In front of my eyes, Callie’s pallor seemed to grow even more ashen, another serious complication. I saw numerous bruises on her undamaged arm; most appeared to be days or weeks old. Gently lifting her shirt, I looked for evidence of internal bleeding but strangely didn’t find anything that would explain her worsening color. She needed to be at the hospital, sooner rather than later. I calculated the odds, knowing that while there was risk in transporting her, there was more risk in waiting for an ambulance that might not be able to make it here at all.

“My SUV can make it, but you’ll have to drive so I can stay in the back with her. Do you have something we can carry her on? A stretcher? A cot? Anything?”

“We have cots in the back. A shipment of camping gear just came in. Will that work?”

“Yes,” I said. “Go get one!”

Claude rushed off. Around me, men watched with wide eyes. I pulled the keys from my pocket and held them up.

“I need one of you to go out to my SUV. It’s parked to the left of the entrance, the big black one. Fold down the seats and make room for the cot. Leave the back hatch open. For the rest of you, I’m going to need some help getting her on the cot, and then carrying her. Does anyone have an umbrella? I want to keep her as dry as possible.”

They stared at me, unmoving, until Frank suddenly lunged forward and grabbed my keys before racing toward the door. At the same time, Claude burst from the back carrying a bulky cardboard box.

“Get out of the way! I need room!” he shouted before practically dropping it on the floor. He began ripping it open.

“Is she going to be okay?” he asked.

“I hope so,” I said. “Listen to me. I need you to call the emergency room at the hospital. They need to know that the patient has a serious head injury, possible internal bleeding, and compound fractures of the radius and ulna. Can you do that?”

By then, he’d freed the cot, revealing heavy plastic straps locking it into the closed position.

“Does anyone have scissors or a knife?” Claude shouted.

“Did you hear me, Claude? You need to call the emergency room. They need to be ready for her.”

“I got it. I have to call the hospital. She’s going to be okay, right?”

I repeated to him what I needed him to say.

“Yeah, okay.” He nodded. “I don’t know what happened.”

“For now let’s just take care of her, okay?”

Claude shouted to the others while pointing toward the cot. Again, I saw him reaching for his phone. “I need scissors or a knife to cut these straps.”

Someone I didn’t recognize stepped forward while whipping out a knife. With the press of a button, the blade flicked open; it wasn’t just a knife but a weapon, but who really cared? He used the blade to cut the plastic straps, and pushed the cot open, snapping it into place. He began to unfold the legs and I waved him off.

“It’ll be too tall if you open the legs. Just move the cot next to her, okay? I’m going to need some help gently moving her onto the cot, and then more help carrying her out to the car. I need as many hands as possible, so get close.”

People react in various ways during life-and-death moments. I’d seen people rise to the occasion or freeze in place, but the men at the Trading Post seemed to have collected their wits enough to know what needed to be done. The knife owner inched the cot into position; several others moved around her body.

“I’m going to keep her neck as steady as I can, in case there’s a spinal injury. The rest of you slide your hands under her. I doubt she weighs a hundred pounds, so she’s not going to be heavy. I’ll count down from three, and when I say lift, use a smooth, gentle motion while we move her onto the cot. The whole thing should take only a few seconds, okay? Does everyone understand?”

I made eye contact with each of them and saw them nod. “Once she’s on the cot, we’ll carry her out to the car. There aren’t good handles, so it might be kind of awkward, but she doesn’t weigh much, and there’s a lot of us. All right?”

Again, I saw them nod.

I called out the countdown and instructed them to lift. I kept her neck steady, and she was moved onto the cot without incident. A moment later, we began carrying her through the store. At the door, another man was waiting with an open umbrella, which he used to shield Callie from the downpour. The back hatch stood open.

With the downpour continuing, I had to shout to be heard. “I need someone to get inside the SUV and be ready to grab the cot as we load it, so there’s no extra jostling!”

A young man in his twenties hopped in, wedging between the driver and passenger seat, facing the rear. As a cohesive unit, we gently loaded the cot into the back, more smoothly than I’d imagined possible. I hopped up, kneeling, and hunched over beside her body. “Claude? Can you drive?”

