Robert Ellis - The Dead Room

That’s when he heard the car start forward.

He turned and squinted at the approaching lights. At first he watched in disbelief, even confusion. Then his heart started pounding and it suddenly occurred to him that what was happening was real. His eyes jerked down to the heavy wheels moving toward him. He heard the squeaky packing sound rubber tires make when they press down snow. He tried to scream but couldn’t. Digging through the snow with his fingers, he pushed at the ice, clawed at it. When the oversized wheels rolled over his legs and his own blood splashed him in the face, he peered up from beneath the car and saw someone running from the house. It was Sally. Waving her hands in the air and screaming as he looked back at his crushed legs. His arteries must have been severed. Blood was shooting onto the snow as if from a garden hose. He tried to keep his eye on it, reaching down to cover the wounds, but everything went black.

Teddy ran down the hallway at Bryn Mawr Hospital, trying not to think about the woman he’d left behind because he knew he couldn’t right now.

It was after midnight. He found Sally Barnett huddled in a chair in the waiting room all alone. When she saw him enter, she stood up and rushed toward him, laying her head against his chest. She was sobbing, and he could feel her body shaking in his arms.

“How is he?” Teddy asked.

She gazed up at him with tears streaming down her cheeks and shook her head.

Sally was ten to fifteen years younger than Barnett. Teddy had liked her the moment they first met. She was easy to talk to and had a cheery spirit. She was one of those kind of people who could calm any situation down by her mere presence. When Teddy joined the firm, Barnett invited him over to the house for dinner. Sally gave him the tour, showing him photographs of the restoration. She’d documented the entire process, and he realized they shared an interest in architecture.

“They’re trying to save his legs,” she said. “But it doesn’t look good.”

“Is he still in the operating room?”

“No,” she said, pointing to the critical care unit. “It lasted three hours. He’s in there now.”

Teddy glanced at the doors and turned back. “Is he conscious? Can we see him?”

She nodded slowly, the agony in her face clear. “He’s lost a lot of blood though. He’s very weak.”

Teddy pressed the button on the wall and the doors swung open. As they entered the unit, Sally led the way down the hall to the nurse’s station. Although the lighting was subdued, he spotted Barnett in the first alcove and moved toward him hesitantly. He was lying on the bed, his entire body trembling. His eyes were pointed at the ceiling and fluttering. Teddy looked at his legs wrapped in bandages and held in place by a series of metal pins and hardware. IVs couldn’t handle the drug load. Four bags of medication hung from two racks over the bed, feeding his system through the ports of a central line injected into his neck.

Teddy had picked up the call less than hour ago. He’d been in Carolyn Powell’s bed-in her arms-when his cell phone rang. All Sally could manage to say was that Barnett had run himself over with his own car. He threw on his clothes, the drive to the hospital manic. Even though the snow had stopped, the roads were a mess.

“How could this happen?” he said.

“He was working on something at the office and got home late. When he opened the garage, he slipped on the ice. I saw it happening from the window. I couldn’t get there in time.”

Barnett grabbed Teddy’s arm. He looked at Barnett and saw the man’s face turned toward him, his eyes still blinking uncontrollably. He could feel Barnett pulling him closer. In spite of the tube in his mouth, the man was trying to speak. Teddy leaned closer, concentrating on the sounds but the words were unintelligible. The sight of Barnett twisting on the mattress and straining to be heard was harrowing. Whatever he was trying to say appeared more than important.

A nurse hurried over from the counter, pulling Barnett’s hand away and checking his vital signs on the monitor.

“This patient is in critical condition,” she said in a harsh voice. “His heart rate’s up. You can’t do this. I’m sorry, but you’ll have to wait outside.”

Teddy looked back at Barnett. The man’s eyes were tacked to the ceiling again. As he walked Sally into the waiting room, he noticed she didn’t have a coat or even her purse.

“Where are your things?” he asked.

She looked back at him helplessly, shaking her head and unable to speak.

“Tell me what you need,” he said. “I’ll drive over and bring them back.”

Teddy skidded to a stop at the curb, thinking he’d better do something about his tires and still trying to decipher what Barnett had been struggling to say with a half-inch hose stuffed down his throat and a central line piercing the artery in his neck.

He climbed out of the car, looking at Barnett’s house and the lighted windows through the trees. Given the hour, every other house on the street was dark. As he walked down the driveway, he spotted the Grand Cherokee smashed into the side of the garage at an odd angle. Moving closer, he saw Barnett’s blood splashed all over the white snow. The deep red stain covered a fifteen-foot square of ground, and Teddy wondered how the man had survived long enough to make it to the hospital.

Sally had ridden in the ambulance with Barnett, and not wasted time running back into the house for her things. She’d asked Teddy to bring her a coat and sweater. In the den he’d find her purse and knitting bag. Keeping her hands busy would calm her down, she’d said.

The snow was almost a foot deep. Ignoring it, he stepped around the blood and kept to the shoulder of the drive. As he reached the Grand Cherokee, he moved to the front and examined the hood. The car had rolled over Barnett’s legs and turned slightly until it crashed into the wall beside the open garage door. The entire front end on the left side was crinkled like an accordion. He looked back at the driveway, noting the rise in elevation. He could see Barnett’s footprints in the snow and followed them with his eyes until he found the spot where Barnett parked to get out of the car.

Teddy opened the driver’s-side door, checking the automatic shift and finding it set in DRIVE. Piecing it together, he realized Barnett got out to open the garage with the car still in gear. Grand Cherokees were built like tanks. The heavy car must have picked up speed as it rolled down the hill.

He shook his head, picturing Barnett on the ground trying to get out of the way and knowing he wasn’t going to make it. For some reason, he thought about the tires that needed to be replaced on his Corolla again.

Teddy spotted Barnett’s keys still in the ignition. Pocketing them, he swung the door closed and moved back down the drive along the shoulder. People make mistakes , he thought. Accidents happen every day . But Barnett had just driven home in a storm. Teddy couldn’t believe that the man wouldn’t have been more cautious, particularly with the car that had just brought him home.

He turned and took another look at the blood in the snow. When he noticed the footprints leading across the yard into the trees, he became very still.

They shouldn’t have been there. There was no reason for them to be there.

He lit a cigarette, staring at the tracks in the snow and considering the possibility that he was imagining things. He wasn’t, he decided. The tracks came and went from the exact spot Teddy calculated Barnett had parked when he first got out of his car.

He looked back at the driveway, trying to account for all the different sets of prints in the snow. There weren’t that many, the snow fresh, and his mind was clear. He saw the Grand Cherokee’s tracks intermingled with a double set of tire tracks that could have only been made when the ambulance arrived. That covered the vehicles, and he stepped back to take in the different sets of footprints. He saw Sally’s moving from the house to the bloodstained area where the car ran over Barnett’s legs. Turning back to the spot where the ambulance had stopped, he noted two sets of different prints left behind by the medics. The space between the footprints were spread out, and Teddy could tell the medics had been running.