Caught In The Middle

I lurched and fell against the car door. Straightening, I stared in disbelief at the small hole in my windshield and the cobwebby cracks that radiated from it.

I barely had time to register “shot” when Curt, gloves off and on his knees looking for my keys, grabbed the back of my coat and pulled me abruptly down.

A second shot fragmented the side window above our heads. Little pieces of glass rained down on us, stinging our faces and getting caught in our hair.

“Around the other side of the car,” Curt ordered. “Hurry! We’re too exposed here! And keep down.”

“This isn’t some accident, you know,” I said. “It’s got something to do with Patrick Marten.”

“Who’s Patrick Marten?” Curt asked.

“He’s the dead man I found in my trunk last night.”

GAYLE ROPER

has always loved stories, and as a result she’s authored 40 books. Gayle has won the Romance Writers of America’s RITA® Award for Best Inspirational Romance, finaled repeatedly in both the RITA Award and the Christy® Award contests, won three Holt Medallions, the Reviewers’ Choice Award, the Inspirational Readers Choice Contest and a Lifetime Achievement Award, as well as the Award of Excellence. Several writers’ conferences have cited her for her contributions to the training of writers. Her articles have appeared in numerous periodicals including Discipleship Journal and Moody Magazine, and she has contributed chapters and short stories to several anthologies. She enjoys speaking at writers’ conferences and women’s events, reading and eating out. She adores her kids and grandkids, and loves her own personal patron of the arts, her husband, Chuck.

Caught in the Middle

Gayle Roper

I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you and watch over you.

—Psalms 32:8

For Georgia with great affection

I love your love for the Lord

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

ONE

“It was a dark and sleety night,” I muttered as I slid behind the wheel and slammed the car door, grateful to have reached protection without drowning. I tossed my briefcase onto the seat and shook the water out of my short, spiky hair.

“Merrileigh Kramer, what have you done?” my mother had asked in horror when I’d had my waist-length hair drastically cut at summer’s end on the new-look, new-person theory.

I looked in the mirror and wondered the same thing myself. I hadn’t cut my hair, except for its annual split-ends trimming, since ninth grade. For a woman who hated change, I did a very drastic thing when I entered that beauty parlor. And it had only been step one.

Now I sighed and reminded myself that it’d grow eventually. The only trouble was that I didn’t know what to do with it while it grew. Somehow women routinely got from Halle Berry short to Halle Berry long and looked good in the process. I feared there wasn’t enough mousse in the world for me to accomplish that feat.

I eased my way across the parking lot, uncertain how slippery the millions of needles of icy rain had made things. The others who had been attending the Wednesday evening Board of Education meeting with me moved just as slowly. What had begun as a cold, nasty rain had turned to sleet when we weren’t looking.

When it was my turn to pull out onto the road, I stepped slowly on the gas. The wheels spun for an instant on the thin layer of ice, then grabbed hold.

I hated ice. Every time I drove on it, I thought of my mother and the winter’s day in Pittsburgh years ago when she had been driving me and four friends home from Brownies. I remembered the terrifying spin across the other lane and the oncoming cars scrambling to avoid us. I remembered the thud of our car as it hit a utility pole. I still felt my heaving stomach and tasted the fear. Mostly I remembered the screams and my mother’s white face and the blood from the bashed noses. The fact that no one had been badly hurt then did not ease my fluttery heart tonight.

I drove carefully, watching for trouble. At Manor Avenue and Lyme Street I detoured slowly around a pair of cars half blocking the intersection as they sat with their left headlights locked together. Their drivers stood in the rain doing a good imitation of their cars, noses mere inches apart.

I couldn’t help grinning at them, but I gripped the wheel more tightly. My heart throbbed in my temple.

With relief I turned onto Main Street where traffic was moving more quickly, keeping the road from freezing. When I passed The News office, the lights were still on, and I felt a surge of belonging. I beeped my horn in greeting to whomever was working so late. Don, my fearsome editor? Mac, his lecherous but charming assistant? Larry, the sports guy?

