Friday, November 26, 1999 10:54 PM, Chicago, Illinois--I left Indiana and Battle Ground almost three days ago now, never dreaming that my journey home to a simple and somewhat rowdy Davis Thanksgiving in Northern Kentucky would be so long delayed, nor so entirely complicated by a simple, yet critical, error in judgment.

I was about thirty milesno, less, I had yet to pass Shelbyvilleout of Indianapolis going south on Interstate 74. It was the way I always take, the fastest main road; four lanes, two each way, with the soothing hum of cornfields to both the left and right.

I've never been the kind of person to stop for troubled motorists, not out of lack of desire to be of service; only a single woman of my stature and youthful appearance is already at a moderate risk without compounding such a deficit by getting out of her own car. I'll usually call 911 on my cell phone if I see anything particularly suspicious or anyone in need of aid.

It was a beige late model Ford LTD. They don't even make them anymore, but we used to own one when I was a kid, which was perhaps what caught my eye. There was a dark-haired woman standing next to it in the medianshe had clearly been heading for Indy when she must have experienced a massive blowout to her left front tire, unexpectedly sending the automobile deep into the grassed strip separating the two lanes. Just as I passed by, she was kicking at what was left of the tire. It wasn't much more than the rim. With each kick her long dark coat swirled about her, not buttoned despite the cold.

I sped past, doing just above the 65 mph that Indiana allows two-axled vehicles under law. But I couldn't get the image of her out of my head, standing there, kicking and probably cursing at that tire for all she was worth. It was then that I had a flashshe had been wearing high heels. Not exactly good for walking the distance to the next exit, for which I had yet to see a sign. It was a lonesome stretch of highway for that part of the country, and I realized that soon it would be coming up dark. Something told me to turn the car around, that if I didn't I'd regret it all night, and into the next day. That if I didn't circle back I'd be haunted by the image of her, her coat swirling in the wind, darkness and cold looming patiently all around her. So I did.

It didn't take long, U-turns legal in the state, and unpaved turnarounds abundant on even the major highways. I pulled onto the shoulder once I was in sight of her vehicle. Oddly she hadn't turned on either her flashers or her headlights to signal passersby for help, but I spotted her easily enough with the Mag-Lite that I had pulled from my own well-prepared trunk.

"Do you need any help?" I asked, then wondered if perhaps I should have introduced myself first. Being new to such a situation, I was uncertain as to the correct protocol. She didn't seem to notice, either me or the protocol.

"I'm Maggie," I continued when she didn't answer, but instead stood there as if contemplating the veracity of my offer. "If you like I can take you up to the next exit to call somebodyan auto club maybe?"

That seemed to get her attention.

"Yeah," she replied, cocking her head at an angle, her eyes narrowing slightly into mine. "That would be just great."

Now don't ask my why I didn't think to offer the use of my own cell phone, right there in the glove compartment, or why it never occurred to me to check and see if my full-size spare and jack wouldn't do for her car. As I said, it was my first time doing something like this, and I was a little nervous.

She thanked me for helping as we were getting into my car. She seemed like a nice person, a little pre-occupied to be sure, but nice enough.

So as I drove to the next exit, I asked about her holiday plans, meaning to be polite. She didn't say much, mentioned she had been heading to Chicago to see family, one of whom had recently been in an accident. She did not disclose the details. I told her I was sorry to hear it. Then she returned the question, and I told her about my own trip, as well as how many suitcases I had wedged into the trunk of the car, the necessary food that I had packed--as my mother was not the most inclined to cook beyond desserts--and even the fact that I had taken out a larger sum from the ATM than usual (I had a funny little bit I was working up about it), as I was planning on some pre-Christmas shopping.

It all seems a little silly now, a little obvious, but she was easy to talk to. We laughed together. I even started thinking that maybe I'd stay with her while she waited to get picked up, keep her company. Just being around her made me a little melancholy that I didn't have anyone to spend the coming hours of my trip with.

It was at this time, just as we were pulling into the first Shelbyville exit that she drew the gun from her coat. It didn't take much to threaten me, I have always been a person who avoided violence and confrontation at any cost, and I'd never run into someone issuing orders holding a weapon. She had apparently seen the power cord to my phone, which I had failed to tuck away since its last use.

"Take it out," she said, "and dial."

I dialed the number as she instructed me, I recognized the Chicago area code. We were sitting in the front seat of my car with the engine idling in the parking lot of the Waffle Steak. The dome light wasn't on, so to anyone who might have been curious, I was making a call and she was waiting for me to finish so we could go inside.

It did not seem possible that she could want anything enough to hurt me for it if I played along, or else I imagined that she would have simply killed me when I stopped and taken the car. At least that's how it seemed at the time.

The phone rang at the other end and a woman answered, giving the name of a police precinct.

