Gayle Roper - Caught In The Middle

I slid across the seat and flung open the far door. I didn’t think I’d hit the man—I had neither heard nor felt a thump—but I had to make sure he wasn’t crushed beneath my wheels. I pressed a hand against my anxiety-cramped abdomen and climbed into the downpour.

The man wasn’t lying broken on the road. In fact, he wasn’t anywhere, lying or standing, broken or whole. He had completely disappeared.

I leaned against my car, weak with relief, and took deep breaths. I barely felt the icy sleet running down my neck. Finally I was able to move enough to get myself back into the car and, with a strange, shaky feeling, I drove the few remaining blocks home. I couldn’t wait to get there, take a hot shower and relax with Whiskers purring on my lap as I drank a Diet Coke and ate a handful of Oreos. By then my heart would probably be beating normally again.

My snug, cozy, carriage-house apartment had once been part of the estate of Amhearst’s leading citizen, Charlie Mullens, a man who’d made millions in the stock market in the twenties and had built a great mansion to forget his New York tenement beginnings. He had lost his fortune in the Great Crash of ’29 and his life shortly afterward when he drove the new Rolls-Royce he could no longer pay for into the railroad overpass. His heirs, reduced to working for a living, soon sold the gracious, money-eating mansion and moved from Amhearst.

Over the next forty years, the property passed from hand to hand, deteriorating steadily until it was razed in the early seventies. At that time the carriage house, which had sat peacefully behind the mansion unnoticed and unused, was renovated into four one-bedroom apartments, two on the ground floor, two above. A long, narrow drive off Oak Lane gave access to the quaint building, and I turned down the drive, grateful to be home.

It was still somewhat strange to me that this washome. Here I was, all alone in Amhearst, working as a reporter at The News, responsible to no one but God and Don Eldredge, the newspaper’s owner-editor.

I don’t have to do anything, I had understood one evening during my first week in Amhearst. I’m completely on my own. If I want to eat and pay the rent, I’d better go to work, but I don’t have to. And there’s no one here who cares enough to make me.

It had been a strange, lonely and frightening realization. There were no family, no friends, no acquaintances here. It was just me, making my own choices. The next day I went to the animal shelter and got Whiskers, a huge gray-and-white mottled cat with marvelous white whiskers. Now at least I was responsible to one living being. Now I had to fulfill at least one obligation every day, or my shins would be black-and-blue from Whiskers butting them, his special way of asking for his dinner.

Leaving Pittsburgh and home had been hard for me. I like to think of myself as independent, but the truth is that I like to be “independent” surrounded by familiar things.

I’d gone back home after college, moving in with my parents, content to be where everything was known and comfortable. I hadn’t had to find a new doctor or a new dentist or a new church. I’d become a general reporter at the paper where I had worked for three of my college summers, and I’d done very well, even winning a couple of minor journalism awards.

And, of course, Jack was in Pittsburgh: handsome, personable, accomplished, irresponsible Jack.

I had expected to live at home one, maybe two, years at the very longest. After all, I was an independent spirit. I was amazed and appalled when I woke up one day and realized that I had been there four years, waiting for life to happen. Waiting for Jack.

“Just a little more time, Merry,” he’d say. “That’s all I’m asking. Just a little more time.”

Eventually, to save myself from drowning in despair, I came to Amhearst, and my first weeks here were terrible. I hated all the new people, the new streets, the new stores. I got a toothache, probably from grinding my teeth all night in fear, and I had to find a dentist. I hated him, too.

But I made it. I learned to like my job, and I slowly remembered that being alone isn’t the worst thing in the world. I might not be laughing much yet, but I was slowly regaining some self-respect.

“Forgetting what is behind,” Dad said one night on the phone, quoting St. Paul. “Straining toward what is ahead. Pressing on toward a new life. We’re proud of you, Merry.”

Jack spoke to me on the phone a few times, too, and even came to visit me once. I agonized over that visit, filled with equal measures of hope and dread. The reality was dull compared to my nightmares and daydreams.

“Come back when you’re ready to get married,” he told me when he left.

“I’ll come back when I have a ring on my finger and a date on the calendar, not before,” I replied. Then I went into my apartment and cried myself sick.

And so summer became fall, and fall a nasty, sleety, early December night with icy roads, and I was finally home.

I parked, climbed out into the cold and wet, and hurried to my trunk, where I’d stashed a case of Diet Coke. The dim light by the walk barely illuminated the area.

I looked uncomfortably over my shoulder. It was dark and spooky back here even on a nice night, but in the rain and sleet, it was worse than usual. The large lilac at the edge of the house was especially eerie tonight, with its branches creaking and complaining about their icy bath.

I eyed the dripping tree, trying to penetrate it to be certain it wasn’t hiding someone. Come May, those blossoms had better be beautiful and fragrant to make up for my heart palpitations the rest of the year.

Although, I told myself with false bravado, no bad guy in his right mind would be lurking behind a lilac tree on a night like this.

Even so, the last thing I expected to find when I raised the lid of my trunk was a dead body.

Instinctively I slammed the lid down. I stood, shocked, until a sudden, stout gust of wind made the lilac creak alarmingly. I jumped and swung around, but of course no one was there. We were alone, the corpse in my trunk and I.

It can’t be true, I thought. It simply can’t be. Things like this don’t happen to real people, just people in mystery novels. My mind is playing tricks on me because I’m tired and had such a nerve-racking trip home.

I looked at the dark outline of my trunk lid. The slight illumination from the light by the walk glinted on my keys still dangling in the lock.

I raised the lid just far enough for the light to come on, then bent cautiously and peeked in.

There was a body, all right. A man. He had on a green, down-filled jacket, and he was lying on his stomach, his face turned away.

I slammed the lid again and made it to the porch just in time to sit before I fell. I put my head between my knees and stared blankly at the wet cement.

There was a body in my car!

When I could move again, I stumbled into my apartment and called the police.

“Please come quickly!” I hardly recognized my shaky voice. “Please.”

I got out of my wet clothes and into my heaviest sweats. I toweled my hair and went to wait numbly at the front door, my breath frosting the glass of the storm sash.

When the first flashing light turned down the alley, I ran to the parking area. Soon I was standing under my gray umbrella surrounded by men in dripping, bright-orange slickers with POLICE written in black on their backs.

“First question,” said one. “Did you touch anything?”

I shook my head, horrified at the thought.

“Okay, then,” he said. “What happened?”

“I was going to get a case of sodas out of my trunk. I opened it and there was this body.”