Tomorrow Don would bestow upon me the honor of writing a story about the first ice storm of the season. I knew it. Such stories were favorite ploys of editors, and as new kid on the block, I was certain to get the assignment.

I’d had worse. At least there’d be plenty of material in the police report about all the fender benders. Between the ice storm and the Board of Education meeting, I’d be plenty busy before morning deadline. Then I had scheduled the interview with the local artist. Variety to be sure.

I turned onto Oak Lane and felt the wheels slew.

Hang on, I told myself. You’re almost home.

I took my foot off the gas, gritted my teeth and proceeded slowly between the rows of cars parked against each curb.

Suddenly a car on my right roared to life like a lion scenting its prey. Without looking, it sprang from its parking spot, barely leaving the paint on my fender. I instinctively did exactly what I’d always lectured myself about not doing. I hit the brakes hard on ice.

Of course I went into an immediate skid. My headlights raked across the offending car as it pulled away, briefly revealing a man, hat pulled down over his eyes, collar up against the weather, staring intently ahead, completely unaware of me or anything else.

My stomach became mush and my heart thumped wildly in my ears as I skidded helplessly toward a new blue car parked on the left. I whipped my wheel into the skid just like everyone said you should, but still the shiny blue door panels with their navy-and-red racing stripes rushed at me. My headlights blazed on the chrome; the black windows loomed darkly.

But my real terror was for the man who had suddenly materialized at the front bumper of the blue car, standing like a pedestrian waiting for a clear path to jaywalk. I had no idea where he’d come from.

“Please, God, don’t let me hit him!” I was a Brownie again, panic-stricken.

His features were indistinct through my rain-washed window, but I could see the O of his mouth as he saw me rushing toward him. He turned to run.

I closed my eyes involuntarily against the crash, shoulders hunched, face screwed up in apprehension. I was probably screaming, but thankfully I don’t remember. Screaming has always struck me as a sign of weakness, and I like to imagine that I react with style even when I’m afraid. And I was afraid.

After a very long, slow-motion moment, my car shuddered to a silent halt. I cautiously opened my eyes and found myself mere inches from the blue car’s front fender, the two cars neatly side-by-side and too close together for my door to open. I could not have parked so well had I tried.

I slid across the seat and flung open the far door. I didn’t think I’d hit the man—I had neither heard nor felt a thump—but I had to make sure he wasn’t crushed beneath my wheels. I pressed a hand against my anxiety-cramped abdomen and climbed into the downpour.

The man wasn’t lying broken on the road. In fact, he wasn’t anywhere, lying or standing, broken or whole. He had completely disappeared.

I leaned against my car, weak with relief, and took deep breaths. I barely felt the icy sleet running down my neck. Finally I was able to move enough to get myself back into the car and, with a strange, shaky feeling, I drove the few remaining blocks home. I couldn’t wait to get there, take a hot shower and relax with Whiskers purring on my lap as I drank a Diet Coke and ate a handful of Oreos. By then my heart would probably be beating normally again.

My snug, cozy, carriage-house apartment had once been part of the estate of Amhearst’s leading citizen, Charlie Mullens, a man who’d made millions in the stock market in the twenties and had built a great mansion to forget his New York tenement beginnings. He had lost his fortune in the Great Crash of ’29 and his life shortly afterward when he drove the new Rolls-Royce he could no longer pay for into the railroad overpass. His heirs, reduced to working for a living, soon sold the gracious, money-eating mansion and moved from Amhearst.

Over the next forty years, the property passed from hand to hand, deteriorating steadily until it was razed in the early seventies. At that time the carriage house, which had sat peacefully behind the mansion unnoticed and unused, was renovated into four one-bedroom apartments, two on the ground floor, two above. A long, narrow drive off Oak Lane gave access to the quaint building, and I turned down the drive, grateful to be home.

