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I’m afraid that the 911 dispatcher found me less than coherent.
“Someone tried to kill my dog’s vet,” I said as soon as the voice on the other end confirmed that I’d reached emergency services.
“Name, please?” the voice said.
“Emma Iverson. I’m afraid she’s in a bad way.”
“Where are you calling from, Ms. Iverson?”
“The veterinary clinic in Amatista. She’s moaning a little, but—”
“Do you know the street address of your location?”
The poor woman on the floor let out another moan. The bleeding on the back of her head seemed to have more or less stopped. I remembered hearing somewhere that head wounds often appear worse than they actually are because the head tends to bleed more profusely when cut than other parts of the human anatomy.
“I’ll have to go outside to find the address,” I told the dispatcher. “Shouldn’t I try and do something for the victim?”
“We can’t dispatch an ambulance until we have your exact location,” the voice on the other end of the phone informed me as if Amatista were big enough to get lost in.
It was like talking to one of those weird in-home voice-activated devices which, while privy to great swaths of the collective knowledge of humankind, is not necessarily at the ready with the particular bit of information you require.
I half expected to be offered a list of restaurants in a three-mile radius that offered delivery. Of course, there would be zero options on that list. We have only one restaurant, the Bird Cage Café, which does not deliver. If you blink as you pass through Amatista, you’ll miss it altogether.
Clearly, the officious voice on the other end of the line had never been to Amatista and didn’t know that there was only one vet clinic, it was visible from the highway, and any ambulance driver who’d ever been to Amatista, never mind the police, wouldn’t have any trouble finding it.
I decided to play along with the voice. There’s no use arguing in these situations.
I darted into the reception area and plucked a business card out of the little plexiglass holder on the counter.
“14378 Highway 14. The cross street is Calle Ocho.”
“Thaaannk you,” said the voice drawing out the a in an exaggerated show of exasperation. “I have dispatched emergency services to your location. They should be arriving in twenty to thirty minutes. Please stay on the line in case I need further information.”
That’s the problem with living way out in the middle of nowhere: when you need help, it takes ages to arrive. I decided that calling on local help was my best bet.
“I’m going to have to hang up on you, Alexa,” I told the impatient dispatcher.
“My name is not Alexa; it’s Cammie.”
“My apologies. I’m going to hang up and summon local help.”
“I’d advise you to stay on the line.”
“Can you tell me how to assist a woman lying face-down in a pool of her own blood?”
“Is the injured individual in any immediate danger?”
“Not unless her attacker returns,” I said.
“Do you know the identity of her attacker?”
“No.”
“Do you have any reason to believe her attacker might return?”
I wanted to say, “How should I know?” but instead, I just said, “No,” and walked to the open door of the exam room, pulled it shut, and activated the button lock, just in case.
The dispatcher’s question increased my urgency to summon assistance or at least company.
Earp, who’d initially howled his little head off and thrown his body repeatedly against the closed door of the exam room across the hall after I’d locked him in, had gone quiet.
He was too quiet, which made me worry that the pug had gotten into something in there and was currently consuming it, edible or not.
“Don’t move the victim and wait for help to arrive,” the dispatcher told me.
“Anything else?” I asked.
“Don’t move the victim and wait for help to arrive,” she repeated as if reading off of a script.
That was not terribly helpful. I already knew how to do nothing.
“I’ll call back if there’s anything else you need to know,” I said and hung up before not-Alexa could repeat her instructions for the third time.
Unfortunately, we do not have a doctor living in Amatista. We do not even have a nurse. We have two vets, but one was currently incapacitated on the floor, and the only number I had for Dr. Bagley triggered a recorded message that I was pretty sure originated with the landline that rang a few times in reception before going silent.
We didn’t have a doctor. We didn’t have a nurse. We didn’t even have a vet available. So, I did the next best thing: I called a lawyer.
“Hello, Emma,” Jason Wendell said when he answered. “You ready for our date tonight?”
I was supposed to be going to see a musical in Santa Fe that evening with Jason, Amatista’s only lawyer and most eligible bachelor.
Mr. Wendell had gained the exalted status of most eligible on the strength of being under forty, gainfully employed, and possessing all of his original teeth and most of his original hair.
I had not been sure if our outing to see the Santa Fe Players perform The Music Man was supposed to be a “date” date or not. Our relationship was a bit ambiguous. I was 100% in favor of moving us out of the friend zone, but I was a little hazy about how Jason felt.
“There’s been a bit of a crisis. I could use some help,” I told Jason.
Calling a veterinarian lying prostrate on the floor of the Amatista animal clinic surrounded by a pool of her own blood “a bit of a crisis” was rather understating the case for Jason hurrying right over, but it turned out that he didn’t need a great deal of urging to come to my assistance.
