The Curl Up and Dye (16 page)

LilyAnn kept screaming for help, hoping her neighbors would hear as she dived for the phone and dialed 911.

“911. What is your emergency?”

She could hardly breathe because of her welling panic and spit out the information in short, chopping sentences. “LilyAnn Bronte. 1704 Willow Drive. Man in my house. Trying to kill me. My neighbor is fighting. Send help. We need help.”

“Is he armed?” the dispatcher asked.

“Knife. He has a knife! Hurry!” she screamed, as Lachlan swung the knife at Mike, barely missing his face.

“Ma’am, wait on the phone with me,” the dispatcher said, but Lily couldn’t.

One moment Mike had the upper hand, and then Lachlan rolled and pinned Mike to the floor.

“No!” LilyAnn screamed, and even as the dispatcher was telling her to stay on the phone, she grabbed her grandma’s lead crystal vase and swung it against T. J.’s head like a ball bat.

The ensuing crack sounded like a gunshot as T. J. went limp. Mike pushed out from under him, crawling to his knees to check Lachlan’s pulse.

“He’s still breathing,” he gasped, trying to catch his breath.

“Well, damn. Then I didn’t hit him hard enough,” LilyAnn said, and then broke into sobs.

As Mike looked up at her from the floor, he got his first clear view of her condition, and his heart nearly stopped.

She was covered in blood.

“Oh my God, oh my God.”

He crawled to his feet and grabbed her shoulders, frantically running his hands up and down her body, checking for wounds. “Where are you hurt? Where did he cut you? Talk to me, sweetheart! What the hell did he do?”

LilyAnn pushed his hands away and threw her arms around Mike’s neck.

“You saved me! You saved me!” she sobbed. “I thought I was dead.”

Mike was shaking. In the distance, he could hear sirens, and he caught a glimpse of their neighbor through the open door, running across the street toward Lily’s house.

“LilyAnn, look at me,” Mike shouted.

She felt like she was going into free fall. Everything was beginning to echo, and Mike’s face kept going in and out of focus.

“There’s blood all over you. Where are you hurt?” he asked.

She swayed on her feet. “It’s all his,” she mumbled, and passed out in his arms.

He caught her as she fell and was laying her down on the sofa as Thomas Thane ran into the house.

“Dear God! What happened?”

“The man was trying to kill her. I heard her screaming as I drove up.”

Thomas toed T. J. with his shoe. “Is he dead?”

Mike took a breath. “No, but she damn sure tried to make that happen.”

All of a sudden, he was too shaky to stand. He sat down on the floor beside the sofa and laid his head against her arm. His belly was hurting, and he was going to be pissed beyond words if the sorry bastard busted anything loose.

The first police car slid to a stop at the curb, with an ambulance a half a block behind it. Mike saw Lonnie Pittman running toward the house with his gun drawn and then saw two other cruisers pull up, as well.

Lonnie came through the door with his gun aimed and saw T. J. Lachlan out on the floor and LilyAnn unconscious and bloody on the sofa. He was almost afraid to ask.

“Is she alive?”

Mike nodded. “She fainted.”

Lonnie knelt to check Lachlan’s pulse. “He’s still alive.”

Mike sighed. “She has already apologized for that oversight.”

Lonnie managed a sideways grin. “She’s damn sure bloody. Are you sure she’s not wounded?”

“She said it was all his, and I am inclined to believe her.”

At that point, two other officers came in, followed by the first wave of EMTs. One stopped by Lachlan, and the other went to LilyAnn.

Mike watched him checking her vitals, checking for wounds, feeling for obvious broken bones, but after a thorough check of her body and blood pressure, he rocked back on his heels.

“How is she?” Mike asked.

“She has a good pulse and no visible wounds other than bruising. Blood pressure is 140/85, which is a little high, but under the circumstances, I think she’s good.”

The other EMT’s comments were vastly different.

“This one is not. His blood pressure is low, and his breathing is labored. There’s a deep gash in the back of his head and I suspect concussion, possibly a skull fracture.”

“That would be from where LilyAnn took him out with her grandma’s vase.” Mike pointed to the shards of broken glass.

Lonnie was counting off the obvious wounds that he could see as the EMT turned Lachlan over.

“He’s missing part of an ear, and the gashes on his face look like they went into some of the facial muscles.”

The EMT beside LilyAnn picked up her hand.

“Part of his face is under her fingernails,” he said. The other one was still checking out Lachlan’s condition. “I’ve got teeth marks here… and lipstick on his ear?”

