She tried not to cry. If Bridget was here, she’d tell her to think of somebody other than herself. If Claire was here, she’d be brave because Claire was always brave. Where were Claire and Jenny and Beth? What about Paul and her friends? She had to find them. But how could she find anyone in this pitch dark?
“Help!” A voice came from below her, down where the water had almost killed her. The voice sounded young and scared.
Frannie wasn’t Claire and she wasn’t Bridget. She was hurt and cold and scared, too. She couldn’t help anybody.
“Help my mom, please!”
Frannie stood up. Her legs didn’t want to hold her. She stumbled a few steps. “I’m coming,” she shouted. “Where are you?”
Frannie made her way down the ridge, stabs of pain shooting through her bare feet. She made out two pale forms struggling toward her. It was a girl and a woman. The girl’s face was covered with mud, the woman wasn’t wearing a stitch of clothing. “Help,” the girl whimpered. “She’s bleeding so bad.”
Frannie put one arm around the woman and supported her as they climbed up the slope.
“I was asleep in the car. Mom was in the water—” The girl choked on a sob.
They reached the overturned car. The headlights lit the woman’s ghostly white face, and Frannie could see her mud-covered torso. The woman was naked and scraped and bleeding, but that wasn’t what made Frannie’s stomach turn over with a sickening lurch. Her arm was a mass of blood and flesh and the gleam of white bone. Frannie stepped back from the horrible sight. It was too awful. She wanted to run right into the dark and never look back.
“It hurts terrible.” The woman’s voice was a croak of pain.
“Mom.” The girl knelt beside her. “Mom, you’re going to be okay.”
Through the mask of mud, Frannie recognized Connie—the one with the dog and the twin sisters and the marshmallow-hearted dad who loaned them the hammer that Frannie hadn’t bothered to return. The woman was the sweet mom who didn’t like Yellowstone. Frannie’s chest squeezed and the panic she’d manage to push down crept up her throat again.
“What should we do?” The girl looked up at Frannie.
Why was she asking her? Frannie wasn’t a nurse like Bridget. She hadn’t even taken a first-aid class when it was offered at the high school. Frannie took another step back. There had to be someone—an adult—in charge here.
She looked into the dark. There were shouts and movement, calls for help. No one was coming to help Connie and her mother. There wasn’t a doctor or a nurse or a telephone to call an ambulance.
“Stay here with her,” Frannie said. They needed light, and something to wrap this poor woman in. “I’ll be right back.” She went to the upside-down station wagon and tried to open the side door but it was stuck. The back gate came open and she pulled out a cardboard box, her hands rummaging for something—anything—that might help.
She felt a long cylinder. A flashlight. Within a few moments, she found a sleeping bag. She ran back to Connie. She laid the sleeping bag on the ground and they helped the injured woman to lie down.
Almost immediately, a stain of blood darkened the fabric.
A man stumbled up the incline and into the beam of the headlights. He had gray hair and a bushy mustache and was dressed in striped pajamas and a pair of rubber boots. He stared at the upended car.
Frannie turned her flashlight beam on him. “Is that car yours?”
He nodded.
“Find me something to stop her bleeding,” she ordered. “Towels or sheets or something.” That was her voice, and it sounded calm and even like she knew what she was talking about.
The man disappeared in the dark, and she hoped he wasn’t leaving them, too.
“Will she be alright?” Connie asked her.
“She’ll be fine,” Frannie said, hoping it was true more than she’d ever hoped for anything in her life. Her mind was working now. Bridget had talked nonstop at the dinner table about her patients at the hospital. Maybe some of it had sunk in.
The man in the pajamas came back with a pile of kitchen towels. She gently laid one where the bleeding was worst. She pressed carefully and the woman winced.
“I’m sorry,” she said as her insides flip-flopped. The last thing she wanted was to hurt the woman, but if they didn’t stop the bleeding—
“The twins.” The mother groped for Connie with her good hand. “You have to find them.”
Frannie remembered the girls with the grass stains, so excited about the bear. Where were they in this dark nightmare?
“I will,” Connie said to her mother. “Please, will you help me?” she asked Frannie.
