Chapter 19
As anyone who has ever lived through a catastrophe can testify, the trauma does strange things to the mind.
Time telescopes in and out. It can seem to take an eternity for an ambulance to arrive, but only seconds for everything in your entire life to change.
It’s impossible to live through catastrophic events and not be brutalized by memories so painful that even what you can remember you don’t want to.
And yet the details, a few of them, are etched so deep in your mind you can never forget them.
They become the stuff of nightmares and night terrors and PTSD.
That kind of blow bruises the psyche, and the soul bleeds.
While the wail of sirens was still only a symphony in the air, Jojo rushed back to the lifts to find her niece and collect Trident.
It was clear that Jojo knew more about what was going on than anybody else, and people stopped her, tried to get her to explain and she had to elbow her way through the crowd.
Trident was right where she’d left him, hadn’t twitched, still snarling, his eyes not leaving the man she’d commanded him to “guard.” As soon as she gave him the release word—“break”—he relaxed and moved to her side and the man literally collapsed to his knees, the tension draining out of him, too shocked and upset even to be angry … yet.
When Miriam spotted Jojo, she pulled free from the Amish woman who had done what Jojo had asked.
She had taken care of the little girl. And Jojo thanked her with her eyes because she couldn’t talk yet.
All she could do was pull Miriam into her arms and hold the child as the little girl sobbed.
She turned her tear-stained face up to Jojo and started to ask, “Why …?”
But Jojo put her finger to her lips and shook her head. “Not now, Sweetie,” she said, “not now,” and hugged the child tight.
For the rest of the night, and it was a long, horrifying night, Jojo never let the child out of her grasp.
It’s not like Jojo had never been in a catastrophic situation.
She’d been to war, she’d been in battle, but this was absolutely not the same thing.
When Jojo was in combat, she was prepared.
She’d had a weapon to defend herself against the danger, she could fight back.
And she had been trained—in the heat of battle, all soldiers fell back on their training to get them through.
The things they did by rote kept them alive because their minds just flat out couldn’t think fast enough to make the critical decisions.
Here, she was as vulnerable as everyone else. No, not as vulnerable as the Amish. She looked into their faces and saw more shock, confusion and disbelief than on the faces of the English.
Violence was a part of the everyday life of any human being on the planet who had access to a television set, an iPhone or an iPad.
The Amish didn’t. They didn’t sit in darkened rooms night after night, watching violent death, blood and gore of every imaginable sort.
They’d never seen or experienced anything remotely like what was happening to them now.
And they were responding as she knew they would, by gathering in small groups, holding hands and praying.
From that point forward, her brain recorded snapshots, images that her mind processed and stored, and those became the fabric of her experience.
Click-click: a lone woman in an iridescent purple ski jacket. With the hood pulled up over her head, she looked like some alien being, the mirrors of her wraparound goggles reflecting the chaos around her like the visors of lunar astronauts reflected the moon’s surface.
Click-click: an EMT rushing to get a man on a stretcher to his ambulance, until the bright light on the ambulance revealed the gory wound in the man’s chest. A look of horror and disbelief took over the EMT’s face, and he stopped hurrying.
Click-click: a little girl in a bright pink snowsuit.
Her helmet had a flowing mane of artificial hair—colored blue and green and aqua, looked like the fin on a tropical fish.
She’d climbed up on the stone railing around the steps and was looking around, terrified, crying: “Daddy, Daddy, where are you?” until a man came and scooped her up.
There was blood, apparently somebody else’s, smeared all over the front of his orange ski jacket and it streaked the child’s pink coat as he carried her away into the crowd.
Click-click: Lieutenant Conor McCaffrey, directing the army of gray-uniformed officers as efficiently as a commander in battle. He had been trained for this, though she was certain he never believed he’d ever be called upon to use that training.
The one image that defined them all, that was captured in HD video in Jojo’s mind to be replayed over and over again, was near the end of the evening as officers were dismissing people and allowing them to leave.
Jojo looked up and saw a horse-drawn buggy racing across the parking lot, zigzagging through the parked cars with people leaping out of the way.
An Amish woman stood up in the buggy, slapping the reins on the horse’s back, crying out, urging him forward.
When he’d dragged the buggy as far as it was possible to drag it, because the cars were packed too tightly, the woman dropped the reins and leapt off the buggy seat.
