Mirror of Shadows (11 page)

“Thanks for dinner and the movie, Matt. It was fun.”

“It was, wasn’t it? You think maybe we could do it again, sometime soon?”

She smiled coyly. “I suppose we could do that.”

“Great. I’ll call you then.”

“I look forward to it,” Ella said, fidgeting with her keys, while Boo rubbed on her ankles and shiny black pumps.

Matt stepped in very close and put one arm up high on the doorjamb and slipped the other liquidly around to the small of her back, pulling her slightly to him. He kissed her softly, lingering for a taste of her strawberry lip gloss on her lower lip. Then he pressed in a little harder for a less gentle kiss, one she figured he was hoping would electrify her and make her tingle all over. Though it was tantalizing, it felt a little too practiced for Ella’s liking—like it was some kind of signature move he used.

She pulled away before he was done, making it known he would be moving no further this evening. She smiled and retreated behind the door, knowing she had thrown a cold glass of water in Matt’s face, but she just wasn’t ready for all that. After all, he was just passing through town; no sense in getting too attached if it wasn’t going anywhere.

Ella locked the door when she heard the truck start, and then picked up Boo and headed for bed.

*****

Ella had a ton of errands in town to do the next day and she was glad she wouldn’t have to deal with Jeremy just yet. Marlin had some more papers for her to sign; some items she had ordered from the department store had arrived and needed to be picked up; and she had to do some household and grocery shopping.

While driving through town, she saw Matt’s truck parked at the hardware store next to what looked like her mother’s car. She thought,
he sure spends a lot of time at the hardware store for someone who doesn’t live in town or have a house to fix up
. Even odder was the thought of her mother at the hardware store; she didn’t think her mother knew how to fix anything house-wise. As quickly as the thought of what he or she might be doing there, she put them both out of her mind, and headed for her next stop.

After her last stop on her list of things to do, she noticed her brakes seemed different. Mushier or something; she couldn’t quite wrap her head around what was different but they didn’t seem the same. She didn’t really think too much about it—just made a mental note of something to add to the never-ending list of things to do, fix, and maintain.

Up the hill she went, quickly gaining altitude. The road leveled out when it came to the famous oak trees and turned narrow and windy for a mile or so and then down hill just before hitting the turn and last incline up to the house. It was here at the windy point where the brakes started acting up. They didn’t seem to be responding well. She wished at this point that she had bought that stick-shift car instead when she was car hunting years ago. Still she trudged on. She just wanted to get to the house, and then she could ask Jeremy to look at the brakes before she had to drive the car again.

The sun was behind the mountain and though it was daylight most everywhere else, in the mountains it was starting to get dark fast. A squirrel darted across the windy road just before the steep downgrade of the hill and the brakes grabbed for only a millisecond, jerking the car into a slide in the mud. Though that was a little scary, the fact that the brake pedal went down to the floor and had no pressure whatsoever was much more of a concern.

Down the hill she started with the car gaining speed. She pumped the brake pedal, but there was no response and still no pressure. She could smell an oily, smoky stench coming in the vents as the car picked up more speed as it barreled down the steep grade. Panic set in as she went flying around the corners. The mud made the car slide even more than it should have and Ella was really scared. She tried to talk to herself out loud. “Think, Ella, think. Stay calm. Keep pumping the brakes and turn into the slides.”

Her earnest attempt at persuasion was not helping. She knew the next turn was tight. The pep talk continued louder than ever as she knew it would be upon her any second.

“You can do this, Ella. You know it’s coming…” she said, trying to inject bravery into her words while pumping the brake pedal ferociously.

“If only I could downshift,” she said, preparing herself for the notorious curve that had just come into view.

“…
that’s it!” she said with enthusiasm.

She didn’t have a stick-shift, but she did have lower gears, and she pulled the gearshift down two clicks to low gear. The car lurched, the engine whined, and the transmission groaned in displeasure. Thank God it was front wheel drive or the whole car would have gone into a spin as she started into the hard left. The car went sideways around the curve but seemed to be turning, holding until the wheels hit a trench in the soggy mud and the car flipped.

Ella thought of her physics class. Words like
inertia, force, mass,
and
velocity
shot through her mind as the car rolled over and over. It felt as if everything was moving in slow motion. Her purse, her hair, a cd, an exacto knife with blue tape, an old tube of Chapstick, all passed before her eyes as the car rotated around the car like contents in a front loader washing machine. After several turns, the car came to a sudden and jarring halt against the huge trunk of a tree on the embankment she had been flung down. In doing so, her head jerked hard to the left and then forward, hitting the door window and then the steering wheel. The horn blared and something hot ran down her forehead before the gray fog came in and took the pain away.

Chapter 11

Jeremy had been in town picking up what he hoped were his final pieces of copper piping. He had just about finished up the plumbing under the house and was hoping for a change of pace in starting on the electrical the following week. Hearing the eight foot pipes bounce against each other with each bump of the road, he wondered if he strapped them tightly enough to the truck so as not to lose them on the windy road.

One last turn and up the hill to home
, he thought. The sky still was light but on these mountain roads under the canopy of trees it was dark enough to need his headlights for safety.

He thought he heard something under the sound of Green Day blaring “Brain Stew” on the radio. He reached for the volume knob when he saw strange marks in the mud on the hard turn left and he was almost blinded as his headlights reflected back at him through what he thought looked like a side mirror lying on the road.

