared to be choking on the blood in his mouth. The male EMT performed a quick finger sweep, while the female EMT applied a rigid cervical collar.

  “Stabilize the head…”

  “No loose teeth… Let’s suction his throat…”

  Charlie’s shirt was soaked with sweat. The sky was full of quick-moving, low-level scud clouds. The tornado had left a trench of braided prairie grass in its wake, four-foot-long cordgrass leaves impossibly twisted around broken milkweed stems. Several nearby oak trees had been completely denuded, and the wheat fields held swirl patterns. The wind must’ve lifted the truck up like a toy and slammed it into the massive oak, which clutched the mangled chassis in its sagging limbs. The truck was riddled with bullet-shaped holes from flying debris, and all the windows were busted in.

  “Sinus bradycardia at fifty beats per minute…”

  “Let’s load and go.”

  The wind was making the grass gallop. Above the whistling sound, Charlie could hear something else—a cry, almost human. Clara, howling with indignation at having been abandoned, the tips of her teeth like glistening barnacles breaking through the pink and healthy gums.

  “Daddy?!”

  The fields were yanked into sharp focus as he recognized Sophie’s voice.

  He spun around, heart hammering dangerously in his chest. His daughter staggered out of a stand of trees, covered in mud and blood, the wheat around her braiding and streaming in the wind. He could taste the tang of his own panic as he tried to swallow. “Sophie?” He ran across the road and swept her up in his arms. He hugged her so tightly she squealed in his ear. “You okay?” He inhaled sharply. “Are you hurt?”

  “Is he dead?” she wailed, looking beyond her father’s shoulder, her eyes staring wide with helpless terror.

  He thought he was going crazy. His heart kept booming in his ears. What was she doing here? She was cut up pretty badly. He checked her scalp beneath her wet, wind-tossed hair. “Did you hit your head?”

  Her eyebrows rose with mild surprise. “Is he dead?” she asked. “Did he die?”

  “No.” His blood went cold. “He’s unconscious.”

  “Is he going to die, Daddy?”

  “Shh. Calm down, sweetie.” He stomped hard on his anger.

  “We were in the truck. It got so dark, it was raining really hard. We were getting closer to the tornado,” she said, “when a tree branch flew into us head-on and smashed the windshield. Boone tried to keep the truck upright, but then the tornado got us.” She burst into tears, and he held her in his arms, wanting to shield her forever from the wind, the bogeyman, all bad things. “I was wearing my seat belt,” she said with a shiver. “But Boone wasn’t wearing his. He got thrown from the truck, but I was wearing my seat belt, Daddy… so I was okay. I unhooked it and climbed down.”

  “Thank God.”

  She struggled to keep her footing. “Is he gonna be okay?”

  “Shh.”

  “Is he?” She sobbed against his shoulder.

  “Did you hit your head? How’s your head? Are you dizzy?” He checked her scalp with a lingering sense of unreality. “Over here!” he yelled at the paramedics, and the female EMT came right over.

  “Does it hurt anywhere?” she asked before calmly listening to Sophie’s heart with a stethoscope. “Can you breathe okay?”

  “Take her in,” Charlie told the EMT. “We’ll follow.”

  “Daddy?”

  “We’re right behind you, sweetie.”

  9

  CHARLIE FOLLOWED the EMTs into the emergency room, where Sophie thrashed around on the gurney, hair plastered to her face with sweat. “What’s going on?” she said. “Where’s Boone?”

  He caught her hand and held it, while half a dozen doctors and nurses swarmed around them, ordering CAT scans and X rays and blood tests. Then a nurse began to cut away her clothes.

  “Daddy?” she cried, overwrought with emotion and shock.

  “Quiet, sweetie.” He was sweating bullets now. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

  “What are they doing?”

  “Helping you.”

  He didn’t let go of her hand until one of the nurses took over. “I’ve got her now,” she said. “You can go wait outside.”

  Back in the corridor, Willa kept pressing on her wind-whipped hair as if she were trying to calm it down. “Charlie? She okay?”

  “I think so. I hope so. Christ, I’m shaking.”

  She rested her hand lightly on his arm. The waiting room smelled of dead flowers and was virtually identical to the one he’d grown to despise so many years ago—that robin’s-egg blue waiting room outside the ICU. There’d been no burn units back then, and he’d spent weeks recuperating in the ICU before being transferred to the pediatrics ward on the sixth floor. Waiting room. Even the name was grim. A place where time crawled, where every chair was unforgiving. Better to pace up and down the halls, dragging your IV caddy around behind you.

  “I’ll kill him,” Charlie said now, his pants and shirt stained with his daughter’s blood.

  Willa held his eye. “She’ll be all right.”

  “This can never happen again.”

  “Charlie,” she said, squeezing his hand, “she’s going to be just fine. She was wearing her seat belt. She’s conscious, coherent, moving around.”

  “I lost my sister. My mother. Maddie. No way am I losing my daughter to that little prick.” He stared straight ahead in deep shock. After a few minutes, he got up and talked to the receptionist, a steely-eyed brunet who told him that a doctor would be with him momentarily.

