Buch lesen: «Critical Impact»
“Why did you come here, of all places?” Stu asked, looking at Anna’s profile.
“I came here,” Anna said, “because I was hoping it would help me remember something.” She looked back at the blasted-out building and shook her head. “I didn’t do this, you know. I wish you would believe me….”
Stu looked at her intently and said, “I came here, I followed you, because I wanted to tell you that I do believe you. Arresting you was a mistake.”
She stared at him for several more minutes before she whispered, “You believe me?”
“I do.” And in so saying, Stu knew he was putting himself in a compromising position. He was a police officer. It was his job to remain objective. And, of course, there was all that evidence against Anna. He didn’t know what he was going to do about that….
LINDA HALL
When people ask award-winning author Linda Hall when it was that she got the “bug” for writing, she answers that she was probably born with a pencil in her hand. Linda has always loved reading and would read far into the night, way past when she was supposed to turn her lights out. She still enjoys reading and probably reads a novel a week.
She also loved to write, and drove her childhood friends crazy wanting to spend summer afternoons making up group stories. She’s carried that love into adulthood with twelve novels.
Linda has been married for thirty-five years to a wonderful and supportive husband who reads everything she writes and who is always her first editor. The Halls have two children and four grandchildren.
Growing up in New Jersey, her love of the ocean was nurtured during many trips to the shore. When she’s not writing, she and her husband enjoy sailing the St. John River system and the coast of Maine in their thirty-four-foot sailboat, Mystery.
Linda loves to hear from her readers and can be contacted at Linda@writerhall.com. She invites her readers to her Web site, which includes her blog and pictures of her sailboat, www.writerhall.com.
Critical Impact
Linda Hall
MILLS & BOON
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They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.
—Isaiah 40:31
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
EPILOGUE
LETTER TO READER
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
ONE
When Anna Barker reached out to open the heavy wooden door of City Hall, she was hurled backward in a blinding flash and a crush of ear-rupturing noise.
It happened fast. One second she was carrying her grande latte, her large stage makeup bag and several books of photographs, and trying to avoid the leering glances of the mayor, the next she was flattened on the ground beside the building, nose pressed into the grass.
She lay there, stunned. She didn’t move, couldn’t. At first nothing hurt. And then everything did. Her left arm was sprawled next to her body and her other hand was up next to her face. She felt a burning on her neck and shoulders. She raised her hand to check the liquid. Blood? No. Hot coffee. She could tell by the smell of it. She had spilled her coffee.
A spasm of coughs rattled her chest. She spat out some dirt. That small exertion sent coils of pain through her core. She took tiny breaths—deep ones hurt—and tried to steady herself. Everything around her was noiseless, still and surreal. It was like she had been cast into some deep, suffocating cave. She opened her eyes and was filled with a horrid sense of terror. She couldn’t hear herself cough. She felt, but didn’t hear, the groans that welled up from inside her. She blinked and the movement hurt. She was confused. Where was she? What had just happened?
Gingerly, she tried to take stock of her surroundings. She was lying on a patch of lawn in front of the City Hall building in Shawnigan, Maine. Anna’s brain told her to rise, to get up, to run, but the rest of her body would not respond.
She tried to remember. First, she had been walking up toward City Hall, then the mayor had come, accosted her and finally gone in ahead of her. Next thing she knew there had been that thunderous sound and bursting light. And she had ended up here. Could it have been the bomb? It had to be the bomb. But no, the bomb for the mock disaster wasn’t scheduled until tomorrow. And it wasn’t going to be a real bomb, anyway. Just smoke and noise. A simulation.
Maybe something about the bomb had gone terribly wrong.
Her throat was raw and she forced herself to move her head, cast a backward glance toward the building she had almost entered. All she saw was bricks, gray stones and rubble. Where was Mayor Johnny Seeley? He’d been just ahead of her. And earlier two of her esthetics students, Hilary and Claire, had gone inside. She had come early to talk with Hilary. Were they somewhere in all that rubble? Were they okay?
Her eyes felt scratchy. Why was everything blurry? She guessed that her contact lenses must have come out in the blast. She raised her head.
People were running toward her, climbing over shattered pieces of the fountain that used to be in front of City Hall. Splashing through the water that gushed from its broken facade. Through hazy eyes she saw the lights of police cars. She shifted her gaze and saw the back of a broad-shouldered man in a red shirt leaning over and gesturing to a woman. Her hand was raised and she appeared to be holding something. Were they looking at her? She wished she could see better.
Was that…? No. It couldn’t be! Was it Peter? Had he followed her to Maine? No! She squinted and tried to clear her gritty vision. She turned away, lest he see her, come for her…
She needed to get up, scramble away from this place. Away from him. But she couldn’t move her body.
