TIME PASSED, BUT SELDOM IN HER HEAD. IN THE MONTHS THAT FOLLOWED, it was hard for Erin to shake the feeling that she was still back there, lying on the concrete floor of the basement or rummaging through the room where she’d discovered the plastic sled. She was laughing with Robbie on the hillside behind Jacob’s Field or biking next to the BNSF Railway as the massive steel cars trundled past her. Erin visited the places she remembered while she was awake and then again when she closed her eyes to sleep. In her dreams, things sometimes turned out differently. She dug her mother up from the marsh and found that she was still breathing. The axe sliced through Erin’s ankle and lifted again to finish off the rest.
They met her at the hospital: her father, Matta, and Lieutenant Stutzman. There were so many questions to answer, and Erin told them what she could that night and the rest of it when she was able. There were two operating rooms at Trinity Hospital but only one surgeon. Robbie’s case took priority. His spleen had been shattered in the crash that put an end to the life of Connie Griffin, and Erin waited in the emergency department while the team worked to save him.
“We’re gonna make it,” she’d told him in the yard next to the dried-out riverbed, but by the time the ambulance arrived, Robbie had closed his eyes and was no longer responding. The medics brought them both to the hospital, Erin riding shotgun in the front seat as the siren wailed and the paramedic worked frantically in the back to keep her friend alive.
“Come on now,” he said as he started the IV and connected it to a bag of fluid hanging from a hook in the ceiling. “You stay with me, okay?”
Erin looked back through the open walkway. “What’s the matter? What’s wrong with him?”
“His abdomen’s rock hard and his blood pressure’s in the toilet. Step it up,” the medic called to his partner. “He’s got a heart rate of one-fifty and he’s pale as a ghost.”
“He crashed his Jeep,” Erin told them. “He was wearing a seat belt.”
“Any medical problems?”
“He’s an alcoholic. He was showing signs of withdrawal before you got there.”
“Anything else?”
“I don’t know.”
“How are you related exactly?”
Erin thought of the many ways she could answer. “We’re friends,” she said. “We’ve known each other since we were kids.”
Erin looked down at Robbie from her seat in the cab of the ambulance. She could see the top of his head, the dark swath of hair against the stark white sheet pulled tight across the mattress.
The medic leaned across him and fished something out of the cabinet. “I’ve got two large bores going full tilt,” he called out to his partner. “He’s clenched down, so I can’t intubate. Make sure they know we’re coming in hot.”
The man in the driver’s seat picked up the radio and called it in to dispatch. “Tell them to get the OR ready. He’s in class IV hemorrhagic shock. Blood pressure’s next to nothing.”
“If he needs a transfusion, I can donate,” Erin told them. “Please don’t let him die. He wouldn’t have come if I hadn’t called him.”
The medic sitting next to her kept his eyes on the road. “Left-hand turn coming up,” he called back to his partner, who grabbed a handrail as the rig swung around the corner.
They pulled into the hospital a few minutes later. “Stay here,” the driver said. “You’re injured as well.”
Erin sat in the passenger seat as they pulled the stretcher out of the back and wheeled it through the open doors of the emergency department.
“Please,” she whispered, “he’s got to make it.” She looked through the windshield, but the world beyond was blurred and foggy on the other side of the glass.
“—waking up now,” he said, and Erin lifted a hand to her face to find a plastic oxygen tube with a prong inserted into each nostril. “She might be a bit sleepy for a while,” a voice said, “but the sedation should wear off over the next thirty to forty minutes. I’ve straightened the bones in her ankle, although she’ll still need to go to the OR to have it fixed. It can wait until morning, though.” Dr. Houseman put a hand on her forearm. “We’ll want to make sure your friend is stable before tying up the OR on an elective case.”
Erin started to close her eyes, and then opened them again. “How is he doing?” she asked. “He scared me, the way he looked in the back of the ambulance.”
“Dr. Jamison is a good surgeon,” he said. “Robbie is getting the best care possible.”
“He’s going to make it? You can tell me that, can’t you?”
“He’s in critical condition. Things are going about as well as can be expected.” He turned to Matta. “If I can get some additional information . . .”
“Of course,” Matta replied, and the two of them left the room together.
