If they’d found the man’s sister, it wasn’t Caleb, which erased a tiny, irrational worry from her mind. Steve had said a few very fuzzy and confusing things about the shooting, but nothing other than the fact that the man who shot Amelia wore a mask. He said Caleb’s name a few times but never in context, and then he said, before dozing off, “I shot him. Oh my God, I shot him!”
It was moments like that one that made her glad to be a paramedic. She didn’t mind picking up the pieces, both literally and figuratively, in life or death situations, but one thing she never had to do was decide who was guilty and who was not. After all, even if Steve wasn’t her brother-in-law, she’d have a hard time convincing herself that this former firefighter and upstanding citizen could shoot someone.
Instead of suspicions about who shot the mystery man, all Ellie could consider was, who was this man? Without his mask and after he had been cleaned up during the autopsy, would she recognize him? She walked down to Collin’s ancient Jeep where he was waiting outside the hospital in the turnaround. Any warmth that had hinted at summer earlier in the day was gone, and the cold penetrated her thin layers in one vicious gust. But even as she climbed into the familiar front seat where she had proudly etched her own declaration of love to Collin so many years ago with an E+C in the center of a wonky, lopsided heart, the curiosity kept nibbling at the edges of her consciousness and this new idea . . .
That maybe she’d go and take a look for herself.
Ellie looked at her phone again: 2:17 a.m. When she was on a twenty-four-hour shift, two a.m. was her least favorite hour. For some reason, it was at two that her eyelids would droop and her body would cry out for sleep. And if she ever dared to sit down during that predawn hour, there was no hope of staying awake.
But today she was on edge. More on edge than she’d ever been, even on the call when a man in Forestville tried to “aim” some fireworks over his girlfriend’s house as part of his proposal by holding them as he lit the fuse and nearly blew all of his fingers off. It was her job to pick up all the charred “bits” to put on ice for a surgeon.
That made her heart pound; this made her heart ache; and sitting in a dark car outside of her boyfriend’s apartment at two o’clock in the morning wasn’t Ellie’s idea of comfort. Collin was supposed to run in, grab clothes and toiletries, and be out in two minutes. But it had been nearly fifteen, and after texting five times in a row, she was getting frustrated.
If she wanted to get home, changed, and back to the hospital with a bag before the hospital became too active and she lost her nerve, Ellie couldn’t imagine being gone longer than an hour. If she’d known it would take this long, she would’ve just showered in Collin’s mildew-ridden little shower and used his Head & Shoulders 2-in-1 to get as much of herself clean as possible and tossed on a pair of his jeans. It didn’t really matter what she looked or smelled like right now. It just mattered that she was there for Amelia when she returned from her procedure . . . and that she found her way down to the basement before eight a.m.
As Ellie reviewed the pieces of the case, a dark place started to grow inside her gut. The man in the mask was dead—it seemed like Steve might have shot him. Self-defense was an easy explanation.
But then why was there this whole “armed and dangerous” warning about Caleb? And why was he leaving the scene of the crime covered in blood and holding a gun? Steve needed to wake up from his drug-induced slumber soon. She hoped this time he’d have more information.
Ellie looked at her phone again: 2:22 a.m. and still not a single response from Collin to her texts. It was entirely possible that he had fallen asleep. He was always running on full speed and fitting studying in between his rounds. Then, with the stress today, he must’ve crashed again. Ellie dropped her phone into the armrest on the Jeep door, thumping up against the E+C etched into the plastic. The lightweight door swung open easily, and Ellie’s knees creaked as she jumped down to the crumbling cement driveway.
The row of small rental apartments had been built sometime in the fifties, and it showed—crumbling red brick, off-colored heavy wooden doors covered in stains and nicks that told the story of all the people who had crossed the thresholds. Back then, they housed newlyweds or the occasional bachelor who worked in the town but without the benefit of a housewife to keep house. There was one neighbor, an elderly retired general practitioner twenty years older than Ellie’s dad, who had moved into the complex as a newly graduated med student and had never left.
Ellie had no desire to live in the tiny, dingy apartments filled with heavily waxed linoleum floors and a creeping mildew that had to be sprayed down weekly with a bleach-and-water mixture to prevent the fungi from taking over any damp part of the apartment. She’d already had to turn off some part of her heart that wanted to be a doctor, at least for the foreseeable future, and she wanted to live in a town where she could walk down the street and not run into anyone she knew for days on end. But it would take another huge flick of a switch to get her to live in this dingy row of apartments.
The side door was the closest to the driveway and the only entrance they ever actually used. Ellie tested the door handle, and it turned easily. The heavy door swung open with a gentle touch, and a strange chill went down her neck and through her. The darkness of the entry and the way her feet slapped against the tile brought Ellie back to earlier that day at Amelia’s. She glanced around Collin’s apartment for signs of distress out of reflex rather than actual fear.
The apartment was sparse and was definitely the home of a single man who was rarely home. When Collin had gotten the apartment in January, Ellie was disappointed. She knew he moved back into town to be closer to her as she cared for her father and worked at the fire department, driving the ninety minutes to and from school several times a week and crashing on couches in between. At the same time, she had hoped he would move in with his parents or somewhere more temporary. But Caleb still lived at home, and the Thornton parents were not too keen on having another child back under their roof, especially one they thought they’d successfully jettisoned. And Collin’s parents were super traditional and frowned on the idea of Collin living with a woman he wasn’t married to.
Now his apartment furnishings were made up of a scratchy off-white couch they’d found tossed out on a corner in Champaign, a small table—with stools instead of chairs—that also doubled as a desk, and a tiny flat-screen television that sat in the corner on a wobbly, ancient stand that had been built for the old tube TVs.