Two police cars and an ambulance raced by, sirens blaring, as Fern pedaled home around 12:00 that night. Her mind was on Ambrose, as usual, when the cacophony of emergency vehicles whooshed past.
“Dan Gable must be stuck in a tree again,” she said to herself. She giggled at the thought, although the ambulance for a cat might be a first, even in Hannah Lake. Last time it had been the fire truck. Bailey had seriously enjoyed every minute of it and had praised Dan Gable for days afterward. Maybe that was why Bailey never showed up at the store. Fern flew down 2nd East and turned onto Center, wondering where the excitement was. To her surprise, there were more police cars than Fern had ever seen at one time lining the road. Cops on foot were spread up and down the street with flashlights in hand. The lights swung back and forth in a purposeful swath, like the officers were canvassing the area in search of something. Or someone, she supposed, curiously.
As Fern headed down the road, a cry went up and officers began running toward the beckoning call.
“I've got him! I've got him!”
Fern slowed and got off her bike, not wanting to be anywhere near whoever “he” was if the police had just captured someone dangerous. The ambulance was frantically waved down and before it had even come to a complete stop, the back doors flung open and two EMTs scampered out and ran down the embankment beyond Fern's line of sight.
Fern waited, her eyes pinned to the spot where the ambulance workers had disappeared. Nobody came back up for several minutes. Then, when Fern had almost convinced herself to get back on her bike and permanently remove herself from the scene, an officer pushed something up out of the ditch. It was a wheelchair.
“That's weird,” Fern mused aloud, wrinkling her nose skeptically. “I thought they would use a gurney.”
But the wheelchair was empty, and it was coming up the embankment, not being brought down.
And then she knew. She knew that it was Bailey's chair. And she dropped her bike and ran, screaming his name, oblivious of the shocked reactions around her, to the officers who scrambled to assess the threat, to the arms that reached out to keep her from the scene.
“Bailey!” she screamed, fighting through a sea of uniformed arms to get to him.
“Miss! Stop! You need to stay back!”
“It's my cousin! It's Bailey, isn't it?” Fern looked frantically from face to face and stopped on Landon Knudsen. Landon was a squeaky new recruit to Hannah Lake's Sheriff's department. His pink cheeks and blond curls gave him a cherubic appearance, completely at odds with his stiff uniform and the holster around his hips.
“Landon! Is he okay? What happened? Can I please see him?” Fern didn't wait for him to respond to one question before she asked another, needing the answers but knowing that once he spoke she would wish she'd never asked.
And then the EMTs were pushing the gurney back up the hill, rushing to the open doors of the waiting ambulance. There were too many people around the gurney and Fern was still too far away to make out who occupied the stretcher. Her eyes met Landon's again. “Tell me!”
“We're not sure exactly what has happened. But, yeah, Fern. It's Bailey,” Landon said, his face lined with apology.
Landon Knudsen and another officer that Fern didn't know, an older man who was obviously Landon's senior partner, took Fern to Bailey's house and there informed Mike and Angie that Bailey had been taken by ambulance to Clairmont County Hospital. It was after midnight. Angie was in her pajamas and Mike was rumpled from falling asleep in his recliner, but both were in the old blue van in two minutes flat. Fern climbed in with them and called her parents on the way. They wouldn't be far behind. And then she called Ambrose. In very few words, sanitized and shortened because Angie and Mike were listening, she told him something had happened to Bailey and that they were going to the hospital in Seely.
The police gave them no details but escorted them to the hospital about half an hour north of Hannah Lake with sirens flashing, hastening the journey. It was still the longest half hour of Fern's life. The three of them didn't speak. Speculation was too terrifying, so they sat in silence, Mike Sheen behind the wheel, Angie clutching his right hand, Fern trembling in the single back seat that was positioned behind the empty space designed for Bailey's chair. Fern didn't tell them she'd seen the wheelchair. She didn't tell them that it had been in the ditch. She didn't tell them that she thought it was too late. She just told herself, over and over, that she was wrong.
When they rushed into the ER and identified themselves, the two police officers on their heels, they were led to an empty partition. A thirty-something man in green scrubs with Dr. Norwood written on his nametag, dark circles under his eyes, and a subdued expression on his face, informed them that Bailey was gone.
Bailey was dead. He'd been declared dead on arrival.
Fern was the first to break down. She'd had longer to process the possibility, and she'd known. Deep down she had known the instant she saw the chair. Angie was in a state of shock and Mike angrily demanded to be taken to him. The doctor acquiesced and pulled the curtain aside.
