Menace in Christmas River (Christmas River 8) (12 page)

I saw her pressed against the cold brick wall of the building, her feet moving as she tried to back up even further. Her voice had gone hoarse, and her hands were clamped over her mouth tightly, as if she was trying to stop a voice she had no control over.

Something dark stained the sleeves of her wool jacket.

Her eyes bulged with fear as she looked at me, and then down to the thing on the ground.

The thing that had caused her screaming.

I paused a moment before looking, trying to prepare myself for what my eyes were about to see.  

People only screamed the way Holly Smith was screaming about one thing – I knew that from experience.

It was only a question now of who was lying there.

I took in a deep breath of the cold air, feeling it freeze in my lungs. I peeled my eyes away from Holly’s lily-white face and bulging eyes.

I looked down.

And even though I had tried to steel myself, the sight still sent shock waves through my soul.

He lay on his side, his arms and legs splayed out unnaturally. Ice pellets were accumulating on his black coat. His head tilted off to one side, his dark hair dusting the cold layer of ice beneath him.  

A small pool of blood spread out, turning the area around his head the color of a dark cherry snow cone.

There was no movement. No breath. No sign of life.

And while I couldn’t see his face, it took me only a second to figure out who it was lying there, dead.

It was the boots. Those expensive, fashionable, but impractical boots which he had complained about the night before. The ones that couldn’t grip worth a damn.

“
What happened
?” I managed to squeak out.

Holly’s hands were still clamped over her mouth and those light blue eyes held a look of complete terror.

She shook her head, lowering her hands slightly.

“I was just… I was just coming out of the ladies’ room and I saw him lying here,” she muttered. “And I checked his pulse and… he’s dead. My God, he’s dead!”

I looked down at the man, a numb sadness overpowering me.

I hadn’t liked Cliff Copperstone.

In fact, I may have despised him.

But that didn’t mean he deserved to die like this: far from home, alone, in the bitter cold of a February storm.  

I quickly glanced around, realizing what must have happened.

He must have slipped. The way he had the night before. Except this time, he hadn’t gotten off so easily.

The man must have hit the back of his head on the hard ice.

I cringed, thinking of him in the shadows of the hallway only minutes earlier.  

You don’t know what’s going on here. You think you do, but you don’t understand a thing… 

His words echoed in my head, and I shuddered.

A stiff, howling wind suddenly hurled sharp pieces of ice into my face, and railed against the windows behind us.

Holly let out a short muffled yelp in response, and I turned my attention back to her.

Her eyes were brimming with tears, and her hands, which she had clamped firmly over her mouth again, were red and raw from the cold.

I went over, putting an arm over her shoulder, nudging her back toward the doors.

“You’re just in shock right now, Holly, but you’re okay,” I said in the calmest voice I could muster. “Let’s just get you inside where it’s warm.”

“He was just… he was just there…” she muttered.

Her frail shoulders were trembling, and her purse slid off her shoulder and onto her wrist with the uncontrolled movement.

“I saw… and…”

But there was nothing more to it.

Another gust of wind howled into us, and her voice faded away with it.

But in the strange silence afterwards, I heard something.

Something faint and weak and hardly audible.

Something that could have easily been the cruel winter wind playing tricks.

But it wasn’t.

I turned around.

His arm flinched slightly, and I felt my heart jump in my chest at the sight of it.

“
Cinnamon
…”

I gasped.

Chapter 25

“Cliff?!” I shouted. “Cliff, can you hear me?”

The cold ice beneath me bled through my jeans, turning my knees numb as I knelt over the man who only a few seconds ago seemed lost forever. 

I gently squeezed Cliff’s shoulder, and he groaned.

“Holly?” I said, looking quickly back at her.

Her eyes were as big as coconuts and she didn’t seem to hear me.

“
Holly
!”

That snapped her out of it. Those big deer eyes of hers focused on me.  

“Go find the Sheriff,” I said. “Tell him we have a badly injured man here. Go quick.”

She nodded.