All of a sudden they all turned and stared at LilyAnn.

“Well, shit,” Lonnie muttered. “She bit off his ear.”

Mike tried to laugh, but it made his belly hurt. He grabbed it and doubled over.

Seconds later they had him on his back.

“You have a new surgery scar,” the EMT said.

“Yeah, I had an accident about six weeks ago. They took out my spleen.”

The EMT picked up his radio as Mike pushed himself up to a sitting position.

“This is Beau. We need a third bus at the address. I’ve got three down.”

He popped smelling salts beneath LilyAnn’s nose. She came to with a gasp, reaching for Mike.

“I’m here, honey,” he said, and grabbed her hand.

She was shaking as she pushed herself up, then saw Lachlan facedown on her floor.

“Is he
still
breathing?”

Lonnie grinned. “Yes, ma’am, he is. Can you tell me how he got in?”

“I don’t know. I went to my room to change clothes. The light was out in the closet, and when I turned around to go get a bulb, he tackled me facedown to the floor.”

Mike was shaking. He couldn’t wrap his head around how close he’d come to losing her.

Lonnie continued to take notes as the second set of EMTs came in the house.

“How did you get away?” he asked.

“I threw my head back and busted his nose, then bucked him off my back and ran. He caught me again in the hall. He took a swing at my head and missed. You can see where he rammed his hand through the Sheetrock. I scratched his face, kneed him in the dangly bits, and ran again.”

Lonnie grinned. He’d never heard a man’s balls referred to in quite such a manner.

LilyAnn felt light-headed as she looked down at the red blood on her white pants and the Christmas tree on her sweatshirt. After all that had happened, the lights were still flashing. She shoved her hands through her hair and thought it was a good thing she’d taken off her halo before this happened, because she’d been anything but an angel tonight.

Lonnie was still writing. “Then what happened, LilyAnn?”

“I was almost out the door when he caught me again, and that time he had pulled a knife. If it wasn’t for Mike, I would be dead.”

Lonnie’s eyes narrowed. “Yes, ma’am, Mike arrived at the right time for sure. It appears you’re gonna have yourself a black eye, but I’m giving this round to you. Lachlan’s missing a piece of an ear, parts of his face, and I’m betting you fractured his skull with that vase.”

“Who’s up?” the EMT asked, as they rolled a second gurney into the house.

“Take this one,” Lonnie said, pointing to Mike. “He’s recently out of surgery. I want to make sure we don’t have some internal bleeding here.”

LilyAnn suddenly realized Mike was on the floor for a reason. She bolted to her feet.

“Oh my God! Are you saying he hurt Mike?”

Before they knew it, she was swinging a fist at Lachlan’s head as they were trying to lift him onto the gurney.

Lonnie caught her before she connected and pulled her back.

“Leave something for the law,” he chided.

Mike crawled to his feet and put himself on the other gurney.

“You’re next, little lady,” the medic said.

“I’m fine,” she argued.

“Ma’am, if you could see yourself, you wouldn’t say that.” He gently pushed her down onto the last gurney and rolled her out.

“Lonnie, lock my door,” she called back.

“Don’t worry about your house, LilyAnn. Once everyone hears what you did to Lachlan, there isn’t a crook within a hundred miles who would take you on again.”

***

Before nightfall, the news of the attack on LilyAnn, and Mike’s heroic rescue on her behalf, had spread throughout Blessings, putting something of a damper on the holiday festivities.

When Rachel Goodhope heard what had happened, she shut herself in the bathroom and cried until her throat was raw. The guilt of not reporting her rape would weigh heavily on her soul. If she had reported it, there was every reason to assume this would never have happened to LilyAnn.

Mike was back in the hospital under observation, as was Lily, in a room down the hall. The last she’d heard, T. J. Lachlan was under guard and handcuffed to his hospital bed on the floor below.

He had a skull fracture and his ear had been repaired to seal the wound, but there were no immediate plans to address the wounds on his face. The theory was that if he survived, it wouldn’t matter how pretty he was in prison.

The photographer who’d taken pictures of LilyAnn at the Salvation Army dinner only hours earlier was on his way out of the hospital with a follow-up shot of her in a wheelchair.

By morning, LilyAnn Bronte would, once again, be the topic of conversation in Blessings, just as she had been when she won the title of the Peachy-Keen Queen and when she’d lost her almost-fiancé in the war. But notoriety was no longer on her radar. All she wanted was to find Mike.

