Home Repair is Homicide 5 - Wreck the Halls by Sarah Graves

Author:Sarah Graves [Graves, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307493422
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2001-02-12T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

When the ambulance had departed, its siren screaming uselessly, I went out behind the shed and vomited, trembling with grief and fury. Wade held my head, wiped my mouth with clean snow, listened to me rage until I was only weeping with simple sorrow.

And then I couldn't even do that anymore. My eyes felt like hot stones, matching the larger one beating painfully in the center of my chest. Across the dark bay, the blur of lights on Campobello condensed into bright sharp points.

Wade held his hand out. After a moment I took it and stood up. Suddenly I remembered Monday, looked around in fright. “Where is she?”

“I put her in the truck. Come on, now. You're soaked through.”

“So what?” I asked bitterly, wanting to hurt someone.

But he only drew me against him, preventing me from sinking back down into the snow and just sitting there.

Sitting until I froze.

“I called George. Ellie's going over to Clarissa's,” he said as we drove back through town.

The Christmas lights were all still on in the shop windows, full of fake cheer: reindeer with hard, sharp hooves poised ready to batter and smash, Santas with sly, evil grins on their garish plastic faces.

“Right,” I said dully. “I’ll call Victor later, ask him to let us know when…” My throat closed.

“… when they know something,” I finished.

Wade nodded, pulled up in front of the house. “I’m going to drop you off, okay? George and I are going to go back and get Bob's car. And Timmy Rutherford—”

Timmy, the other full-time cop in Eastport. Soon to be the only.

“—Timmy's going to meet us, have a look around. Get the weapon bagged up and so on. Talk to Melinda.”

The other houses on the street had their late-night lights on: one upstairs window or the glow of a television from a darkened room, as people got ready for bed. Innocent people who didn't know how a dying man's eyes looked, how his breath felt as it rushed out onto your lips.

Softly. Lips salty with tears and blood. “Jake,” Wade said.

I turned. “It's okay, you go.” Monday leaned hard against me, her heart beating strongly under her ribs, and I was crying again.

“Jake, what we did back there.”

There was blood under his fingernails, dried droplets in pockmarks on his cheek. I brushed at it and it fell away in crumbs.

“What we did, it'll make the difference,” Wade told me. “Or not.”

It wouldn't. How could it? We had done CPR until the ambulance arrived, then let the EMTs take over.

“But for you, it's one-foot-in-front-of-the-other time.”

Monday wriggled against me: alive, alive-o.

“And thinking time.”

I shook my head: not at him, because we'd both heard that car starting down the road from Melinda's. That was what Wade meant. But what I was thinking about it—the other thing I was thinking, besides that Bob's attacker had almost certainly been in that car—couldn't be true.

“Wade,” I began softly, and then it washed over me:

Sitting in a lean-to built by an explosion of my father's greed and foolishness, watching flaming pieces of my life float down out of a clear, blue sky.

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