Janice Kay - Maternal Instinct

Carla came back, looking small inside a baggy sweatshirt. “I’m sorry.”

Hugh’s smile warmed and softened his saturnine face. “Don’t be. You’re still in shock.”

“Maybe.” She bit her lip.

“So, your friend called,” he prompted.

Nell held her pencil poised to take notes.

Carla Shaw’s friend Becca had called and said she heard gunshots and screams and she didn’t know what was happening. She’d let Carla know more when she did. Carla had hurried to the nearest office to tell other people, but she stayed in earshot of her phone. Only Becca didn’t call back. Everybody discussed whether they should phone 911 or what, and finally one of the claims adjusters, a man, of course, had stood.

“Hell, I think I’ll go down there and check it out.”

“I tried to stop him,” Carla said, staring at them with big, haunted eyes. “But he wouldn’t listen. He had to be macho. He went down the stairs. And…um—” her mouth worked “—now he’s dead.”

Nell dropped her notebook and went to the young woman, not so much older than her daughter. Kneeling, she covered her hands with her own. “I’m sorry.”

Tears filled Carla’s eyes. “He was kind of a jerk. But mostly just a guy. You know?”

Nell nodded wordless agreement.

“Why would somebody shoot him?”

“I don’t know,” she said softly.

Carla freed one hand from Nell’s and wiped her wet cheeks. “We couldn’t really hear anything. Only then the elevator doors opened, and everybody stuck their heads out of the offices, because we thought it must be Kyle.” She was shivering uncontrollably now. “Only it wasn’t. It was that man. He was shooting as he walked out. I had just the one glimpse, and then I ran back in my office and locked the door and squeezed behind some filing cabinets. I don’t know how I was strong enough to move them.”

“Did he come into your office?”

“The glass insert in the door exploded, and I think maybe a spray of bullets hit the filing cabinet, because it jerked—really, almost jumped, like somebody had slammed into it. But I couldn’t see out, and later, when the police came, the door was still locked. So I guess he didn’t bother coming in, even though he could have just reached in and opened the door.”

Her eyes showed that she wondered why. Had she hidden so cleverly he thought no one was in there, or did he not want to bother hunting? Had her prayers to God been answered? Or had she just been lucky?

Nell remembered a story she’d heard once about a soldier in Vietnam who’d awakened one morning and discovered that his entire platoon lay dead around him. Every single man had had his throat slit during the night. Every one but him. He spent his life haunted by the question: why? Why him? Why not the friend who had slept beside him, or the guy he didn’t like, or the captain? Why was he chosen to survive? Did his life have some yet unknown purpose? Or had he been chosen at all?

Carla and all the others would live with some of the same questions.

Hugh did the note-taking. They got the names of the others she had clustered with, two of whom had died under the barrage of submachine-gun fire within seconds. Nell comforted as best she could once they had wrung everything Carla knew from her.

In the end, they left her staring at a soap opera on television, still huddled inside her sweatshirt as though the temperature was sixty instead of eighty inside the small house. Walking silently down the driveway under the hot sun beside a tall, grim Hugh, Nell smelled again the heavy scent of the roses.

They would hear this story again, and again, Nell realized. Today, tomorrow, perhaps for weeks. She knew from experience that by the end of the day, they might be able to hear it and minutes later climb into the car and crack a joke, or talk about dinner plans, or a movie one of them had seen last weekend. They might even think themselves inured, but the horror would be lurking deep in their psyches, the reminder of the sprawled bodies, the acrid scent of blood, the remembered terror on every face.

How would she get through this summer, working this horrific case, worrying about her daughter, worrying about herself? she wondered in a kind of daze. Partnered with a macho jerk who could smile like that?

A man who, insane though the very idea was, would be the father of the unborn child she might be carrying, if the fates chose to teach her a lesson.

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