  Momentarily. He knew what that meant.

  He sat back down on the beaten green couch and stared at the dirty white walls and glazed tiles in earth tones. Willa waited with him in silence while the steady drip of the TV set provided a constant background hum, like rain on the roof. His mouth was bone-dry. He formulated a plan at the water cooler. He would ground her for a month, send her off to private school, lock her in a castle tower and throw away the key. He tried to cool his overheated imagination as he sat back down and pushed the hair off his forehead. Waiting room.

  How many operations had he had altogether? Twenty? Twenty-five? As a young burn patient, he used to curse the nurses who forced him to flex his aching limbs. He cursed the dressings, the antibiotic cream, the daily wound cleansing. Twice a day, one big-boned nurse in particular—a beefy Swede, tough as a drill sergeant—made him do his ROM exercises in a whirlpool that reeked of disinfectant. Not moving his limbs meant fibrosis of the joints. Nurse Natalie, with eyes the color o
f unripe pears, had made his short life miserable. She’d pushed him harder than he’d ever been pushed before, but now, every day, he silently thanked her.

  “Chief Grover?”

  A movement at the top of his vision made him look up. A frowning doctor, very young, crossed the room toward them. His ID tag said “Russ Pressler, M.D.”

  Charlie got to his feet. “How is she?”

  Pressler had small, deep-seated eyes and a buzzed haircut. “You were lucky.” He kept his voice professionally detached. “No broken bones, no concussion. We treated her for minor injuries and gave her a tetanus shot. She’ll be feeling it tomorrow. I’d recommend bed rest and plenty of Tylenol.”

  “What about those cuts on her face and arms?”

  “Tempered glass is designed to shatter into little cubes upon impact. Those marks on her skin are linear, right-angled and very superficial.”

  “So she’ll be okay?”

  He nodded curtly. “They’ll heal. We’re waiting on the CAT scan, but she’ll be released once that checks out. She’s with the other patient now. He’s in a coma but stabilized. He’s vented and we’re monitoring his life signs.”

  Charlie darkened. “Where are they?”

  The doctor walked him toward the ICU, then pointed at the daffodil-yellow curtain in the corner.

  Boone Pritchett lay motionless on his motorized bed, an endotracheal tube taped to his mouth. His eyes were slightly open but unseeing. His ventilator worked noisily up and down, adding a sibilant hiss to the air.

  Sophie stood next to the bed, dressed in orderly scrubs. Her hair was combed off her face, and she clutched a plastic bag full of her own bloody clothes. “It was leaking cold air through the floorboards,” she said without looking up. “My feet were freezing from the blasts of cold air.”

  Charlie stood for a moment, quietly observing her baby-smooth complexion and expressionless face.

  “It happened so fast.” She wiped away a tear. “It got dark, and then the rain came. I could feel the whole truck lifting up into the air. I kept my eyes closed…”

  “He placed you at great risk,” Charlie told her. “I’ll never forgive him for that.”

  She turned around, so frail-looking he wanted to whisk her away from here and never let her out of his sight. “He’s not as bad as you think,” she said.

  “Sophie… this guy embodies every shade of shadiness.”

  He could detect the panic in her eyes. “He’s smarter than most people give him credit for.… Just because his dad’s a Neanderthal…”

  “Sweetie, you can’t see him anymore.”

  Her eyes brimmed with angry tears. “That is so bigoted,” she cried. “How can you say such a bigoted thing?”

  “Your mother wouldn’t want it. I don’t want it.”

  She crossed her arms and rocked back and forth, biting back the tears.

  “This can never happen again.”

  “Why are you doing this to me?” she said in a high, reedy voice, failing to comprehend the significance of what had just happened, how close she’d come to dying.

  “You lied to me,” he said. “You said you were going back to class.”

  “So?”

  Shock waves. Still in shock. Count to ten and take a deep breath. “Excuse me?”

  “Revelation, Dad. I’m not perfect.”

  He resisted the urge to overreact. “We shouldn’t be talking about this right now. We’ll talk about it later.”

  Her head sank lower. “You don’t have any right to tell me who I can or can’t see,” she said, fingering the locket at her throat, those tiny silver links. “It’s a free country.”

  “Do you understand what I’m saying at all?”

  “You’re the one who doesn’t understand!”

  His pager beeped, and he snapped it off his belt. It was Mike. “Honey,” he said to her, “I’ve gotta take this.”

  “Don’t touch me!” She jerked away. “Go make your stupid phone call.”

  He activated his cell phone. “What is it, Mike?”

  “There’s been a double homicide, Chief. Last night in Texas. A middle-aged couple, unusual circumstances. A tornado touched down about three hundred yards from the house.”

  He felt the news like a feather tickling the back of his neck. “How soon can you get here?” he said.

  10

  IT WAS dark by the time they arrived at the crime scene, red and blue beacons from the local radio cars greeting them with an eerie, strobing silence. Power was out all over Dogtooth, Texas, due to downed electrical lines, and the house was veiled in a gray haze. Charlie could feel his pulse ticking in his throat as he and Mike climbed the porch steps together, their shadows jumping away from their flashlight beams.

