Chapter Five #2
She wasn’t sure of the answer and in any case, she was too tired to think anymore. She finished eating and then returned the leftover crackers to the kitchen.
Finally, she turned off all the lanterns except the one she’d carried back into her bedroom.
Once she was settled in bed, she turned that one off.
Other than a faint illumination that drifted through her window, the room was plunged in darkness.
The sound of croaking frogs competed with the faint sound of insects, creating a lullaby she heard every night.
It was familiar and soothing, and she fell asleep almost immediately.
She was awakened a bit later by a hard knock on her front door. She glanced at her phone on the nightstand next to her. Ten thirty. It was possible it might be one of her sisters, but she doubted it. They never came by this late, and they would have called first.
She grabbed her knife from her nightstand, turned on the lantern and carried it into the living room. She lit several more lanterns, and then gripping the knife firmly in her hand, she called out to ask who it was.
Not receiving an answer but still curious, she eased open her front door.
Nobody was there. She looked around but didn’t see anyone. She was about to close her door when she saw a small box on her porch. It was the size of a jewelry box. She looked around once again and then bent down to pick it up.
Out of her peripheral vision, she saw a dark shape rushing toward her.
The person, all in black and wearing a mask, slammed into her body with enough force to knock her off the porch and to the ground. Before she could get up, the person kicked her. Again and again, the kicks hit her in her ribs, forcing the breath out of her as pain racked her body.
In an effort to protect herself, she curled up in a fetal position as sobs escaped her. She’d dropped her knife when the attacker rammed into her, and now she had nothing to use for her own protection.
She tried to scream, but the sounds that left her were more like kitten mewls. She didn’t have enough air in her lungs to really scream and her ribs were on fire.
She needed to get up. Somehow, she needed to stand up and fight back, but the constant kicks to her body made it impossible for her to rise.
Finally, the kicks stopped. Before she could catch her breath, the attacker began pummeling her around the head. One particular blow landed on the side of her chin, and stars momentarily danced in her head.
If she didn’t do something, she feared she would be beaten to death.
Despite the agonizing pain that torched through her, in spite of being hit over and over again, she began to crawl toward the porch.
Inch by painful inch, she crawled. Hopefully the attacker hadn’t seen her knife.
And hopefully she could find it and use it to halt the beating once and for all.
She summoned up the strength and screamed once again, this time with enough force that birds squawked and flew from their nighttime perches.
“Monique…is that you?” Bill Stanger, the busboy at the café and her nearest neighbor, yelled out from his front porch.
“Bill…help me!” she cried.
Her assailant delivered one final kick, and then Monique heard him running away.
Thankfully Bill came to help her. He took one look at her and then gently scooped her up in his arms and carried her inside and to her sofa as she cried with intense pain.
“Where’s your phone, Monique? I need to call the police, and you need an ambulance. Where’s your phone?” he asked again urgently.
“On my…my nightstand,” she managed to gasp out.
It didn’t take long before Daniel and a team of his men entered her shanty. Daniel rushed to her side. “Monique, are you okay? Can you tell me what happened?”
She spoke haltingly amid her tears, explaining what had happened from the time she received the knock on her door until Bill came to help her.
He only asked her a few questions about the physical description of the attacker, which she couldn’t answer, and then the medical team came in with a stretcher to take her to the hospital.
“Daniel, can you do me one favor?” she asked amid tears. “Would you call Jacque and tell him what’s happened?”
“I’ll be glad to do that,” he replied.
As they carried her outside, she continued to weep with pain and fear. The only person she wanted with her right now was her partner in crime, the man who she knew would make her feel safe.
It was just after eleven thirty when Jacque’s phone rang. He saw that it was Daniel, and sleep immediately fell away.
“Chief, what’s going on?” he asked.
“Monique has been attacked,” Daniel replied.
Jacque shot up in the bed. “Where?”
“In front of her shanty. I don’t know exactly what happened, but she asked that I call you.”
“Where is she now?” Jacque asked as he quickly scrambled out of bed.
“I had her taken to the hospital. She should be there now.”
“Thanks.” Jacque hung up and immediately got dressed. He grabbed his phone and his car keys and quickly left his shanty.
His thoughts were in turmoil as he hurried through the swamp to get to his car. Daniel had said she’d been attacked. What exactly did that mean and how badly had she been hurt?
Damn, he should have asked more questions.
Hopefully he’d get answers when he reached the hospital.
What had she been doing outside her shanty at this time of night?
He should have insisted she stop with her snooping after she’d received the threatening note.
If this attack was about that, then she was done. He would make damned sure of it.
He reached his car and roared off toward the small hospital that served the town.
His gut tightened in knots of tension, and anger battled with anxiety inside him.
The anger was mostly directed at himself for indulging her in the hunt for her mother’s elusive book.
He should have never agreed to any of it in the first place.
What he should have done was go to Daniel and let the lawman know her intentions.
Right now, he couldn’t figure out exactly why he hadn’t done that.
It didn’t take long for him to pull into the parking lot in front of the emergency room entrance. Jumping out of the car, he raced inside and approached the woman at the receptionist desk. “I’m here for Monique Santori,” he said.
“She’s back with the doctor right now. If you’ll just take a seat, somebody will be out to talk to you when they can,” she said.
“Thanks,” he replied, then sank down in one of the green plastic chairs against a wall.
Would he even be allowed to speak to anyone about her condition? He wasn’t related to her in any way. With all the privacy laws, he had no idea. But she had wanted him to know what happened. She had asked Daniel to call him.
She had been attacked. That was all he really knew. Had she been stabbed? Shot? How, exactly, had she been attacked? The fact that she’d needed to come to the hospital ripped him up inside.
He was the only person in the waiting room, and as he sat alone with his thoughts, he couldn’t help but be wildly worried about her.
It was about thirty minutes later when Daniel came in. “Any news?” he asked as he sat down in the chair next to Jacque.
“Not yet,” Jacque replied. “Can you tell me exactly what happened?”
“Somebody tried to beat the hell out of her.”
All of Jacque’s muscles tightened once again, and he felt sick to his stomach. She had been beaten? “How bad?”
Daniel frowned. “Hard to tell. According to her, most of the blows were to her body. You have any idea who might have done this to her?”
“None. What the hell was she doing outside her shanty at that time of night? Did she say?” Jacque asked.
“Yeah, she said somebody knocked on her door. When she went to answer nobody was there, but there was a small box on her porch. She bent down to pick it up, and that’s when somebody in dark clothes and a ski mask slammed into her hard enough to knock her off the porch and to the ground.”
“Do her sisters know about this?”
“I haven’t told them yet. Angelique knew I got an emergency call, but she didn’t know it was at Monique’s shanty.
I wanted to sort through all the details before telling them.
” Daniel shifted in the chair. “I found the box she talked about at the scene, and I opened it. I figured it was probably empty, but there was a note inside. It said I warned you. Do you know what that’s all about? ”
Jacque was torn between the need to tell Daniel the truth and Monique’s desire to keep it a secret. “You’ll have to ask Monique about that,” he finally said. “Was she able to give you any kind of a description of the person who attacked her?”
“No, as I said before, the person was dressed all in black and wore a mask. Monique said everything happened so fast she had no idea as to height or weight.”
“It’s too bad she couldn’t give you something to go on,” Jacque replied, his stomach still aching for her.
“Yeah, that seems to be the story of my cases right now,” Daniel replied with obvious frustration.
At that moment Dr. Gregory Harmon walked out to greet them. Jacque had seen the older doctor a couple of times in the past four years for a variety of ailments, so he knew who he was.