Chapter 5
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As days went, it had just been one more of those long, busy workdays. Sammy was okay with that, but, by the end of her shift, she’d seen both Leland and Burton. She’d seen Burton once more before Leland took over, and everything appeared to be fine.
She checked in with Leland before she left. “All is well?”
He nodded. “All’s well.”
“Good,” she replied. “There was some talk earlier that maybe this one politician might be involved.” He turned to her, his gaze a little flat. She frowned. “I guess you don’t want to talk about it.”
“Nope,” he stated, with a genial smile.
His smile notwithstanding, she got the impression that the Colbert door was definitely closed. She frowned, wondering if she had upset anybody because it wasn’t her intention. As she got home, she called Burton. “Hey, is everything okay?”
“Yeah, it’s okay,” he told her. “Why? What’s up?”
“Well, I stopped in to talk to Leland for a minute before I left, to make sure everything was okay, and I got the impression that he wasn’t ready to talk to me.”
“No, he probably isn’t,” Burton stated.
“Look, if I said anything to upset you, I—”
“Nope, you didn’t, but we also don’t know who is involved, and we can’t have anybody alerting the wrong people.”
She hesitated and added, “That seems specifically pointed at me.”
“I’m not saying it is,” he clarified. “We’re not exactly sure what’s going on, but a warning was given today that we have to take seriously.”
“Oh, good God,” she muttered. “How did you hear about it? Who told you?”
“It was addressed to me specifically,” he replied, again not giving her any information.
Taking a chance, she blurted out, “Look. My comments about Colbert earlier were just because I don’t know anything about him. I hate to see a man’s reputation get blown apart because of a line of questioning that has nothing to do with him. And I only told you about it.”
“I get it,” he said. “That’s not the point.”
“So? What is the point?”
“You’re the one who contacted me, remember?”
There was definitely a distance between them.
Almost desperate to regain whatever ground she’d lost with him, and knowing that she would need to sit down and figure out why that upset so her so much, she shared, “I didn’t mean anything by it.
I guess that’s kind of the reaction you might expect when you talk about somebody who’s been a long-time force in this town—”
“Yeah, we know that,” he interrupted. “And, if we didn’t, we’ve certainly been made aware of it now.”
“And do you think I had something to do with that?”
“I don’t know. Did you?” he asked curiously.
“Well, since I don’t know what the problem is, but you’ve obviously got some sort of a problem with me all of a sudden,” she stated, “it would help me to understand why and what. I didn’t have anything to do with what happened to Talia, and I’ve been doing my best to help her all this time.”
“I know that,” he emphasized, then sighed. “Still, the fact remains, somebody tipped off Colbert that we were asking questions about him.”
She asked, “And you think it was me?”
“I don’t know who it was,” he said in exasperation. “But I’m the one who got the warning today to stay clear or else something more would happen to Talia. And that warning … was for Anderson. So, they clearly don’t know me, just assumed I was her brother.”
“Oh my gosh,” she cried out. “When did this happen?”
“It happened today at the hospital,” he shared calmly. “And he clearly had a good idea that questions were being asked.”
“But that didn’t have to be me,” she declared, clearly frustrated now. “I haven’t talked to anybody. I’ve been so busy, I haven’t even mentioned anything to anybody.”
“That’s good,” he said, “and you need to make sure that you don’t from this point forward.” His tone had warmed as he spoke, as if understanding that she really didn’t have anything to do with it.
“I mean it though,” she repeated. “I haven’t spoken to anybody.”
“Good. For your own sake,” he added, “you need to make sure you don’t. I don’t know how far they’re willing to go to clean up and to keep things quiet. Just make sure you don’t get caught in a crossfire.”
In the background, she heard somebody calling him.
“Got to go.” And, with that, he ended the call.
She stared down at her phone in shock.
Things never really became real until, all of a sudden, people started talking about warnings … and in the hospital where she worked every day. She thought about it and racked her brain, trying to figure out if she had mentioned something to anybody. She didn’t think so.
At what point in time could she have even mentioned it?
It’s not like Colbert’s name came up in conversations among the staff or the patients.
Colbert was not the kind of person she had anything to do with socially, so how did any of this make any sense?
And the fact that it bothered her so much was equally disturbing for her.
She spent the next little bit worrying that maybe she had mentioned it to somebody unintentionally.
Yet, as she thought back throughout her day, nothing popped up.
She finally sent him a text. I’ve just mentally gone through my entire workday. I can’t see at any point in time where his name was mentioned.
He immediately texted her back. It’s all good.
She wasn’t sure that it was all good because it felt very much as if she had done something wrong, or she might have come close to doing something wrong.
She hated that feeling. Yet she also didn’t want to even come close to doing anything wrong either.
Being wrong in a case like this could be fatal, and she was only just beginning to understand that.
Poor Talia could not handle another beating, and to even think that Sammy could be complicit in something like that hurt her on so many levels.
It’s not that Burton blamed her, but she had certainly felt shut out, just in case, and that was something she found very hard to deal with.
As she sat here thinking about it, she wondered what had happened, as she hadn’t even seen anyone around and wondered who had threatened Burton.
She certainly didn’t have access to the hospital’s cameras.
Hopefully the men did, but she had no way of getting that sorted.
And she wondered if she had missed anything else today at work.
The only thing that came to mind had been one of the staff smiling up at a man in a suit, then whispering something about him being delicious when he’d gone.
The nurses often joked about seeing good-looking men in the hospital, just because they were stuck in a job that often gave them way less peace of mind than they needed.
Even as Sammy pondered whether that would have been the threatening stranger, it wouldn’t have made any difference because he would have just been there for whatever purpose he had, and she didn’t have access to visitor logs.
She didn’t think anybody on staff tracked that.
She groaned, headed to bed for an early night, her frustration levels on high as to why and how anybody would have mentioned anything about Colbert. Could it have been an innocent comment, or would it have been something absolutely devastating and possibly fatal?
Later as Sammy struggled to fall asleep, she realized she hadn’t set her security alarm. She reached for her phone, and, using the app, she quickly set it, only to have it report that one of the living room windows was open. She stared at that message on her phone and shook her head.
She never opened that living room window.
It was behind the couch, awkward to reach, and never used.
She had no reason to consider that this could be something sinister, and yet it was sinister.
She immediately got out of bed, quickly grabbed a robe and slippers, and walked to the top of the stairs.
She lived in a small townhome but an end unit.
It was two stories, and this window in the living room was on the ground level.
Why the hell was it open? Who the hell had opened it, from the outside no less?
Had somebody been in her house? And, if they had been, did she have anything on camera?
Rather than going down to that living room window, she brought up her video camera on her phone, but she didn’t have any camera covering that particular window, just the front door.
Still she hoped someone had started at her front door.
So she checked anything from the front door in the last few hours and found nothing.
That living room window was very hidden behind a large hedge that surrounded her property, except for the sidewalk coming up the center to her front door.
The camera only kept track of anybody coming up that sidewalk, which meant she had no idea if anybody had come into the house or not.
Was that window big enough for somebody to crawl in?
Unfortunately the answer was yes. She immediately made a call.