Page 69 of Brave
His hand squeezed hers again. “You didn’t call me, honey. I decided a celebration was more important than what I had planned. I was just pulling back into the driveway when I heard the shots. You don’t remember I broke down your door? Pony was bleeding hard. I pressed a towel to her head and called the ambulance.”
Blinking, she shook her head. “Pony isn’t dead?”
“If he’d had a bigger caliber gun or better aim, she might be. But no, honey.” Pulling her close, seeming not even to care as he brushed a kiss across her forehead, Carlson said, “She isn’t great, but she isn’t dead.”
For the first time in what felt like hours, Cynthia managed to breathe.
Her mother was checked into one room.
“Shock,” the doctor told them. “She’s fine. She can go home tomorrow.”
Police kept coming and going. There was one standing outside her mother’s door, making it impossible for Cynthia to work up the courage to approach.
Pony was checked into ICU on the other end of the floor. Now and then, she got up and with Carlson’s help, walked the length of the hospital far enough to check on her too. Police were in and out of her room as well.
“The bullet glanced off her skull, leaving a nice gash but doing no real harm,” another doctor told her. “We’ve stapled the wound and are keeping her for observation just to make sure there’s no concussion. The police will be talking to her for a few hours at least, but she can go home tomorrow so long as someone will be there to keep an eye on her.”
He’d said a lot more than that really, but all she really remembered was the animalistic sound of Pony’s crying when the detectives told her Ethen was dead.
God, that sound. Cynthia shivered, the echoes of it still ringing in her foggy head. She’d wanted so much to go in to her, to wrap her arms around her, hug and comfort her. The need was so intense, she would even have gone in with the police and detectives still present. But Pony had taken one look at her and gone wild.
“This is your fault!” she’d screamed. It took a doctor and two orderlies to hold her to the bed so she wouldn’t rip the IV from her arm and come after her. “He forgave us! He wanted us back, but you killed him! I loved him and you killed him anyway!”
A nurse made her go back to the waiting area, well out of Pony’s sight. But those wailing screams had gone on and on, drowning out the alert that went out over the speaker system, until they sedated her.
That had been hours ago. Pony was sleeping now and Cynthia’s fog had lifted. And still she sat glued to that chair in the waiting area, as if she were bound by invisible tethers. The detectives came to talk to her, but Carlson cut them off. “Give it a rest, guys. She’s been through a lot. You can talk to her tomorrow.”
“And you are?” one of the men asked.
“Another witness to what happened,” Carlson happily told him, “and the guy who will lawyer her ass up, making it even more difficult for you to talk to her. I know you’re just trying to do your job. I appreciate that, but she’s been through about what she can handle tonight. You can talk to her tomorrow.”
Sighing, the other man said, “Look—”
“No,” Carlson cut in. “Unless you can tell me how the hell Ethen got released from prison ahead of his parole date or how he got his hands on a gun, then this conversation is over.”
“He was already scheduled to be released,” the first man said. “The prison’s overcrowded. They let a bunch of guys go free today. Normally, they try to notify people when that happens, but they must not have got to you all yet. We don’t know where he got the gun, but we’re working on it. If we can just have a word with her while the details of what happened are still fresh in her mind…”
Carlson remained, an unmovable wall between her and them, until they gave in and left. She couldn’t even find the will to tell him thank you. She was trapped, stuck in a dream-like existence where everything both looked and felt like a nightmare. It didn’t seem real. It had to be happening to someone else. She was sitting comfortably in a movie theater somewhere, watching this all play out onscreen.
Two sets of jean-clad legs walked out of nowhere, stopping in front of her.
She looked up, first at the dark-haired, grey-eyed stranger standing in front of her, and then at Spencer just behind him.
“This is the other one I told you about,” Spencer said.
“Hello, Cynthia,” the stranger said, and she looked at him. His brown hair was tied back in a ponytail. The paleness of his skin around the neckline and snug sleeves of his white polo shirt showed the sharp contrasting color of a man who spent time out in the sun. He wore a rodeo buckle on the worn leather belt that wrapped his lean waist. His eyes, however, his eyes were what caught her. They were slate gray, almost as pale as Ethen’s. It was a similarity that made her shiver, especially when he lowered himself to squat in front of her, bringing himself down to her level. “Cynthia, my name is Marcus Hawke. Are you all right?”
She had no idea how even to process that question.
“I understand you’re a friend of Pony’s. She doesn’t know it yet, but I’m a friend of hers too. I know this is going to be difficult and you won’t understand why, especially after all that’s happened, but she’s coming home with me. You’ve done everything you can for her, but now it’s my turn. I need you to go say your goodbyes. It’s going to be a very long time, if ever, before you see her again.”
Still trapped in someone else’s movie, Cynthia looked from him to Carlson.
“I’ll go with you,” Carlson offered, rising to stand and holding out his hand.
Together, they walked down the hall to Pony’s ICU room. She stopped at the doorway, reluctant to go inside. With the help of whatever sedative the doctors had given her, Pony was still asleep. They’d restrained her, but somewhere in the last few moments of free will that she’d had, she’d turned her face away.
Carlson touched her shoulder, silent and supportive. She wanted to go inside, but she didn’t. From the open doorway, she drank her visual fill of one who was her last tie to a part of her life that had been far from happy, and then she walked away.