Help me! God, help me!
In the opposite direction from where Peter was, she saw a man running toward her, his hands cupped around his mouth. He was calling to her, but she couldn’t hear a thing.
She looked up in time to see a wall of stone plummet toward her, gray rocks tumbling into each other as they fell, surrounding her, entombing her.
Stu McCabe had been standing beside the hospital auxiliary tent and squirting a line of mustard on his free hot dog when he heard the explosion. Ahead of him, he watched in horror as the entire front of City Hall seemed to fold in on itself.
An earthquake? No. He would have felt an earthquake. People were screaming now and running in all directions. He ran toward the building because he had seen a woman fall. He needed to get to her!
Anna regained consciousness slowly. When she finally did, all she felt was pain. It seared white-hot down her arm and it intensified in her wrist. She was lying flat, the right side of her face pressed against something hard and jagged. Her right arm was pinned.
She groaned, heard nothing but the pounding of her heart and a roaring in her ears. When she opened her eyes, she saw only blurred darkness. She tried to move her head a bit to see where she was, but she trembled with pain, and shook with cold and shock.
She knew she was under rocks and debris, yet somehow, the cascading stones hadn’t crushed her. Her torso was being protected by something flat and square. A door? Maybe. She worried that if she moved, even slightly, it would come down and crush her completely. Already she was finding it difficult to breathe. She had to concentrate. Breathe in. Breathe out. In. Out.
She closed her eyes against the pain and inhaled the acrid smell of fire and sulfur. She coughed, and each raspy cough sent hot pain into her chest and across her arm and into her wrist. She felt pain right down to the tips of her fingers. She tried making any small sound she could, but didn’t know if she was heard by anyone. She heard only the roaring in her ears.
The thought came to her that she might actually die in here. This was what it was like to be buried alive. She coughed again and finally she prayed.
God, help me to get out of here, but if not, help me not to be afraid.
She prayed this over and over and over. Slowly, she realized that despite everything, she was some how still breathing. Clean air was getting to her from somewhere. She felt a tiny waft of cool air on the very top of her head. With great effort she moved her eyes to where she could almost see the pinhole between the rocks and rubble. It might be enough to survive. She tried to ignore the grinding pain in her right arm as she turned her face, moved it toward that gap in the rubble and gulped in pure air.
Quietly, she began to sing the new hymn she had learned last week in church about God’s protection.
She sensed movement above her and prayed that whatever it was it wouldn’t send the piece of flat rock into her chest.
Time passed, but she couldn’t tell how much. She kept breathing, and kept thanking God for the gift of air. She drifted in and out of consciousness.
She came awake again when she felt a warm touch on the fingers of her left hand. She opened her eyes and stared up into the face of a man. He was talking to her, but she couldn’t hear him. She closed her eyes.
Slowly, one by one, pieces of rock and debris were moved away from her head and then her body. The pain was unbearable when they moved the slab away from her wrist. Tears filled her eyes. She moaned and she blacked out again from the pain.
Every once in a while she would open her eyes. And when she did, she looked up into the man’s face. His smile gave her hope.
The trapped woman looked so helpless. When all of the rubble had been painstakingly removed piece by piece, he gently reached down and cupped his hands around her dusty head.
He recognized her. He didn’t know her, had never officially met her, but she’d been to some of the planning meetings. If he was not mistaken, she was the one in charge of making the victims of the mock disaster look as real as possible. He winced when one of the EMTs moved the piece of cement from on top of her right hand. It looked crushed. No wonder she was drifting in and out of consciousness with the pain.
Two EMTs placed the stretcher as close as they could to her twisted form. The main thing was to keep her back and neck immobilized. Her eyes were closed, but she was saying something. He bent his head close to her face.
“Yes?” he said.
She wasn’t talking. She was humming some thing.
“You’re going to be all right,” he told her as he smoothed bits of dust and debris from her hair.
She opened her eyes and looked up at him. He couldn’t help himself. He smiled down at her. As they carried her stretcher past the crowds of people who were beginning to mill about, he kept his eyes on her face. And as he did so, he thought about another woman, a woman he was not able to save from another bomb in another time and place.
He vowed that this time would be different.
When next she opened her eyes, she knew she was in the back of a fast-moving ambulance by the equipment that surrounded her. Every rut, every bump in the road sent shivers of pain down her arm.
The man was still here, the man whose face she had looked into when she was lying in the rubble. She couldn’t hear him, but she looked at his mouth and was able to read his lips. He was saying, “Don’t worry. You’re safe now. You’re safe now.”
