Before She Was Found. Heather Gudenkauf
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“She came over about thirty minutes ago,” Kevin pipes up from behind the bar. “Said you were out of milk and cereal at the house and was going to eat breakfast here.”
Officer Wilson pauses, waiting for Jordyn’s crying to stop. When it doesn’t she sighs and gets to her feet. “Why don’t you and your grandpa come to the station and we’ll talk more, Jordyn. We could really use your help. There’s a bad person out there who hurt your friends. Anything you can tell us might help us catch him. Okay?” Jordyn peeks up and sniffles and nods.
“Go wash your face, Jordyn,” Thomas says, “then we’ll go down to the station. Okay?”
“But I don’t know anything.” Jordyn wipes her eyes. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Just tell the truth,” Thomas tells her. “The police will decide whether or not it’s important.”
The three adults watch as Jordyn slouches off to the bathroom. “Jesus,” Kevin says when she’s out of earshot. “What happened to those kids?”
“I’m not sure,” Officer Wilson says, “but there was a hell of a lot of blood. When we got there the Landry girl was being loaded into an ambulance. She looked really, really bad. The other girl emerged a few minutes later covered in blood. They put her in a police car and took her to the hospital, too.”
“Jim Landry runs the Appliance Barn, doesn’t he?” Kevin asks.
“Yeah, the mom works at the elementary school. Nice people,” Thomas says. “This happened at their house?”
“No, down by the old depot,” Officer Wilson says.
“The depot?” Thomas asks in surprise. “What were they doing by the railroad tracks so late at night?”
“A lady walking her dog found the Landry girl and called for help.” Officer Wilson shakes his head. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Jordyn comes out of the bathroom. Her face is splotchy, eyes red.
“I’ll meet you and Jordyn at the station in an hour,” Officer Wilson says and Jordyn’s eyes fill again with tears.
“I don’t want to—” she begins but Officer Wilson stops her.
“This isn’t a request, Jordyn. Someone messed those girls up pretty bad,” she says and moves toward the exit. “See you soon.”
“Come on, Jordyn,” Thomas says. “You need to get dressed and then we’ll head over to the station. You got things covered here, Kevin?”
Kevin assures them that he’s got things under control and Thomas and Jordyn walk next door in silence. Once inside Jordyn runs up the stairs to her bedroom. The smell of freshly brewed coffee beckons, and Thomas, aching for the rush of caffeine, lifts the carafe too quickly, sending searing liquid down the front of his shirt. Cursing, he quickly sheds the soaked shirt, makes his way to their small laundry room and tosses it in the basket overflowing with dirty clothes. Ever since Tess has been in the hospital the daily chores of laundry, dusting and sweeping have gotten away from him.
Thomas pulls a wrinkled but clean plaid shirt from the dryer. It wasn’t that he didn’t know how to press his own clothes—he did—but Tess always said she didn’t mind and he had gotten spoiled that way. Thomas looks at his watch. There was no time for ironing right now; Officer Wilson was expecting them soon. He pulls on the rumpled shirt and tries to smooth out the creases with his fingers.
A pair of Jordyn’s tennis shoes and her jacket are lying in a jumble next to the stacked washer and dryer. No matter how many times Thomas reminds Jordyn to pick up after herself it just doesn’t seem to stick. He has resorted to piling all of Jordyn’s scattered belongings into a laundry basket and dumping them onto her bed, thinking they will be impossible for Jordyn to ignore.
No such luck. With a sigh he reaches down and retrieves the jacket, a light blue fleece that cost about fifty dollars more than it should have. To think that even in the dinky town of Pitch labels matter. Thomas finds it ridiculous, but Tess says that it’s important for Jordyn to fit in, especially with not having her mom and dad around.
Thomas drops the jacket and tennis shoes into a laundry basket filled with more of Jordyn’s wayward possessions when a dark stain on the sleeve of the fleece catches his eye. He fishes it from the pile and examines the three-inch splotch on the cuff. His first thought is that chocolate is a bear to get out of fabric but this stain is more red than brown. He lifts it to his nose and instead of a sweet sugary scent his nose is met with the smell of copper.
He scratches at it experimentally and a rusty patina is left behind on his fingertip. Blood. Thomas searches for any other drops of blood on the jacket but it only seems to be in that one spot, just below where the palm of the hand meets the wrist. Jordyn didn’t say anything about getting hurt, didn’t complain of a recent injury. There wasn’t a lot of blood. Barely enough to mention. But still. He thinks of Cora Landry lying in a hospital bed with her terrible injuries.
Thomas turns away from the basket filled with Jordyn’s shoes, a hairbrush, a pair of socks, a soccer ball and an array of books and magazines and carries the jacket to the sink and turns on the cold water. He reaches into the cupboard for a stain stick and plastic jug of ammonia. It would be a shame, he thinks, scrubbing vigorously at the stubborn spot, if the jacket ended up being ruined.
September 14, 2018
I got the call about Cora Landry last April. I had rushed into my office to check my messages and to catch up on some paperwork before my next appointment. I had four voice mails. One from the parent of a patient hoping to reschedule their session, two from pharmaceutical reps and one from a fellow doctor at the hospital—Leo Soto, an ER doc with a smooth, timbered voice and a soothing bedside manner. He wanted me to stop down if I had time. A young girl had been brought in by ambulance early that morning with stab wounds. She was heading into surgery soon to repair the wounds from an attack. Extensive reconstructive work to her face was expected.
Due to the violent attack, Dr. Soto anticipated a need for psychological support for the girl and her family. I remember looking at my watch. I was buried beneath paperwork and my next appointment was due to arrive shortly. It sounded like an interesting case.
After getting the call from Dr. Soto, I made my way through the hospital’s maze of corridors and skywalks that admitted over twenty thousand patients per year and had more than thirty thousand ER visits. I was only one of about seven hundred physicians employed by the hospital but I loved the bustle, brainpower and the diversity the hospital had to offer. Plus, as a divorcee with no children it housed the only family I have left in the world. To get from the psychiatric tower to the emergency department I took an elevator down three floors and walked what felt like a mile.
“Thank you for coming down, Madeline,” Dr. Soto said, greeting me. He was tall and slender. A dark-skinned man, with neatly trimmed silver hair and a matching mustache. At six-feet tall he and I, in my one-inch heels, were the same height. “I’ll take you to see Cora and her parents,” he said. “Cora is heavily sedated right now but if you can just say a few words to the mother and father about the resources available to them, I know it will be helpful.”
“Of course,” I agreed. Once assessed, each patient in the emergency room has a private room that shields them from the craziness of the ER. Behind the sliding Plexiglas door was a preteen girl lying in the hospital bed. Her facial wounds were hidden beneath swaths of gauze, but even so, I could see that significant damage had been done.
“We didn’t dare try to stitch her up,” Dr. Soto told me. “If there ever is a case for a plastic surgeon, this is it. All we are doing at this point is treating her collapsed lung and giving her antibiotics. My biggest concern is saving her left eye. They’ll be taking her to surgery momentarily. Frankly, I’m very worried about the parents. The mother