CHAPTER 25
1561 Words
CHAPTER 25
There were voices, murmurs that sounded like they were coming from underwater. Tension. Worry. Would the nightmare never cease?
A high-pitched electronic wailing. Ceaseless. Relentless. Enough to drive you crazy if you let it.
Pain everywhere. Hot pain, as if a fiery lance still sizzled inside her. Over and over and over again.
People shouting commands. Hands poking here, prodding there. She wasn’t ready to wake up yet.
“Kennedy? Sweetie? Can you hear me?”
The voice pulled her out of some dark, murky mire. She returned slowly, reluctantly. The light overhead burned. Why was someone shining the sun in her eyes?
“She’s waking up.” The gush of enthusiasm sounded out of place as the nightmare begrudgingly loosened its hold.
She blinked. Her eyes were even scratchier than normal.
“It’s me, sweetie. Sandy. And Carl’s here, too.” The voice was pleasant, kind. If Kennedy had any tears left in her ducts, she might have let them flow.
A hand held hers. A voice, strong as the wind. Bold as the ocean. “We’re glad to have you back.”
She tried to focus. Carl. She didn’t recognize where she was. Was this the next chapter of the nightmare, a short reprieve before it dragged her back down in its clutches to the abyss?
“You’re all right, sweetie.” Sandy swept some hair off Kennedy’s brow. “You’re going to recover just fine.”
“You’re a very lucky young lady.” Carl beamed at her with a sort of paternal pride.
“What time is it?” The words made sense in her mind, but she couldn’t tell if they came out right.
“Excuse me.” At the sound of the authoritative voice, Carl and Sandy stepped aside. A man in a police uniform strode over to Kennedy’s bed. “I’m Detective Drisklay. I see you’re waking up.” He took a noisy sip from the Styrofoam cup he was holding.
Details of her kidnapping and rescue crept back into her memory. When she recalled the knife stab, she was thankful she didn’t feel anything but tired. Tired and groggy. How much time had gone by? How long had she been passed out? She wiggled her fingers. Everything was working fine. Now she had to check her ...
“I can’t move my feet.” She hadn’t meant to sound so panicked.
The detective cleared his throat. “Blame the anesthesia. The blade really couldn’t have made a safer cut ...”
Kennedy looked around for something she could vomit into.
The detective stirred the coffee in his cup. “Now that you’re awake, I have some questions to ask you.”
“Beg your pardon, officer.” Carl’s tone was respectful, but his words were resolute. “She’s just survived an abduction, a major injury ...”
Kennedy wasn’t sure how Carl’s retelling of all her recent trauma could help anything.
“What my husband is trying to say,” Sandy jumped in, “is that maybe you could give her a little more time to recover. She just woke up not a minute ago. I imagine she wants to talk to her mom and dad ...”
Kennedy’s throat constricted painfully at the mention of her parents.
The detective frowned. “Unfortunately, we have reason to believe that ...”
“I’ll do it.”
Three pairs of eyes stared down at her.
“I’ll answer your questions.” Kennedy still didn’t feel like her tongue was working quite right, but they seemed to understand her.
“You don’t have to,” Sandy crooned. “Don’t feel pressured ...”
“I already heard him make plans to kill somebody. A friend of Jodie’s.” She sucked in her breath. Jodie. She tried to sit up, but it was as if all her core muscles had gone on strike. “He sent Jodie to the hospital. She was passed out. He had tried to get her to take ...”
Detective Drikslay held up his hand. “We got the girl as soon as they came out of the complex. We were already there waiting.”
“That was some fast thinking you did, contacting us on the church website.” Carl was glowing as he stared down at her with his arm around his wife.
“We had plans to storm the complex for other reasons,” the detective explained. “We would have jumped in with gas until we learned they were also holding hostages.”
“What you did on that computer may have saved both of your lives,” Sandy gushed.
Kennedy didn’t care about any of this. “Where is Jodie now? Is she all right?”
“Your little friend will be just fine.” The detective stared at his coffee, and Kennedy immediately noticed his use of the future tense. She looked to Carl and Sandy.
“She lost a lot of blood.” Carl had such a different appearance when he wasn’t smiling. “She’s in another part of Providence right now getting a transfusion.”
Kennedy detected the heaviness that seemed to crouch down on everyone’s shoulders. She already knew the answer to her next question. “And the baby?”
Carl shook his head. “By the time she got here, it was too late.”