Bailey's face and hair were wet and matted with mud, the area around his nose and mouth wiped partially clean during attempts to resuscitate. He looked different away from his chair, like someone Fern had never met. One of Bailey's fingers was bent at an odd angle and someone had placed his thin arms by his sides, making him look even more foreign. Bailey called his arms T-rex arms–completely useless and disproportionate to this rest of his body. His legs were equally thin and the shoe on his right foot was missing. The sock was soaked with mud like the rest of him and his headlamp lay beside him on the gurney. The light was still on. Fern couldn't take her eyes from it, as if the lamp was to blame. She reached for it and tried to turn it off, but the button was flat, permanently pressed down, and it wouldn't release.
“It was the light that helped us find him so quickly,” Landon Knudsen offered. But it hadn't been quickly enough.
“He was wearing his light! He was wearing his headlamp, Mike!” Angie collapsed into the chair by Bailey's side and clutched his lifeless hand. “How could this happen?”
Mike Sheen turned on the officers, on Landon Knudsen whom he'd coached and taught, on the senior officer who had a son who had attended his youth camp last summer. With tears in his eyes and with a voice that had made his wrestlers sit up and listen for three decades, he demanded, “I want to know what happened to my son.”
And with very little resistance, knowing full well that it was against protocol, they told him what little they knew.
911 Dispatch had gotten a call from Bailey. They had an idea of his general location and the fact that he was in duress. Dispatch sent all available units to that location, and within a few minutes, someone saw the light from his headlamp.
Interestingly enough, the band was twisted so the actual light was on the back of Bailey's head, the way a kid sometimes wears his hat with the brim in back. If the light had been on the front of his head, it would have been submerged in water and mud. Bailey had been found in the ditch with his headlamp shining up into the heavens, marking the spot where he lay. The officers would not confirm that Bailey had drowned. Nor would the doctor. Both simply said that an autopsy would be performed to determine cause of death, and with an expression of sorrow for their loss, Bailey's parents and Fern were left alone behind the thin partition, faced with death as life moved on around them.
Sarah Marsden didn't sleep well. She hadn't slept well in years. After her husband Danny had passed away she was sure she would sleep like she too had died, delivered from the strain and hard labor of caring for someone who couldn't do much for himself and who was angry and abusive toward anyone who tried to help him.
Danny Marsden had been paralyzed from the chest down in a car accident when their daughter Rita was six years old. For five long years, Sarah had done her best to take care of him and her young daughter, and for five long years she'd wondered each day how she could go on. Danny's neediness and his misery took a toll on them all, and when he passed away the day before Rita's eleventh birthday, it was hard to feel anything but relief. Relief for him and relief for herself, relief for her daughter who had only seen her father at his very worst, though if Sarah was being honest, Danny Marsden wasn't a nice man before his accident.
Yet Sarah still didn't sleep well. Not then, and not now, more than ten years later. Maybe it was worry over her daughter and young grandson, because Rita had chosen a man just like her father. The difference was, Becker was able to inflict physical pain as well as emotional pain. It was the bodily harm Sarah worried about most. So when the phone rang at midnight she was immediately alert and reaching for the phone.
“Hello,” she answered, hoping Rita just needed to talk.
“She won't wake up!” Becker's voice blared out, making her wince even as she pressed the phone more firmly to her ear.
“Becker?”
“She won't wake up! I went in to get a couple of beers at Jerry's and when I came back out to the truck she was just laying there like she had passed out. But she wasn't drunk!”
Fear slapped Sarah across the face and left her reeling from the blow. Staggering, she braced herself against her nightstand and kept her voice steady, “Becker? Where are you?”
“I'm at home! Ty's screaming, and I don't know what to do. She won't wake up!” Becker sounded like he'd had more than a beer at Jerry's, and Sarah's fear swung on her again, catching her in the stomach and doubling her over.
“Becker, I'm on my way!” Sarah was shoving her feet into flip flops and grabbing her purse as she ran for the door. “Call 911, okay? Hang up the phone and call 911!”
“She's tried to off herself! I know it! She wants to leave me!” Becker was howling into the phone. “I won't let her leave me! Rita–”
The phone went dead and Sarah trembled and prayed as she threw herself into her car and squealed out of her driveway. She punched at the keypad on her phone and tried to keep herself together as she gave the 911 operator Rita's address and repeated Becker's words: “Her husband says she won't wake up.”