She wore no cap, either black or white, no cape in the freezing cold.
She had run out of the house in the apron she was wearing as she prepared dinner, leapt into the buggy, and went roaring down the road.
How the buggy made it through the traffic on that road, Jojo couldn’t imagine.
But there was no before or after, there was just this one now moment of the woman leaping off the buggy and running through the crowd, her hair undone and flying around her face, her eyes wild, darting like a frightened rabbit’s from one thing to the other, in the kind of desperation where you look at everything around you but actually see nothing at all.
“Where is she?” she screamed. “Where’s my Annie?”
The name sliced into Jojo’s heart. Annie. That must be the little girl who had fallen into the snow, her chest blown away by a sniper’s bullet.
People in the crowd tried to talk to her, to calm her, but she pulled away, frantic, desperate.
Jojo had seen that kind of mindless hysteria before and found herself getting up and walking purposefully toward the woman, who was now encircled by a crowd of people as she turned around and around, screaming, “Where’s my baby? Where’s Sarah Ann? Where is she?”
Miriam let go of Jojo then, understood that the woman needed her aunt more than she did.
Jojo crossed the empty space the woman had created around herself by her hysteria, refused to be pushed away, and wrapped her arms around the woman’s body like a straitjacket.
The woman didn’t so much resist as just kept doing what she’d been doing, shouting for her child, screaming the little girl’s name, struggling to go and find her.
Jojo held on tight, whispered into the woman’s ear words neither one of them heard nor understood, words in their native Deitsch. She stood inside the circle of onlookers, holding the woman, rocking back and forth as the woman swayed and screamed and cried.
Conor McCaffrey materialized out of the crowd then, leading an EMT. He went to the woman and gently peeled Jojo’s arms away from her.
“Are you Mrs. Jeb Miller?”
“Yes, yes, where’s my Sarah Ann? I know she’s here. They said she was here, but she’s not here. I can’t find her.”
He put his hands firmly on the woman’s shoulders and said, “Ma’am I’m here to help you.” When Jojo heard his words in English, she realized that the woman had been speaking Deitsch and he hadn’t understood what she was saying.
“She says she’s looking for her little girl, Sarah Ann Miller … Annie,” Jojo translated. “Can you take her to …?”
“Yes, I can.”
She turned to the woman and said in Deitsch, “He knows where Sarah Ann is. He can?—”
“Where is she?” she demanded, speaking to Lt. McCaffrey in English. “Where’s Annie?”
“I’ll take you to her, Mrs. Miller.”
Her eyes flashed to Jojo, who knew the look: He’s English. Can I trust him?
“Go on now, he’ll take you to your little girl,” Jojo reassured her in Deitsch.
Conor took the woman’s arm and guided her to a big blond trooper, spoke to him, and he directed her to a cruiser, helped her into the back seat, then the trooper got in beside her.
The cruiser had its red and blue bubble lights going, splashing vivid color on the white chunks of snow in the air, turning them into confetti for a parade.
McCaffrey turned toward Jojo, and the two of them stood for a long moment, looking at each other without finding the words to say anything, because there was nothing to say.
For the first time since she’d heard the thump sound of the little girl’s body falling into the snow behind her, Jojo felt something besides fear and anxiety rise up inside her, and for a moment, she didn’t even know what the emotion was.
Then she could name it. It was anger. It was rage.
That bastard had shot an innocent little girl.
The image of another innocent little girl struggled to elbow its way out of the dark cavern in Jojo’s mind where she’d imprisoned it.
The child’s hair wasn’t blonde. It was black.
Her eyes were brown, not blue, but she was as sweet and innocent as little Annie Miller … and she’d been shot, too. Murdered.
Bam.
Jojo thought for a startled moment that she heard an actual sound when she slammed shut the Ugly Place door in her mind. She trembled for a moment, then found her strength to leave the image behind her in the dark.
There was enough darkness in the world already without her digging up more from her own soul.
Someone … some psychopath had mass-murdered innocent human beings because …
she had no idea why, but it didn’t matter.
No why justified what he’d done. She wanted him caught, prosecuted.
He had to pay for the lives he’d destroyed.
Joanna Kaufmann understood that she would never rest until he’d been brought to justice.