Downtown, I thought. "What do I do now?" I asked, thinking maybe I was going to be reporting my own kidnapping.

"Ask for Detective Ray Vecchio," she said, and for the first time I noticed that she looked tired, like she had been running for a long time. And though her hair mostly fell across her cheekbone and covered it, there was a bruise and cut, which looked bad enough for a band-aid, but was without. When she blinked, her eyes stayed closed just a moment longer than they should have. She was worn out.

I asked for Vecchio. "They want to know what it's about," I relayed to her, one hand over the microphone, certain I was more eager to know than the person on the other end.

"You only talk directly to him," she said, instructing me. "Tell them," she almost smiled, "it's about polar bears."

I did as she said and was quickly transferred. It was answered in the middle of the first ring.

A long string of curses and possibly broken Italian ensued, followed bywell, the basic gist of it was, "what do you want?"

I looked to her for what to say.

"Tell him who you are, and that I have a gun on you." Her voice flattened. "NOTHING MORE."

So I did.

"You'll be alright," the voice said to me, although despite the gun I didn't feel any pressing fear for my life. "Just tell me what she wants, we'll get you out of there. Where are you right now?"

"I can't say."

"Good," she said, moving the gun to just below my rib cage. "Tell him I want some answers."

Things went on between the two of them, with me as interpreter, each one coaching me on what to say to the other. And me, sitting there, holding a three-way conversation that I couldn't follow.

"You tell her to let me know where she is, and I'll be happy to give her what she's got coming to her," he threatened.

"She wants to know if he's dead."

"Yeah, tell her the funeral's Saturday, here in town. If she comes we'll arrange a special escort. Something real nice."

"She's knows he's not dead, she's been checking the papers."

"Let her know I am deeply touched by her concern."

"If he's there you have to put him on."

"Sure, sure, I'll go find him, he must have stepped out to the john. Just keep her talking," this was directed to me. "We've almost got a trace."

"It's no good," I let him know. "I'm on my cellular."

I saw her shift slightly in her seat, and she shook her head. Intuiting what she was thinking, I asked, already knowing, as did she, the answer. "He's not there, is he?"

"You listen to me," the detective said, again addressing me. "This woman is capable of anything. My partner's in the hospital right now with a bullet lodged in his spine that they can't take out. She put it there. She shot his wolf and tried to frame him for something she did. She even killed her own sister." He took a deep breath that echoed across the line. "You do whatever she asks and stay alive, Maggie. We'll find you."

Correctly sensing from the length of the dialogue on the other end without my responding that he was talking to me, she took the phone from my hand flipped it shut and hung up.

"What did he say to you?"

"He said you shot a wolf and framed his partner and killed your sister," I said. "Is that true?" I guess I was getting a little unnerved now.

"What did he say about him?" she asked, her voice strained. The circles under her eyes were shadowed in the light from the Waffle Steak sign. I had deduced that the "him" she was interested in was also the detective's partner. But she didn't use his name. As though "him" was all she needed to say.

"He said he's in the hospital with a bullet in his spine."

"Will he walk again?" she asked.

"I don't know," I said, "You hung up."

"He didn't die," she said, but not to me.

I felt the barrel of the gun ease for a moment away from my ribs. I wondered if she was disappointed.

A few moments passed and she directed me to the McDonald's drive-thru, where I ordered dinner for her, still with the gun to my ribs. I paid out of my own walletshe made no move to get into hers. We got on a gravel road that ran parallel to the expressway, and within a few miles she instructed me to get out of the car. She let me take my jacket from the back seat and put it on. I askedand in retrospect this was quite sillythat if I couldn't have my purse (I had realized by then that all that was mine was now hers) could I at least have my chap-stick. She shrugged and handed it over, making sure that I also had a pair of gloves.

"Get down on your knees," she said, and by now I was so used to doing as she asked, I did it without thinking, without even feeling the gravel as it bit into my knees through the jeans.

"You should not have been kind to me," she added, then used the butt of the gun to knock me unconscious from behind.

I don't know how much later it was when I came back around. It wasn't the loss of the car, or my clothes, or my wallet even that upset me. Nothing upset me. I had the peculiar feeling that if she had just asked to take them I would have obliged her. She was that sort of person. The kind you want to help. The kind you turn your car around on the highway to see if they need your assistance.

I reached in my pocket for where I'd put the chap-stick and was surprised to find my phone. It had not been in my coat when I got out of the car. I'm sure I would have remembered its weight against my side.

Just as I turned it on and fumbled with my gloved hands to press redial, and Detective Ray Vecchio, it began to snow. Thick, heavy flakes that fell all around me like the white feathers from a pillow I had burst once as a child, picturesque as a holiday snow globe.

It wasn't long before a local officer found me, even from my poor description of the location where she had left me. But it was long enough that Victoria was now gone, and I didn't know if she had stayed on back roads or returned to the highway, and if she had, which direction she had taken.

