Lindsey dashed down the hallway. She was forced to take small steps since she was in her pencil skirt and heels, which was just as well, as she had to swerve around two patrons in a tug-of-war over the latest Stephen King novel and a mom pushing a stroller with twin babies. Then she was out the main door and running down the sidewalk with Beth on her heels.
When they reached the street, they stopped to check both ways, and Beth, gasping for breath, asked, “What happened?”
No cars were coming. Lindsey cut across the road, not bothering to use the crosswalk.
“It was a hit-and-run,” Lindsey said. “Theresa stepped into the road, and a car came out of nowhere and hit her and then sped off.”
“Oh my God!” cried Beth.
Together, they reached Theresa. She was lying on her side, curled up into a ball and rocking ever so slightly back and forth. She was gasping and panting, and high-pitched moans were coming from her throat. Dennis and Sam were kneeling beside her, looking as if they were afraid to touch her but wanted to comfort her.
“Theresa, we’ve called an ambulance. What can I do for you?” Lindsey crouched down beside the woman.
“My leg,” Theresa cried. “Oh, my leg. It hurts. It hurts so bad. I think I’m going to be sick.”
A sheen of sweat had beaded up on her skin, which was a sickly shade of gray.
“I think she’s going into shock,” Dennis said. “I saw this when a buddy of mine had his arm blown off in Vietnam.”
“Her leg is definitely broken,” Sam said. “Look at the weird angle of it.”
Lindsey glanced at Theresa’s shin and felt her stomach lurch. It was bent forward. Shins weren’t supposed to go that way. She felt her own stomach roil and knew the pain Theresa was feeling had to be excruciating.
“I think I’m passing out,” Theresa said. Her eyes rolled back into her head, and her entire body relaxed.
“Oh, crap!” cried Beth. She hunkered down beside Lindsey. “Is it okay if she passes out? What if she also hit her head? There could be a traumatic brain injury happening, and passing out would be a definite no-no.”
“You’re supposed to raise a person’s feet when they pass out,” Sam said.
They all glanced at Theresa’s leg. Lindsey shook her head. No one was willing to touch it and risk causing more damage or hurting her.
“She’s breathing,” Dennis said. He moved closer so he could see the rise and fall of her chest. “I say we let her be, but maybe you should talk to her—you know, reassure her.”
“It’s going to be okay, Theresa,” Lindsey said. She brushed back a hank of thick dark hair from Theresa’s forehead. “We’re here, and we won’t leave you until help arrives.”
Theresa blinked twice, and Lindsey took that to mean she could hear her. A shudder rippled through Theresa’s body, and her teeth were chattering.
“Here, she might be cold from the drop in her blood pressure.” Sam unbuttoned his wool cardigan and handed it to Lindsey to drape over the injured woman.
The sound of a siren was just audible, and Beth said, “I’ll flag them down.”
She jumped up and stood on the side of the road, shoving the hood off her head so she looked less like a pigeon and more like a person. She bounced up and down and waved her arms. The ambulance driver homed in on her and pulled over. In seconds, two EMTs, a male and a female, were out of the vehicle and tending to Theresa and her leg.
Lindsey stepped back to give them room. She stood with the others as they watched the man and woman go to work checking Theresa’s vitals and preparing her to be lifted onto the stretcher.
“What happened?” the woman asked. She glanced up at the group while she opened her medical kit. Her name tag read Annie.
“Hit-and-run,” Lindsey said. The words fell like stones falling from her mouth. A hit-and-run, here in Briar Creek in the middle of the day. It seemed so unthinkable. So unlikely. She glanced up at the sky. The same fluffy white clouds she’d been admiring before were rolling by, but suddenly they felt ominous instead of pretty. She shivered.
“Ma’am, can you hear me?” the male EMT said to Theresa. “I’m going to have to move you just a bit.”
Theresa whimpered, and Lindsey turned her head away. She couldn’t bear to watch. She noticed the others did as well.
“Keep everyone back!” The order was barked from the sidewalk, and Lindsey saw Emma Plewicki, the chief of police, directing one of her men, Officer Kirkland, to keep people away from the area.
It was then that she noticed a crowd had gathered across the street. This was not surprising, given that everyone in the small town kept track of everyone else. This community closeness had seen them through hurricanes, blizzards, summer tourists, and property-tax hikes.
“Lindsey, what happened?” Emma demanded as she joined them.
“Theresa Huston was struck by a car when she stepped off the curb to cross the street,” Lindsey said. “It appears her leg is broken.”
“And the driver?” Emma asked.