But as she closed her eyes she wondered if she would ever be safe if Peter was back.
TWO
Anna opened her eyes. She was on her back in a single bed, blanketed to her neck in white. She was in a shadowy, dim hospital room.
She looked down at the bed. Her right arm was encased in a white plaster cast that went from her shoulder clear down to the ends of her fingers. Her arm was also hooked into a kind of contraption that held it completely immobile and slightly away from her body. Her left hand lay next to her, but a clear tube snaked from her inner wrist to an IV bag on a stand beside her. Just in front of the IV stand there was a movable bedside table with two bouquets—some stemmed flowers in a vase plus an orange potted mum.
Her gaze went back to her right arm. She was an esthetician. She was right-handed. Before this happened, she’d been working on Whisper Lake County’s mock disaster drill. As head of makeup, it was her job to make the fake wounds on the pretend victims look realistic.
The mock disaster was going to test the readiness of Whisper Lake County’s fire and police departments, EMTs, hospital and search-and-rescue team. Was it still going to happen? Had it happened?
A movement to her left caught her attention. A man was standing beside her window, silhouetted by the streetlight outside. His back was to her. Hands in his pockets, he peered out at the night, seemingly deep in thought. For one horrible moment she thought it was Peter, and she shrugged away from the form and down into her blankets.
Her slight movement must have caught his attention, because he turned to her. It was a man she didn’t know—yet she somehow did. And when he smiled at her, she remembered. This was the face she had looked up at, the man who had found her, rescued her and smoothed her hair away from her face as he rode with her in the ambulance to the hospital.
His face broke out in a grin and he came toward her. He was saying something to her, but it was muzzy in her ears.
He came closer. “Hello,” he said.
She tried to say something, but her voice was hoarse and crackly. She cleared her throat. “Hi,” she said.
“Miss Barker, I’m Deputy Stu McCabe, and this is Deputy Liz Corcoran,” he said, gesturing toward a young lady who was now getting out of the chair by the door. Anna noticed for the first time that a woman was in her room. She was tall and long-limbed.
“How are you doing?” he asked her. She squinted up at him. His face was slightly blurry around the edges. Her contact lenses were gone, so nothing was really too clear. He was tall and was wearing a brown sweater. His hair was light and, from what she could see, cut short, like a military hairstyle.
“I don’t know,” she answered. That was the truth. Right now she felt numb. She had so many questions, some that she was afraid to ask. Had it been a bomb? A gas explosion? An earthquake?
There was a deep, dull pain in her right arm. Her face hurt, and so did her left wrist where the IV was attached.
He bent toward her. “When you’re up to it, we’d like to ask you a few questions.”
She nodded. That’s the reason he was here. He was a police officer with questions. He had picked her up, held her closely and talked kindly to her on the way to the hospital simply because it was his job. It made her feel let down in a way she couldn’t define.
“Okay.” Her voice broke. “But can you first tell me what happened?”
His face darkened. “A bomb.” He said it simply.
A bomb! Her eyes went wide. “Why? What…?”
The woman named Liz came and stood beside Deputy McCabe and said, “We don’t know. We’re still trying to piece things together.”
“What time is it?” Anna suddenly asked. When had this all occurred? She looked helplessly at her right hand where she normally wore a silver watch.
“Around 9:00 p.m.,” Deputy McCabe said.
“Wow,” she said, opening her eyes wide. “I’ve been here the whole time?”
“They just brought you to your room. You were in surgery for quite a while. Your family is in the hall. Your mother is here.”
“My mother’s here?” Anna was finding it difficult to tear her eyes away from this man.
“We met your mother, Catherine, and your aunt, Lois.”
“Good. Um…” She was desperate for facts. “So it was a bomb? Did it have something to do with the mock disaster?” Her voice echoed in her own head as she spoke, but at least her hearing was getting better. “Did it go off accidentally?”
“No,” Deputy McCabe said. “It didn’t. It wasn’t supposed to be a real bomb. Just smoke bombs.”
“Pretty coincidental timing, though,” Liz said.
“Was it…terrorists?” She shifted slightly in her bed, but quickly came to the conclusion that any movement, no matter how slight, caused pain.
“Again, we don’t know,” he said.
Liz added, “At this point we’re looking at every possibility.”
“What about the others?” she asked. “Two of my students went in ahead of me.” Her head was spinning. Hilary had been inside City Hall and Claire, too. Plus, the mayor.
Deputy McCabe paused, took a breath. “Hilary Jonas and Claire Sweeney have been positively identified. They died this morning in the blast. I’m so very sorry, Anna.”