Claude jumped behind the wheel as someone closed the back hatch. The cot had only inches to spare between the rear hatch and the seats up front. Callie remained unconscious, her breathing still shallow. Blood continued to drip from her ear. I checked her pupils again, and they were still reactive. I prayed we would get to the hospital on time.

“Do your best to keep the ride as smooth as possible,” I said to Claude as he started the engine.

A moment later, we were on the rain-drenched roads, but I barely noticed the drive. I kept my attention on Callie, wishing she’d wake, wishing she would move. Her arm continued to swell. I wanted Claude to drive faster, but in these conditions it was impossible. The SUV shook in the gusts; at times we slowed to a crawl while rolling through water that nearly reached the floorboards and splashed against the windows. I prayed that a neurologist would be waiting in the emergency room, and I wished that the local hospital were a trauma center. The nearest one—Vidant, in Greenville—was at least another hour distant in good weather; today, I doubted an ambulance could make it there at all. A helicopter was out of the question.

Claude shouted back to me, letting me know when detours were required or when he was about to turn, all while continuing to inquire about Callie. In time—it seemed like too much time—we turned into the hospital parking lot, heading for the emergency room. Callie’s condition seemed to have deteriorated even more. To Claude, I barked an order.

“Tell them we’re going to need a stretcher and a lot of hands to move her.”

Claude jumped out and raced inside; almost instantly, a stretcher appeared, surrounded by half a dozen nurses and a physician. I climbed out from the rear hatch and recited what I knew about her condition. Callie was moved to the stretcher and then wheeled inside with the nurses and physician surrounding her before vanishing into the back. Claude and I trailed behind, finally stopping in the waiting room. I could still feel the surge of adrenaline coursing through my body. I felt strangely disassociated, almost as though I were an observer of my own life.

In the waiting room, half the chairs were empty. There was a mother and a couple of younger children, another small group of elderly people, a lady who was clearly pregnant, and a man in a makeshift sling. It was busy but not chaotically so, which I hoped would allow Callie to get the attention she needed.

A single glance at Claude revealed how shaken he remained by what had occurred.

“Nice job getting us here. You did well.”

“Thanks. In another hour, we might not have been able to make it. It’s flooded everywhere. Do you think she’ll be all right?”

“I hope so.”

“You don’t think she’ll die, do you?”

“I don’t know,” I answered, unwilling to lie to him. “I’m worried that she didn’t regain consciousness. That’s never a good sign.”

“Jesus,” he said. “The poor thing. You’d think she’d finally catch a break. First the fire and now this.”

“What fire?”

“Her trailer burned down last November, not long after Thanksgiving. She barely got out and lost pretty much everything except the clothes she was wearing. It took her some time to get a new trailer. When she finally did, I let her have some old furniture I had in the garage. Despite all that, she never missed a shift. Makes me wish the store offered health insurance. Do you think the hospital here will still take care of her? I don’t think she has any.”

“Legally, they have to take care of her. And a lot of hospitals have programs to help those who can’t pay. I don’t know what they do here, but I’m sure they’ll figure something out.”

“I hope so,” he said. “Damn. I still can’t believe it. I keep seeing the whole thing over and over in my mind.”

“Did she lose her balance and slip?”

“No,” he said. “That’s what was so crazy about it.”

“What do you mean?”

“She was on the top step, hanging another vest. She was using an extender and stretching out so she could reach the peg, and then…all of a sudden, her eyes closed and she just kind of…folded. Like she fainted.”

Little alarm bells suddenly rang as I processed Claude’s words.

“Are you saying she was unconscious before she fell and hit her head?”

“That’s what it looked like to me. Right before it happened, I remember watching her and thinking that her coordination was off, like she was off-balance or something. A customer in the store fainted one time and she looked just like he did.”

He sounded believable, and I wondered what that meant. Fainting could be due to something as simple as dehydration or low blood pressure but it was occasionally a sign of something more serious. It was regarded as its own medical emergency until the cause was known. I thought about her pallor, and wondered if somehow the two were connected.

“Hold on,” I said. “I need to let the doctor know about this.”

I walked to the registration desk. As I did, the woman behind the desk handed me a sheaf of papers. “We need to get her checked in,” she said. “Are you family?”

