I was concentrating on watching my feet as I transferred from the driveway to the stepping-stones, but something butted on the edge of my awareness. The light had been behind me as I left the house, but now that I was returning, I could see a few things I hadn’t noticed before; and one of the things I could make out was a bush planted where no bush had been the day before.
I paused on the seventh stepping-stone from the front porch. I tilted my head and stared, trying to puzzle out what I was seeing. A large dark heap, right in front of the foundation plantings… my slippers would get thoroughly soaked if I left the stepping-stones to investigate. I shifted my feet, peering with no better luck at the vague and immobile shape, and realized that my slippers were doomed.
I stepped gingerly onto the soggy grass, clutching the paper and umbrella.
Seconds later I’d dropped both.
The dark shape on my lawn was Shelby Youngblood. He was unconscious, lying on his side, wearing a dark raincoat with a hood. He was immobile because someone had hit him on the back of his head. When I pulled the hood away from his face, the hood was filled with blood.
I foolishly wasted seconds trying to arrange my umbrella to shelter the wound. Finally realizing I was acting like a woman with no sense, I tore into the house and hit 911 on the phone in the study. Once I’d explained to the calm voice on the other end what my problem was and where I was, I hung up and punched in Angel’s number. For some reason, I feared she was hurt too. But she answered, in the groggy normal voice of someone wakened at four forty-five by the telephone ringing.
“Come outside, now,” I gabbled. “Shelby’s hurt, but I’ve already called the ambulance.” My eardrum echoed with the sound of her receiver crashing down. I slammed down my own telephone and ran back outside, my heart and lungs in a race to see which could work fastest. But I had pulled open the right-hand drawer on Martin’s desk as I dialed Angel, and this time there was a flashlight in my hand.
I crouched by Shelby in the rain, which of course picked this moment to come down in torrents. Though anyone lit up by a flashlight in the dark is not going to look great, it seemed to me that Shelby was an especially bad color. I held the umbrella over him, wondering if there was anything I could do.
Well, I should see if he was still alive.
I slid my hand inside his raincoat, found that Shelby didn’t have a shirt on, and lay my hand on his chest. It was moving in and out, how deeply I couldn’t gauge; but Shelby was breathing, and at the moment that was all I cared about.
I’d been concentrating on him so hard that I didn’t hear Angel coming. Suddenly she was crouching on the other side of her husband. She was barefoot and in a nightgown, with a shirt of Shelby’s pulled over her. Her hair hung in a loose tangle around her narrow face.
“Is he breathing?” Her voice was sharp.
“Yes.”
“You called 911?”
“Yes.”
“How long ago?”
“Five minutes,” I guessed. “They’re on this side of town, they’ll be here any minute.”
Sure enough, I saw the blinking red lights far down the road toward town. I tried to pray, but the rain was plastering my hair to my skull and dripping down my neck, and Shelby seemed so close to leaving us that all I could do was urge the ambulance forward mentally, hoping that the best team Lawrenceton had to offer was on duty this cool spring night.
I had a flash of sense as the young man and woman were loading Shelby into the back of the ambulance. I dashed into the house, opened the coat closet, and yanked out Martin’s lined raincoat. Pounding down the porch steps, I yelled to Angel just as she was about to climb in the ambulance. I could see the flash of annoyance on her face, but she realized she needed more body coverage than she had, and she turned her back to me and held her arms a little out and down, and I slid the coat over her wet arms and nightgown as quickly as I could.
With a scream of the siren the ambulance was off, and I could finally go inside. Everything I had on was soaked through, and though the morning was not really cold, I was chilled to the bone. I stripped right inside the front door so I wouldn’t get more water on my wooden floors than I absolutely had to-I could see the splotches left from my previous entrances and exits- and I sprinted upstairs to the shower to let the hot water wash the dirt and rain off. I dressed in record time, turning on the heat lamp in the bathroom to start my hair drying, and I plugged in my usual handheld dryer too; but with a mass of thick hair like mine, it took too long, and I drove to the hospital with damp hair that was curling and waving around my face like streamers of confetti.
I’d taken the time to use my emergency key to the Youngbloods’ apartment to grab some clothes for Angel.
It felt very strange to be poking through her things, dropping the basic garments into a plastic Wal-Mart bag. I included shoes, a toothbrush, and a hairbrush at the last second.
Angel was sitting in the emergency waiting room at the little Lawrenceton Hospital, her hands folded and her face blank. She didn’t recognize me for a moment.
“What have they told you?” I asked.
“Ahhh… he’s got a concussion, a bad one. He has to stay here for a few days.” Her voice was expressionless, numb.
“He’s going to be all right?”
“We’ll see when he wakes up.”
“Listen, then, Angel… are you hearing me?”
“Yes. I hear you.” She was a pathetic sight. She was as wet as I had been, and she had pulled on Martin’s raincoat over her wet clothes, so she was warm enough for the moment; but the damp was sealed inside the coat. Her blond hair hung in rattails down her back, and her feet were bare and streaked with dirt and bits of grass. The passivity of her strong body was so upsetting I had to retreat into briskness.
“I brought some clothes and shoes, and your toothbrush, and your hairbrush. Is Shelby in a room yet?”
“No, he’s still in emergency. They brought in a portable X-ray machine, and since I’m pregnant I had to leave. They didn’t even want me to put on the heavy apron, they wanted me out.”
“Well. We’re going to find out what room they’re going to put him in, and you’re going to go in there and take a shower, and by then the cafeteria here will be open, and we’re going to go in there and eat.”
Angel blinked. She seemed a little more aware.
“That sounds okay,” she said hesitantly. “But no one will be with him.”
“You don’t need to watch him, they’re doing it for you. He’s going to be okay,” I said soothingly. “Now, I’m going to find the admissions person, and see about getting all this started.”
The “admissions person” was glad to see me, since she hadn’t been able to get much out of Angel besides Shelby’s name and his birthday. I gave the clerk Shelby’s insurance program group number, the same as Martin’s since they were both covered by Pan-Am Agra’s group plan. I gave the clerk an address, next of kin, everything but Social Security number, and I promised her Angel would remember that after breakfast. By dint of being cheerful and persistent, I was able to get Shelby’s future room number, and took Angel there, resisting the impulse to ask to see Shelby myself.
After fifteen minutes with Shelby’s admissions hygiene kit, a hot shower, and clean clothes, Angel was a new woman, and after we talked our way into the employee cafeteria and she downed a plate of grits and sausage and toast, she was approaching normality.
It was while we were sitting there, Angel with another glass of orange juice and me with my third cup of coffee, that the deputy found us.
He was a young man I didn’t know, dressed in a crisp uniform. He seemed concerned and wary, all at the same time. He introduced himself as Jimmy Henske.
“Do you have a relative on the town force?” I asked.
“Yes, ma’am, my uncle Faron. You know Uncle Faron?”
“Yes, I do.” He’d questioned Angel the day before, Arthur had told me. Faron was a good ole boy, with a heavy Southern drawl and an unreconstructed attitude about women on the force and black people having power and money. But Faron was also a courteous and anxious man who had no idea he was biased and would swear on a stack of family Bibles that he was fair to one and all.
Jimmy had the family coloring and build. The Henskes tended to be tall, thin, and reddish, with high-bridged
