Rescue Read Free Page B

the farm had ever been prosperous. When his parents had bought the place—Webster had been seven—the kitchen
     floor was linoleum, the walls made of lath and goat’s hair, and the dining area was white with plaster dust. Up a flight ofstairs was a sitting room with a blocked-up fireplace, a porch that had been finished off to make a sewing nook, and a decent-sized
     bedroom that his parents took over. In the attic were two small rooms that his cousins and aunts and uncles used when they
     visited.
    Until Webster was twelve, he’d slept on a loft bed that his father had built in the sewing nook. When Webster turned thirteen
     and his body grew too long for the bed, his father knocked down the wall between the two attic rooms and made one big one.
     It had a sloped ceiling and a window at either end. The back window overlooked Webster’s mother’s vegetable garden, a large
     hydrangea bush, and a tall mimosa tree that produced puffy salmon-colored balls each August. Two Adirondack chairs were set
     underneath that tree, and it was there that his parents often sat in summer, trying not to pay too much attention to the vast
     tract of land they’d sold off to finance improvements in the hardware store.
    Webster said good-bye to his parents and drove into the Vermont morning, the sun just rising, steam coming out the backs of
     the vehicles in front of him.
    They couldn’t have sent the woman home yet, Webster reasoned, not with that level of alcohol in her blood, three and a half
     times the legal limit. Webster wanted to see her face and hear her voice. He’d done an “after” call only once before, with
     a ten-year-old who’d nearly drowned in a marble quarry. Webster had needed to see the boy alive. Needed to feel the reward
     of what he’d done. Needed to hear the parents thank him. At the time, three months into the job, he’d had a two-week run of
     lousy calls that had caused him to want to quit before he’d barely begun. Two children burned to death in a trailer fire.
     A cardiac call they might have been able to do something about had they beensummoned sooner. A three-car collision on the ice on 42, an entire family of French Canadians wiped out: mother at the scene,
     father in the Bullet, baby daughter at the hospital.
    Webster parked and walked into the ER. The staff knew him, and they didn’t. He cornered a nurse he thought he recognized.
    “I brought a woman in last night,” Webster said. “DUI, stomach laceration.”
    “They’re giving her fluids. She’s still got a Foley catheter. They’re going to discontinue her IV in half an hour.”
    Webster checked his watch. “Half an hour? She could get the d.t.’s.”
    “Doesn’t matter what I think. Towle’s orders. Signs of old bruises on her body, by the way.”
    “I found something at the site that belongs to the woman,” he said.
    “I’ll take it,” the nurse offered.
    Ordinarily, Webster would have left it at that. “I’d like to see her if you don’t mind. Just to see how she’s doing.”
    The nurse narrowed her eyes. “Visit away,” she said. “Bed number eight.”
    Webster pulled the curtain aside. The woman’s face was pale, with bruises ripening beneath her eyes. She had a mouth that
     might be French like her name. Her hair was still glossy. He moved closer to the bed. The alcohol was depressing her system.
     When they took the fluids away, she’d get a headache and the heaves.
    Under the thin coverlet, the bandages made a runway across the woman’s stomach. He noticed the narrow outline of her body,
     her nipples under the cloth. Her johnny was open at the neck,and Webster could see the place where Burrows had rubbed her sternum. Hell of a bruise, but you had to make it work. He remembered
     her long legs, the bikini underpants.
    Webster said her name.
    An eye fluttered.
    He touched her arm and raised his voice a little. “Sheila?”
    She opened her eyes. He watched as she tried to focus. She said nothing.
    “My