Erin closed her eyes and drifted off. She was back in the basement, standing over the skeletal remains of Angela Finley. “She needed a friend,” someone said, and when she turned around, it was Robbie the way she remembered him as a child. He stood at the foot of the stairs and wouldn’t look at her. His eyes were on the cement floor as his dark hair hung limply in his face. “I’ve got to go now,” he said, and Erin watched as he ascended the stairs, the sound of his footsteps hollow against the wooden boards.
She awoke with a start, her hands clutching the crumpled sheet beneath her. “Where is he?” she asked. “What’s happened to him?”
Her father was sitting in a chair at the bedside. He stood up and hovered over her, taking her hand in his own. “Are you talking about Robbie? He’s still in the operating room. There’s no word yet from the surgeon.”
She looked through the open doorway and saw Jeff Stutzman standing in the hallway, talking on his cell phone. He glanced up at her, hung up the phone, and entered the room. “How are you feeling?” he asked.
“Horrible. How’s Robbie?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and shook his head. “I don’t have any more information than you do.”
Erin turned to her father. “When will we know? Why can’t they tell us anything?”
“Let them work,” he said. “Let them focus on Robbie. They’ll answer our questions as soon as they’re able.”
“Okay,” she said, and looked back at the lieutenant.
“You’ve been to Connie’s house? You saw what was in the basement?”
“Briefly,” he said. “It’s a crime scene. I’ve called in the state forensics lab. They have people heading out there now.”
“And the other house, too? There are some things in the closet that belong to the victims.”
“Yes,” he said. “We’re on top of it. Right now you should rest. And I would really appreciate it if you and your father would stay in one place for a while and let us sort this out.”
“Okay,” she said. “I won’t be going back to either of those houses.”
“Good,” he said, and glanced at her splint. “How’s the ankle?”
“Hurts,” she said, “but not as bad as before.”
“Well, that’s progress.” He smiled. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but . . . I’m kind of glad that you broke it. It limits your mobility. Maybe it’ll be enough to keep you out of trouble while it heals.”
“I doubt it,” she said. “I’ve still got the other one.”
“Right.” He sighed. “Guess we’ll have to keep an eye on you, then.”
She looked at her father, then back at Jeff. “You want to hear about what happened?”
“You already told me,” he said, “before the sedation.”
“Oh.”
“I’ll listen again, though. I’ll listen as many times as you want to tell it.”
“I don’t remember what I told you when I first got here.”
“All the better,” he said. “Of course, if you’d like to have an attorney present . . .”
“No,” she said, “I can tell it myself.”
David reached out and put a hand on her shoulder. “Erin—”
“It’s okay,” she said, and locked eyes with her father. “I just want to tell him about today.”
Jeff pulled out a pen and a pocket-size notebook. “Go ahead,” he said. “Tell me again what happened.”
She recounted things as best she could, letting her father’s lies about what had happened in the past stand for now. Perhaps later their story would need to be amended. She would talk to Robbie first. The decision belonged to all of them.
“What will happen to the remains of the bodies?” she asked.
Jeff closed his notebook and put it away. “They’ll be sent to the state crime lab in Missoula,” he said. “After they’ve finished examining them, I expect they’ll be returned to Wolf Point to be cremated or buried . . . in a proper cemetery,” he added, glancing at David.
They talked for a while longer, and then it was time for Erin to be moved to the inpatient unit of the hospital. David asked if he could stay with her overnight, and although it was against the rules, the hospital staff decided to allow it. The nurse brought in a reclining chair that she placed beside the bed, and Erin and her father spent the rest of the evening in quiet conversation as they continued the delicate task of repairing the parts that were still broken between them.
Matta came to the room to let them know that Robbie was out of surgery and doing well, although Dr. Houseman was concerned about the severity of his alcohol withdrawal. The news that he had stabilized came as a great relief to Erin, and an hour later she fell asleep. There were no dreams that she could recall the next morning, but only a sense of reassurance that her father was watching over her. If she awoke during the course of the night, reliving the horrors that had happened that day, David never mentioned it. Erin opened her eyes seven hours later as the light of early dawn sifted through the window. Something had changed, she realized, and for a moment she was six again, awakening in the barn after delivering Miss Pepper’s calf the night before. Her mother would be fixing breakfast in the kitchen, only, Erin was older now, and Helen wasn’t with them. She had been put to rest like all the others, and maybe now the families of Wolf Point could mourn them as a community—united instead of divided—as they surrendered the dead to make way for the living.
Her father was sitting next to her with his face turned toward the window. She reached out and took his hand, and they watched the daybreak together as the first hour of the new morning unfolded before them.