Page 48 of Always Murder

By the time I reached Millie, she was pulling her phone out of her pocket.Her hands were shaking so badly that she couldn’t unlock it.I had the half-formed idea of taking the phone from her to help, but then I got close enough to see what was inside: the storage unit was small, with boxes and plastic totes and a workbench making the floor space even smaller.I had the impression of feathers and glue guns and approximately a million beads.

Paul lay on the floor, on his back, dressed in a coat and hoodie and joggers that wouldn’t have drawn a second look anywhere in town.His face was covered with blood.More of it matted his fair hair.A broken nose for sure.A laceration across his forehead, running up into his hairline.If you spend enough time at the dinner table talking about autopsy reports and forensic pathology, you get to become a kind of armchair expert on these kinds of things.That was how I knew I was looking at a wound delivered by a blunt object.Someone had hit Paul in the face, and the impact had shattered cartilage and split the skin wherever it didn’t have enough give.

Someone had gotten close enough to hit him in the face, I thought.

And then, more clearly, I thought: someone he knew.

Paul murmured something, and I realized his eyes were open—barely a crack in the mask of blood, but open.

“Yes, we need an ambulance,” Millie was saying into her phone, her voice thready.She rattled off an address.“I don’t know what happened.He’s hurt.”

“He’s conscious,” I told her.“He was hit in the head.”

She repeated those facts to the dispatcher—probably Jaklin Ruiz—while I crouched next to Paul.None of the visible injuries looked life-threatening.Head wounds bled a lot, and his nose was going to need some work.The real danger, though, was concussion, swelling of the brain, all the stuff I couldn’t see.

“Okay,” Millie was saying.“Okay, okay.Please hurry.”

I hurried to the Mazda3 and found Millie’s first aid kit under the driver’s seat.When I got back to the storage unit, Millie had one of Paul’s hands clasped in hers, while she kept the phone to her ear and murmured answers to whatever the dispatcher was asking.There was blood on Paul’s hand, too.Blood drying around his nails.When his limp fingers shifted, he left crimson marks wherever he touched her.

The first aid kit had several gauze pads, and I opened these and pressed one against the laceration on Paul’s forehead.

Paul groaned and shifted, and Millie pulled the phone away from her ear long enough to say, “Paul, STAY STILL!”

Believe it or not, that worked.

Settling onto the concrete slab, Paul began to mumble again.

“Hey,” I said, “it’s okay.Everything’s going to be okay.”

I couldn’t catch all of it, but words floated up out of the slurry of speech.Plaintive.Defensive.“—just playing, Millie, we were just wrestling—”

Tears spilled from Millie’s eyes, and she squeezed Paul’s hand harder as she shook her head.

I’m not exactly the most physically affectionate person—ask Millie sometime for her history of our first thirteen hugs, each of which was excruciatingly and somehow more awkward than the last—but I patted Paul’s chest and said, “You’re not in trouble.You’re fine.Just relax.”

Something inside his coat rustled under my hand.

In the distance, the first sirens began.

Millie turned toward the sound, answering another question in a low voice.I took the opportunity to reach into Paul’s pocket.

It was a long, narrow sheet of paper that had been folded twice, the kind that comes on a pad with a magnet so you can hang it on the fridge, the kind that always makes me think of grocery lists.I unfolded it.At the top, there was a flowery C, and it didn’t take a deductive genius to figure out whose fridge this paper had been hanging on.Below the C was a list of names done in an almost unreadable scrawl that had to be Paul’s handwriting.Most of the names had been crossed out.

The sirens were louder.Closer.

I worked my phone out of my pocket and took a picture of the list.Then I folded it and returned it to Paul’s pocket as flashing lights grew outside the storage unit, and the sound of crunching tires announced the first vehicle.

Chapter 16

A few hours later, we were all at Klikamuks General Hospital.

Allmeaning: the Naught family, the Naught family boyfriends (Elliott, David, and yes, even Keme), the sheriff, and me.

Bobby, naturally, had been the first deputy on the scene, and after Millie and I had told him what had happened, he’d done a sweep of the storage facility.By then, though, whoever had done this to Paul was gone.When the paramedics took Paul, Bobby suggested I drive Millie; he stayed to secure the crime scene.

At the hospital, we had to wait before we heard anything.And then we had to wait some more.The good news was that the doctor had done a CT scan, and Paul’s brain didn’t appear to have any swelling.(I’d been tempted to ask if they’dseena brain, which was mostly nerves, but also partly due to the fact that Paul had been such an idiot.) The bad news (if you were the friendly family sleuth) was that Paul was only allowed one visitor at a time in the ICU.And Christine and the sheriff were taking turns hogging him.

Not that Christine didn’t have a right—I mean, this was her son, after all—and obviously the sheriff needed to see if Paul could remember anything.But it meant I couldn’t get in there and do top-notch investigative work—which, in my mind, meant shaking Paul by the shoulders and shouting,What in the world were you thinking?

---