She waited until the nurse who’d been checking her vitals left her room, and then she slipped out of bed, wincing from the amount of growing aches and bruises, and headed for the door.

With nothing on under her gown and the opening in the back a little too airy for public viewing, she snagged another hospital gown from inside the bathroom and put it on like a shirt, tying it in the front beneath her chin. It wasn’t much of a bathrobe, but it covered her bare backside, which was all that mattered. She already knew Mike’s room number, so she waited until the hall was clear and made a run for it.

She burst in Mike’s room with long legs flying, and her bare feet making little slapping noises on the tiles. Her eye was already several shades of purple, her bottom lip was swollen and puffy, and Mike thought she was beautiful.

“Do they know where you are?” he asked.

“Not yet they don’t.”

She wanted to crawl in bed with him. Instead, she fiddled with the ties on the hospital gown and tried to pretend she wasn’t naked beneath it.

“What did the doctor tell you?” she asked.

“That I’m bruised, but nothing broken or pulled loose.”

She kept looking at him, remembering what a relief she’d felt when she’d seen him in her yard. Instead of saying what was on her heart, she addressed food.

“I didn’t get to make you eggs.”

He leaned back against his pillows and patted the side of his bed.

“Come sit by me.”

She scooted up onto the side of the mattress as Mike reached for her hand.

“We’ve had a rough couple of weeks, haven’t we?”

She nodded.

“This feels like high school. Misunderstandings that could easily be explained but weren’t because two people acted like dumb-ass teenagers.” Her pulse was racing. She wanted to hear him say he cared.

“So you said you wanted to talk to me. What did you want to say?”

His fingers tightened. The lump in his throat was so big that he felt like he would choke if he opened his mouth, but he’d waited eleven long years to say this.

All of a sudden the door flew open. A nurse peeked in, then turned around and yelled down the hall.

“I found her!”

She crooked her finger at LilyAnn and frowned.

“You said I could move around,” LilyAnn said.

The nurse arched an eyebrow. “I did not mean in
his
bed.”

Mike grinned at LilyAnn.

“Busted.”

Lily frowned at the nurse. “I needed to talk to him.”

He gave her fingers another squeeze. “We have lived next door to each other all our lives. I’m not going anywhere.”

LilyAnn sighed. “Thank you for saving me.”

“Just repaying the favor, honey.”

She slid off the bed and went out the door with the nurse right behind her.

He felt as frustrated as she looked, but it was still better than how he’d felt last night, even with a sore belly.

After the doctor made rounds later, he left orders at the nurses’ station that, if they stayed stable through the night, Lily and Mike were to be released the next morning.

Lily went back to her room in dejection. She couldn’t talk to Mike, but she still had to call her mama. Grace needed to hear what happened from LilyAnn’s lips before she heard what happened through the Blessings grapevine.

She made the call, waiting for someone to pick up, and knowing the news was going to put a huge damper on her mother and Eddie’s holiday spirit. Still, it would be far better news than if Lonnie was calling to tell them she was dead.

Then she heard her mama’s voice.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Mama.”

Lily could hear the delight in her mother’s voice.

“LilyAnn, hi, honey. Did you have a good day at the Salvation Army dinner?”

“Yes, the whole event was great. I had a lot of fun, and Mike was the Santa Claus.”

There was a little silence. “Uh… so are you saying you two aren’t fighting anymore?”

“We’re not fighting, Mama, but that’s not why I called. Something happened after I got home, and I wanted to tell you before you heard it from someone else.”

Grace’s voice tensed. “What happened, baby? Where are you? Are you okay?”

“I’m in the hospital, but—”

“Oh dear God! Lily! What happened? Wait! I need to get Eddie! Eddie! Get on the other phone.”

LilyAnn pinched the bridge of her nose to keep from crying as she waited for her stepfather’s voice.

“I’m here, sugar! What happened?”

“T. J. Lachlan has been stalking me.”

“Oh dear God!” Grace cried.

“Hear me out, Mama. I already told you I’m okay.”

Grace was crying. Lily could hear her, but she had to get it said or she would cry, too.

“When I came home this evening, he was hiding in the house. He attacked me, and I fought back. The house is a bloody mess. Mike arrived in the nick of time and saved me, okay? I have no injuries other than some sore muscles, bruises, and a black eye. Mike is here under observation, mostly because of his recent surgery and the fight.”