Hannah Alexander - A Killing Frost

She touched the other side of her face. “This one was when I saw a shadow moving past the cracks in the barn where we hid for a while. So I started another fight.”

Debra paused, closing her eyes. Her face was losing color.

“It’s time to get you onto a bed.” Jama stood and took Debra’s arm. Debra followed willingly. Her footsteps were slow. She stumbled, and Jama wrapped an arm around her.

“Debra, did you lose consciousness when he hit you?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you have any idea how long you were out?”

Debra shook her head. “No way to tell. All I knew was that I said something that made him mad. I think I called him a moron, and he swung. That’s all I remember until I heard his voice. I was lying on the barn floor in a pile of hay. He jabbered on, as if nothing had happened.”

“But you do remember everything up to that point?”

“Yes, I…think so.” Debra sank onto the exam bed.

Jama pulled off the jacket and helped her lie back. The woman felt so frail. So breakable.

“Clancy hated doctors,” Debra said. “He hated anybody he thought was rich. Talked about it all the time, bragging how he took a sledgehammer to a Rolls, knocked the windshield out of a Porsche.”

Jama placed a blood pressure cuff on Debra’s arm and pressed the button on the automatic machine. “Why did he hate them so?”

Debra shook her head. Jama noticed that her eyes didn’t focus. “He was crazy, you know? Grew up poor, to hear him tell it. Mother was an addict, died from withdrawal when he couldn’t find any crack for her, couldn’t con a doctor into writing him a narcotics scrip.”

“That’s why he went after Mark with such a vengeance, then,” Jama said. Debra’s blood pressure was too high. It didn’t fit with the low heart rate.

The front door opened, and Jama and Debra heard footsteps, and the sound of men’s voices, mingled with Ruth’s.

Debra started to cry. “Oh, Jama, help me. I don’t want to go to prison.”

Jama called out the door to her boss and the agents. “Ruth, we need Chelsea for radiology, and we need a bag of saline. Debra’s dry, but there’s something else going on. I won’t know if she can be moved until I do an exam and we take some X-rays.”

She looked up when Agent Sydloski stepped into the room. He studied Debra’s battered face.

“You should see her abdomen,” Jama told him.

He nodded. “Do whatever you need to do.”

Jama was attempting to establish an IV in Debra’s needle-tracked arm when Debra spoke again.

“It hurts.”

“I’m sorry, honey. I’m being as gentle as I can.”

“My head. Hurt’s so…so bad.” Debra cried out, and then her body went limp. Her head flopped to the side. She stopped breathing.

“No. Debra!” Jama did a sternal rub to try to wake her. There was no pulse. Jama checked her pupils. The right one was blown.

Jama looked around for Ruth. “I need a crash cart. We’ve got a code blue.”

Jama sat on Zelda’s front porch swing, watching the morning rush-hour traffic pass by. Two school buses, three minivans, two cars in the space of ten minutes. A lot for River Dance. Everyone waved, and Jama waved back, glad she was far enough from the street that no one could see her tears.

They wouldn’t stop flowing. It was as if she’d dammed them up all these years, and the dam had finally broken.

The worst part of the morning had been watching Zelda age and wither when Jama told her about Debra, when they watched Debra’s body being taken away by Jim Wilcox from Berger Funeral Home.

A gentle south wind continued to blow this morning, warming the air with spring’s touch. The tears chilled on Jama’s cheeks, and she withdrew yet another tissue from her pocket.

She heard a familiar sound, and looked up to see Tyrell’s Durango coming down the street. She looked away quickly as it parked in front of Zelda’s house.

Why had she stayed here? She wasn’t up to this. Wasn’t up to anything today. Ruth had given her the day off. Why not return home to Columbia? She needed more sleep. She did not need more grief from Tyrell. Hadn’t she done that enough to herself these past years?

From the corner of her eye she saw Tyrell step from his Durango and walk slowly up the sidewalk. He stopped at the porch steps.

“Hi,” he said.

She glanced at him, nodded, looked away. Didn’t he have enough sensitivity to give her a break today?

He took the steps, hesitated in front of her, then sat down in the antique rocker. For a moment, he was silent, rocking back and forth, as if he had all the time in the world, as if they sat like this every day. Their knees nearly touched. He was close enough for her to catch the scent of the soap he’d showered with this morning. And yet she’d never felt so far from him.

What was he doing here?

She braced herself for more questions about the night of Amy’s death, more anger that she knew he would have to work through. It was understandable, but not for her. Not today.

“I heard about Debra.” His voice was surprisingly gentle. Not what she expected.

More tears flowed, no matter how hard she tried to stop them. She did not want to expose herself to him like this.

“Do you know what caused it?” he asked.

“There will be an autopsy.”

“I know. I want to hear your opinion.”

“Subdural hematoma.”

“Okay, I’m a little rusty on that one. Remind me.”

Jama didn’t even want to think about it. “She took some hits to the head, and it appears one of those injuries knocked her out, possibly fracturing her skull. The trauma tore some veins.”

“I heard she walked all the way to town,” Tyrell said. “How could she travel so far with that much damage?”

“An injury of that sort is unpredictable.” Jama could always talk about medicine, and some of the stiffness left her voice. “The blood vessels would have started bleeding, and kept bleeding after she woke up.”

“But she would have been in pain, right?”

“She complained of a bad headache, but she described it as a migraine. I doubted her explanation last night as soon as I saw her, but she refused treatment. Nothing Zelda or I did could convince her to cross the road with me. Her headache grew worse this morning, and with the excitement of the FBI coming for her, she grew agitated. The veins blew.”

“The ticking time bomb.”

She looked at him. “Exactly. I don’t know if the excitement this morning was what set it off or not, but once it happened, no one could save her.”

Tyrell stopped rocking and sat forward. “How long from the time she refused treatment to the time you heard Doriann scream?”

Jama looked at him, startled when she realized what he was getting at. He held her gaze, and she saw the fatigue in his eyes.

“Several minutes,” she said.

“So if Debra had agreed to go to the clinic with you, would you have heard the scream?”

Jama blinked as she thought of Debra lying on the bed, refusing treatment. Blast these tear ducts! She covered her face with her hand as the tears flowed.

“I couldn’t do anything to help her.”

Tyrell got up, opened the screen door of Zelda’s house and stepped inside. A few seconds later, he came back with a box of tissues. He set the box on her lap and returned to the rocker.

“Could you have done anything for her if you’d gotten to her sooner?” he asked.

Jama shook her head. “It’s a clinic, Tyrell, not a hospital. We don’t have the capabilities everybody seems to think we have.”

“Then Debra’s refusal to go to the clinic last night probably saved Doriann’s life. I understand she intervened a few times yesterday.”