Taking the Fall (13 page)

“Should we call the police?”

“Not yet,” I insisted. “Let’s give her some time.” And us some time to investigate.

“Right. She might incriminate herself even more.” Suddenly Blythe gripped my arm hard. “Bren! What if she kills someone? What if she’s going in there because whoever lives there knows something, and she’s going to shut them up for good?”

“Nobody’s home. The carport’s empty. That little garage is too small to hold a car. They probably just use it as a shed.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll just take a peek and see what she’s up to.” I got up and darted over to the house Stacey had broken into, then flattened myself against the wall and inched sideways toward the open window. I took care not to bump the screen Stacey had leaned against the side of the house. My heart beat double-time as I peeked inside. Stacey was less than six feet away, with her back to me. The room was set up as an office. I ducked back out of view and gave Blythe a thumbs-up.
 

Blythe pointed frantically to her phone screen. She mouthed something.

“Crazy Eric?” I mouthed back. I was pretty sure that’s what she was saying. “Here?”

She shook her head and mouthed again. “Map app says it’s Crazy Eric’s house!”

Crazy Eric’s House! Stacey Goode was breaking into the home of our favorite police officer. Why on earth would she do that?

I turned back to the window—right as Stacey turned around. Our eyes met. It was too late to duck down. She’d seen me. My phone was already in my hand. I tapped on my camera app and snapped a picture of Stacey standing there in Doyle’s office. What else was I going to do? A woman who might very well be a murderer had caught me catching her. I needed some ammunition. Or possibly some future proof of who had a motive to cause my demise.

Stacey’s mouth—at first open merely in surprise—twisted into a vengeful snarl. She leaped toward the open window, and I flew back, sending my phone whirling over a bed of rose bushes.

“Run!” I screamed at Blythe.

“Not without you!” she screamed back as she scrambled to her feet.

I needed to get my phone, but Stacey was tumbling out the window after me. Blythe and I could take her, but what if she was packing? Besides, I didn’t really want to have to explain to Riggins—or Crazy Eric—what I was doing on his property if we caused a commotion. Doyle would find a way to nail us for this for sure. I ran to Blythe, and she took off at full speed. I looked over my shoulder and saw no one. Where had Stacey gone? Back into the house? Had she skulked off somewhere to call the police on us? Surely she wouldn’t dare, not with the knowledge that I had her picture on my phone. My phone! Had Stacey seen me drop it? Was that where she was right now, getting my phone?

I darted back to the house, scanning the bushes for Stacey as I drew near. I didn’t see any signs of her. I got down on my hands and knees in front of the rose bushes and immediately regretted my choice of jogging shorts. Something jabbed into my shin like a little dagger. It was all I could do not to scream. I stood and pulled a dead rose thorn out of my flesh, and blood streamed down my leg. Lovely. Just lovely. I stayed on my feet and bent my head cautiously to look under the bushes. Lots of thorns and rose petals. No phone.

I was debating the merits of hunting down Stacey and throttling her until she handed over my property, when a gruff male voice said, “Can I help you?”

I just about jumped out of my shorts. An elderly gentleman stood before me, holding a dirt-caked shovel. A friendly neighbor? I tried to smile.

“Oh,” I said. “You scared me.”

“You know what scares me? What scares me is some strange lady crawling around in the bushes, and right next to an open window. What’s that screen doing there, anyways?”

“Uh … Oh, that
is
strange. The window sure is open. Now, that’s not very safe. But I was just looking for my phone. Can’t find it, though. Guess I’ll be going.”

“That phone?” The man pointed at a hydrangea bush beyond the rose bushes. There, nestled in its branches, was my phone.

“Oh, thanks so much. I was just, running,”—he looked at me like,
Yeah, I’ll bet you were running, Missy. Running from the law
—“and it flew right out of my hand.”

He grunted and leaned on his shovel. I grabbed my phone and turned around to say good-bye, and hopefully get out of there before he decided to call the police, but something rammed into the back of my head. I was falling. It was so dark.

20

I felt cool. No, cold. I shivered, and an awful shudder of pain went through me. It seemed to originate in my head. Oh, no. I was going to barf. I rolled over and threw up. On the ground. What was I doing on the ground? And why did I feel like somebody just beat the stuffing out of me?

