I worked at a command center with twenty-two phone lines, four radios, and nearly two hundred thousand calls a year. Requests for police, fire, emergency services, animal control—it all came to us. We transferred the calls for emergency services and fire to a second dispatch service, but animal control, police, the prank calls, the incoherent calls, the genuinely panicked and hysterical calls were all ours.
I once worked a shift where my fellow dispatch officer saved a woman’s life by having her scream until the home invaders panicked and ran away. Another shift, my colleague got a terribly injured teenage girl to describe the car that ran her down. The girl died before the police got there, but her statement was recorded on our call lines and became the evidence that put the drunk driver away. I cried with people. I screamed with people. Once, I sang lullabies to a five-year-old boy while his parents shattered glass and hurled insults just outside the closet door.
I don’t know what happened to the boy. I think about him sometimes, though. More than I should.
Which is why after six years, I left Arvada and returned to the mountains. I guess I’d lost some weight. I guess I didn’t look so good.
“Oh, Charlene Rosalind Carter Grant,” my aunt Nancy said quietly when I got off the plane.
She took me in her arms. I stood in the middle of the airport and cried.
My aunt had been right: I’d needed to go away, and now it was good to be back. I embraced the mountains; I welcomed my community, where I was surrounded by neighbors and everyone looked you in the eye and smiled. Aunt Nancy had become my family, and this one town, had, finally, become my home.
I didn’t plan on leaving again. But I guess someone else had other ideas.
*
STANDING AT RANDI’S FUNERAL, I didn’t feel any sense of danger. My childhood friend was dead, but the more Jackie and I learned about her rat bastard ex, the more we thought we knew the perpetrator. Just because the police couldn’t charge him, didn’t mean her abusive, alcoholic ex hadn’t done the deed. Doctors are probably wise enough in the general workings of forensic science to cover their tracks. Plus, Randi was softhearted. We could see her letting her ex through the front door, despite her best judgment.
I spent some time with the Providence detectives, trying to advocate on my friend’s behalf. Jackie sprung for a private consultant from Oregon, some retired FBI agent to analyze the scene. Neither one of us got anything to show for our efforts.
Then, one year later, Jackie…Who lived in downtown Atlanta, who was city-smart and corporate battle-hardened, and, in many ways, forewarned. Who would she have welcomed into her home that night? Who would she have stood quietly and allowed to strangle her in her own living room, without putting up a fight?
Certainly not Randi’s ex-husband.
Meaning, maybe the abusive ex didn’t do it. Meaning, maybe it was someone else.
Someone who knew Randi and knew Jackie. Someone they knew and trusted.
Someone who, by definition, would have to know me, too. Because there were no such things as Randi and Jackie. For ten years, in our town, it had always been Randi Jackie Charlie. Just like that. One name for one entity. The three amigos. All for one, one for all.
With two dead, did that mean there was now one left to go?
In contrast to Randi’s memorial service, I stood dry-eyed next to Jackie’s cherrywood coffin, searching the crowd in the tiny, tastefully decorated Victorian funeral parlor. I peered into the faces of my grieving neighbors, community members, friends.
I wondered if someone standing beside me right now was already counting down until the next January 21. Except why and how and who? So many questions. I figured I had 362 days left to find answers.
We concluded Jackie’s service at 9 P.M. I was in my car by 9:15. Luggage in the trunk, the feel of Aunt Nancy’s dry kiss fresh on my cheek.