Chapter 18 – A Cry for Connection
Danni didn’t remember how she had gotten down the stairs, nor when the police had questioned her. Just that she kept clinging to the blanket wrapped around her, one ear filled with the sounds of soft sobs, the other barely making out the sounds of the questions the tall woman in the uniform was asking her. She had given her name, her age, her address, in a monotone, almost matter-of-fact manner but as soon as the woman had asked about Joey, the words had gotten stuck in her throat, choking on her until she almost suffocated on them. Someone else was talking on her other side, she was barely able to make out their voice over Maggie’s sobs. She couldn’t bear to look anywhere but straight ahead of her, her mind still filled with the stark memories of Joey in his bath, the blood dripping down his arms, the white of his face, the look on his face.
She was certain she would never forget that look.
His limp mouth hanging open, perhaps left that way by the echoes of his final scream. His eyes wide open, rolled back in his head, his shoulders covered in red that threatened to obscure his whole arms. She had never known that the human body could produce so much blood. She tried to call to mind a time where she might have come close, but there was no comparison.
She would surely never see so much blood again in her life. In the back of her mind, in a place she would only understand and acknowledge later, she would be thankful for that. But, at that time, the image flashed like a jammed projector before her eyes, forcing her to see it again and again every time she dared to blink. Her glasses felt more like screens, reflecting the ghastly tableau back at her. She whipped them off again and again, trying desperately to wipe away the picture to no avail. Why wouldn’t it go away? Why? Why did she keep seeing it every time she closed her eyes? Would it follow her? When had her life taken such a horrible left turn? When had she taken her hands off the wheel and taken such a hard turn in the wet?
“Ma’am… Ma’am… are you okay? Can you hear me?” Called a voice beside her that she didn’t register. It hadn’t occurred to Danni that she had stopped talking in the middle of an answer, her jaw hanging slack, her mouth suddenly dry.
“What… what was the question?” Danni asked, reaching for the edge of the blanket that someone had draped over her at some point. She couldn’t remember who or when.
“What was your relationship to the deceased?” The deceased. That was what Joey was now. Deceased. Just two little words, something so categorical, so formal, that stripped away all he was and reduced him to just another figure. He wasn’t a person with beaming eyes, a smile that warmed you from the inside out and a kind word for all he knew. He was just… gone… Was that it? Was that all he would be from now on? If the newspapers told of this, would they know his name? Know why he smelled of lavender every day? Know that he would give you the shirt off his back, literally?
Would any of them know him as she had? As well as any of those in the village had known him?
“We were… neighbours. Just neighbours… I guess… you could call us friends…” The words were getting stuck again and she had to stop to inhale just to even get them out, like she was trying to swallow a stone made of hot ashes. Doable, but painful. So very painful.
The woman was scribbling down something on a pad. There was sound, somewhere, she was sure of it. The sounds of a great many voices talking all at once, flashes of red and blue lights, a wind had kicked up at some point, but she couldn’t feel its usual bite, just how her hair brushed against her cheek and tickled her neck. Someone was crying. But the sounds and sights seemed to fade in and out of her awareness, as if someone were fiddling with a dial in her head that weakened or sharpened her senses. A shadow fell over her and her eyes flicked down to the ground, following it up to the hulking form of a man she vaguely recognised as Maggie’s husband, the man that had come out of the car beside her the day before. A man whose name she didn’t even know yet.
He and the policewoman who must have been speaking to Maggie began to exchange words and, eventually, quite a few gestures, though Danni was so wrung out, she scarcely understood anything that was being said to her. She felt as if she were a wet rag someone had squeezed until it was fraying apart at every seam. Even so, the scene slowly came into full, blindingly sharp focus for her. Police officers were stretching that tape with its toxic yellow colour and damning black stripes in front of Joey’s door, others were pulling parts of the crowd away from the collective and questioning them. What information they might glean from them, she didn’t know. What questions she might have answered in her stupor, she had no idea. One by one, police officers were coming in and out of Joey’s house, disappearing and reappearing around the corner to his door.