  The interior of the house was pitch-black. Charlie’s body gave an involuntary twitch as he shone his light over the once-bright wallpaper in the front hall, with its muddy boots and coat hooks strung with limp rain ponchos. He got a whiff of the ’70s in the daisy decals covering the cellar door and the purple-painted handrail leading up to the second floor, a string of lights from last Christmas wrapped around the banister, all that fun and color ending in blackness at the top of the stairs. He noticed that a couple of balusters were missing, like the grotesque gaps in a jack-o’-lantern’s smile. When the wind slapped the screen door shut behind them, they both jumped.

  “Holy shit.” Mike looked at him and grinned foolishly.

  A gruff voice sounded in the dark. “Don’t touch anything.” It was coming from the open doorway at the end of the front hall. They walked through a narrow vestibule and turned a corner into a rather large living room, where none of the furniture matched. The woodwork was all mahogany and oak with fluted pilasters, and the air smelled stale and slightly humid, and of something vaguely familiar. Something that stood Charlie’s hair on end.

  “You Grover?” Sheriff Chester McNeese was on the delicate side, a little man with something big working around inside of him. His pale hair was shaved close to his scalp, and he had a vividly pockmarked face and a nasty habit of sucking on his front teeth.

  “Sheriff.” Shaking hands in the dark felt oddly intimate. “This is Detective Rosengard.”

  “How do.” McNeese shook Mike’s hand. “Rosengard, is that Jewish?”

  “Yeah,” Mike said, going through his little ritual. “I’m the only Jew in Oklahoma.”

  “Well, hey. I ain’t no Bible-slappin’ man myself. I have great respect for all religions.”

  Mike smiled thinly. “Amen to that, brother.”

  “Behind you,” McNeese said, and they swung around.

  Charlie fell silent as he stared at the grisly scene. Two lifeless bodies were propped side by side on a worn rawhide sofa, their mouths ajar, their eyes suspicious. The man wore flannel pajamas and a George Hamilton tan that made his lips look almost white. The woman had her legs curled underneath her wide hips, so that she tilted slightly toward the man. She wore green stretch pants and little white shoes, and both of them appeared to be in their mid-fifties. He had a half-smoked stogie in one hand, and she looked like a freeze-dried apricot. Some of the impalement injuries were partial-body thickness; others were full-body thickness, with both an entry and an exit wound. Miscellaneous pieces of wood stuck out of them at odd angles, to freakish effect.

  Charlie winced, his scars prickling with sympathy pain.

  “I figure it’s your guy, right?” McNeese said, the tremolo in his voice betraying the fear he failed to mask. He kept one hand on his holstered gun. “The one in all the papers?”

  Charlie nodded grimly. It hit him in the solar plexus. The killer wasn’t trying to disguise the murders anymore. The victims were just sitting there on the sofa. He was taunting them openly now.

  “Twister touched down three hundred yards north of here,” McNeese told them. “The damage path was seven miles long. It hit a trailer park. That’s where we’ve been focusing most of our attention since last night. Three dead, countless injured. B
roken bones, head injuries. People walking around just wailing, their clothes torn to shreds. We didn’t find these two until late this afternoon, when a concerned neighbor came calling.” He paused to scratch his head, and you could hear the sound of fingernails on dry scalp. “If this ain’t the craziest damn thing…”

  “Not a lot of blood spatter in the living room,” Charlie said. “No disarray or overturned furniture.”

  Mike glanced at him in silent acknowledgment.

  “Nobody thought to look here,” McNeese went on. “The house wasn’t hit. We were up all night fighting fires and digging out survivors. My cousin’s dead. I’m still in shock about it.”

  Charlie tracked a trail of blood droplets and sliding marks across the Oriental carpet into the kitchen, where all the refrigerator magnets and recipe cards had slid off the door and landed in a puddle of blood. The teakettle was cool to the touch. A mug of tea, now at room temperature, sat on the oak table. The telephone notepad had doodles all over it. On the floor, walls and ceiling was an inordinate amount of blood spatter.

  And then something different. A small parade of kitchen appliances was lined up on the pink Formica countertop—a food processor, blender, electric can opener, a coffeemaker and an electric mixer. Each appliance was plugged into a wall outlet, and inside the blender, food processor and electric mixing bowl were dozens of pieces of silverware—forks, knives, spoons.

  Charlie took a puzzled breath, then lowered his flashlight beam. The blood on the floor had been cleaned up in places—he detected wipe marks on the linoleum. He found the mop standing upright in a metal bucket in the pantry. If they sprayed the floor with luminol, he predicted, a circular pattern of blood would emerge on the linoleum, left there by the bottom of the bucket.

  Back in the living room, three sheriff’s deputies were milling around in the dark, processing the scene by flashlight. The mood was sober. Charlie swept his light over the bloodstained rawhide sofa. “What’s the deal with the silverware?” he asked McNeese.