A new wave of pain, followed by its lovely twin, nausea, seized me, and I reached out, trying to grip the ground. To get hold of anything solid. Wood. That’s what I felt under my clammy palms. Finished wood. A deck. It hurt to open my eyes much more than a slit, but I forced myself to survey my surroundings. I recognized those rhododendrons flowering above me. And the wooden benches Blythe and I had sat on. Why was I not surprised that I’d eventually ended up lying in this weird little spot, helpless and in pain?

“Brenna!” Riggins cried. Then he called over his shoulder, “Over here! She’s here! He hurried over to me as he barked a bunch of police-ese into his radio.

I opened my mouth to warn him about the throw-up, but it was too late. He’d already knelt in it. Great. The pain and nausea already made me wish I’d never been born. Now I found myself wishing a person actually could die of embarrassment.

Riggins must’ve felt the puddle, because he looked down at his pants, then shifted to a different spot. But he didn’t look disgusted. I expected a curse word or two. Instead he said gently, “Are you hurt?”

“Somebody hit me.” My words sounded slow and slurred to my own ears. Something was definitely wrong with me.

“Who hit you?”

I tried to focus, to form clear words. I didn’t understand what had happened. But the answer to that question was important; I knew that. “I don’t know. Didn’t see.”

“They hit you from behind?”

“I think so.”

“Brenna!” This time it was Blythe.

Why did she smell like a pine tree? She smelled the puke and crinkled her nose, then knelt down on the safe side of me. Riggins was talking into his radio again. About the victim. And an ambulance. Me. He must be talking about me.

“No ambulance!” I said.

“Brenna, if you’re hurt—” Blythe attempted.

“No ambulance. I refuse treatment.” Visions of endless medical bills danced in my already throbbing head.

Riggins frowned at me. “You refuse treatment?”

“That’s right. Blythe, am I bleeding?” I lifted my head so she could look.

She gingerly parted my hair with her fingers. “No. But Brenna, it’s not that simple. Someone assaulted you. You’re evidence. We have to have you examined in order to report it, right Officer?”

“Right,” Riggins said firmly.

My own sister was conspiring against me with the cops. What next? And what was up with her hair? It looked positively mangled.

Riggins lowered his voice. “It’ll help your case. You could be in a lot of trouble.”

“Trouble?” I said.

“We got a call about you breaking into a house. Officer Doyle’s house, to be exact.”

“I didn’t—”

Riggins held a hand up in a gesture for me to stop. “Brenna Battle, you have the right to remain—”

“Are you serious?” I looked into those sad brown eyes. He was serious. I shut my eyes and groaned as Riggins read me my rights.

“Don’t worry, Bren.” Blythe smoothed the hair back from my forehead. “We’ll get this straightened out.”

I insisted we couldn’t afford to take an ambulance ride, on top of the inevitable two-thousand-dollar CT scan, and Riggins took pity on us and agreed to help Blythe stuff me in the back of his cruiser for the ride to the closest ER, twenty minutes away. Blythe was reluctant to leave me in the police car alone, but I assured her I needed her to follow behind so she could drive me home as soon as they released me. If they released me. Dear God, I’d never felt so under arrest, sitting in the back of that police car with the sound of my rights being read still ringing in my ears. Blythe must’ve realized that, but she probably couldn’t bear to remind my concussion-addled self that I would not be free to go once the doctors were done with me.

Was I going to have to go down to the station to “get booked?” wasn’t that what they called it?
I can’t go to jail!
I wanted to scream. I felt sick again. Riggins looked at me in his rearview mirror.

“Need some air?” he said. I didn’t answer. He lowered my window anyway.

I’d been X-rayed and scanned to the hilt, and I was lying on a gurney in a room in the ER, waiting for the results. Blythe had been by my side the whole time. Riggins had left to go do some more investigating. Lucky for me, the Bonney Bay Police Department was short-handed.

Once I’d asked Blythe what was up with the pine-needle hair-pins, she’d whispered a reminder to me that she’d been climbing a tree, and then it had all come back to me. Well, all except the important part—who had knocked me unconscious.

Blythe pulled a stool up to the gurney and squeezed my hand.