“Sped off,” she said.
Emma’s lips compressed to a hard, thin line. Emma Plewicki was a good-looking woman with a heart-shaped face, a head of thick, glossy black hair, and a curvy figure that distracted from the raw muscle beneath the swerves. And most of the time she wore a wide, warm smile that greeted the residents of Briar Creek even while she mediated their difficulties. That smile was gone right now, and in its place was a look of cold fury. Emma took crime in her town personally.
“Can you describe the car?” Emma asked. She pushed her narrow-brimmed police hat back on her head and surveyed the scene, taking in the tire marks on the road and the bent iron fencing that encircled the park. Officer Kirkland was standing on the far side of the road, keeping the gawkers over there while asking questions and canvassing the crowd for any information.
“It was a sedan, four doors, white,” Lindsey said. She glanced at the others. “Right?”
Dennis nodded but Sam shook his head.
“It was a two-door,” Sam said.
“No, it wasn’t,” Dennis argued.
“Oh, what do you know?” Sam asked. “You were about to lose to me at checkers.”
“I was not! I was about to triple jump you for a king.”
“Puh.”
The two men looked like they were about to square off for a shoving match. Lindsey eased her way in between them and sent Beth a desperate look. She gave Lindsey a slight nod to let her know her message had been received and slid in between the two men as well, creating a nice two person buffer.
“I only saw the back of the car. It was definitely white,” she said. “Honestly, I just followed Lindsey when she ran out of the building. I wasn’t even sure of what was happening.”
“We’re about ready to roll out,” Annie, the medic, said to Emma.
They loaded Theresa onto a stretcher. Her right leg had been braced, and she was strapped down. Annie held up Sam’s sweater, and he took it from her with a nod.
“That was quick thinking,” she said.
Sam shrugged like it was no big deal, but Lindsey could tell he was pleased to have been able to help.
“I’m going to follow them,” Emma said. “Lindsey, can you give me a quick rundown of what you saw?”
“There’s not much to tell. It happened pretty fast. Theresa was walking through the park. She stepped into the road to cross the street, when out of nowhere this car appeared, and before she could get out of the way, it sped up and hit her.”
Emma frowned. “You’re certain it sped up when Theresa stepped into the crosswalk?”
“Positive,” Lindsey said. “I was standing in the back room of the library, looking out the window, and I had just turned away when I saw the car out of the corner of my eye. That’s what made me look. While I was watching I heard the engine rev as the driver sped up.”
“I saw it, too,” Dennis said. “I even said to Sam, ‘What’s that fool doing?’”
“He did,” Sam agreed. He pushed back his baseball cap and scratched his head. “Is Ms. Huston going to be all right?”
“I don’t think we’ll know for sure until she’s had some X-rays,” Emma said. “Back to the vehicle—was there anything distinctive you remember about it? Dents, mismatched tires, broken windows, bumper stickers, anything?”
Lindsey shook her head. The others did the same.
“Did anyone get a look at the driver?” Emma asked.
Lindsey glanced at Sam and Dennis. They’d been closer than she had, but they were elderly and she had no idea how good their eyesight was. Plus, like her, they had probably focused on Theresa and not the car.
“Sorry. I didn’t get a good look,” Sam said.
“Me neither,” Dennis said. “Hell of a thing to have happen.”
“We’re taking her into New Haven,” the male EMT said to Chief Plewicki. He looked as if he was about to say more and then thought better of it. Instead, he helped lift the stretcher into the back of the ambulance and shut the doors.
Lindsey suspected he’d been about to tell them how badly her leg had been broken. He didn’t need to. She doubted she’d get the visual of that weirdly bent leg out of her mind for a long time to come.
“I’m right behind you,” Chief Plewicki said.
She turned and strode toward her squad car.
“Theresa! Oh my God, Theresa!”
They all turned toward the street to see Liza Milstein pushing through the crowd with two students about the same age running beside her. She was a petite young woman in her early twenties with light brown hair that she wore in a ball on top of her head. She was clutching a stack of textbooks in her arms, and her backpack was unzipped and hanging off one shoulder as if she’d been interrupted in the middle of her studies and hadn’t bothered to put her books away. A set of headphones dangled around her neck, but she seemed oblivious to all of it as she ran toward them, looking frightened.
Meredith Lane and Zach Stoliwicz were right behind her. Lindsey had come to know all three of these college students, along with Toby Carter, who wasn’t with them at the moment, as the four students had formed a study group that met in the Briar Creek Public Library two years ago when they began commuting to college in New Haven.
