Lisa Jackson - Born To Die

Good.

Trace made his way to the bank of elevators and felt a jab of disappointment that Kacey was already gone. Not that it mattered, he told himself as he stepped into the next car, where a male attendant was holding on to the hand-grips of a wheelchair where a woman in a cast was seated. Trace sidestepped the outstretched, casted leg and waited as the doors whispered shut.

It was weird to think that Jocelyn was dead. He’d seen her less than three months ago, when she’d asked him over and they’d made another stab at it, or at least she had. He hadn’t been interested but had wanted to smooth things over. The evening had ended with her asking him to spend the night. He had been tempted but had known that going to bed with her would be a bad idea. At that point, when he’d said he’d better leave, that getting involved wouldn’t be a good idea, primarily because of Eli, she’d become instantly furious. White hot and pissed as hell.

The elevator stopped with a jolt, and the doors swept open in the main lobby. Trace waited for the patient in the wheelchair to be pushed out of the car, then headed toward the lobby doors at the front of the hospital.

Outside, it was snowing again, the wind bitter and harsh, the promise of December heavy on its breath. Turning his collar against the cold, he dashed across the emergency lane to his truck. He was yanking open the door when he caught a glimpse of a gray coat from the corner of his eye.

“Mr. O’Halleran?”

He recognized the doctor’s voice before he turned and caught sight of her avoiding iced-over puddles, flakes of snow catching in the wisps of auburn hair that had escaped the hood of her coat.

“Trace,” he said.

Already her face was red with the cold. “I just wanted to ask how Eli’s doing.”

“Better, I think,” he said, leaning on the open door to his truck. “I indulged him with movies and soda last night.”

She managed a smile. “Just what I prescribed.” She shifted from one booted foot to the other and cocked her head toward the hospital. “I’m. . I’m sorry about Jocelyn.” She seemed sincere, her green eyes clouded. “That was rough.”

He felt the muscles in the back of his neck tighten, and he nodded. “Eli’s gonna take it hard.”

“Will you call the sister you mentioned?”

“I’ll let the cops find her. Jocelyn and I weren’t even really friends. The only reason I’m involved in this is that someone from the school called me and asked if I knew where she was. I got curious. Since I knew where she kept the extra key, I went to her place. Her car was parked in its regular spot. Her purse was inside the apartment. When I heard about an unidentified woman jogger being injured up at the park on Boxer Bluff, I contacted the police.” He glanced back at the hospital, three floors rising toward the gray heavens, snow covering the grounds and piling on the cars parked in the lot.

“So, they asked you to ID her.”

“Yeah.”

“They were homicide detectives.”

“I know. I don’t get it,” he admitted. “She was still alive when we got here and I thought it was just an accident.”

“So did I.” Her eyebrows knitted for the briefest of seconds before she forced a smile again. “Well, tell Eli I said hello.”

“I will.”

She was off then, black boots walking quickly across the lot to a spot where a silver Ford Edge was parked. She opened the SUV’s door and turned, waving to him, before sliding inside. Less than a minute later she’d reversed out of the space, then cranked the wheel and driven out of the lot, her taillights twin red dots as she melded into a stream of traffic.

Trace hadn’t even realized he’d been standing and watching her until her car had disappeared. Then he finally climbed inside and fired up his Chevy.

Funny how he found Eli’s doctor attractive.

At that thought, he scowled and reminded himself she was off-limits. Besides, there was something about her that reminded him of Leanna, Eli’s mother, and that was enough to convince him to remain single. His marriage to her had been thankfully brief, and he’d ended up with a son out of the deal, even if the boy wasn’t biologically his.

Didn’t matter.

He ground the gears of the old truck, flipped on the wipers, and watched as they shoved an inch of snow off the windshield. Easing the Chevy out of the lot, he glanced back at the hospital and thought of Jocelyn Wallis, his kid’s teacher, a woman with whom he’d made love. Now dead. His jaw slid to one side. Didn’t seem fair. Had she tripped and fallen in a freak accident? Or, he wondered, had she been helped over that short wall with the hope that she would end up in the river?

Why else would homicide cops show up at the hospital?

Had someone jostled her, knocked her over the ledge, and then, panicking, taken off? Or had she been intentionally pushed? A random victim? Or a target?

Snow was really coming down now, big, fat flakes that covered the streets and flocked the surrounding shrubbery. Rather than driving directly back to the ranch as he’d planned, he turned onto the road that wound around the edge of the bluff to the park. The road was steep; the old engine ground as his tires slipped a bit. At the crest, he nosed into a parking spot and climbed out to walk along the jogging path to the area where Jocelyn’s body had been discovered.

Hands plunged deep into the pockets of his jacket, he stared across the short, crumbling, ice-encrusted wall. Far below, the river rushed by, its angry roar echoing in his ears. Above the swift, icy current a ledge protruded, and Trace saw that the snow upon that rocky shelf had been disturbed, big ruts and divots cut into the blanket, now slowly being recovered by new flakes.

“What the hell happened?” he whispered, his breath fogging, his words inaudible over the sound of the surging river. He couldn’t help feeling a little stab of undeserved guilt. What if he’d been around to take her call? What if he’d met with her? What if something he’d done, one little seemingly innocuous thing, could have changed the course of history? Could a bit of timing have saved her?

“I’m sorry,” he said aloud but wasn’t even sure he understood why he’d murmured the words. Her death seemed such a waste.

Preventable?

Who knew?

He turned his gaze away from the river, to the park, where spruce, pine, and hemlock showed frigid, frosted needles and the aspens stood with naked branches. Two groups of women in stocking caps and gloves walked briskly by, a man jogged, and a couple, their baby wrapped close to the husband in some kind of sling, strolled past.

Seemingly serene.

A winter wonderland.

Aside from the snow disturbed on the ledge far below, where Jocelyn Wallis had tumbled to her death.

With no answers about a woman he barely knew, he returned to his vehicle and backed into the street, then guided his truck to the road that wound out of the town to the surrounding farmland. He needed to see about his kid and relieve Ed and Tilly. They did have a ranch of their own to run.

All the way home, he thought of Jocelyn and Leanna and, now, Acacia Lambert, the doctor who reminded him of two women who had been a part of his life, but the foremost thought on his mind was how he was going to tell his young son that his teacher, Miss Wallis, was gone.

“I can’t tell you much about Jocelyn except that she was an excellent teacher,” Barbara Killingsworth said from the far side of a wide desk in an office decorated with framed, matted artwork created presumably by the students of Evergreen Elementary. Rudimentary houses drawn in crayon were mounted beside detailed representations of buildings and still lifes brushed in shades of watercolor or etched in pencil.