It was still somewhat strange to me that this washome. Here I was, all alone in Amhearst, working as a reporter at The News, responsible to no one but God and Don Eldredge, the newspaper’s owner-editor.

I don’t have to do anything, I had understood one evening during my first week in Amhearst. I’m completely on my own. If I want to eat and pay the rent, I’d better go to work, but I don’t have to. And there’s no one here who cares enough to make me.

It had been a strange, lonely and frightening realization. There were no family, no friends, no acquaintances here. It was just me, making my own choices. The next day I went to the animal shelter and got Whiskers, a huge gray-and-white mottled cat with marvelous white whiskers. Now at least I was responsible to one living being. Now I had to fulfill at least one obligation every day, or my shins would be black-and-blue from Whiskers butting them, his special way of asking for his dinner.

Leaving Pittsburgh and home had been hard for me. I like to think of myself as independent, but the truth is that I like to be “independent” surrounded by familiar things.

I’d gone back home after college, moving in with my parents, content to be where everything was known and comfortable. I hadn’t had to find a new doctor or a new dentist or a new church. I’d become a general reporter at the paper where I had worked for three of my college summers, and I’d done very well, even winning a couple of minor journalism awards.

And, of course, Jack was in Pittsburgh: handsome, personable, accomplished, irresponsible Jack.

I had expected to live at home one, maybe two, years at the very longest. After all, I was an independent spirit. I was amazed and appalled when I woke up one day and realized that I had been there four years, waiting for life to happen. Waiting for Jack.

“Just a little more time, Merry,” he’d say. “That’s all I’m asking. Just a little more time.”

Eventually, to save myself from drowning in despair, I came to Amhearst, and my first weeks here were terrible. I hated all the new people, the new streets, the new stores. I got a toothache, probably from grinding my teeth all night in fear, and I had to find a dentist. I hated him, too.

But I made it. I learned to like my job, and I slowly remembered that being alone isn’t the worst thing in the world. I might not be laughing much yet, but I was slowly regaining some self-respect.

“Forgetting what is behind,” Dad said one night on the phone, quoting St. Paul. “Straining toward what is ahead. Pressing on toward a new life. We’re proud of you, Merry.”

Jack spoke to me on the phone a few times, too, and even came to visit me once. I agonized over that visit, filled with equal measures of hope and dread. The reality was dull compared to my nightmares and daydreams.

“Come back when you’re ready to get married,” he told me when he left.

“I’ll come back when I have a ring on my finger and a date on the calendar, not before,” I replied. Then I went into my apartment and cried myself sick.

And so summer became fall, and fall a nasty, sleety, early December night with icy roads, and I was finally home.

I parked, climbed out into the cold and wet, and hurried to my trunk, where I’d stashed a case of Diet Coke. The dim light by the walk barely illuminated the area.

I looked uncomfortably over my shoulder. It was dark and spooky back here even on a nice night, but in the rain and sleet, it was worse than usual. The large lilac at the edge of the house was especially eerie tonight, with its branches creaking and complaining about their icy bath.

I eyed the dripping tree, trying to penetrate it to be certain it wasn’t hiding someone. Come May, those blossoms had better be beautiful and fragrant to make up for my heart palpitations the rest of the year.

Although, I told myself with false bravado, no bad guy in his right mind would be lurking behind a lilac tree on a night like this.

Even so, the last thing I expected to find when I raised the lid of my trunk was a dead body.

TWO

Instinctively I slammed the lid down. I stood, shocked, until a sudden, stout gust of wind made the lilac creak alarmingly. I jumped and swung around, but of course no one was there. We were alone, the corpse in my trunk and I.

It can’t be true, I thought. It simply can’t be. Things like this don’t happen to real people, just people in mystery novels. My mind is playing tricks on me because I’m tired and had such a nerve-racking trip home.

I looked at the dark outline of my trunk lid. The slight illumination from the light by the walk glinted on my keys still dangling in the lock.

I raised the lid just far enough for the light to come on, then bent cautiously and peeked in.