Another officer had found the abandoned LTD. Its plates were missing, making it safe to believe she had swapped them with mine, and I could not recall what hers had been when I stopped in the dark, not even the state or county.

Somewhere during the questioning, in the back of the officer's car at the site, I noticed a dull ache and itch at the base of my scalp. When I put my hand to the spot, it pulled away somewhat damp, my fingers covered in both crusted and fresh blood.

Quickly I removed my jacket, and the collar told a similar story. If I had not fallen forward, the snow would have been stained as well. When the officer returned a moment later, I mentioned it to him. He seemed a great deal more alarmed than I felt, and soon we were hurtling pell-mell down the gravel road toward the nearest hospital, where after a local anesthetic and four stitches I realized how badly I wanted to go to bed. The young intern who stitched me though, feared for a concussion, and I was sentenced to waking every three hours during the night.

I was taken to the local police station where I was put up. They wanted me to answer more questions in the morning.

When I woke it was to the pain at the base of my skull and the long face of someone telling me he was Detective Ray Vecchio. He was kneeling beside the cot I had been given, much closer than I would like to encounter most people first thing in the morning. Momentarily forgetting my trip to the ER, I started and rolled away, onto my back. When the stitches hit the pillow, I nearly rocketed out of the cot and into him.

"Whaaaat?" he shouted, no doubt thinking I was having a seizure. He had his arms out before I could tumble over the edge--my balance also seeming to have suffered from the night before--and I ended up even closer, his hands to my shoulders, steadying me for an instant, before letting one of them push my hair to the side as he inspected the back of my neck, and the source of my discomfort.

"I'm fine," I said, trying to regain my composure, rubbing at my still-sleepy eyes.

"They've cut your hair, shaved it almost to the skin," he told me, as if I hadn't known, as if I hadn't silently put a curse on the tech who had held the scissors.

He stood and stepped away from the cot.

"Just to get to the cut," I said, much more casually than I felt. "It'll grow back. Besides, the rest of it's long enough to cover it up."

"Dammit," he said, squeezing his eyes closed, but I knew it wasn't to me. I knew he was thinking about her, blaming her, even if I wouldn't.

"I'm sorry I freaked," I offered. "I'm a little jumpy."

"With the night you had," he said, "no need to apologize." He inclined his head to where one of the officers was seated. "Have these yokels here even fed you?"

"No. They did wake me every third hour, though. Kept me from having to spend all night tied to a hospital bed."

He looked into my pupils like someone who knew how do to such things and pronounced me well enough to travel.

Unlike my hosts, he had the decency to let me get cleaned up and take me over to the Waffle Steak for breakfast as he questioned me.

It was less than an hour until lunchtime when I remembered that it was Thanksgiving Day. Using his phonemy battery was dead from use the night beforeI called my family, told them I wasn't feeling too well, and was staying behind in Indiana. I apologized for not calling sooner. I did not mention my stolen car, my stitches, or my hijacker.

"What's this number you're calling from on the caller ID, Maggie?" my dad--currently obsessed with this new bit of technology--asked. "This area code looks like you're all the way up in Chicago."

"It's nothing, Dad," I told him. "Must be a crossed wire somewhere."

I didn't like lying to my parents. Especially not in front of a near-stranger, a police officer who was counting on my telling the truth in other matters. I didn't like it, but I liked it a lot better than coming clean about the entire incident, spoiling their dinner and inciting them to hop in the car and drive across country to see if they could help the situation. Which of course they couldn't.

"I'll tell them later," I felt compelled to say to Vecchio after I hung up.

"I don't blame you," he said. "It's not the greatest day to be dealing with crime."

His response and expression made me realize that he had probably pulled himself away from a family somewhere of his own to deal with me and the can of worms my incident seemed to have opened up.

He had driven down especially from Chicago to see me, and as he was taking Interstate 65 back north, the Shelbyville police asked if he would take me back to Battle Ground with him. It was on the way. I think they were relieved to be rid of me.

We rode for almost an hour in his classic Riviera without speaking, when he started to talk. I had been looking out the side window, my head propped on the seat, careful of my stitches, and for a moment I was sure he thought that I was asleep, and that he was talking to himself.

He told me the story, as he knew it, about Victoria, and the man in the hospital. He wasn't eloquent by any means, but I was curious enough not to mind. Turned out that she hadn't shot Ray's partner after all, but even so that didn't leave much to exonerate her.

I kept quiet, knowing that he wasn't really talking to me, he was just talking. His words seemed to cast a spell over us and around the car. There was almost no one on the highway, just us and the snowy cornfields, and the radio station playing so quietly I couldn't tell what type of music was even on. Occasionally we passed a silo, or a lonesome farm house.

