Savage Drift

^{CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE} DEAN

In the morning there was a knock at the front door.

“Jamie! Lizzie! Are you there?”

I guess I’d fallen asleep for a while, because the knocking woke me up.

I hurtled down the stairs and looked out the three glass panes at the top of the front door.

All I could tell through the swirly glass was that it was a black woman.

“Jamie, it’s me! Open up if you’re home!”

I opened the door and she jumped back when she saw my face.

“Don’t be scared,” I said. “We found Rinée and brought her home. That’s all.”

“Oh my God. Where are Jamie and Lizzie? Do you know where they are?”

“Why don’t you come in and I’ll tell you?” I told her.

“Tell me first, then we’ll come in.”

She held her hand up in a halt position toward the car. I saw a boy there, watching with his face pressed up to the glass.

“Is that—”

“Rinée’s brother, J.J.—Jamie Junior,” she answered. “I told him to wait. Didn’t know what I’d find. I got a call from his school yesterday. Whole bunch of kids were not picked up. I went and got him, but we had to spend the afternoon at the hospital with my husband. He was attacked—I’m sorry. I’m a mess. I’m Lea, Rinée and Junior’s aunt. Please, tell me what you know about my brother and his wife.”

“Lizzie… We don’t know where Jamie is, but Lizzie. Rinée’s mom. She was killed. I’m so sorry.”

Tears filled the woman’s eyes.

She nodded.

“Is… is Lizzie here in the house?”

“No,” I said. “The body is not here.”

I didn’t tell her where it was or how her sister-in-law died. I planned to, I did, but it could wait.

“All right,” she said. “I can do this.”

She turned and beckoned to the boy.

The first thing J.J. did after his aunt explained that neither of his parents were home, but that Rinée was safe was to shoot up the stairs in a flash and go straight to Rinée’s room.

I heard his voice speaking softly, waking her up and then her crying for a moment and him shushing her.

“She’s fine!” he called down.

Lea was watching me. I was pacing in the living room. I knew I should, I don’t know, offer to make coffee or something. But I was worried about Astrid.

“Listen,” I said. “My girlfriend’s sick. I’m not sure what to do. She won’t drink anything or eat and she’s pregnant and she’s been throwing up all night. Could you take a look at her—”

“Why didn’t you say so? Where is she?”

Astrid was still on the floor, where she’d been all night long. Only now she was lying on her side.

“Hmm,” Lea said, frowning.

“I think it’s a stomach virus. Or maybe some bad chicken—”

“Go get me a spoon and some fresh whatever this is,” she said, handing me the cup of Gatorade. “We gotta get this girl hydrated.”

By the time I got back, Lea was on the floor, sitting cross-legged with Astrid’s head and shoulders pulled into her lap.

“Find me a clock,” she said. “We’re going to sip one teaspoon of Gatorade every three minutes. Gonna do by the clock, baby doll. Gonna get you feeling better. You’ll see.”

Astrid whimpered.

“How many weeks’ pregnant is she?”

“Twenty-eight, we think,” I said.

“All right, okay, you’re gonna be fine, tootsie,” Lea said. Her voice had a calming effect. She was so confident and capable—you just naturally wanted to do whatever she said. “Hey,” she said, looking up at me. “Do me a favor and fix the kids some breakfast?”

“Yeah,” I told her.

In a different situation, in a different world, I might have told her that I was used to cooking for kids. That it had once been my job.

I fed the kids scrambled eggs and toast with jelly. Rinée and J.J. were cute together in a way that was heart wrenching.

J.J. was very quiet. He seemed around ten years old. I would have thought he’d have a lot of questions for me about where his parents were, but he didn’t ask me a thing. I remembered how, back at the Greenway, the little kids acted sort of like this after we got stuck there. You could call it denial, but that didn’t really fit. It wasn’t that their minds had perceived there’d been a series of deadly accidents and they were choosing to deny they’d happened. It was as if a veil had been thrown over their consciousness—preventing the horror from creeping in at all. Like layers of gauze protecting their minds from things they couldn’t handle knowing.

That was the kind of softness I saw on J.J.’s face at breakfast. All he saw was his baby sister.

I’m not even sure he knew I was there.

After an hour, Lea came down.

“I got her into bed. I don’t know. I wish the hospital wasn’t so packed. I’d run her down there just to have them check her out.”

Off the concern on my face, she rushed to add, “I think she’s going to be fine. If we can get her hydrated, she’ll be fine. She needs rest.”

“Is it okay for us to stay here? We don’t really have any place to go—”

“Oh, you’re staying here. No question.” She looked at her watch. “The only thing is that I left my husband at home. He’s gonna need his bandages changed soon.”