“It was her uncle.” Kennedy fixed her eyes on the detective, wondering if he was going to write that down on the little notepad in his breast pocket. “Anthony. He wanted to force her to have ...”
“We know all about Anthony Abernathy.” The detective scowled. “But I’m curious about what you said about killing someone.”
Kennedy told him how Jodie didn’t want her uncle to realize how far along in the pregnancy she really was. “Jodie said the boy wasn’t really the father, but her uncle would think it was. She didn’t want to get him in trouble. They mentioned a boys’ home. Vermont, maybe?”
Detective Drisklay nodded. “We’ll look into it.”
Kennedy wanted to see Jodie. She wanted to hug her, apologize for not finding a way to help her sooner. How much did one little girl have to endure? And then after she assured herself Jodie really was safe, Kennedy wanted to sleep for a very, very long time.
But she couldn’t. Not now. There was still work to do. “Jodie’s uncle told one of his men to go and ...” Could she bring herself to speak the words? “He told Dustin to go and kill that boy.” Had she really just said that? Had it all really happened? If she weren’t here lying in a hospital bed, if she didn’t have such vivid memories of the cold, the hunger, the knife stab, she might have thought it was a dream that felt a little too real.
“Well, you don’t have to worry about that,” the detective assured her. “Anthony Abernathy and Dustin are dead. Killed on the scene.”
Kennedy shut her eyes for a minute. Would she ever forget? Could she ever forget? “What about the other one? Vinny.”
“He got away, but we suspect he’s injured. The important thing is you’re safe, and so is the girl.”
“Her family knows by now?” Kennedy wondered how Wayne and Vivian Abernathy would respond to a crisis like this. What would it do to their picture-perfect family? She hoped Wayne would have the decency to stand up for his daughter instead of worrying how the events would impact his campaign, but she had her doubts.
“I just got back from praying with them.” Carl sounded tired. “I think they’re blaming themselves for what Anthony did. They never suspected.”
“She was babysitting over there all the time,” Sandy added. “They thought he just needed the extra help since Moriah died. They had no idea ...”
The detective cleared his throat, and Sandy took a step back. Kennedy tried to follow the gist of the conversation as he asked her more questions, but she never felt like she could grasp what was really going on. Her head felt as heavy as her calculus textbook when he finally left, mumbling something about sleeping off his coffee.
“I suppose we should be going, too.” Carl helped Sandy into her sweater.
“What, so soon? I thought the party was just starting.” The voice sounded familiar, but Kennedy couldn’t place it until she saw the hair.
“Nick!” Sandy spread out her arms and gave him a hug. “That’s nice of you to stop by.”
He ran his hand through his dreads. “Well, I got Carl’s text, and I figured I’d stop by right after youth group and see how everything’s going.” He gave Kennedy a little wave. “How d’you feel?”
She was too tired to smile but tried to give him a reassuring nod. “I’ll be just fine.”
“You bet she will.” Carl clapped Nick on the back.
Nick looked around the room awkwardly. He wore a bright orange Hawaiian shirt over a T-shirt with Jesus and his disciples all piled into a white Honda. The caption at the top read In One Accord. Kennedy probably would have been glad to see him if she weren’t so exhausted. She wasn’t certain she’d remember any of this in the morning. How long had it been since she had slept the whole night through?
“So the media is kinda going crazy over all this.” Nick didn’t seem to know where to focus his eyes, which darted from Carl to Sandy to the various objects lying around the room.
Sandy winced, but Nick went on with his explanation.
“I guess they’re saying now Anthony Abernathy was on some sort of rampage. Trying to sabotage his brother’s campaign.”
Carl shrugged. “Everyone’s desperate for a scoop.”
“No, that’s what he said before he ...” Kennedy swallowed. Had she really remembered right? She could still hear the shouts of her rescuers and the sound of gunfire when she shut her eyes. Her whole body sank farther into her hospital mattress at the thought of Jodie and all she had gone through.
“I still don’t know how someone so close to Wayne could do a thing like that,” Sandy breathed.
“That appears to be the question of the day.” Nick put one foot up on a little hospital chair near the wall and drummed on his bent knee. “Some are guessing it has more to do with protecting his own hide than anything else.”
Carl made a motion to the door. “Maybe we should talk about this more on our way out.”
“That’s a good idea,” Sandy replied.
Nick offered a sheepish good-bye. Kennedy wanted to tell them she didn’t mind. She was dying to understand it all herself. But her vision grew blurry as she watched them gather up their things, and she was asleep before their voices died out in the hall.
- Writer
