Page 11 of Pieces of Her (Andrea Oliver 1)

Andy stared at her mother’s mouth, wondering if she was hearing the word or reading the word on her lips—so familiar that her brain processed it as heard rather than seen.

“Andy,” Laura repeated. “Help me.”

That had come through, a muffled request like her mother was speaking through a long tube.

“Andy,” Laura had grabbed both of Andy’s hands in her own. Her mother was bent over in the chair, obviously in pain. Andy had knelt down. She’d started knotting the tablecloth.

Tie it tight—

That’s what Andy would have said to a panicked caller on the dispatch line: Don’t worry about hurting her. Tie the cloth as tight as you can to stop the bleeding.

It was different when your hands were the ones tying the cloth. Different when the pain you saw was registered on your own mother’s face.

“Andy.” Laura had waited for her to look up.

Andy’s eyes had trouble focusing. She wanted to pay attention. She needed to pay attention.

Her mother had grabbed Andy by the chin, given her a hard shake to knock her out of her stupor.

She had said, “Don’t talk to the police. Don’t sign a statement. Tell them you can’t remember anything.”

What?

“Promise me,” Laura had insisted. “Don’t talk to the police.”

Four hours later, Andy still hadn’t talked to the police, but that was more because the police had not talked to her. Not at the diner, not in the ambulance and not now.

Andy was waiting outside the closed doors to the surgical suite while the doctors operated on Laura. She was slumped in a hard plastic chair. She had refused to lie down, refused to take the nurse up on the offer of a bed, because nothing was wrong with her. Laura needed the help. And Shelly. And Shelly’s mother, whose name Andy could not now remember.

Who was Mrs. Barnard, really, if not a mother to her child?

Andy sat back in the chair. She had to turn a certain way to keep the bruise on her head from throbbing. The plate glass window overlooking the boardwalk. Andy remembered her mother tackling her to the ground. The pounding at the back of her head as her skull cracked against the window. The spiderwebbing glass. The way Laura quickly scrambled to stand. The way she had looked and sounded so calm.

The way she had held up her fingers—four on the left hand, one on the right—as she explained to the shooter that he only had one bullet left out of the six he had started with.

Andy rubbed her face with her hands. She did not look at the clock, because looking up at the clock every time she wanted to would make the hours stretch out interminably. She ran her tongue along her fillings. The metal ones had been drilled out and replaced with composite, but she could still remember how The Sound had made them almost vibrate inside her molars. Into her jaw. Up into her skull. A vise-like noise that made her brain feel as if it was going to implode.

Eeeeeeeeeeee...

Andy squeezed her eyes shut. Immediately, the images started scrolling like one of Gordon’s vacation slide shows.

Laura holding up her hand.

The long blade slicing into her palm.

Wrenching the knife away.

Backhanding the blade into the man’s neck.

Blood.

So much blood.

Jonah Helsinger. That was the murderer’s name. Andy knew it—she wasn’t sure how. Was it on the dispatch radio when she rode in the ambulance with her mother? Was it on the news blaring from the TV when Andy was led into the triage waiting room? Was it on the nurses’ lips as they led her up to the surgical wing?

“Jonah Helsinger,” someone had whispered, the way you’d whisper that someone had cancer. “The killer’s name is Jonah Helsinger.”

“Ma’am?” A Savannah police officer was standing in front of Andy.