Miss Dimple Rallies to the Cause (24 page)

But just then the “log” groaned.

When she could think again, Jo wished her sister would stop that screaming, but it wasn’t Louise making all the noise, it was both of them, with Jo doing more than her share. Lou had Jo’s arm in a death grip and was attempting to drag her back the way they had come. “Forget the car!” she said. “We’re getting out of here.”

Stumbling along behind, Jo finally managed to wrench free. “Wait, Louise! We can’t. There’s somebody back there and they’re obviously hurt. We can’t just run off and leave them.”

The beam of the flashlight made erratic circles in the night as her sister attempted to plow her way through a forest of brambles and vines. “We’ll send help. Come on, Jo! We don’t know who that is back there.”

Still, Jo held back. Whoever it was didn’t seem to be in a position to harm them, and she stubbornly refused to go on until they at least found out how badly the person was injured. The year before both sisters had enrolled in a Red Cross first aid class, and she was aware of the danger if someone went into shock. The night air was cold, and the ground even colder. “What if that’s Miss Dimple lying back there, or Virginia?” she said.

Her sister hesitated. “Oh. I guess you’re right,” she said, and turned around abruptly. “Can you remember where we were?”

Jo couldn’t, but feeling their way cautiously and shining the light from side to side in front of them, they made their way back to the now-silent form on the ground.

“Lou, it’s a woman!” Jo said, kneeling beside her. The woman lay on her side with an arm over her face, and Lou focused the light on the back of her head. “Is she breathing? Oh, dear Lord, she’s not dead, is she?”

Jo felt for a pulse in the darkness and was relieved to find one. “What happened? Can you talk?” she asked, gently turning the woman’s face to the light.

“Why, Jo that looks like … it
is
! It’s
Millie McGregor!
” Panting for breath, Lou squatted beside her sister and brushed matted hair from the woman’s eyes. “Millie, who did this to you? We’re bringing help, honey. It’s going to be all right.”

But Millie’s eyes remained closed, her face, still and pale, and she was bleeding from a gash in her forehead. Jo leaned closer and found her breathing shallow. “We’ve got to get help, but we can’t move her, Lou. She might have broken bones or something. Let’s cover her with the afghan—at least she’ll be warmer, and we’ll flag down somebody to help.”

“You go,” Lou said. “You can move faster than I can. I’ll stay here with Millie.”

“I don’t like leaving you here alone. What if—”

“Will you please go on? We don’t have time to argue. I’ll be fine—now hurry!”

Leaving her sister with the light, Jo picked her way to the car for the afghan and hurried back, waiting as Lou tucked it around Millie. “Go to the first house showing a light,” Lou said—“and be careful!”

Now that her eyes were becoming accustomed to the darkness, Jo was able to find her way to the street without a major incident, although it seemed every limb snagged her hair and every briar, her legs, but she dared not rush. If she became injured and couldn’t walk, what would happen to Lou and Millie?
And what if the person they saw running away came back to finish the job?

Josephine Carr couldn’t afford to think of that. She paused to decide which direction to turn and broke into a run. By the end of the first block, which seemed deserted, she had a stitch in her side and was almost out of breath. Surely she wasn’t this out of shape! Somewhere in the distance a dog barked, and Jo hoped it was confined by a fence. The last thing she needed was an angry dog nipping at her heels.

The few houses in the second block were in darkness, and knowing it would take several minutes to bring someone to the door, Jo passed them by. Spying a yellow square of light up ahead, she ran on.

After what seemed like forever and a day, Fred Rankin came to the door with a glass of milk in one hand and a poker in the other. His wife, Mabel, her hair rolled in rags, peeked out from behind him. The poker, Jo realized, was a would-be weapon—just in case.

“Jo? Is that you?” Mabel, whose daughter Grace had gone all through school with Fain, recognized her almost immediately. “What on earth’s the matter? Are you all right?”

Jo Carr didn’t waste any words explaining the situation.

*   *   *

Fred Rankin obligingly abandoned his bedtime milk to deliver Jo to the vacant lot where she had left her sister and Millie. Naturally, Mabel insisted on going along as well. She was afraid to stay by herself, she said, with a criminal on the loose in the neighborhood. Why, for all she knew, he might be watching them this very minute. A couple of phone calls from the Rankins soon brought a procession of rescuers rushing to the scene. Doc Morrison and Chief Tinsley arrived at the same time, followed soon afterward by Harvey Thompson, who had outraced his competitor in his ambulance/hearse.

