“Stacia,” I whisper, and Jordan immediately grabs my arm, trying to pull me back into the shadows behind him. I don’t move.
Her eyes are distant at first, then they focus in on me. Her blouse hangs oddly to one side, and her jacket is ripped. She has something rectangular clutched in her free hand, but I can’t make out what it is. She looks unkempt and wild in a way I’ve never seen her before, and she lowers the gun back to her side.
I hear people in the distance and she looks toward them. She pulls the rectangular package in against her chest before sprinting into the trees and toward the other end of the park. I watch her go, wondering if I should have stopped her and whether she was being attacked and needs help.
With my mind whirling, it’s only when her back disappears into the trees that my thoughts settle on the form on the ground and my whole world lurches to a stop.
“No … no, no, no!” My words begin as a whisper and end as a shout. Jordan reaches out to stop me, but I break free, running over to the body on the ground and praying again and again in my head for it not to be him.
When I reach the form, I roll him onto his back. Everything in me seems to lock up in one instant as I see those familiar blue eyes gazing up at me.
Jordan is by my side immediately, pushing his hands into the bloodstained shirt, trying to apply pressure to the wound in the center of his chest.
I can’t breathe. I can’t think. How can this be happening? Stacia shot Mr. Masters? Why? Why?
Then the blue eyes blink and turn on me. Choking in a deep gasp of air, I lean down. “You’re going to be okay. We’ll get help.” I pull out my phone and begin to dial 9-1-1 with shaking fingers, but Mr. Masters pushes the phone out of my hand and it falls somewhere in the grass behind me. He seems like he wants to talk, but blood trickles out of the corner of his mouth when he opens it.
“No … don’t talk. Just wait until you’re better.” I sit beside him, hugging his head. “I love you. Please don’t leave me.”
Sitting back, I see a tear leak out the side of one of those blue eyes. Then they fill with an abrupt terror as he pulls me down again. Jordan still has his hands pressed against Mr. Masters’s wound, but I hover close over Mr. Masters, brushing one hand across his forehead.
He draws another rasping breath. It looks like it causes him extreme pain, and I choke on a sob.
Then he utters the one word he’s been trying so hard to tell me: “Run.”
My head shoots up, and I look around us, suddenly feeling a very different sort of fear, but there is no one else. The commotion of people in the distance is getting closer, but it’s only the three of us alone in this clearing. I lean back over this man who has always been there and whisper, “Shh. It’s okay.”
With a final shudder his body relaxes and his eyes become unfocused. By now the entire front of Mr. Masters’s shirt and jacket are red with blood, and there is a rapidly spreading damp spot on the ground beneath him.
I kneel beside his head, a slow numbness creeping over me like the ocean tide on the beach.
“Mr. Masters?” I whisper, but there’s no response. My own voice seems far away, and I move in a daze. On instinct, I do what I always see people do at crime scenes on TV. I press my fingers against his neck, trying to find a throbbing pulse—something to give us hope that he can be saved.
I feel nothing.
Jordan is covered in blood up to his elbows and his skin is deathly pale in contrast. He keeps putting pressure on Mr. Masters’s chest and repeating his name. Finally, I reach out and grab Jordan’s wrist.
“He’s gone,” I say, then I repeat it again until it sinks in for both of us. “He’s gone. He was trying to help Daddy. He was trying to help me, Jordan. He came here to meet us, and oh God … he’s gone.”
My voice cracks, and Jordan finally looks up at me. Neither of us speaks. There isn’t anything to say.
Suddenly there are flashlights and shouting people everywhere. Not people—police. I look for the phone Masters had pushed out of my hand. I didn’t call them. Jordan is yanked to his feet and I see Chief Vega behind him. He grabs Jordan’s face and looks hard at him. “What in God’s name are you doing here?”
I glance in the direction Stacia ran and raise my shaking hand to point that way. “Stacia … she ran that way.”
Vega looks down at me, his face a mask. Then he nods, releases Jordan, and starts shouting orders.
She really killed Masters? How could this have happened? Nothing makes any sense. I squint into the darkness but I see no movement anywhere in sight. My entire body is quaking even though I don’t feel cold. In fact, I’m so hot I think I’m sweating. My brain and body don’t appear to be communicating, and I can’t figure out how to make them start talking to each other again.