بخش 03 - فصل 47

47

Mr Hodges has a thousand questions, but Pete has no time to answer any of them. He ends the call and sprints down Sycamore Street to his house. He has decided getting Tina’s old wagon will take too long; he’ll figure out some other way to transport the notebooks when he gets to the Rec. All he really needs is the key to the building.

He runs into his father’s office to grab it and stops cold. His mother is on the floor beside the desk, her blue eyes shining from a mask of blood. There’s more blood on his dad’s open laptop, on the front of her dress, spattered on the desk chair and the window behind her. Music is tinkling from the computer, and even in his distress, he recognizes the tune. She was playing solitaire. Just playing solitaire and waiting for her kid to come home and bothering no one.

‘Mom!’ He runs to her, crying.

‘My head,’ she says. ‘Look at my head.’

He bends over her, parts bloody clumps of hair, trying to be gentle, and sees a trench running from her temple to the back of her head. At one point, halfway along the trench, he can see bleary gray-white. It’s her skull, he thinks. That’s bad, but at least it’s not her brains, please God no, brains are soft, brains would be leaking. It’s just her skull.

‘A man came,’ she says, speaking with great effort. ‘He … took … Tina. I heard her cry out. You have to … oh Jesus Christ, how my head rings.’

Pete hesitates for one endless second, wavering between his need to help his mother and his need to protect his sister, to get her back. If only this was a nightmare, he thinks. If only I could wake up.

Mom first. Mom right now.

He grabs the phone off his father’s desk. ‘Be quiet, Mom. Don’t say anything else, and don’t move.’

She closes her eyes wearily. ‘Did he come for the money? Did that man come for the money you found?’

‘No, for what was with it,’ Pete says, and punches in three numbers he learned in grade school.

‘Nine-one-one,’ a woman says. ‘What is your emergency?’

‘My mom’s been shot,’ Pete says. ‘Twenty-three Sycamore Street. Send an ambulance, right now. She’s bleeding like crazy.’

‘What is your name, si—’

Pete hangs up. ‘Mom, I have to go. I have to get Tina back.’

‘Don’t … be hurt.’ She’s slurring now. Her eyes are still shut and he sees with horror that there’s even blood in her eyelashes. This is his fault, all his fault. ‘Don’t let … Tina be … hur …’

She falls silent, but she’s breathing. Oh God, please let her keep breathing.

Pete takes the key to the Birch Street Rec’s front door from his father’s real estate properties board.

‘You’ll be okay, Mom. The ambulance will come. Some friends will come, too.’

He starts for the door, then an idea strikes him and he turns back. ‘Mom?’

‘Whaa …’

‘Does Dad still smoke?’

Without opening her eyes, she says, ‘He thinks … I don’t … know.’

Quickly – he has to be gone before Hodges gets here and tries to stop him from doing what he has to do – Pete begins to search the drawers of his father’s desk.

Just in case, he thinks.

Just in case.