“I can… I can do that.”

She looked at me for a long moment.

“I can do that,” she mumbled again.

I was about to yell at her again, but a second later, she finally slipped inside the heavy metal doors, disappearing into the building.

I turned my attention back to Cliff, peering down at him, feeling my stomach turn as the small pool of blood grew in size, clouding the clear layer of ice beneath him.  

A choking feeling of panic suddenly seized me.

With any other kind of wound, I knew that getting Cliff inside out of the cold would have been the logical move. But with a head injury, I’d heard that it was imperative not to move the injured person – no matter what.

But I had to do something, I realized. I couldn’t just wait there, watching as he slowly bled out.

I ripped my pink scarf off from around my neck, and scrunched it up into a ball. I pressed it against the back of his head, trying to stop the blood from flowing.

Cliff groaned again, which I took as a good sign.

“Just hang on,” I said in a hoarse voice. “Help is on the way. You just hold on here.”

I glanced back at the doors as an unforgiving gust blew more ice pellets into me. I shivered in the bitter, frigid air.

Where was everybody? 

When I turned back to look at Cliff again, he was stretching out his hand toward me.  

I gripped it without thinking twice.

“It’s going to be okay, Cliff,” I said again. “Just don’t fall asleep, all right?”

“She…” he slurred in a voice barely above a whisper. “She ruined...”

I furrowed my brow.

“What?”

“
She ruined me…”
 

The timber of his voice trembled, reminding me of the heavy, lethargic fluttering of a dying moth.

I felt fear course through my body.

He could die at any moment.

He could die right here, with me holding his hand.

I heard the sound of metal bracing against metal, and I turned around to see that the door to the building had opened with a large amount of force behind it.

A split second later, Sheriff Daniel Brightman burst through the building doors, a young woman I didn’t recognize following behind.

Daniel started running when he saw me, his stride slowed by the ice.

“How’s he doing?” he said.

I swallowed hard and shook my head.

“Bad, Daniel. Real bad.”  

The pink scarf I had applied to the wound was being engulfed by a dark stain.

The young woman I didn’t recognize was beside me a second later, leaning over Cliff and pulling his lids open, scanning his eyes.

It scared me how vacant and empty they looked.

“This is Lacey Cooley,” Daniel said. “She’s the sister of one of the contestants, and she said she has some medical training.”

“I’m a first year med student,” the young woman said. “So I’m not terribly knowledgeable, but I’m better than nothing.”

She looked over at me.

“So he slipped and hit his head?” she said.

I nodded.

She studied Cliff for one moment longer, then took in a deep breath.

She looked up at Daniel.

“He needs real medical attention,” she said. “And soon. Head injuries like this can be incredibly dangerous. I’m not a doctor yet, so this is beyond my expertise. But I think that it’s absolutely critical that we get him to the emergency room.”

“I’ve got an ambulance on the way,” Daniel said. “Should be here any minute”

I bit my lip and looked away out into the storm.

I could barely see five feet beyond the covered veranda through the swirling ice.

I wasn’t any doctor either.

But I knew in my very bones that if we didn’t get Cliff Copperstone to the hospital soon, then the Chocolate Championship was going to be the least of the day’s casualties.

Chapter 26

Daniel’s boots hit the ground in heavy restless steps behind me as he paced nervously on the thin strip of snowless concrete. Behind him, the muffled and hushed noises of a gathering crowd echoed against the auditorium’s brick wall.

Bits and pieces of the conversations drifted toward me, carried by the stiff, icy wind.

“That’s him! That’s Cliff Copperstone lying there.”

“He must have slipped on some ice.”

“How bad do you think it is?”

“Have you ever seen a storm like this in all your life? You can’t even see the cars under all that snow!”

“The weather station didn’t say it was going to be this bad.”

“Is he going to live?”

“I don’t even have snow tires.”

“How are any of us going to get out of here?”