“No,” I said. “I’m not sure she has any family in town and I don’t know much about her. But she works for Claude, and he might be able to get the paperwork started,” I said. I motioned for Claude to join me before I explained that I might have additional information for the physician and asked her for a piece of paper. I scrawled out a note, repeating what Claude had told me, and watched as the woman behind the desk passed it on to a nurse before returning to the desk. Meanwhile, Claude sat down and scanned the forms.

“I don’t know how much of this I can answer,” he muttered.

“Just do what you can for now,” the woman responded. “We can get the rest from her later.”

I hope so was all I could think.

Claude called Frank at the store to pull her personal file for some of the information; while he was doing that, I sat in the waiting room. Little by little, the adrenaline was receding from my system, leaving me drained. In silence, I continued to think about Callie, hoping for the best but feeling unsettled by the strange and sudden notion that the worst was still to come.

I dropped Claude back off at the store, still fighting the storm and multiple flooded roads before finally making it back to my house. A quick run-through left me pleasantly surprised that the tarp seemed to be working and all the leaks had stopped. Soaking wet again, I threw my clothes in the dryer, put on some sweats, and made another pot of coffee.

While it was brewing, I fired up my laptop and did a little digging on medical sites on possible causes of fainting, then other conditions that might explain her poor color and assorted bruising. There were too many possibilities to consider, some even life-threatening, but nothing definitive until tests were done. Even then, the primary worry right now was the head trauma. I hoped she’d had her CT scan, and that they were already figuring out next steps.

Not that it was any of my business. We were strangers and if getting out of the car earlier that morning was any indication, she might prefer to keep it that way. I wondered again why mentioning her parents had provoked such a violent reaction. Until that moment, she’d been distant; it was only then that Callie had panicked.

Except…

I suddenly remembered that she’d seemed to panic when I’d spoken to her at lunch as well. I tried to remember what I’d specifically said that had upset her then, but could only recall generalities and was too tired to think about it any further.

After pouring myself a cup of coffee, I surfed some news sites and checked my email. Most of it was junk that I deleted quickly, but toward the bottom, I opened an email from Marvin Kerman. Though I’d expected a negative reply, I learned that AJ had indeed saved my grandfather’s effects and would send them along. He asked for my shipping address and requested a waiver of any legal claims against his client. Attached to the letter was a form I was asked to sign, which I printed, scanned, and faxed back to Kerman. Depending on how quickly the items were sent, it was possible that I’d have them sometime next week.

Hungry again and deciding on a sandwich, I fished some turkey from the refrigerator, then went to the cupboard for a loaf of bread. Like my grandfather, I generally didn’t keep a lot of food in the house, but as I pulled down the bread, I suddenly remembered cleaning out all the old food when I’d first moved in. And, like a key turning in a lock, I had a strong hunch as to the identity of the person who’d squatted in my grandfather’s house after he’d passed away.

I wasn’t absolutely certain, but I felt it had to have been Callie. I’d thrown away a nearly empty jar of peanut butter, something my grandfather wouldn’t have had in the house because he was allergic to peanuts, but something Callie ate every day. Claude had also mentioned Callie was almost OCD about cleanliness and aside from the broken back door, the house had been in nearly perfect order when Natalie had walked through. Those things could be written off as coincidences, but given her friendship with my grandfather and no family in the area, where else would she have gone when her trailer burned down? It also explained why she’d been so insistent that she’d done nothing wrong when I’d tried to speak with her at lunch; those adamant and fearful denials made a bit more sense if she’d actually broken into the house, since she knew she’d been guilty.

Added all together, it was convincing if not absolute proof, but over the next few days, I grew even more certain I was right, even as I continued to wonder about her condition. Then, on the following Monday, right after my session with Bowen, I received unexpected confirmation that Callie had indeed been inside my grandfather’s house.

A woman identifying herself as Susan Hudson, an administrator in the billing department of the hospital, called the house, asking for my grandfather. I informed her that he’d passed away but that I was the next of kin, and after a bit of hemming and hawing, she finally revealed the real reason for her call.

“Callie,” she told me, “is using your late grandmother’s social security number.”