There was a body, all right. A man. He had on a green, down-filled jacket, and he was lying on his stomach, his face turned away.

I slammed the lid again and made it to the porch just in time to sit before I fell. I put my head between my knees and stared blankly at the wet cement.

There was a body in my car!

When I could move again, I stumbled into my apartment and called the police.

“Please come quickly!” I hardly recognized my shaky voice. “Please.”

I got out of my wet clothes and into my heaviest sweats. I toweled my hair and went to wait numbly at the front door, my breath frosting the glass of the storm sash.

When the first flashing light turned down the alley, I ran to the parking area. Soon I was standing under my gray umbrella surrounded by men in dripping, bright-orange slickers with POLICE written in black on their backs.

“First question,” said one. “Did you touch anything?”

I shook my head, horrified at the thought.

“Okay, then,” he said. “What happened?”

“I was going to get a case of sodas out of my trunk. I opened it and there was this body.”

He looked at me, eyebrows raised, waiting for more. “That’s it?”

I looked back, aghast. “A body isn’t enough?”

He smiled. “Open the trunk for us, please.”

Obediently, I did. “See?” I pointed helpfully at the corpse sprawled on top of a cardboard box filled with two dozen cans of decaf Diet Coke.

I swallowed convulsively and looked away. My stomach was teeming with acid, and my mouth tasted like metal. The flashing lights and the crackling car radios did nothing to ease my tension.

The policeman, a beefy man with a heavily seamed face, studied the body.

“Who is he?”

I stared at the policeman, thunderstruck. “How should I know?”

“It is your car,” said the policeman reasonably.

“Well, it isn’t my body!”

“Oh.” The policeman’s voice was neither believing nor disbelieving. “Then you’ve looked at him well enough to know you don’t recognize him?”

I swallowed hard a couple of times against the thought of studying the man. “Are you kidding? I haven’t gone near him. See me? I’m standing with my back to the car so I don’t have to look at him.”

“Then how do you know you don’t know him?”

“I just know.”

“Uh-huh. Well, why don’t you tell me exactly what happened here tonight.”

I had never felt so unreal in my life. My car was now bathed in bright light supplied by portable generators rumbling in a van with RESCUE in red-and-gold letters on its white side. Two policemen were trying to arrange a plastic tarp to shield the whole area from the weather. One tied some ropes to the creaky lilac, and the other hammered some pegs into the macadam of the parking area and looped ropes around them.

The vanity license plate my brother, Sam, had given me for my birthday mocked the intense scene. MERRY, it read.

“So you’ll remember who you are, and so you’ll remember to be happy,” he said when he gave it to me. What he wasn’t saying was that he wanted me to forget Jack, but I knew. I had looked at the plate, knowing the love and concern that went into his ordering it, knowing he couldn’t have foretold that my romantic trials would force me to decide to move just when he planned to give it to me. But the truth was that MERRY was a heart-piercing reminder of the un-Merry person I had become.

Now my car, my trunk, my parking lot, even MERRY had become police business.

I sighed as I watched another heavy peg pounded into the macadam. Hopefully my landlord would understand that it was the police who had made the holes in his parking area, not me. Somehow, knowing Mr. Jacobs, I doubted it.

“Miss Kramer, please tell me what happened here tonight,” the policeman repeated.

I forced my eyes from the activity and looked at him. “Nothing much happened here,” I said. “I opened my trunk, and there he was. I closed my trunk, hoping he’d go away. I opened my trunk and he was still there. I called you.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

A car squealed into the alley behind the official cars. A man climbed out and walked authoritatively toward the open trunk. He leaned under the protective plastic and around the men taking photographs, studied the situation, then walked to the policeman and me.

As he watched the approaching man, the policeman snorted, little puffs of foggy breath erupting from each nostril. “The press already! That’s all we need.”

“Don!” I said as I flung myself at the man. He ducked to miss the points of my umbrella and patted me comfortingly on the back.

