Sing It to Her Bones

13

Angels. I hadn’t expected angels.

In the silence following the crash, two of them swam before my face. My eyes gradually focused, and I realized that my angels were air bags that had deployed, saving my life.

The car had nose-dived into the pond at a forty-five-degree angle, and I found myself sitting in water up to my hips, trapped in the driver’s seat by my seat belt. By the time I’d figured out that I wasn’t actually dead and that I’d need to do something, the water had risen to my waist.

I pushed the red release button with my thumb, and as the seat belt recoiled, I floated up a few inches. Get out, Hannah! I felt frantically along the door and finally located the door handle a few inches underwater. I wrapped grateful fingers around it and pulled. But when I pushed at the door with my shoulder, it wouldn’t budge. Oh, God! What had I seen on TV? Wait for the pressure to equalize, something like that. Easy enough for actors to say. With rising panic I waited, watching the water creep up to my chest. When it was even with the window, I tried again to open the driver’s side door. It still wouldn’t move.

A dead animal floated by. I was trying to put as much distance between me and the poor creature as I could, when I realized it was only my wig. I reached for it and noticed splotches of red on the blazer I’d borrowed from Connie. Blood? Where was it coming from? I touched my cheeks, my forehead, my nose. Oh, Lord! Blood was pouring from my nose and dripping all over Connie’s precious scarf! I felt with all five fingers along the bridge of my nose and was relieved to discover that nothing appeared to be broken.

By then the water had filled the glove compartment, which hung open with the owner’s manual floating about inside, still in its plastic cover. This car, I thought, is a goner. But not me! I’d worked too hard to live-through the triple ordeal of surgery, recovery, and months of chemotherapy. I wasn’t about to let a couple of demented juvenile delinquents take my life. Not without a fight anyway!

Open the window! I pushed on the button, but nothing happened. The engine’s dead, you dope! The electric windows aren’t going to work.

I pushed fruitlessly against the driver’s side window and began to get hysterical. Take deep breaths, Hannah. Breathe! You can do this. I floated over to the passenger side of the front seat, fumbled for the door handle, pulled it toward me, and then pushed outward. Much to my relief, the door opened as the car was, by now, nearly full of water. A sizable pocket of air remained between the dome light and what was left of my rear window. With my face hovering near the ceiling I gulped in some precious air, held my breath and, kicking hard, swam out of the car and bobbed to the surface. Still clutching my wig, I swam a few yards and turned to tread water as I watched my car tilt and teeter, list and slide on its inexorable way to Toyota heaven, that happy scrap yard in the sky.

I splashed about, feeling for the bottom of the pond with my feet. Where’s my damn purse? I remembered throwing it into the backseat and thought briefly about diving down to retrieve it until visions of Chappaquidick rose unbidden to my brain, and reason prevailed. Instead, I swam the short distance to shore, waded onto the muddy bank, pulled myself out, and lay back, panting, on a patch of tall grass. When I dared to look, my trusty Toyota, barely two years old, disappeared into the pond with a final blub-blub-blub as water poured over the bumper and my Save the Bay vanity plate.

I don’t know how long I lay on the bank of the pond, trying to regain control of my breathing. In. Out. Calm down, Hannah. The utter silence surprised me. Baxter’s ducks and chickens must be laying low. No frogs ribbiting. No crickets chirping. In this tiny town where the populace seemed to communicate by some form of rural telepathy, I expected help to materialize at any moment. Police cars, an ambulance, the volunteer fire brigade. But if it hadn’t been for the bubbles rising from the center of the pond and the concentric rings spreading across its surface, lapping in tiny waves at my feet, I might have dreamed the whole episode. Except for the blood.

Lying there in my sodden, borrowed clothes, I began to shake as the adrenaline rush subsided and a light breeze began to cool my skin. I wrapped my arms around my chest, hugged myself for warmth, and waited. And waited. No mounted cavalry cresting the hill. Prince Charming was busy, hiding out from the wicked press in Cape Cod. And there wasn’t a sign of Hal or Dennis, so no knight in shining armor to the rescue either.

Regretting that real life wasn’t much like the movies, I started to walk.

“My God, Hannah, you’re bleeding!” Connie screamed this into an ear that was still ringing with the echo of an already deafening shotgun blast.

“It’s just a bloody nose.” I ripped a paper towel from the roll and used it to wipe my face. I looked down at the mud and blood that dotted the blazer and scarf I had borrowed from Connie. “But I’m afraid I’ve ruined your scarf.”

“Never mind about that.” She pushed me in the direction of a kitchen chair. “What on earth happened?”

“Some maniacs ran me off the road and into the Baxters’ pond.” I began to shiver. “This just isn’t my week, Connie.”

Connie disappeared into her studio, came back with the familiar afghan, and wrapped it around my shoulders. “I’m calling the doctor.”

That was the last thing I needed, but I didn’t say so. “No, Connie, don’t do that. I’m fine. Really. I just need a hot bath. A good, long soak.”

“Dennis, then.” I didn’t argue with that.

While she went to the phone, I peeled off my ruined clothes and settled into a lovely tub of vanilla-scented bubble bath. I was gingerly feeling around my scalp for cuts when Connie rapped twice and poked her head around the door. “Dennis will be here in fifteen minutes.” The door closed, then opened again almost immediately, as if she’d forgotten to tell me something. Connie entered, lowered the toilet seat lid, and sat on it. “And I’m not leaving you until he gets here.”

