Mysteries Dreams and Darkness

Enjoy this Anthology excerpt from one of the stories—“Nineteen Going on Dead” by Sally Love
Gina’s smile was as beautiful as ever. You’d never know she was damaged—unless you stayed long enough to hear her rambling conversation, hopping from the tasteless chicken nuggets she ate for lunch, to her favorite orange-poppy dress, to reciting the official rules of Whispering Pines, the group home where she’d lived for two years. A poor substitute for a real home, even the name on the outside plaque was a lie. Not a single pine tree grew on the property.
Gina didn’t look up until he spoke her name. Before entering her hospital enclosure, Sergeant Franklin Izzo had visited with the ER resident. The best the doc could figure, she’d failed to swallow the prescribed doses of Lexapro in the previous twenty-four hours. A phone call to the Pines told Izzo she’d been AWOL for part of the night.
“How’re you doing, kiddo? Gimme five.” He held out his hand. “Up high.”
She swatted his hand.
“Down low.”
She swatted low.
He pulled his hand back. “Too slow.”
Her laughter filled the claustrophobic room. The game she loved as a toddler was fun again—at nineteen. He swallowed to dislodge the lump in his throat.
He used to love hearing her girlish giggle. Now it was painful, too young for a former Honors coed.
“Did you go for a walk last night?” He fished an evidence bag from his pocket and with an orange stick, gently scraped from under her fingernails, one-by-one, what could only be dried blood.
Gina frowned. “No, Franklin. I rode in the flashing-light car.”
An ambulance had carried her to the hospital.
“Before the ride, Gina.”
Another frown. With a quarter-turn of an imaginary key, she tick-a-locked her lips. “I promised not to tell.”
“Promised who?”
“Megan.”
Megan Greenleaf was one of fifteen residents occupying her wing.
“Tell me, Gina.”
“We went to the Shop-N-Save for Milky Ways.”
“How’d you get out? Wasn’t the door locked?”
She ducked her head, then whispered, “I found the hiding place.” She slid two fingers into her left Reebok, pulled the brass key from under her arch and deposited it in his outstretched palm.
Brain injury or not, the kid was still smart. “Who was in the store?”
“Benny.”
The Vietnamese storeowner worked nights.
Before moving his sister into Whispering Pines, Izzo had spent three days walking the area, interviewing every resident and shop owner within four square blocks, making sure everyone in the neighborhood understood she was off limits.
Gina leaned forward to pick at a thread atop her kneecap, seemingly unaware of the tiny shards of playground gravel mixed with bloodstains.
“Who else?”
She rocked in the scarred, bolted-down chair. “Two bad boys.”
“Did you know them?”
She shook her head. “Benny didn’t like them.” She paused. “Benny wouldn’t sell them beer.”
Izzo made a mental note to collect the security tape.
“Benny made them leave. They stole a flashlight…and beef jerky.”
The kid was as observant as always. “Then what did you and Megan do?”
Her rocking halted. A brilliant smile spread across her face. “The swings.”
A neighborhood park was nestled in a residential area three blocks from the store. Gina had been fearless as a preteen, pumping her legs until she swung higher than the top bar, higher still until she paused in mid-air, the metal chain actually beneath her. He’d hold his breath as the steel loops developed slack. A split second later she’d plummet, jerking the slack from the chain at the bottom of her orbit, shrieking and laughing.
The swings sat approximately a hundred yards from the bicycle trail.
“What happened at the swings?”
She rocked frantically. “The bad boys came.”
“The same two from the store?”
She nodded, then pulled at her hair. “Megan.” Tears streamed, refilling dried tracks along her cheeks.
Megan was in another part of the hospital surrounded by skilled specialists caring for her physical and mental injuries from a vicious rape.
Izzo raised his brows, encouraging his sister to continue. He untangled the hand she’d embedded in her dark curls and pressed it between his. “Then what happened?”
“Big Rat left.”
“Big Rat?”
She pulled at her nose, pushed two fingers under her upper lip, then pinched her nostrils.
“Big Rat had a long snout and buck teeth and he smelled.”
She brought an index finger to the tip of her nose as she had so many times during family games of Charades.
Two patrol officers had found her wielding a bloody flashlight and pacing a tight circle around Megan. After persuading Gina to drop the flashlight, the paramedics hustled both young women to the hospital. An hour later, the uniforms stumbled upon the cyclist bludgeoned to death.
The first officer at the scene reported hearing the victim’s description—red bicycle shorts and shirt. Izzo blanched. Gina was terrified of everything red. Her post-accident irrational fear forced him to consider she might be guilty. Then he scolded himself. Even brain injured, his gentle sister could never kill anyone.
Izzo leaned over and pecked her cheek. “You’re the smartest little sister in the world.”
She offered him another smile, but it never reached her eyes. They’d been sad for two years and three months. That horrible Tuesday Izzo and Gina had sat facing an ornate oak desk and the gold nameplate of Jerome Peavy, M.D. The psychiatrist had removed everything colored with even the smallest bit of red, leaving the room a cavern of bland beiges and blues.
Gina sat mute, folding a sheet of aluminum foil into ever-smaller shiny squares. After six months of tests, re-tests, psych interviews, neurological consults and whispers between medical professionals, the doctors offered no precise diagnosis.
At a college party she and a dozen other students had crowded into the bed of a pickup layered with straw and too many longnecks—the urban version of a hayride.
By interrogating the partiers, Izzo learned that when the unlatched tailgate flew open at fifty miles-an-hour, Gina was the first to hit the berm. Thick St. Augustine grass saved her life, but she arrived unconscious at the Ben Taub trauma center. After a week-and-a-half of holding her motionless hand and force-feeding her unremitting chatter, Izzo watched her eyes flutter open. Weeks later, her fractured shoulder healed, and for a while, they thought her brain had, too. Then came the ¬terrified screams at the red pencil, the red roses, the red book.
He’d sworn the day of the accident—accident my ass!—was the worst day of his life.
He was wrong. The worst day of his life was today.
Two years and three months ago his intelligent, vibrant sister had been drinking life in gulps. Now Gina was locked in the psych ward of the charity hospital awaiting arraignment.
She was nineteen going on dead.