“Are you sure you left them back here?” Fred asked as, using his flashlight, they shoved aside clutching brambles and waded through things they couldn’t see that rustled and crunched underfoot in the darkness.

“What if whoever did this to that poor woman is still here somewhere?” Mabel asked, clinging to her husband’s coattails.

Then that would be all the more reason to hurry, Jo thought, but considered it better not to say it aloud. Instead, she called out, hoping she was leading them in the right direction. “Lou! Louise! Where are you? Answer me!”
What if that person really had come back?
Jo ducked under a limb and pushed forward.

“I don’t hear a thing,” Mabel said. “And what’s this up ahead? It looks like—”

“A car,” Fred said, and threw out an arm to stop them.

Lou’s car!
“Lou, Lou! We’re coming!” Jo shouted, and began running in the direction she hoped was right.

In answer, a sallow shaft of light wavered in the distance. “Here! Over here!” her sister called out. “Hurry! We have to get her out of here. She needs a doctor,” Lou added.

“Doc Morrison’s on the way.” Jo knelt beside her sister and touched Millie’s wrist. At least she still had a pulse, but for how long?

“I’ll go back out to the street and flag him down,” Fred volunteered, but that wasn’t going to be necessary, they learned, as the sweep of headlights from an approaching car illuminated the darkness behind them.

“How long ago did you find her?” the doctor asked as they moved aside to make room for him.

Jo exchanged looks with her sister. How long
had
it been? Thirty minutes? An hour? It seemed like they had been here forever.

Lou frowned. “Does anybody know what time it is?”

Doc Morrison pulled out his pocket watch and held it in the light. “A quarter after eleven.”

“Then we’ve been here about an hour and thirty-five minutes—or at least that’s when we saw somebody running away. Ed was asleep and snoring by nine-thirty when I left home, and it took about ten minutes after that for Jo and me to get here.”

Stooping beside Millie, the doctor gently felt for broken bones. “And when you found her—was she conscious?”

Jo shook her head. “We thought she was a log or something—or we did at first. Lou and I—well, we kind of stumbled over her. We were trying to find branches to put under the tires so we could get unstuck, you see.”

“Tell him about the man who was running away,” Lou urged.

And so Jo did. But, she added, she wasn’t really sure it was a man. “That was when we decided it was time to get out of here … but then we couldn’t.”

“And what in the h— world were you two ladies doing out here at that time of night?” The voice came from behind them, and everyone turned to see Chief Tinsley hacking his way through the underbrush to reach them.

Again, Jo looked to her sister. What good would it do to bring Miss Dimple and Virginia into this when there was probably a perfectly good reason they’d been frequenting the area? She had let Lou’s wild imagination get her into trouble for the last time! Well,
no more,
but she would try her best to worm her way out of this one.

“Well … we only meant to turn around … and then I saw what I thought was a lycopodium fern back in here. They’re supposed to be kind of rare, you know, and I thought no one would care if I took a little tiny piece of it.” Jo couldn’t see her sister’s face in the darkness, but she was sure she was rolling her eyes. “I’ve nursed the one on my porch along for several years now, but I didn’t even know what it was until Beatrice Caskey gave that talk at garden clu—”

From what she could see of the look on Bobby Tinsley’s face, Jo Carr got the definite impression he thought she had the intelligence of a flea. Well, so be it.

“Fred tells me you think you saw a person running away just before you found Mrs. McGregor,” he said. “Can either of you give me any kind of description?”

“It looked like a man, but it was too dark, and he was too far away to be sure,” Lou told him.

“Well, whoever it was, he’s long gone now,” Fred Rankin muttered.

Somebody had obviously managed to get word to Jordan McGregor, who had stayed late to discuss the upcoming game with Eatonton after a meeting of the Elderberry School Board, and he arrived as Harvey Thompson and associates were transporting his wife to the ambulance.

“I’m here now, honey, it’s going to be all right,” he whispered repeatedly, hovering over the still figure on the stretcher, but in the transparent yellow beam of the vehicle’s headlights, the man’s distraught face belied his words.