Anna swallowed several times. Tears welled up in her eyes. How could they be dead? She had been with those girls just yesterday. “What about Mayor Seeley? He also went into the building just ahead of me.”
“They rushed him by air ambulance to Portland. We haven’t heard anything yet.”
She tried to lift her left hand to wipe her eyes, but it was tethered to the IV pole. She felt helpless. Deputy McCabe took a tissue from the box beside her and gently wiped her eyes. The gentle act made her tear up even more. She fought to regain her composure.
“Who would do this?” she gasped.
“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Liz said. “That’s why we’d like to ask you some questions before your family comes back in.”
“Okay,” she said. “I don’t know how I can be of help, but okay.”
Deputy McCabe began asking questions. As best she could, Anna told them everything she saw, or didn’t see just before entering the building. They asked the same questions in many different ways, and she answered until her voice was hoarse and she couldn’t think. She hadn’t paid too much attention to what had been going on around her. Her mind had been on her lesson plan. There was still so much she had needed to get done before the mock disaster. She told them this, too.
When Deputy Corcoran asked her if she had received any threats lately, Anna paused. Deputy McCabe seemed to notice this pause and looked at her expectantly. Did Peter count? Should she tell them about Peter? But Peter was her own business.
She’d never said goodbye to Peter. Was that it? Some weird and awful act of revenge? Peter had lied to her. He’d told her he was a Christian. He’d told her she was special to him. All lies. And on that last date, when he slammed her up against the brick fireplace of his mansion. She thought he intended to rape her. But even if he wasn’t going to rape her, she knew she had to leave. That’s all he wanted from her. That’s why he lied. He didn’t want her for herself. She knew she had to get away from him. She had hit him hard in the chest and loudly said, “No!” until he lost his grip on her shoulders and she shoved him away, then ran.
The following day she left California.
She had been back in Maine a month when she received his e-mail.
The next time we meet, you’ll regret it. I will be back.
Did that constitute a threat?
She took a deep breath and told them about Peter. If he had done this, he deserved to get caught. She gave them Peter’s contact information.
Deputy McCabe wrote it all down.
She heard voices in the hall.
“Anna! Oh, Anna!” She turned toward the door. Her mother, Catherine, was there, along with her mother’s sister, Lois. “Can we see her now?” her mother asked.
“Yes,” Deputy McCabe said. “Come in.”
Anna gave them a weak, “Hi!”
Her mother rushed toward her. “You gave us quite a scare. You were in surgery so long.”
“No one would tell us a thing,” her aunt, Lois, added.
Anna didn’t see the two officers leave, but the next time she looked up, they were gone.
Her mother kissed her cheek and whispered, “I’m so glad you’re okay. We’ve all been praying so hard. I put you on the prayer line at our church, and Lois had you on the prayer line at her church.”
“Thank you.” But here is where Anna had her first inkling of a serious question. Two young women had died. Was she alive because she had more people praying for her? And did they die because no one prayed for them? Why had God protected her, but left Hilary and Claire to die?
“We were so worried about you,” Aunt Lois added. “It’s been all over the news. Everywhere!”
Anna nodded.
“Are you in pain, dear?” her mother asked. “Should I call the nurse? The doctor’s on her way. I know she wants to talk to you.”
“That’s good.” Anna tried not to wince.
Lois said, “We’ll get the nurse. I can tell by your face that you need something for the pain.”
Anna’s head felt muzzy. All she wanted to do was sleep.
“We won’t stay long,” her mother said, smoothing her bangs away from her face. “We’ll be back in the morning. I’ll bring you your Bible and some magazines and books. Is there anything else you’d like?”
“Can you bring me my glasses?” she asked. “They’re in my top dresser drawer in the cottage I’m renting. I lost my contact lenses somewhere.”
“Certainly, dear,” her mother said, writing all this down on a piece of paper.
“I’m in the cottage closest to the water.”
“I know, dear.”
“You can get the key from Bette. I don’t know where my purse is.”
“Bette has already phoned us,” Lois said. “She sends you a hug.”
When Anna had moved back home to Whisper Lake Crossing in such a hurry, her mother had tried to persuade her to move into the cottage that she and her sister shared. Anna declined. She wanted—needed—her own place.
For her entire life, all Anna had ever wanted to do was to fix people’s hair and play with makeup. It was a fascination that sometimes furrowed her mother’s brows. What kind of career was esthetics for a nice Christian girl? Yet, when it became evident that Anna would not be swayed in her career goal, her mother reluctantly decided to support her. Anna breezed through Shawnigan Community College and was hired at a local spa. When a teaching job opened up, Anna applied for it and was accepted. She enjoyed teaching, but knew that what she really wanted to do was stage makeup.