He hit the brakes and pulled to the side of the road. Yep, it was a mirror. He heard the muffled noise of what sounded like a horn on a spent and dying battery. He picked up the mirror then looked over the embankment. There, about sixty feet down, was a car bent around a huge tree trunk. The bottom of the car was facing Jeremy, so he could not make out its type. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and called 911 for help, then he went back to his truck for a dirty tangle of rope he had behind the seat. He tied it around the trunk of a large sturdy tree at the top of the embankment and tossed the rest into the ravine. He rotated the baseball cap he had on so the visor was in the back and pulled out a headlight band from his tool box and placed it on top of the cap. He used the headlight when he had to crawl under the house. He turned on the light and grabbed the rope at the top of the ravine.

He raced down the hill backwards towards the car as the horn beeped its final distorted shriek. The driver’s side door was wrapped around the tree and the passenger side door was wedged up against the uphill embankment and impossible to open. Jeremy headed to the front of the car to see if he could see the driver through the windshield. To his horror he could see the driver, and it was Ella—she was upside down and her hair was covered in blood. He couldn’t get to her. The windshield was cracked, but not shattered, and open to her. He raced to the back of the car and found getting in there was not going to be easy either since the previous accident had messed up the trunk and tail light, impairing his entrance to the back window, but it was better than the front. He picked up a rock and started pounding on the back window, breaking the safety glass and gaining entrance to the car and Ella.

“Ella? Can you hear me?” Jeremy asked as he shimmied into the back of the car and on to the ceiling, receiving no response from Ella.

“Ella, wake up,” Jeremy insisted as he felt for a pulse on her neck and then checked to see she was breathing.

He pulled a pocket knife out of his pocket and cut the jammed seat belt holding her upside down in the seat. He strained to hold the weight of her body as the seatbelt gave way, laying her on the ceiling in a lump. He could finally hear sirens up on the road as he started to pull Ella from the wreckage. Once they were both clear of the car and any danger, he wrapped his flannel shirt around her and rocked her in his arms. He spoke to her softly, telling her she was all right and everything would be okay as he waited for the emergency crew to make their way down to them.

He reluctantly released her when the firemen and paramedics arrived to take over. Many ropes littered the embankment and emergency personnel were everywhere. One crew worked on hooking a winch up to the car and hoisting it out of the ravine, while another crew worked diligently on Ella, and still another team was traversing down the embankment with a basket-type contraption he supposed was to bring Ella up to the ambulance safely.

Once atop the hill, they transferred her to the ambulance gurney and placed her inside. Jeremy hopped in with two paramedics and soon they were on their way to the hospital.

*****

Thankfully, Ella was fine. A broken radius bone in her left forearm, a concussion, and minor cuts and bruises. Jeremy called Marlin and even tracked down Matt
at the hotel Ella had mentioned him staying at t
o tell them about Ella’s accident. Marlin in turn called Patricia who never went to the hospital to check on her daughter.

Matt showered the hospital room with flowers, much to Jeremy’s dismay. Marlin talked to the doctors, fed Boo, and drove Ella home the following day. Jeremy never left the hospital from the ride there in the ambulance to the drive back with Marlin to the accident scene to pick up his truck. In just a day’s time the truck had been ticketed for unsafe parking and abandonment. Marlin told Jeremy he would explain to the police his involvement in the rescue and was sure that the police would toss the ticket out.

The following days were parades of police coming and going from the house interviewing Ella, Marlin, Jeremy, and than Ella again. An investigation had determined that the brakes had been tampered with. Found in the car, and suspected to have been the tool that damaged the brakes, was an exacto knife —Jeremy’s knife to be specific. No charges were being filed, at least for now.

As if there weren’t enough flowers at the hospital, Matt had even more flowers sent to the house on a daily basis. Ella was glad to be home, though uncomfortable with a heavy cast on her forearm. She enjoyed Marlin’s visits and the yummy treats Meme sent with him everyday. It reminded her of her grandmother doting on her and she relished it. That happiness, however, was short lived for soon after she was home from the hospital, Boo went missing and Ella was terribly distraught about her tiny friend being out in the cold, in the woods by herself.

*****

Against doctors’ orders, Marlin’s threats, and unbeknownst to Jeremy, Ella took off into the woods around the property in pursuit of the kitten to which she had grown so attached. Armed with a can of smelly tuna, and shaking a small bag of kitty food, she roamed the woods for hours calling Boo’s name, shaking the bag of food in hopes of bringing the scared, lost kitten out from hiding.

She hadn’t realized just how big the property was until then. She found several things on the property she didn’t know existed.

Not too far from the main grounds of the house she found a large, overgrown hedge that after further investigation revealed that it encircled a secret garden with a fairly large, non-working fountain. It looked as if it had been quite beautiful once and she thought it would be lovely to have it be once again.

An hour or two after she found the garden she found a lone graveyard. It wasn’t large but there must have been fifteen or twenty large headstones and another handful of broken or smaller, less lavish markers. What caught Ella’s attention, though, was one grave all alone away from the others under a large oak tree. The primitive headstone had toppled to its side and lay there without inscription. How sad to think that this one person was not to be among the others. Was this person exiled? Had he or she done something that the others didn’t approve of or was this one person far greater than the others and set apart from them by fortune or fame? If so, then why not have a more elaborate headstone?