The Sound of Broken Ribs(26)
Lei gently shook her head—left, right, left, center.
“This is a small town. Any chance you recognized her?”
Left, right, left, center.
Wales exhaled at length. The smell of wintergreen gum permeated the air, but Lei didn’t see any in the woman’s mouth, nor was the sheriff chewing anything. Maybe Wales had brushed her teeth before her visit. Again Lei noticed the woman’s frizzy ponytail. When added to the wintergreen breath, the two things painted a sultry picture of midday coitus.
“Anything else you can think to tell me? Anything at all?”
Lei thought long and hard about this one. She ran through the accident, as much as she could remember of it, anyway.
She glances up. Bugs smashed on the grill. She’s spinning away. Tumbling through high grass. She can’t move. Everything is broken. Everything is pain. The woman’s face comes into view. Her words fall over Lei, spilling out of the woman’s mouth like a lyric video.
I wanted to know what it felt like to destroy something. What it felt like to ruin a life. You were… you were just in the right place at the right time.
Lei sees a scar, just a little hook, on the woman’s right eyebrow. The raised flesh peeks through the tweezed patch of hair like a winking eye. The half-moon of scar tissue is the woman’s only distinguishing marking. Other than that half an inch of pale skin, the woman is wholly unremarkable. She could be anyone. Anyone at all.
R BROW SCAR
“R?” Harry asked.
“Do you mean ‘right eyebrow scar’?” asked Jenna.
Lei nodded.
“I know at least three women in town with a scar like that.”
“Shit,” Harry said.
“No, no, no,” Wales said, “that’s a good thing. It narrows my list of suspects from around a thousand females living in The End down to three. Not saying it couldn’t be a woman from out of town, but I don’t want to consider that this was someone just passing through. Somehow, that would make it more terrible.”
“I disagree.” Harry leaned forward and stared at the floor. “Knowing a person is capable of doing what someone did to Lei was living in the same general vicinity as us would bother me more than some stranger rolling through, looking for someone to… to ruin.”
“I can understand that way of thinking.”
“All right,” Harry said, “so what happens now?”
“Well. I’ll be interviewing all three woman I know with scarred eyebrows. I know them all fairly well, and oddly enough, two of them have yellow cars. One’s a Toyota and one’s a VW Bug. I can’t believe either one of them could have done it. The third lady doesn’t have a car at all, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t borrow someone’s car, or buy one since the last time I saw her. You’re sure all you saw was a yellow car? No other markings?”
JUST YELLOW
“Okay. Thanks for your time, Lei. I’ll keep you informed as I try to find this person. Keep your head up. They’re out there somewhere, and I intend on seeing that they don’t stay out there long. You two try to have a nice night. Hope your pain gets better.”
With that, Sheriff Jenna Wales left them alone.
*
Sheriff Jenna Wales had seen her share of horrible accidents in her day, but Lei Duncan’s was the worst.
Jenna stepped onto the hospital elevator and pressed the lobby button. A stick-thin woman, even thinner than Jenna’s slight buck-oh-two, stepped through the doors before they could close, and Jenna rode down in a fog of the woman’s perfume. Somehow she managed not to choke on the obnoxious noxious cloud of vanilla and jasmine and what Jenna thought might be an undercurrent of cigarette smoke. When the doors opened, Jenna rushed past the woman, seeking fresh air.
She strode through the hospital’s main lobby and out the sliding glass doors, into sunlight and the aromas of pine trees and car exhaust. A car sat idling in the emergency room’s turnabout. The guy behind the wheel saw Jenna and immediately broke eye contact by looking at his steering wheel. He obviously recognized her, even out of uniform, and was guilty of something—considering the old jalopy he was driving, she assumed it wasn’t grand theft auto.
Jenna held jurisdiction over all of Pointvilla County, which included Chestnut, neighboring Bay’s End, and the surrounding wilderness—which was known locally as Marietta Wood. Not only were Chestnut and The End small towns with a combined population of less than fifteen thousand residents, but Jenna was somewhat of a celebrity due to two high-profile cases she’d worked.
Back in the nineties, when she’d been a rookie with the Bay’s End police force, she’d been instrumental in bringing down a bad cop. She’d lost a kidney when she was shot in the stomach while trying to apprehend Officer Mack Larson. The wound still hurt to this day. Or maybe that was the memory of the event. A teenage boy died after the fact, likely because Jenna hadn’t been able to watch after him. The papers had called her a hero although she hadn’t felt like one.
And two years ago, before she’d won the position of Sheriff of Pointvilla County, Jenna had arrested Emergency Room Physician Brent Cummings; a local shitstain who’d been using his elderly neighbor to supply himself and likely the entire town with illegally acquired pain medication. They’d never proved Cummings was selling, though. He died shortly thereafter of an overdose. The oddest part of his story was his association with one of The End’s only known serial killers. The entire case was a bit strange, but that was The End for you.