J. Wachowski - In Plain View

“No. Thanks. If Gatt decides to fire me-” I blanked. I’d never faced this kind of work dilemma before. I didn’t even have a vocabulary for this kind of scenario. “I guess I’ll figure something out. I want to stay. I want to be here when Jenny wakes up. She might need to see a friendly face, you know?”

“Sure, baby.” She didn’t smile but I heard warmth in her voice and the next thing I knew, she’d grabbed my head with her two hands and planted a big kiss on the top of my forehead. “You’re gonna do all right. You’ll do fine.”

Half a smile crooked my lips. “Took me long enough.”

“That’s true,” she admitted.

“The least you could do is argue a little.”

She took up residence in the sleeping chair and I curled up on the empty bed. And we waited.

When the phone rang the second time, it was with the brutally unfamiliar jangle of the hospital phone.

“What?” I answered in a hiss. It was still pitch dark around the curtained window and I had that nauseous disorientation that lack of sleep brings.

Across the room I could see Tonya staring. Jenny, thank goodness, didn’t budge.

“Maddy? You won’t believe it-”

“Ainsley, is that you? What the hell time is it?” My eyes were burning. My brain wouldn’t compute the numbers on my watch into anything meaningful.

“How’s Jenny?”

“She’s still asleep. They say she may sleep for hours. Where are you?”

“I’m at the Jost farm. I’m ready to go. I’ve got the camera all set and, you won’t believe this, there’s a car at the end of the driveway.”

“A car?”

“A silver SUV.” Ainsley made the words a sibilant tease. “And I saw someone get out and go around the backside of the house. What should I do? Should I go check it out?”

“No! Absolutely not. You keep recording and-” I considered and discarded a couple of options before I settled on, “Call the cops. Call Curzon.”

“What if this guy’s up to something? There are other people in there. Rachel. Her dad.”

“Call the police, Ainsley! You stay right where you are.”

“Good idea. You call Sheriff Curzon; he likes you. I’ll try to get a little closer, so I can make sure that nothing bad is happening. I’m turning off my phone now, so I can be quiet. I’ll call you back as soon as I know something.”

“Wait! No!”

Too late. He’d clicked off.

“What is it?” Tonya asked.

“Ainsley’s at the Jost farm,” I said. “He saw somebody drive up and creep around the back.”

“Who’d be driving up to an Amish house?”

“Somebody not Amish.” I started digging through my bag for my phone. “I’m calling the cops.” I tried the number I had for Curzon, got voice mail and left a message. I called emergency, made a report to the woman who answered. She seemed skeptical and definitely unconvinced of the urgency I was feeling.

“I’ll make a report to the sheriff,” she said blandly. “They’ll send a car to do a drive-by.”

“When?”

“I’m sure they will get to it as soon as possible,” she assured me.

“Crap,” I said the minute I hung up. I speed dialed Ainsley’s phone but got no answer.

“Well?” Tonya asked. She looked worried. Maybe I looked worried, too.

“I don’t like this.” I started to pace the small length of floor to the end of the bed and back. “The car he saw at the house, Ainsley said it was an SUV.”

“Same kind of car ran you off the road,” Tonya said.

“And followed us that night we went to Tom’s apartment.” Car references flipped through my head and another one clicked. “‘A shiny car.’ The little boy that saw Jenny walk off the playground today, he said she got into a ‘shiny car.’”

“Shiny meaning silver?” Tonya guessed exactly where I was going.

“Whoever he is, if he did this to Jenny, he’s dangerous. Ainsley’s in trouble. Maybe Rachel and Mr. Jost, too.” I looked at Jenny. I looked at Tonya. I felt petrified.

Jenny and Ainsley-they both needed me.

“What do I do?” I said.

“Jenny is safe here,” Tonya said. I understood her offer even before she added, “And I’m not going anywhere.”

“I don’t want Jenny to wake up without me.”

Tonya nodded. “Then hurry back.”

AUDIO (V.O.): “Tom Jost got lost somewhere between a land of black and white, good and evil, simple and worldly.”

7:36:09 a.m.

It took me forever to get out to the Jost farm. Tonya’s Escort was not made for high-speed maneuvers.

The smell of smoke was apparent miles away. The first red lick of dawn was beginning to give way to a weak gray sky that was part smoke and part nasty weather.

When it finally came into view, the house was a shock. That perfect image of country life was a wreck of blackened timber bones. Smoke rose in drifting towers, solid yet impermanent.

The front porch and most of the entrance facade were intact, like an old movie sound stage. Straight through to the back, there were timbers still smoldering. The smell was intense. There was no escaping it, no shift of air current made a bit of difference. It clung to the inside of my throat and nose, rough and bitter. Coughing didn’t help. Neither did spitting. There was a low hum in the air, part buzzing sub-woofer and part baby-cry. It took me a while to figure out what I was hearing. The cows wanted milking, crisis or not.

People were everywhere. The Amish neighbors seemed focused on the animals. They moved deliberately, going about work that was as foreign to me as my camera would be to them. The county volunteer fire department had sent a pumper truck. Fire service types, easy to identify in their bulky uniforms, were raking out smoking clumps and spraying down others. I momentarily wished I had a camera in my hand when I saw a tired, dirty fireman in fifty pounds of gear standing near Rachel’s chicken shed while a rooster on the gable crowed the arrival of dawn-exhausted modern man glaring at old-time alarm clock.

I grabbed the arm of the first firefighter who passed me. “Ainsley Prescott? Have you seen him? Young, blond guy-not Amish.”

“The one who went into the fire? They’ve got him over by the ambulance.”

“Into the fire?”

The flash of the ambulance’s warning light led me over the grass, my footsteps tumbling faster and faster.

I found Ainsley sitting on the ambulance tailgate, having his hands wrapped.

“They keep slipping off,” he told the paramedic. The long shock of blond hair he usually combed so neatly off his face drooped over his eyes. He reached up to flip it back.

“Stop using your hands,” the paramedic said.

“Yeah,” I interrupted. “Try using your head.”

“Maddy!” Relief was all over his face. “What are you doing here?”

Looking at his hands bandaged like The Mummy, turned all my fear into anger. With all the trouble he was in, he should not be glad to see me. I did not understand this kid.

“How’s Jenny?” he asked, his face full of concern.

It was hard to launch into lecture mode with Jenny as the lead. “Fine. She’s going to be fine. She hasn’t woken yet. It may be a while-later this morning.”

“Good. That’s great.”

“What the hell happened to your hands, College Boy?”

He looked down at his wrappings, looked up at me and smile-shrugged. He was about as filthy as a fellow can appear in khakis and a Brooks Brothers button-down. The smear of ash on his cheek looked like the makeup department had arranged it for maximum cute with minimum muss.

The paramedic helping with his bandages jumped in. “Not to worry. Only second degree. And this guy’s a hero. Went in there and dragged the old man out.” Mr. Paramedic clapped him on the shoulder.