Joanna saw the whole thing at once; the on coming car; the couple, still locked in their embrace and totally unaware of the danger; Marianne, chatting away in lighthearted unconcern.
With only milliseconds in which to react, Joanna screamed, “Watch out!” Grabbing Marianne by the shoulder, she propelled her forward into the the recessed entryway.
Startled by the warning, the man and woman straightened up and separated. The man stepped backward toward the safety of the building. The woman stayed where she was, directly in the path of the car. Joanna could see that the man was safe.
But unless the car swerved back off the curb and into the street, the woman, transfixed by fear, was a goner.
Without even thinking about it, Joanna seized the woman’s wrist as she leaped past. There was a whiplash jerk as the woman’s arm was wrenched forward. Joanna heard the sickening pop of a dislocating shoulder, heard the shriek of pain, and then the two of them plowed forward into the entryway where a shaken Marianne was just scrambling to her feet. Joanna and the other woman landed on top of Marianne in a muddled heap of flailing arms and legs. Joanna’s jawbone smashed into something hard in a skull-cracking explosion of stars.
It took seconds for Joanna’s head and vision to clear. When they did, she was sandwiched between the other two women. Beneath her, Marianne’s body was unnaturally still, while above someone moaned, “My arm, my arm! I think it’s broken.”
“Linda,” Burton Kimball said, reaching for his wife. “My God! Are you all right? They tried to kill us! Somebody call the cops.”
By then people were trying to come out through the door, but Marianne and Joanna both blocked the way. With her head still spinning, Joanna managed to roll off. The door opened far enough for some of the people inside to squeeze out onto the sidewalk. Not surprisingly, one of the first people out the door was Jeff Daniels. Right behind him was the television cameraman.
Jeff was kneeling beside his stricken wife when Marianne’s eyes fluttered open. “What happened?” she whispered.
Someone, the cameraman most likely, hurried to help Joanna to her feet. Her dress was torn, and three of the four gold buttons were missing.
Undersheriff Richard Voland appeared out of nowhere. “What’s going on here?” he asked, turning to Joanna.
“There was a car,” she stammered, pointing in the direction where the speeding vehicle had plunged off the steps at the end of the sidewalk and disappeared. “A red Cadillac. On the side walk. It tried to run us down.”
Voland looked where she pointed, but by then no car was visible. “A car on the sidewalk?” he asked disgustedly, as though the story was too farfetched to be given the slightest credence.
“Whatever would a car be doing on the sidewalk?”
“Trying to kill us,” Burton Kimball answered.
“Somebody call an ambulance. There are people hurt here.”
The sound of Burton Kimball’s voice galvanized Dick Voland into action. While he started issuing orders, Joanna knelt beside Jeff. “Is Marianne all right?”
Jeff shook his head. His wife was struggling to sit up, but he forced her back down to the side walk and covered her with a jacket someone handed him. “Lie still, Marianne,” he whispered urgently. “YOU stay right where you are.”
Unable to help Marianne, Joanna turned to Linda and Burton Kimball. Linda sat shivering on the curb, resting her injured arm on her lap while tears streamed down her face. She was trying not to cry, but the pain was too much. Burton at tempted to put his jacket across her shoulders, but she ducked away.
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t put anything on me. It hurts too much.”
Joanna’s stomach turned. The car hadn’t hurt Linda Kimball; Joanna Brady had.
“I’m sorry,” she apologized, feeling sick. “I didn’t mean…”
Linda Kimball looked up at her through anguished, tear-filled eyes. “My God, Joanna, don’t apologize. My arm hurts like hell, but if it weren’t for you, we’d all be dead.”
And then something funny happened. Linda Kimball started to laugh. “Did you hear that, Burtie? she gasped. “Here’s Joanna, trying to…
apologize… for hurting… for hurting my arm. “My God! That’s the funniest thing… I ever heard of.”
The laughter was high-pitched and hysterical, and it echoed eerily in the street even as the can yon walls began to reverberate with the sounds of approaching sirens.
“Be quiet,” Burton Kimball urged. “You’ll hurt yourself more.”
But Linda only giggled harder. “I know…” she managed. “It only hurts… when I laugh!”
Jenny somehow pushed her way through the milling throng of adults and threw her arms tightly around Joanna’s waist. “Mommy,” she wailed in a small, frightened voice. “Are you okay? You’re bleeding.”
Dazed, Joanna reached up and touched a finger to her face. There was a cut on her face where Marianne’s head had smacked into her cheek bone cut, but not much blood. “It’s no big thing,” Joanna assured Jenny. “I’m shook up but okay.”
Looking down at the top of her daughter’s head, Joanna was suddenly aware that her double breasted navy-blue dress, missing three critical buttons from the front, was gaping open to reveal an expanse of white bra to any and all who cared to see. With one hand still on Jenny’s shoulder, she tried to hold the dress shut with the other.
People milled around them. Even though inside the city limits it wasn’t the county’s jurisdiction, Dick Voland had placed himself in charge, issuing orders to the city cops who answered the call, helping direct the arriving ambulance.
Joanna was well aware that Dick Voland had been all over the county campaigning on Al Freeman’s behalf. Andrew Brady and the undersheriff had never seen eye-to-eye. There was even less love lost between him and Joanna. It annoyed her that his very first reaction to something she said had been outright disbelief. When Burton Kimball had said the exact same thing, he had automatically accepted it at face value. If that was the way he acted, what would happen if they ended up having to work together?
Despite Marianne’s plaintive insistence that she was perfectly fine, the attendants and Jeff quietly overruled her and loaded her onto a gurney. With the city’s single ambulance loaded and headed for, the hospital, the ambulatory Linda Kimball and her husband climbed into the back of a waiting police car.
“Joanna,” Eleanor Lathrop hissed from the sidelines, gesturing desperately. “Come here. Hurry.”
The look on Eleanor’s face was so pained that for a moment Joanna feared that her mother had been somewhere near the melee and that she, too, had been hurt in the scuffle.
“What’s the matter?” Joanna asked worriedly as she and Jenny hurried to her mother’s side.
“You’re not hurt, are you?”
Eleanor Lathrop shook her head. “For heaven’s sake, Joanna. Can’t you see those cameras are running?”
Joanna glanced back over her shoulder. Sure enough, three television cameramen were lined up, shoulder to shoulder, with their video cams humming away. “What about them?”
“Your dress, for one thing!” Eleanor wailed tearfully. “Your bra is sticking out. I’ve looked all over for your buttons, and I can’t find them any where. The only thing I have in my purse is this. Now go in the rest room and use it.”
Desperately Eleanor pressed a huge safety pin into Joanna’s hand. Looking down at it, Joanna was tempted to burst into her own storm of semi hysterical laughter. But she didn’t.
Because it really wasn’t a laughing matter. That safety pin encapsulated the difference between Joanna and her mother: between the active participant and the bystander. With the car screaming down on them, Joanna’s prime concern had been to keep people from harm. Eleanor’s prime consideration, on the other hand, was always and forever the maintaining of appearances.