Hollywood had beckoned. Maybe if she moved to California she could get a job doing makeup for movies. She packed up and moved. She’d apply for a job once she got there. She had never done anything quite so reckless before.
But what she didn’t fully understand was the hierarchy in movie land. It made no difference what you knew, it was who you knew. She worked at networking. She met Peter and he promised her things. He said he could get her a job. He did.
But then she owed him.
Six months ago she came home to Maine without saying goodbye to anyone. Her mother knew what had happened, but her mother was the only one.
Anna was currently renting a cottage in a resort called Flower Cottage, which was only a few minutes’ walk along the lakefront from her mother’s cottage.
“And when you get out of the hospital, whenever that may be, you’ll be staying with us,” her mother added. “The new windows came today. You’ll stay in the parlor. We’ve already been talking about that.”
Anna smiled up at her mother and her aunt—her only family. The sisters were only a year apart in age, and no one would mistake them for being anything but sisters. Yet their personalities were like the moon and the sun. Her mother was soft-spoken and introverted while Lois was opinionated, outspoken and extroverted. When Lois’s husband died and Catherine invited her to come live in the cottage, Anna worried that Lois would take advantage of her mother, yet Catherine seemed to be holding her own. And for this, Anna was glad.
But what would it be like to add a third person to the mix? She closed her eyes. Maybe she wouldn’t have to find out. Maybe she could go home to her little rented cottage by the lake.
But without the use of her right hand for a while, she guessed she would have no choice but to stay at her mother’s.
“I hate to break up this party,” a nurse said. “But we need to get Anna ready for the night. And it’s way past visiting hours. The doctor will be here in a few minutes.”
The sisters kissed her good-night and left.
“I’m Sara,” the nurse said when her visitors left. “I’m your night nurse. If there’s anything you need, please call me. I’ll clip the button right here beside your left hand. Is that okay?”
“Thank you.”
The doctor was an orthopedic surgeon named Dr. Neale, who told her that she was indeed lucky that her right hand hadn’t been entirely crushed. It had been touch and go for a while, the doctor explained.
Anna nodded.
The doctor went on. It didn’t look as if crucial nerves had been damaged, and they were doing every thing they could to save her hand. The cast and splints had been configured to provide the least mobility now at this critical stage.
Save her hand? Anna blinked. She was told that her wrist and hand would require further surgeries, plus lots of physiotherapy. The doctor concluded by saying that her muffled hearing as a result of the blast should be temporary. Anna nodded, took the proffered pain pills and drifted off to sleep.
Anna woke up. It was dark. A doctor in green scrubs, a surgical mask and a bonnet was standing at the foot of her bed and holding a pillow. Anna squinted. Were they taking her for more surgery? She would be glad when her mother brought her glasses tomorrow. What did this doctor want? More blood? A check of her vitals? To change the IV?
The person with the pillow simply stood there and looked at her without moving.
Finally, Anna said, “Hello?” Her middle-of-the-night voice was feeble and hoarse.
No response.
Anna said it more loudly. “Yes?”
The person in the green scrubs moved to the side of her bed. Then the doctor bent down close to Anna, and with one quick movement plunged the pillow into Anna’s face.
Anna writhed and whipped her head from side to side, trying to break free. It was as if she were in the cave of rubble all over again.
She remembered suddenly about the nurse call button. Sara had said she had clipped it beside her left hand. Was it still there? She grasped for it, somehow found it, and pressed it over and over again.
She felt she was going to lose consciousness when she dimly heard from the PA beside her, “Anna—it’s Nurse Sara, I’m on my way.”
The pillow and the doctor in green had vanished by the time Sara arrived.
“Someone tried to smother me!” Anna blurted out, tears running down her cheeks.
“What!”
“Someone was just in here. All in green. And he tried to smother me with a pillow.”
Sara went out into the hallway. A few moments later she was back again. “I didn’t see anyone in the hallway, Anna. There’s no one else here tonight. It’s a very quiet night.”
“But there was someone. It was a doctor and he put a pillow on my face.” Anna couldn’t breathe. “He was wearing all dark green and a mask, like a surgeon.”
Sara sat down beside her and put her hand on Anna’s left arm. “Anna, there’s no one here. One of the side effects of the amount and type of pain medications you’re on is the feeling of being smothered sometimes. I’ll talk to the doctor about it in the morning. In the meantime, would you like me to sit with you for a while?”
“I would. Thank you.”
With tears stinging her eyes, Anna finally drifted off to sleep. Had someone really been here? Or had it been a dream of the worst kind?
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