“We have to figure out who did this to me,” I said. “Someone dangerous is out there.” And they were probably after Blythe, too. I told Blythe the last thing I remembered, the neighbor with the shovel confronting me.

“I think Doyle is trying to convince everyone that you were hit by someone who saw you breaking in and confronted you—or that you even confronted them and they came out on top.”

I sniffed at that. Me, not come out on top in a face-to-face confrontation? Unlikely.

“He’s probably convinced they just haven’t come forward yet, that they’re scared that you were hurt so badly,” Blythe said. “But Riggins texted me. He said they’ve got a neighbor who said he talked to you down at the station in Bonney Bay,” Blythe said. “That must be the guy. But just because he’s the last person you remember, doesn’t mean he’s the one who did it, or that he saw who did it. You could’ve left the yard before you got hit. You could’ve even gone into the park overlook by yourself.”

“True,” I mumbled.

Judo players who’d been choked out often vehemently denied it, not just because they didn’t want to lose, but because losing consciousness often affected short-term memory. They truly didn’t believe they’d passed out, because they had no memory of it happening. Being knocked out had similar effects on memory. I’d spent enough time in a sport where people occasionally got thrown on their heads, to be familiar with that.

“I wish I’d seen something. I thought you were right behind me. But then I couldn’t find you anywhere, and you didn’t answer when I texted. I had this horrible feeling. I started yelling your name, and then I called the police. I didn’t know what else to do.”

“I’m glad you did, Blythe,” I reassured her. “Now we just have to make sure the police realize it was Stacey or some accomplice of hers.”

“We’ll show them those pictures on your phone. Of the paint at Stacey’s house.”

The pictures! “I got another picture! Of Stacey breaking into Doyle’s house!” Thank God, I had that picture. Not to mention the picture of the paint on her gate. I’d completely forgotten. Getting knocked on the head will do that to you. “Maybe we should wait until we have a chance to show it to Riggins alone. What if Doyle just takes my phone and deletes it?”

“I don’t think he’d go that far. But why don’t you send the pictures to me right now to make sure we have a copy.” Blythe glanced at my running shorts, as though searching for a pocket. Her eyes got big.

“My phone!” I said. “I don’t know where it is.”

“I’ll text Riggins. Maybe he found it at the scene.”

At the scene. When had my life become one giant crime scene?

Blythe texted, then waited. Her phone buzzed. She read the text and then shook her head. “I’m sorry, Bren. They didn’t find it.”

My heart absolutely sank. Blythe took my hand. “They’ll find it, Brenna. I’m sure they will.”

Three hours later, we were still waiting for the CT scan results. “What exactly are we waiting for?” I said. My body had already been combed for evidence as much as I was going to allow. The type of assault I’d endured did not warrant me removing my clothes, as I’d made very clear to the lady examining me. What exactly were we waiting to find out? That I had a concussion? That much was obvious.

Blythe didn’t want to leave my side, not with a maniac out there, but she was on the verge of doing a potty dance on the stool. “I’ll be back in just a sec,” she promised.

“I’ll be alright,” I assured her.

And I was alright, until my favorite hairless Sasquatch stomped in and jerked the curtain open. He loomed there with a gleam in his eye that I didn’t like one bit. I pushed myself up into a sitting position even though my aching head protested.

Doyle flipped on the bright light right above me, and I couldn’t help a wince of pain.

“Is this your bag?” he demanded. He held out my judo bag, a big black duffle I’d carted to countless practices and events, and shook it by the shoulder strap. My stuffed monkey key chain animal, with his white judo gi and black belt, jangled from the handles as though desperately waving for help.

What was going on? Had Blythe really asked the police to go into our apartment and get my stuff?

“Yeah, that’s mine,” I said. “Why didn’t Blythe get it herself?” And why did I need a bag? How long did I have to stay here?

“Probably because she doesn’t have access to the evidence room.” His mouth jerked up in that snarl-smirk I hated.

“What are you talking about? Give me my bag.”
You jerk
. I left that part off. That should earn me points for judiciousness, right?

Doyle held the bag back, just out of reach, taunting me. “This bag,” he said, “was found in my house.”

To say my stomach lurched would be an understatement. “In your house?” My voice was practically a squeak.