Lisa Jackson - Born To Die

Today, she figured, it wouldn’t be appreciated.

Cisco trotted after her as she headed for the back door. “Not this time,” she told the dog as she zipped up her insulated jacket and stepped into her boots. She patted him on his furry little head. “Today you’re in charge.” His tail began moving so quickly, his whole rear end nearly gyrated. Then she slipped out the back door to the garage, where her Jeep was still dripping melting snow.

She opened the garage door, slid behind the wheel, and backed out. Jeremy had parked in his usual spot, as if he’d never taken a stab at moving out. There was a part of her that wanted him back home, but that was a purely emotional mother response. She knew better, had witnessed some of her friends allowing their kids to yo-yo in and out of the house.

That wasn’t for her.

The kid had to start making some serious choices.

She threw her Jeep into gear, hit the remote on the visor, and saw the garage door begin to close.

How had it come to this, where she and her kids were forever testing each other, and they were determined to make the wrong choices? Last year, when she’d been in the clutches of a madman, thinking she would never see either of her children again, she’d vowed to make it up to them, to either turn in her badge or change her ways, work only a forty-hour week, put her family above all else. And her kids, too, had promised to change their self-involved habits, to walk the straight and narrow, get good grades, make the right choices, never give her a minute’s grief.

All those New Year’s Eve vows had been broken by Valentine’s Day, and they’d slipped into their same old, dysfunctional routines.

Maybe she’d made a mistake by not moving in with Santana. Maybe a strong male role model was just what Jeremy and Bianca needed.

“It’s never too late,” she told herself.

Obviously what she was doing alone wasn’t working.

On the outskirts of town, where the neon lights began to glow, she told herself to close her mind, for the moment, to her kids and their problems and turn her attention to whatever lay ahead.

By the time she reached the crest of Boxer Bluff, she saw police and rescue vehicles, their lights strobing in the night, flashing red and blue on the surrounding snow. Firemen, rescue workers, and several cops were working the scene of the accident. Alvarez, dressed in department-issued jacket and hat, was standing near a short, crumbling wall overlooking the falls and talking with one of the town cops.

Pescoli nosed her Jeep into an empty parking slot near the park as two medics loaded a woman on a stretcher into the back of a waiting ambulance. A crowd of about fifteen people had gathered, all craning their necks and talking amongst themselves beyond a police perimeter. A news van and camera crew were following the EMTs’ every move as they transported the injured woman.

Pescoli flashed her badge at the town cop, who seemed to be in charge of keeping the bystanders at bay.

“What gives?” she asked Alvarez.

“She’s alive, but barely. Looks like she was jogging and either tripped or slid and fell over the rail.” Alvarez indicated a spot where the snow was disturbed on the top of the crumbling guardrail, an old rock wall that had been built over a hundred years earlier and was barely two feet high.

She shined her flashlight over the broken snow and path where the woman had fallen over the cliff face. “She hit on that ledge down there and somehow didn’t slide farther, into the river. It’s a miracle that she’s alive.” The beam of her flashlight played upon the broken ground below.

“Is she conscious?”

“No. Don’t know how long she was out here or how serious her injuries are, or if she’ll make it.” Frowning, Alvarez shined the light back on the path. “Too many footprints and too much snow to see if anyone was with her.”

“And no ID, no car?”

“Her run didn’t start here, just ended here.”

“But you think it’s more than an accident.”

“Unknown.” But Alvarez was clearly puzzled, eyeing the snow-covered path where dozens of footprints had been left. “The crime scene guys are doing what they can, separating out her prints, the ones that match her shoes, and they’re looking for anything that might help, other prints.”

“Nothing on her to ID her?”

“Just a key. No cell, no iPod, or anything else.”

“She could have just tripped.”

“Yeah.” Alvarez’s breath fogged in the air.

“No witnesses?”

Alvarez shook her head.

“Who found her? And please don’t tell me it was Ivor Hicks or Grace Perchant,” she said, mentioning a couple of the locals who had a history of being in the middle of trouble. Ivor thought he’d been abducted by aliens years earlier, and Grace Perchant claimed to talk to ghosts. Pescoli didn’t think either of them was all that reliable.

“No,” Alvarez said. “Iris Fenton was out taking a walk.” She motioned to a woman bundled in a heavy down coat, gloves, and a red stocking cap, from which silvery curls protruded. “She lives on the other side of the park with an invalid husband. Already checked her out.”

Pescoli was nodding.

Alvarez glanced to the departing ambulance. “Hopefully she’ll wake up and tell us she’s just a klutz.” She then eyed the embankment, the steep ravine, and the river, tumbling over the falls, the water roiling wildly far, far below. “Helluva place to slip so hard that you vault over the rail and land just where the cliff drops off, four feet from the wall, right here at the very top of the bluff. A few years ago this part of the hill fell away.” She ran her light over the outside of the rail, to make her point. In either direction the drop-off beyond the guardrail wasn’t as sheer, the vegetation more viable, but the spot where the accident occurred was the most steep. “Real bad luck.”

“That why the crime scene people are here?”

She nodded. “I’ve already called Missing Persons. We’ll see if we can find out who she is. In the meantime, I want to go to the hospital and talk to the docs who examine her, find out if her injuries are consistent with her accident.”

“Which you’re not buying.”

“The jury’s still out,” Alvarez said as she reached into her pocket and withdrew her keys. “You coming?”

“Meet you there.”

Early the next morning Trace looked out the front window and saw snow falling steadily, only to pile up around the fence posts and drift onto the front porch.

Eli was still asleep, though he’d had a bad night, the pain in his arm and his cough waking him every few hours. In the end, around three this morning, Trace had carried the kid downstairs, and together, with Sarge curled up near the banked fire, they’d bunked on the oversized sectional. At five thirty Trace had woken, let the dog out; then, once Sarge had taken care of business and Trace had started the coffee, he’d turned on the television to catch the weather report.

The first thing he’d seen was a woman reporter on the screen, snow covering her blue hooded jacket, a microphone clutched in her gloved hands as she stood near the entrance to the park on the crest of Boxer Bluff. Rescue and police vehicles were visible behind her, lights flashing in the dark as snow continued to fall. She was speaking to the camera, but her voice was too soft to hear.

Trace scooped up his remote and upped the volume.

“. . where an unidentified female jogger was discovered just an hour ago on a rocky ledge that juts out over the river nearly a hundred feet below street level.”

The camera panned behind the reporter, to the steep grade and an area below. A narrow shelf protruded over the roiling water, and upon it was one rescue worker in a harness, a coil of rope in his hands. The snow on the ledge had been disturbed by boot prints and what Trace assumed was the area where the jogger’s body had lain before the rescue.