J.J. was playing “kitchen” with Rinée. This was obviously her favorite game. But J.J. had a way of eating and drinking from the tiny plates and cups that made Rinée burst into peals of laughter.

It was good to hear laughter.

Lea smiled, too, listening to it. Then I could see grief or fear starting to gather in her eyes.

“I just keep praying Jamie’s gonna make it back here. I hope he’s okay. I love my brother so much.”

“I know how it feels,” I told her. “I really do.”

I put my hand on her shoulder.

“And I should tell you,” I said. “About what happened to Lizzie.”

“I need to go get my husband,” Lea said. And I realized she didn’t really want to know. “I think I’ll bring him here and we can all stay here. You two can just stay in the master bedroom. There’s a pullout couch in the study upstairs. We’ll be comfortable there. That way, we can all help each other and the kids will feel more comfortable in their own house, anyway.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Keep an eye on the kids while I’m gone?” she asked me.

“You got it,” I said.

“And, later. After dinner, maybe, I’d like to hear your story.”

There was a sadness in the lines around her brown eyes that made my chest ache.

Well, Astrid looked pretty much the same, to me, which is to say—horrible. But she was sleeping deeply, and I knew that was good.

I saw the spoon and the Gatorade on the table next to the bed.

Lea had told me to let Astrid sleep for an hour and then to sit with her and do the three-minute thing again.

So in the meantime, I decided to wash off the front walkway and the grass.

At first, the kids tried to come outside with me. I hesitated—what if J.J. asked me what I was doing? Would he know the dank, brown spill over the cement path was blood?

But I let them go out. They seemed to be enjoying each other so much.

I put on my suit, wanting the advance-warning whistle in case the winds changed.

The hose had a sprayer, which was pretty powerful. It took a lot of the blood away, and it was easy to get the grass clean, but in the end, I had to go inside and get a bucket and some Pine-Sol.

That stain on the walkway was deeply set.

I popped in to check on Astrid. She was awake.

“How are you feeling?” I asked her.

She made the so-so sign with her hand.

“My head is killing me,” she said in a soft voice. “Do you think there’s Advil?”

I found some in the bathroom.

“Can you take it with some Gatorade?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Lea says I should feed you a teaspoon every three minutes,” I said. “But the kids are outside…”

“I’ll do it,” Astrid said.

“You sure?”

“I just got a little dehydrated, Dean. I’m fine,” she said.

Well, her cheeks were sunken, her hair was plastered to her scalp, and her skin looked greenishly waxy. She did not look fine.

But that didn’t seem like a good thing to say to my girlfriend.

Lea came back with her husband, David, just after lunch (frozen meat-lovers pizzas and sweet potato fries for me and the kids—dry toast and tea with honey on a tray for Astrid). David was a huge, barrel-chested black man with one of his arms in a sling. It was heavily bandaged at the end—where his hand had once been.

He seemed pretty out of it, grinning at us and walking in a funny way, like he was constantly stepping over a low door threshold.

“He’s on Percocet,” Lea explained.

“Come on, Davy,” she said loudly. “Just up the walkway and you get to sleep again.”

“Oh-kay, baby,” he answered and tried to give her a kiss.

“No, no.” Lea laughed. “Into the house you go.”

She got him in and I guess she went to check on Astrid, because a few minutes later, she called me, her voice loud with concern: “Dean! Get up here!”

I smelled the vomit as I entered the room.

“Baby, she needs to go to a hospital,” Lea told me.

Astrid was hanging over the edge of the bed. She had puked on the floor.

“No,” Astrid moaned.

“She needs an IV. The Gatorade just isn’t cutting it.” Lea helped her sit up.

“No!” Astrid repeated.

“It’s not a big deal. Dean’s gonna take you in. They’ll give you an IV. After they get you hydrated, Dean’s gonna bring you back here. No problem.”

Lea took me by the arm and led me out into the hall.

“Here’s the thing—the hospitals in Vinita are full up. We waited there with David for eight hours yesterday and he had a hand hanging off him! They won’t see her, just for dehydration. I think you should go on up to Joplin.”

“Okay,” I said, wired with panic. “Okay.”

“See, I think she might have preeclampsia. It can be serious, okay? Lizzie had it with J.J. Just take Mr. Waggoner’s car and go.”

“Who’s he?”

“The man whose car you were driving before. Jamie’s neighbor.”

“Oh. Okay.”

The stupid, logical part of my brain was clicking away, making connections as if I wasn’t in the middle of a crisis, put it together: It wasn’t Lizzie’s car we’d been in. That’s why there’d been no car seat for Rinée.

Lizzie had been stealing her neighbor’s car. The one who killed her.

Before he killed himself.