We reached Battle Ground, the small town where I lived, by mid-afternoon. He didn't say anything, but I don't think it was as near to the interstate as the Shelbyville police had led Vecchio to believe. Neither of us had had any lunch, and when we turned onto Tippecanoe Runknowing that very little would be open and serving lunchI invited him in. He accepted, and we walked into the house.

He looked curiously at everything he saw, from the front porch swing to the wide expanse of yard and surrounding trees that kept my neighbors out of sight. And when the Saint (my St. Bernard) bounded down the stairs, pleased to see me back so soon, I felt the first urge to laugh since Victoria and I had been together. Vecchio put out his hand, which the Saint accepted with his usual friendly lick.

Almost nervously, Vecchio asked for directions to the bathroom. "You do have something indoors, right?"

"Yeah," I let his mild crack at country life go. "Upstairs and to the right. When you're done," I subtly teased, "be sure to pull the chain, and put the Sears and Roebuck back where you found it for the next person."

He looked a little leery at my suggestion, and I assured him, "a joke. Only a joke. But do shut the door when you leave. The Saint has an unnatural fascination with that particular room."

"Oh, yeah," he began to commiserate, "my sister used to have a dog that drank out of the toilet."

"No," I interrupted him, "it's the mirrors that he's fascinated with. If I don't keep the door shut, he stares at himself in the full length all day."

Vecchio's eyebrows showed his doubt.

"He's a little self-centered," I explained. "Naturally, he's a good looking dog, but I am trying to break him of it."

While Vecchio was upstairs, I tried to think of something for us to eat. Problem was, I had been planning to be gone almost a week, and the cupboards and refrigerator were bare. Someone was coming in to look after the Saint and feed him, so there was plenty of dry dog food but nothing for humans.

I quickly mixed up some powdered Country Time Lemonade, and added extra sugar to compensate for the fact that I was making something instant on the food god's holiday. Coupling that with a half a gallon of milk that I had been unable to make myself throw out before I left, we sat down to a dinner of Golden Grahams. It was a good meal.

"This place looks like something out of a book," he said. "Like Grandma's house in the song. Over the river, and all that."

"It is," I told him. "Not from the song, but it is my grandmother's house, all her things, really. I inherited when she died."

As we ate he told me a little about Chicago, about his grandmother's house. When I asked about the rest of his family, he filled that in too. Since we had arrived, we had continued to side-step the reason he was here at all, as though it was simply not polite dinner conversation, or as though the Saint was a child too young to hear the details.

Right before he left, my phone rang. They had found my car, and most of its contents in the visitor parking at a hospital in Chicago. The plates had been switched as we suspected, and it was absent of fingerprints--both mine and hers. According to the ticket stub they found slid between the ceiling and visor, it had been in the lot since ten o'clock the night before.

As a precaution, the police had staked it out, but no one had returned. The keys were in their usual pouch in my purse. My extra cash was gone, along with a suitcase worth of clothes, and some of my food.

The call broke whatever spell we had been under since the car ride. It hit Vecchio much harder than myself. He came screeching into the moment.

"What was the name of the hospital?" Vecchio asked, as if he knew.

I told him.

He scowled.

"I don't think you'll see her again," I offered as he stood to leave the table and the house.

He got his coat and turned at the door, where I held it open, planning to thank him for his help.

"What happened last night," he asked, all the gloss of concern for me as a citizen in peril and the casual detachment of a professional gone. "What really happened between you two?"

"I don't know," I said, which was the truth. Someone had put a gun to my ribs, threatened me with fatal violence, stolen my car, my Thanksgiving and most of my stuff. But as far as what had happened, I didn't know. It was like looking through fog, or trying to touch light.

He stopped on the porch to make a call and see if his partner's room had been breached when she visited the hospital. The answer had not satisfied him. The duty roster had been thin for the holiday, and there had been no one posted outside his partner's room last night or today. The heat of Vecchio's exhaled curses turned quickly into steam, enveloping his mobile phone with a beauty and grace curses should never have.

"I've got to go," he said when he had hung up, as if to remind himself.

"You're going to chase after her?" I asked.

"No," he said, "there's someone I've got to go see."

And I knew, even as I watched him walk to his car, as he brushed away the lightly falling snow from the windshield with the sleeve of his coat, that he was going to visit the hospital. The one where my car sat abandoned in the parking lot, the one that held him--the man with a bullet lodged in his spine.

"Wait," I called after Vecchio. I turned and grabbed my coat and chap-stick. I locked the door without even saying a second farewell to the Saint. Our two glasses and bowls sat on the table, untouched after our meal. As long as he was going to Chicago, I told myself, I might as well ask if he didn't mind if I rode along to claim my car.

He said yes, it would be nice to have some company for the drive. After all, it was Thanksgiving and someone--he didn't say who, a great man, I suppose--had once told him that it only takes an extra moment to be courteous.

The End

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