As the final piece of tape was tied off, Danni was filled with a sudden insane urge to scream, yell, beat at the door with her fists, howl, order them to take down the tape, to get out of Joey’s house, to stop fiddling with his things, to get out and leave him alone, that they must be ruining his rest, that they all had to leave and never return before he woke up or they would make him sleepy when he started work!
She could see it all now. She would tear the tape apart with her bare hands, scream and point, order the officers away, throw them out onto the street if she had to! She would go into the house to apologise, tell Joey that she or his sister would take over the shop floor for a few hours so he could catch up on his sleep and she would make him lunch as an extra apology. She would tell him all about the clothes that she had yet to wash, that she would get them to her as soon as possible, that she had come down to return what pieces of clothing she could.
Then she saw the doctors bringing out the stretcher and the world flipped upside down.
One moment, she had been sitting down and in the next, she was staring up at the sky, blinking dazedly, looking into the shadowed face of two strangers. Someone was patting her cheek lightly, the other making a strange sort of snapping noise her ear, both appearing to speak but she was unable to hear a word. Even her own thoughts came through to her consciousness as a jumped string of barely understandable ramblings. As strong hands reached under her arms and she was settled into a seated position again, only now realising that something must have buckled to send her to the ground like that. At the same time, the pair carrying the stretcher stumbled as they tried to navigate the ice-covered streets made all the worse by the rain that had since stopped. One of them slipped, the stretcher jolted and the sheet covering the limp frame underneath fell away.
There was a fresh scream.
This time, Danni was sure it had come from her.
It hadn’t taken much. Joey’s arm had fallen from underneath the sheet and in the light, everything was thrown into sharp relief. His skin, now resembling marble, had been slashed, that gaping red wound seeming to open wider like a horrible ear to ear grin of the insane. The crowd were growing louder, but it didn’t matter. All she could hear was a buzzing in her head, like so many hundreds of thousands of bees were making a hive in her head. The stretcher vanished into the back of an ambulance without lights or sirens, but it may as well as have been dropped into Danni’s lap for all the good it would do. She’d never be able to forget that sight.
A voice, familiar yet still sounding distant echoed in her ear and automatically, her head turned around to look into the face of the vicar. Behind him, the crowd were a mix of reactions. Some of the men had their hats against their chests, the women had hands covering their mouths, young children were pulling at their parent’s clothes, asking what was going on or more cautious parents had covered their children’s eyes, preserving their innocence. Vicar Nicholas’s mouth was moving, making sounds she had squint to understand, as though he were trying to whisper to her from across a large, crowded room.
“What?” The bees had been replaced by crashing waves, the roar of an angry sea. Noise was blocked out, her head a mess of half-formed questions and warring emotions.
“Let me take you home.” He said, slower this time and she was able to hear it above the din.
She only nodded in response, as the ambulance had pulled away and though the police were still questioning others, including Maggie and her hulking husband, it appeared that they were finished with her. That was the only reason Danni could fathom that the vicar would be suggesting she do anything but stay where she was.
Now she realised it, when she had understood that she was being questioned, her mind had summoned images of grey walled rooms with uncomfortable chairs and bad lighting, a sallow faced officer asking her a million and one questions, as if trying to catch her in a lie. That she may be the one suspected to be the murderer. That they would interrogate her with a good cop and a bad cop. She might get to see which of the cliches she saw so often in crime novels and tv shows held the most merit.
A hand had come to close around her upper arm, an arm went around her shoulders, and her legs began to move without her bidding. She didn’t even remember that she was leaving her bike behind, just barely able to register that she was being led up towards somewhere she only vaguely realised. Up the street, through somewhere that Sun Ellen faintly of wet grass, her feet bumping on what felt like wooden steps until she was being guided into an overstuffed chair. Light playing through the window, dyed vivid colours and recreating pictures of the floor told her that she was in the vicar’s house again. But why was she here? Why hadn’t he taken her home?
Footsteps echoed from the kitchen, coming closer as the vicar reappeared, holding something underneath his arm. Something that sloshed as he walked.
“What… is…” She lifted a hand to point at the thing.
“Something to help.” Was the answer.