“Where are you?” Jason asked.
I imagine he was expecting me to say that I was at Little Tombstone—the rundown roadside tourist attraction I’d inherited from my grandmother and late aunt. There’s a crisis at Little Tombstone every other week, but not generally of a violent nature. More often than not, it’s because some bit of the ramshackle premises has decided to detach itself from the rest, or a pipe has spontaneously sprung a leak.
I have never once summoned Jason to deal with carpentry or plumbing emergencies. Jason Wendell wears imported, handmade leather loafers and starched white shirts. His strengths lie more in the intellectual realm, and he was probably next to useless when it came to rendering first aid. However, as we’d been instructed to do nothing but wait for help, I felt it would not be asking too much to request that Jason provide moral support.
“I’m at the vet clinic,” I told Jason as I knelt over Dr. Vance’s head and tried to decide if I should even touch her. “Dr. Bagley’s new vet appears to have been viciously attacked.”
“I’ll be right there,” said Jason and hung up.
Jason Wendell’s neat, modern concrete office building—which sticks out like a sore thumb in the sea of old adobe and wood frame structures that make up the rest of the village—was only a block away.
While I waited for Jason, I made sympathetic sounds in the direction of the injured woman, not that I believed she was in any condition to take comfort in them. I also made a pass around the room but discovered nothing except the possible source of the lipstick which Dr. Vance’s attacker had used to scribble his, or her, odious epithet.
A purse, which I assumed belonged to Reba, had been knocked to the floor, and the contents, including a bright pink billfold, spangled with rhinestones, a bottle of perfume—which fortunately had not broken as it fell—and a hairbrush lay scattered near the prostrate woman.
I was loathe to disturb the woman’s possessions and contaminate the crime scene, so I left them where they were. Besides, everything I could glean from the victim’s scattered belongings about the motive for hitting Reba on the back of the head was already apparent. It hadn’t been to get her cash or credit cards; her billfold remained snapped shut, and it looked like nothing from her purse had been disturbed save the lipstick.
Whoever had hit Dr. Vance in the back of the head must have snuck up on her, but perhaps it had been more of an impulsive attack than it appeared. Snatching up whatever happened to be at hand and scrawling a hateful message on the floor as an afterthought did not indicate—at least to my mind—a significant degree of premeditation.
The only thing it did suggest was that whoever had hit Reba in the back of the head wasn’t terribly fond of her, to put it mildly, or at least that’s the impression they’d wanted to make.
I supposed that a particularly clever thief who’d impulsively attacked Reba in an attempt to prevent her from reporting his actions might have scribbled the words “Die Reba Die” in an attempt to make the attack appear to be the result of a personal vendetta, but as I stood there making vaguely reassuring sounds at Reba, I decided that scenario was highly unlikely.
Besides, unless the thief had been targeting something kept elsewhere in the clinic, nothing appeared to have been stolen. A row of rodeo trophies, which I assumed were a recent addition to the exam room since Dr. Vance had joined Dr. Bagley’s practice, were neatly aligned on the top of the cabinet above the counter that flanked the wall behind the exam table.
I was tempted to reach up and take one down to examine it in leu of disturbing the bloodied trophy that lay at Reba’s feet, but when I walked over, I discovered I couldn’t even brush the bases with my fingertips when I went up on tip toe.
I glanced at the framed certificates on the walls, which attested to Reba Vance’s professional bonafides. One of the certificates was slightly askew as if someone had brushed up against it, but I resisted the impulse to straighten it.
Less than three minutes had passed when I heard the bell over the front door of reception tinkle and looked at the time on my phone, even though it had felt like I’d been waiting for twenty.
The speediness of this arrival put me on high alert. It was probably Jason, rushing to my assistance, but I called out his name through the door just to be sure.
When he answered back, I unlocked the door of the exam room.
“What happened?” he asked as he joined me in crouching over Reba’s body.
“It appears someone hit her in the back of the head with one of her own rodeo trophies.” I pointed to the bloodied trophy that lay almost at my feet. “What do you do for a semi-conscious person with a head wound?”
“You leave them be until help arrives. Do you know when that will be?”
I looked at my sent calls and did a little math in my head.
“Another fifteen to twenty-five minutes.”
“What’s her name?” Jason asked me.
“It must be Dr. Vance. Reba Vance. She’s who Earp had an appointment to see.”
“Reba,” Jason said, directly addressing the woman lying on the floor, “Can you hear me?”
It was just then that Earp started barking again and resumed throwing himself against the door of the exam room where he’d been confined against his will.
“I’d better let Earp out,” I told Jason and left him there, squatted on the floor next to the presumptive Dr. Vance’s body.