Page 79 of Gumdrops and Garland

“Brenda. Yes. Drunk,” she whispered, her voice quiet. “Shoved me. Hurt my side.”

“Your side?” I asked, checking her side where I was sitting but there was nothing. My gaze met Gabe’s and he glanced down at her other side only to jump up and grab a stack of towels off the shelf.

He threw one at me. “She has a stab wound. Hold that towel on it until the ambulance gets here. It looks superficial, but I’m not taking any chances.”

My hand was shaking when I pressed the towel to Indie’s side, her grimace enough to tell me that superficial or not, it hurt. “It’s okay, baby. Just hang in there.”

Gabe spoke into the walkie attached to his shoulder. “Dispatch.” He released the button until they answered and then he pressed it again. “Send a unit to Brenda Dickson’s place. See if she’s home. If she is, I want her brought to the station for questioning.”

“In regards to?” Dispatch asked.

“An attack on her daughter at the Bells Pass Bakery.”

“Is Indie all right?”

“Not as all right as I’d like her to be,” Gabe answered, staring at her wrist. “Let me know when you’ve picked her up.”

Commotion in the parking lot meant the EMTs had arrived and Gabe jumped up to fill them in.

They kept talking, but my focus was entirely on Indigo. I stroked the hair back off her forehead to keep it out of the blood, but also to keep my hand on her for comfort. “She’s not going to get away with this, baby. Her reign of terror is coming to an end. I promise you that tonight. You will never suffer at her hands again.”

She stared into my eyes for a moment before hers went closed. All I felt was a slight nod before the EMTs pushed me out of the way.

Chapter Twenty-Two

I moaned and rolled my head to the right, making eye contact with Lance lying next to me in his bed with a sleepy smile on his face.

“Sorry to wake you up, but remember what the doctor said about every two hours.”

I groaned again and nodded. “I remember. I also remember that my wrist hurts and so does my head.”

He sat up and climbed out of bed. “I’ll get you some ice and Advil. Stay put.”

He disappeared down the hall and I closed my eyes again, willing the pounding in my head to lessen. Despite my willpower, it wasn’t working. It had been pounding for hours and the doctor told me it would probably do that until morning. I glanced at the clock. It said three a.m. Guess it was morning.

Ivy had come running into the bakery just as the EMTs got me on the stretcher. Lance begged her to stay back and shut down the bakery before she came to the hospital. When she showed up in the ER waiting room thirty minutes later, they were already setting my wrist and casting it. I’ve never been more thankful for drugs in my life as I was when they gave me something that made me unaware of what was about to happen. When I came to again, I had a cast on my hand and a strict no work order for the next seventy-two hours. It would probably take me that long to figure out how to work with my hand in a cast anyway. At least it was my left hand. Upside, right?

I also had four stitches in my forehead where the metal rack had crashed down on me, but the doctor said I was lucky. If it hadn’t gotten caught on the other rack on the way down, I’d probably be dead. I was going to feel rough when the sun came up, but at least I was alive. Unfortunately, when the doctors verified that the injury to my side was a stab wound, they had no choice but to arrest Brenda for assault with a deadly weapon. I guess she was so snockered she fell asleep still wearing clothes with my blood on them.

Lance came back into the room with two icepacks and the medicine. After I swallowed the pills, I rested one ice on my forehead and one in my elbow crease the way the doctor instructed. Apparently, it cooled the blood going to your wrist and helped reduce inflammation, which helped with the pain. With a thick fiberglass cast, that was the only way to get relief.

“Thanks,” I whispered, closing my eyes again.

“You don’t have to keep thanking me, baby. I feel like this is my fault. I keep vacillating between self-hatred for leaving you there alone and being so damn proud of you for taking the hit someone else might not have been able to handle.”

“Don’t hate yourself, Lance. It wouldn’t have been any different if I had gone alone to work the way I usually do. I don’t understand the being proud part. Brenda wouldn’t have hurt anyone else. She was only looking to hurt me.”

“Brenda was, yes, but she didn’t push the rack over on you, right?”

“No, she shoved me and jostled me into them. That one was stuck on the other one and fell.”

“Right, so taking Brenda out of the equation, if someone else had jostled them, the same thing could have happened. What if the rack had fallen on Mel?”

I gasped and immediately regretted it when my head ached. A tear fell down my cheek and he wiped it away without a word. “I never thought of that. What if it was Mel or one of the kids? I have to go in tomorrow and find a safer way to store those racks.”

“You’ll do no such thing,” Lance said with a laugh. “You heard the doctor, and your boss. You aren’t getting near that place for at least three days, and then only if you’re cleared after all your blood tests come back.”

“I’m fine, Lance,” I promised, even though I didn’t know that to be the case. “The stab wound was superficial and the blood tests are just a precaution.”

---