On What Grounds

Two

I ran down to the basement, almost slipping on the messy coffee grounds spilled all over the steps. Anabelle’s body was crumpled at the bottom on the cold concrete floor. Her delicate features were pale, almost milk-white. Her head was cocked at a terrible angle and her long blond ponytail stretched perpendicular to it like the yellow plume of a fragile bird.

Her twenty-year-old face appeared lifeless—but if she truly were lifeless, her limbs would be rigid. They weren’t. Rigor mortis certainly hadn’t set in. I knelt next to her and checked for vital signs, trying not to move the body in case of spinal injury. First I placed my ear to the girl’s nose and mouth. Thank God, she was breathing! Shallow but evident. Next I put two fingers to the girl’s neck. The skin was cold, slightly clammy. The pulse feeble as butterfly wings.

“Anabelle? Anabelle?”

Her clothes appeared to be the same ones she’d worn last evening when she’d reported to work. Blue jeans and a white midriff T-shirt with DANCE 10 printed across the chest.

I ran back upstairs and made a frantic call to 911. Next I rang Anabelle’s roommate, Esther Best, an NYU English major from Long Island, and a weekend barista at the Blend. She lived with Anabelle in a tiny rented apartment about ten blocks away.

“Esther, it’s Clare Cosi. Anabelle—” I said.

“Well, she’s not here,” Esther cut in. “She never came home last night, although that’s not unusual. She might be with The Dick. You might try her cell. Unless she’s got a new one already—boyfriend, I mean, not cell phone.”

“Esther, listen. She’s had an accident. Come down to the Blend now.” I went back downstairs to sit with Anabelle until the ambulance arrived.

The next fifteen minutes passed more like fifteen hours. Mostly, I spent it fretting, and praying, and staring at Anabelle’s limp slender form, thinking of my Joy. My daughter’s features weren’t as perfectly chiseled as Anabelle’s; they were more common, like mine. Yet my Joy had more of an impish energy than Anabelle, a sense of carefree innocence that Anabelle, though she was only a year older than my daughter, seemed to lack.

I had admired Anabelle’s maturity as a worker, but seeing her like this made me admit to myself that there was something brittle and a little desperate about Anabelle Hart. Something fragile and sad, too.

This can’t be the end of her life, I prayed. No one should die so young…for so careless a reason.

Finally, the sound of sirens echoed off the Federal-style townhouses and boutique shop windows of Hudson. After a moment of silence, thick-soled paramedic shoes began clumping around the first floor.

“Down here! Hurry!” I called, then saw them round the corner and almost slip just as I had on the coffee grounds.

“Watch out!”

Two men, both young Hispanics in white shirts and slacks, cursed loudly then continued down. I stepped away, and they began to work. They checked Anabelle’s heart with a stethoscope, her pupils with a small flashlight, and attempted to wake her by calling her name. They tried smelling salts. Nothing worked.

Finally, they fastened a brace around her head and neck, moved her to a flat board, and strapped her down. Anabelle seemed more like a corpse than a person now. Her limbs were limp, her face ashen.

I hated not being able to help, hated being forced to watch impotently as strangers took her away.

Tears blurred my vision, made my nose run. This can’t be happening echoed through my mind so many times I was no longer sure whether I was thinking it, saying it, or screaming it.

At the top of the stairs, the paramedics placed the board on a folding stretcher, then pushed the thing swiftly across the main room.

About then, Esther Best burst into the Blend’s entrance. She stopped dead at the pallid, rag-doll body of her roommate.

“Ohmygod, what happened!” she cried with uncharacteristic emotion. Even Esther’s brown eyes, which were usually narrowed in some sort of jaded, hypercritical observation behind her black-framed glasses, now stared in wide-open shock.

In front of me, the two paramedics were pushing tables out of the way. I followed closely behind, so focused on the stretcher, its wheels thundering across the wood-plank floor, that I didn’t even hear the male voice calling until I tried following Anabelle out the shop’s front door—

Like a steel curtain, an impenetrable blue wall slid closed before me. Navy shirts, gun belts, nickel-silver badges. I collided right into it.

The officers stood shoulder to shoulder. Both looked to be in their mid-twenties. One tall and lean, the other shorter and broader through the chest and shoulders. The tall one with the light hair and gray eyes whose name tag read LANGLEY spoke first. He was holding a notebook.