I was still holding onto Cliff’s hand. Even though Daniel had tried to get me to go back inside to where it was warm, I had refused to leave, though I couldn’t exactly say why. I guess something about the man bleeding out here alone in the cold, bitter snowstorm and in need of help had erased whatever negative feelings I had about Cliff. Or at the very least, put them on hold for a while.

I realized that it wouldn’t have mattered who it was – a complete stranger or my very best friend in the world. I would have been kneeling here in the ice, holding their hand, waiting for the ambulance to arrive alongside them, no matter what.

But we’d been out here longer than we should have been – that ambulance was ten minutes late now, with no word as to the reason.

And I knew I wasn’t the only one beginning to worry.

I pulled Daniel’s jacket tighter around me with my free hand, the one he had draped over my shoulders after realizing I wasn’t going to budge.

I was shivering hard now. So hard that it was taking all my might to keep my teeth from chattering together like a pair of castanets.

I lifted my eyes, searching the vast white expanse that had once been the auditorium’s parking lot.

There were no red lights. No blue lights. No sirens.

Not a single sound except for the howling of the wind and the folks whispering in hushed and worried voices behind me.  

“
Sheriff Brightman? Over
.”

A voice suddenly cracked through Daniel’s radio speaker.

“This is the Sheriff. Over,” he said, walking away quickly, out of the hearing range of the crowd.

I watched him as he held the speaker closer to his ear. I was unable to make out anything other than the intermittenent sounds of static and the mumbling of the operator.

But I didn’t need to.

The sudden, grave expression on Daniel’s face said it all.

I dropped my head, looking back down at Cliff.

A moment later, I heard Daniel’s heavy boots approach.

“That was dispatch,” he said, raising his voice over the wind. “The ambulance skidded off the road and into a ditch on its way over here. Everyone onboard is okay, but…”

He looked at me, and then at Lacey , who was kneeling on the other side of Cliff.

“All the ambulances are presently engaged with other emergencies. Which means we can’t rely on the paramedics getting here anytime soon,” he said.

I closed my eyes and let out a sharp breath.

It was what I had feared.

That the storm had turned the roads into hockey rinks.

“Okay,” I said, quietly. “Okay, so what’s the plan?”

And I knew suddenly by the serious look on Daniel’s face what that plan would entail.

“I’m going to take him in,” he said.

He looked at the young med student.

“Lacey, I would appreciate it if you could come too to monitor him on the way over.”

She gave a sharp nod without hesitation.

“You’re going to drive him to the hospital?” I said. “Through this storm. On those roads? Daniel, that’s—”

“Our only option,” he said, cutting me off.

“But there’s got to be—”

“No,” he said again. “There’s not. And we’ve got to move. And soon. Mr. Copperstone can’t spare the time.”

“But if an ambulance couldn’t get through, how’s your truck going to fare any better, Daniel?”

I resented myself for having asked the question. He already knew the odds and the danger that awaited him out on those roads. And reiterating it didn’t help a damn thing.  

I let go of Cliff’s hand and pulled myself to my feet. I stood up, facing Daniel.

“Look, if you’re set on going, then I’m coming with you, too,” I said. “I’m not just going to wait here and…”

I stopped speaking as my teeth did a tap dance performance.

Daniel pulled his jacket tighter around my shoulders and looked down at me with placid, calm eyes.

“Cin, you’re not going anywhere,” he said.

“But—”

“Cin – we don’t have a lot of time,” he said. “I
need
you to stay here.”

“But why?”

He looked over my head, back at the crowd of people.

Then he lowered his voice.

“You’ve got to help keep things calm here,” he said. “Some folks are gonna try and go out in this mess to get home, but a lot of them will stay and wait it out until the roads look better. You’ve got to make sure panic doesn’t break out, you understand?”  

I knew it was rational for me to stay behind. With Daniel gone, there would be no law enforcement. The closest thing we had to authority would be Councilwoman Eleanor Tunstall and Julie Van Dorn. And while Eleanor could be trusted in a crisis, I didn’t exactly trust Julie to step up and do the right thing if it came down to it.