“It’ll be okay,” he said as though to a crying child. “It’ll be okay.”

Suddenly I realized that I had thrown myself at my boss, a man with whom I had only the most superficial of working relationships, a man I had on a pedestal. Ever since I’d gone into journalism and realized what editors did in putting together a newspaper every day, I had been in awe of them. And here I was, hanging all over my editor like a Southern belle with the vapors. I pulled back in embarrassment but was glad when he kept a comforting hand on my shoulder.

“Don, there’s a body in my trunk,” I said.

“I noticed. Who is he?”

I glared at him. “Why does everyone think I know him?”

“It is your car.”

“That doesn’t mean I know him! I suppose you think I put him there, too?”

“Did you?” asked the policeman.

I blinked, my anger gone as quickly as it had come.

“You don’t really think I did, do you?” I could feel the handcuffs already.

The policeman shrugged. “Someone put him there.”

“Well, it wasn’t me.” I hoped I sounded confident. “If he were really my body, I’d put him in someone else’s car.” I looked from the policeman to Don. “That only makes sense, right?”

The policeman shrugged.

Don smiled.

I shivered. “I think I’ll go inside.”

I sat forlornly in my living room for a few minutes seeing the bright light from the generators through the tall windows. That was a nice thing about old buildings—tall windows.

Restless, I got up, went to my minuscule kitchen and put some water on to boil. People would be in soon, and hot drinks would be welcomed. Personally, I still wanted my Coke and Oreos, but there was no way I had the nerve to get a can from the trunk, even if they let me.

Ten minutes later, the policeman, whose name was Sergeant William Poole, sat carefully in my blue wing chair, his hair hanging damply on his forehead and his shirt gaping a bit about the belly. A mug full of coffee sat on the end table beside him, and he had a clipboard in one hand and a pen in the other. “All right, Miss Kramer, tell me all about it. In fact, why don’t you tell me about your whole day.”

I nodded. “Okay.” I cleared my throat nervously. “This morning I drove my car to Taggart’s garage for its annual state inspection. Jolene Meister, the secretary from work, picked me up at the garage at six forty-five.”

“Where do you work?”

“At The News.”

“Then he’s your boss?” Sergeant Poole nodded at Don Eldredge, who was sitting comfortably on the sofa.

“Yes, he’s my boss.”

“You been at The News long?”

“About three months. I started just after Labor Day.”

“What do you do?”

“I’m a general reporter and feature writer.” Which sounded more glamorous than the gofer I often felt like.

“Have you lived in Amhearst long?”

“Since Labor Day weekend.”

“Where do you come from?”

“The Pittsburgh area.”

Sergeant Poole nodded. “Did you leave a family in Pittsburgh?”

“My parents and Sam, my younger brother, who’s at Penn State.” And Jack, I thought. And Jack.

“So you took your car to be inspected this morning. Why’d you go to Taggart’s?”

“The people at work recommended that garage. No huge bill for unnecessary work, you know?” I noticed I was picking nervously at my cuticles and forced myself to stop. “Lots of garages like to bleed single women, but they told me Mr. Taggart wouldn’t do that.”

Sergeant Poole nodded like he knew Mr. Taggart and agreed. “When’d you get your car back, Miss Kramer?”

“Jolene dropped me off on her way home. I hadn’t expected to be able to leave by five because of a late-afternoon meeting I was to cover and write up, but the meeting was canceled.”

I gulped some tea, then continued. “Mr. Taggart wasn’t around when Jolene dropped me off, but my car was waiting, the new inspection stickers on the window and the bill on the seat, just like we’d arranged when we thought I’d be late.” I shrugged. “I just climbed in and drove off. After dinner at Ferretti’s, I covered the Board of Education meeting at the high school. Then I came home.”

“Did you have dinner with anyone?”

I shook my head. “I ate alone.”

“You didn’t stop for those sodas sometime between picking up your car and coming home?”

“No, I bought them yesterday. I just hadn’t taken them out of the trunk.”