“Theresa—is Theresa Huston in there?” She waved her hand at the ambulance. Liza was panting for breath, and Zach grabbed her backpack before it fell to the ground.
“Maybe,” Emma said. She paused beside the distraught young woman. “Are you family?”
“No, maybe, sort of. Is she all right? What happened?” cried Liza.
Emma gave her a hard stare. “Unless you’re family, I’m not at liberty to—”
“She’s my tennis coach, and she’s engaged to my father. That makes me soon-to-be family. You have to let me see her!”
“She has a right to know,” Meredith said. She supported her friend by putting an arm around her shoulders.
Emma hesitated. Larry Milstein, Liza’s father, was well known in town, as he owned one of the largest furniture franchises in the country and was always good for a donation whenever the town was having a fund-raiser for new school equipment or a new cruiser for the police department. Emma nodded at the driver, and he opened the doors.
“Liza.” Theresa lifted her head with a wince. She glanced at the young woman standing by the open door. “I’m all right. Please don’t worry your father. I’m fine.”
“Worry him?” Liza said. “Look at you—he’s going to go mental.”
She didn’t wait for an invitation but climbed into the ambulance. She turned around and took her backpack from Zach with a quick nod of thanks.
“You don’t have to—” Theresa protested.
“Yes, I do. I won’t leave you alone,” Liza interrupted. She glanced at the driver and scowled. “Can’t you see she’s in pain? Let’s go!”
Liza’s command got everyone moving. The driver shut the door and hurried to the front of the vehicle.
“All right, I’m off. If any of you think of anything you feel is important, call me,” Emma cried over her shoulder as she dashed to her squad car.
“Of course,” Lindsey said.
They stood motionless as the ambulance flipped on its lights and sirens and sped out of town with Chief Plewicki right behind it. The silence that followed their departure felt heavy, as if a large hand were pressing down on the small seaside community, pushing out the air and making it hard to breathe.
“I have lived here all my life,” Dennis said. “And I have never seen anything like that. A hit-and-run, can you believe it? Right here in the center of town in broad daylight.”
“What is wrong with people?” Sam agreed. “He didn’t slow down or stop or anything. He had to have seen her. He intentionally swerved into the bike lane to hit her.”
“He?” Lindsey asked. “Did you see that it was a man?”
Sam frowned, then shook his head. “He had a hat on. I just assumed it was a man.”
“Did either of you recognize the car?” She glanced between Sam and Dennis.
“It was a Chevy,” Dennis said.
“No, it was a Honda,” Sam argued.
“What sort of hat was he wearing?” Beth asked.
Lindsey gave her an approving nod. Good question.
“Baseball hat,” Sam said. “A Mets hat.”
“No, it was a Yankees hat,” Dennis argued.
“Either way, you should tell Chief Plewicki that the driver was wearing a hat,” Lindsey said. “That’s the sort of detail she was looking for. Did you see anything else, anything at all?”
“No,” they said together.
Lindsey glanced at Beth. She looked as discouraged as Lindsey felt. She supposed this was why eyewitnesses were frequently considered unreliable. Three of them had been watching, and they couldn’t agree on the type of car or the type of hat the driver was wearing, none of it, and they had all seen the exact same thing.
“Hey!” Toby Carter, another student from the study group, jogged toward them. “Did I just see Liza climb into an ambulance? Is she okay?”
“She’s all right,” Meredith said. She turned to face Toby. “But Theresa, her dad’s fiancée, was hit by a car. That’s who was in the ambulance.”
“Oh no.” Toby frowned. “Is she going to be all right?”
Zach shrugged. “It looked pretty bad. We saw the crowd gathering from the library window, and Liza recognized Theresa’s sweat suit and came running out here. Where were you? You know we were supposed to meet up to study, right?”
“Yeah, sorry, I spaced on the time,” Toby said. He glanced away, taking in the calm water of the bay before turning back to his friends. “Did anyone see the driver? I mean, who would drive like that through the middle of town?”
“That’s what I want to know. A crazy driver almost took me out in front of the Blue Anchor, and he was coming from this direction.” Charlie Peyton, Nancy’s nephew who worked for Sully part-time as a boat captain, strode toward them. His shoulder-length black hair hung over his face, and when he pushed it back out of his eyes, Lindsey noticed his fingers were shaking.
“You all right, Charlie?” she asked.
He put his hand on the back of his neck. “Yeah, I’m just a little shook up. I’d just finished my lunch at the Anchor when I heard a car screech. I stepped out to see what was happening, and the guy almost hit me. I had to dive out of the way.”