Ordinarily I would have asked Connie to go; since my disfiguring surgery it made me uncomfortable to be seen naked by anyone other than Paul. But my heart was still pounding, and I had to admit I was simply afraid to be alone. What if those lunatics had intended to kill me and decided to come back later to finish the job? I turned my body toward the wall slightly and asked Connie to hand me the shampoo so I could wash my wig.

Ten minutes later Dennis rang the doorbell. I decided to let them have a little quality time in the studio while I finished washing and drying my portable hair. Later, sitting in the kitchen wearing Connie’s fluffy terry-cloth bathrobe, I described the van and its two occupants. When I got to the part about the ball caps, I thought hard, trying to remember their color and if there had been a logo or anything written on them. Something about the driver of the van was bothering me, too, but I couldn’t think what. By the time I finished telling Dennis everything I could remember, I was absolutely certain of one thing, though. No matter what Dennis thought, my assailants hadn’t been juveniles.

“Sorry. That’s it. That’s all I can remember, Dennis.” Connie had set a cup of hot tea in front of me, and I wrapped my hands around it gratefully.

“Not much to go on.” Dennis closed his notebook and tucked it into the inside breast pocket of his jacket.

“Maybe there’ll be paint chips where they rammed me.”

“We’ll have a look when we pull your car up.”

“My purse is still in it, Dennis.”

“We’ll get that, too.”

“And in my purse-”

“Is this some sort of parlor game? ‘And in my purse there is a dollar and on that dollar there is an eagle?’ ” Dennis smiled to let me know that he was pulling my leg.

“I was going to say, Mr. Smarty Pants, that in my purse is positive proof that Katie Dunbar was pregnant. I found the file in Dr. Chase’s office and made a photocopy for you.”

“Holy cow,” said Connie.

“So Angie was right.” Dennis studied the ceiling. “Yet Chip insists he didn’t sleep with her-”

“And you believe him?” I was incredulous. I described the scrap of conversation I had overheard between Liz and Frank Chase. “Clearly her sister knew about the baby.”

“I wonder why she never said anything?” Connie added hot water to my teacup.

“She probably thought it didn’t matter now that her sister has been found dead. Or maybe she didn’t want to embarrass the family,” Dennis said reasonably.

“Liz doesn’t have an unselfish bone in her body,” Connie remarked. “She would have covered up anything she thought might screw up her chances of getting into law school.”

I plunged my used tea bag up and down, hoping to coax a decent second cup of Earl Grey out of it. “The more I think about that conversation and about those creeps who ran me off the road, the more I’m convinced that Liz has to be involved in Katie’s death.” I sipped my tea and studied Dennis over the rim of my cup. “Liz must believe I know something, but what? I could just kick myself for losing that copy of Katie’s chart.”

Dennis stood up. “I can see I’ll need to talk to those two in the morning.”

“Please, Dennis, don’t bring my name into it.”

“I’ll avoid it if I can.” He lay a gentle hand on my shoulder. “You take it easy, now, Hannah. You know, this used to be a quiet little town until you came to visit.”

The next day at nine I watched as the Pearson’s Corner volunteer firemen dredged my poor car, festooned with brown and gray grass, its rear window a mass of cobwebbed glass, out of the pond. I recognized a couple of the volunteers: Bill Taylor, of course, the would-be novelist, and David Wilson, the guy who had given me the willies at Katie’s funeral. It was Bill, in fact, who waded into the water holding a great iron hook attached to a chain that reeled out behind him. The other end was connected to a tow truck that had been driven into the field and parked on a patch of hard-packed clay near an old chicken coop. I could see the hook, clamped to my rear bumper, just visible under six inches of water.

Bill raised his hand and waved it in a tight circle. The tow truck’s engine began a methodical grind. The chain grew taut, then wound itself around and around a drum as my car emerged from the muck, slowly, inch by battered inch.

As it dangled nose down from the winch, water poured from the windows and from the open passenger side door and finally from the wheel wells and engine compartment. While they waited for my car to drain, the workers clustered around Mrs. Baxter, who had just arrived carrying a thermos, a large jar of lemonade, and a dozen paper cups. She set the cups down on the hood of one of the parked cars and poured out refreshments for the volunteers. She offered me some, but I said I wasn’t thirsty. I felt bad enough about ruining everyone’s Saturday without horning in on the refreshments, too.

I was thinking how nice it might be to live in a town like this where people go all out for folks they barely know when David approached me with a plastic garbage bag of items retrieved from my car.

I picked out a sodden box of Kleenex with two fingers. Gee, thanks. The bag also contained a single tennis shoe and an old pair of gym shorts that had probably begun moldering long before this most recent dousing. “How embarrassing,” I muttered aloud. I upended the bag and dumped its pathetic contents out onto the grass: a thermos (unbroken), a coffee mug (minus handle), three waterlogged CDs (Placido Domingo), an umbrella, two pens, a snow scraper, and the car’s owner’s manual.

“Where’s my purse?” I could dry out the money, I thought, and my credit card should be okay. I turned the bag upside down and shook it.

“Sorry, Mrs. Ives. It wasn’t in the vehicle.”

I was short on patience. “It has to be! Look again!”

David regarded me with steady, unblinking eyes and shook his head.

I covered my eyes with my hands. I was certain that the only copy of Katie’s medical record lay somewhere-along with my checkbook, credit cards, and pictures of Paul and Emily-at the bottom of the Baxter’s pond. If Dr. Chase had destroyed Katie’s file, as Liz had ordered, without that photocopy, it was just my word and Angie’s against everyone else’s.