Jo Carr couldn’t even bring herself to feel sorry for her sister, who had to explain to her husband the next day why his car was stuck in the mud in a vacant lot on the other side of town.

Later, in bed, she said a prayer for Millie McGregor and for her husband, who would get no sleep that night or probably for the next few, either. And after all the frenzy of the evening’s excitement, she finally allowed herself to say aloud the thought that had plagued her all night.

What was Millie McGregor doing in that vacant lot at that time of night?

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-TWO

Oh, God! What had she done? And how many times had she promised? If she lived through this, they would have to relocate again, and they were running out of places. He would have to come up with some kind of story to try to satisfy the police, but this time it might be too late.

So why did he still love her?

*   *   *

“I heard your mother was the one who found her,” Geneva said to Charlie during their noon dinner at Phoebe’s the following Monday. “How lucky that she and your aunt happened to come along.”

“They must’ve been terrified,” Lily said. “What a horrible place to get stuck in the mud!” She gave a slight shudder. “Pass the fried apples, please, Annie.”

“Well, for Millie’s sake, I’m glad they did,” Charlie told them, although she had her doubts about her mother’s story of “using the vacant lot to turn around.” Her mother had pretended innocence when she challenged her tale about helping Aunt Lou identify people in old family photographs. “Your aunt was giving me a ride home, Charlie. Surely you didn’t expect me to walk home alone at that hour.”

Charlie didn’t know why not as she’d certainly never thought twice about doing it before. She’d asked why they happened to be driving blocks out of the way, but her mother just pretended not to hear her.

“Poor Jordan McGregor,” Miss Dimple said with a nod in Sebastian’s direction. “I don’t suppose he was at school this morning?”

“As a matter of fact, he was,” Sebastian answered. “He said it was better than doing nothing at the hospital.”

“Any change in Millie’s condition?” Phoebe asked him, and Sebastian shook his head. “I’m afraid it doesn’t look good,” he told her. “It appears she ran into a tree limb in the dark, and her head struck a rock when she fell.”

“I just wonder what in the world she was doing out there,” Lily said.

“They found her car a couple of blocks away,” Annie told her, “so it looks like she must’ve run out of gas.”

Velma Anderson spoke up. “That’s easy to do on the teaspoon we’re allowed, but why not go to someone’s house for help? I’m sure anyone would’ve been glad to give her a ride.”

“It doesn’t seem as if she had that chance,” Phoebe said. “The poor woman probably ran in that vacant lot to try and get away from somebody.”

“Well, I hope they hurry and find who’s responsible. I don’t even like to think of somebody like that on the loose here in Elderberry.” Lily sighed as she ladled jam on her biscuit. “What in the world is happening in our little town?”

“Meanness, that’s what!” Odessa reached from behind her to refill the bread basket. “All kinds of meanness goes on in the dark o’ night. Things we won’t never know about.”

“I, for one, don’t want to know about them,” Velma said, “but I do hope they’ll get to the bottom of this soon. I spoke to Jordan McGregor this morning in the hall, and I believe he’s aged ten years overnight.”

“Aunt Lou said the police were all over the place yesterday when they went to get the car out of the mud,” Charlie said. “She thinks they might’ve found the rock where Millie hit her head.”

Annie fished the lemon wedge from the bottom of her glass of tea and sucked out the remaining juice. “How did they know that was the rock?” she asked, trying to ignore Miss Dimple’s disapproving glance. “One rock looks pretty much like another to me.”

“I guess it must’ve had blood on it,” Charlie said, and then regretted saying it as Phoebe immediately excused herself from the table and left the room.

“Don’t you want any of this bread puddin’? You didn’t eat enough to keep a bird alive.” Odessa started after her, but Miss Dimple shook her head. “Let’s leave her be for now,” she said, speaking softly. “I’ll look in on her before I go back to school.”

*   *   *

By the time school was out that afternoon the news had gotten around that Buddy Oglesby had been arrested and his aunt Emmaline had made a big scene at the police department protesting his innocence. Lily Moss said she’d heard Emmaline even threw a coffee mug at Bobby Tinsley, but Miss Dimple took most of the things Lily said with a grain of salt—well, actually, a lot more than a grain.