He gestured to his jeans, and Lindsey noticed one knee was torn and his Doc Martens were scuffed. He was sweating profusely for a day that was on the brisk side of cool, and his eyes were wide, as if he were stuck in a permanent state of surprise.
“White car?” Lindsey asked.
Charlie nodded.
“Theresa Huston was crossing the street and was hit by a car, a white car, just a little while ago,” Beth said. “I’m sure it was the same one that almost hit you.”
“Oh, that’s awful!” one of the women from the beach said as she joined their small group. “We could hear the commotion but couldn’t see anything. I was afraid to come up from the beach in case it was some sort of nutjob on the loose.”
“What’s worse is the driver took off,” Sam said.
Dennis looked at Charlie. “You didn’t recognize him, did you?”
Charlie shook his head. “No, but I’ll remember his hooked nose and beady-eyed stare for the rest of my life. If I did know him, I’d have chased him down.”
“Good thing you didn’t then,” Beth said. “Clearly, the person is disturbed. If they didn’t stop when they hit one pedestrian, they weren’t going to stop for a second.”
Charlie was shockingly pale, and Lindsey could tell he was trying to shake off the adrenaline surge that had left him shaky. She gave him a bracing hug.
“I’m glad you’re all right,” she said. Charlie hugged her back hard, and Lindsey felt the breath get squeezed out of her lungs. As if realizing he was holding her too tight, Charlie quickly released her and stepped back. “Sorry.”
“It’s oka—” Lindsey was cut off by an imperious voice coming from the curb.
“Officer Kirkland, you will let me pass, or I will take down your badge number and file a formal complaint.”
They turned as one to see Nancy Peyton nose to nose with Officer Kirkland, who was doing his best to cordon off the area with some plastic yellow crime scene tape.
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but I can’t have people traipsing through—”
“That is my nephew,” Nancy declared. “If you want to keep me from him, you’ll have to arrest me.”
They stared at each other for several seconds, and then Kirkland grunted. In the battle of wills, Nancy had forty years of sharply honed endurance on him. He didn’t stand a chance.
“Fine, but walk around and not through the area where the victim was struck by the car.” Officer Kirkland rolled his eyes toward the heavens as if seeking patience.
“Charlie, are you all right?” Nancy cried as she jogged around the crime scene perimeter and reached for her nephew. She wrapped him in a fierce hug, and then leaned back to study him. “You look like you were in a fight.”
“I’m all right, Nanners,” he said. He hugged her back, and Lindsey noticed he looked less shaky. “I’m in better shape than Theresa Huston, at any rate.”
Another squad car arrived, and Kirkland ushered all the bystanders out of the area so that the police could investigate the scene. Lindsey glanced at the dented railing and wondered whether they would call the state police crime scene unit to come and collect paint scrapings or note any tire marks that might help identify the car that was involved.
Her curiosity made her want to linger, but Lindsey knew the most helpful thing she could do was to get out of the way. Besides, it was possible that someone in the library had seen something, and maybe she could get some information for Chief Plewicki.
“Let’s head back to the library,” she said to Beth. “We should tell the others what happened.”
“Right,” Beth said. “And maybe if we’re lucky, one of our patrons saw something that will help the police out.”
Lindsey glanced at her, and Beth shook her head. “Don’t even pretend you weren’t thinking the same thing.”
“Oh, I was thinking it,” Lindsey admitted. “I’m just surprised that you were.”
“Clearly, I’ve been spending too much time with you,” Beth said. “Being a buttinsky is contagious.”
Lindsey laughed. She knew her need for information was usually her downfall. Over the past couple of years, she’d had several harrowing episodes, such as boat chases, being held at gunpoint, and locked in a storage shed in the dead of winter. All of these things should have nipped her curiosity, but no. Instead, she took comfort in the fact that in each instance, the criminal had been caught because she hadn’t been able to ignore pursuing the facts. She felt the same need for answers right now.
It was like an incurable disease. She desperately wanted to know who was driving that car. Why had they sped up when Theresa stepped into the road? Was it an accident or on purpose? Where had they gone? Were they drunk or uninsured? Had they just panicked? It didn’t feel like it to Lindsey. From what she had seen, the car had appeared to be aiming for Theresa. Was Theresa the target, or was the driver out to hit anyone who got in their way? The questions spun through Lindsey’s mind, ending with the most concerning of all: If Theresa was a target, would the driver come back and try it again? Lindsey knew the events of the day would plague her until she had some answers, and what better place to start asking questions than the library?