“Woah, there, ma’am! Sorry, but we need to ask you some questions.”

“Where are they taking her?” I asked, bouncing backward. Instantly, I tried to move around them, but they bobbed and weaved right along with me: Left, right, left, right, left—

The whole thing looked like a pathetic one-on-two basketball game. And with my small stature, there were definitely no NBA offers in my future.

“Calm down, ma’am. They’re taking her to St. Vincent’s,” said the other cop. He was the shorter one. Dark eyes and hair. His name tag read DEMETRIOS.

I strained once more to look around the uniformed young men. On the street, a large crowd of onlookers had gathered—students with backpacks and older residents, many of them Blend regulars. Esther was speaking with one of the paramedics. All eyes watched as the other paramedic shut the two back doors simultaneously. The single loud thud struck me with a terrible premonition of finality.

“Yeah,” said Langley. “They’ll do what they can for her. And her roommate says she’ll go to the hospital. We got some basic information about the victim from the roommate, but right now we need to hear what happened from you.”

After the ambulance drove away—much too slowly, as far as I was concerned—Letitia Vale, one of the Blend’s regulars, poked her head of wrapped gray braids inside the front door.

“Clare? Are you all right? What happened?”

Letitia was the third-chair viola player with the Metropolitan Symphony. A tea drinker. (Tea was not the Blend’s specialty, but we did have a standard selection. Earl Grey, jasmine, camomile—the teas one would expect.) Letitia said what she mostly enjoyed about the Blend was its atmosphere and its anisette biscotti.

When I had first managed the Blend almost ten years ago, Letitia had been a loyal customer. She’d even pulled together a little chamber ensemble to play at the Blend’s annual holiday parties.

“Oh, Letitia, Anabelle had an accident…” My voice choked to a stop.

“Heaven and earth! Is there anything I can do?” asked Letitia.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” the cop named Demetrios told Letitia as he moved his body to block hers in yet another bob-and-weave game, “but we need to close the store now.”

“Oh! Oh, of course. Clare, I’ll come back later.” She waved reassuringly.

I nodded, no longer trusting my voice.

“Okay, ma’am,” said Langley, opening his notebook. “It’s Clare, right? Why don’t we start with your full name and address.”

I stared at him. Suddenly I had trouble focusing.

“Ma’am?” Langley prompted.

“What?” I asked.

He gazed into my face for a long moment.

“Okay, ma’am, I need you to take it easy, okay? I need you to take some deep breaths and sit down.” He motioned to the empty chair at one of the store’s twenty Italian marble-topped tables. “Can you tell us how you found the body—”

“Body?” My stomach turned, saliva filled my mouth. “I’m not…feeling so well.”

Demetrios shot Langley a look.

“Uh, sorry, ma’am,” he said quickly. “I didn’t mean the body. I meant, uh, the girl.”

“Sit down, okay?” advised Demetrios. “You don’t look so good.”

I tried, but couldn’t. It only made me feel worse. All I could think of was what Grandma Cosi used to say to women who’d just suffered a loss or shocking news and came to her kitchen for a reading of coffee grounds. Do something familiar so you don’t faint. I looked up. Saw Demetrios’s name tag.

“That’s a Greek name, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Let me make you some coffee.”

“What? No, ma’am, that’s not necessary—”

But I was already moving behind the counter, grabbing the tall, long-handled brass ibrik, measuring the water, and placing it on an electric burner.

The cops, mumbling between themselves, seemed unhappy with my activity, but it was helping me feel less numb and more normal. I’d prepared Greek-style coffee (aka Turkish coffee) many times. I’d learned how from my world-traveling ex-husband, who’d enjoyed the strong taste—even more powerful than espresso.

As I made the coffee, the cops stood at the counter and watched. After a minute or so, they began to ask me some questions.

(What time had I arrived this morning? Was the shop open or locked? How long had the girl worked for the store?)

As long as I kept busy making the coffee, I found I could answer pretty well.

(Close to nine. Locked. Six months, but I had known her only one.)

I’d explained how I’d just moved in above the store. How I’d managed the place ten years ago but had left to live and work in New Jersey.

They wanted to know why I’d decided to come back after so long.

“A lot of reasons,” I told them absently.

And over the next few minutes, as I continued to prepare the Greek coffee, I silently reminded myself of a few of them—starting with that early-morning phone call four weeks ago from Madame…