I stopped. White. Not blue.
I leaned back in the cheap desk chair, rubbing my temples. If Trent’s car was white, and Brody’s Porsche was silver, where did the blue paint come from?
The door to the lounge creaked open. Mr. Harrison, the school’s head janitor, walked in holding a mop bucket. He looked at me with sympathetic, tired eyes.
“How’s Mary doing?” he asked softly.
“She’s alive,” I muttered. “I’m trying to find who did it, Harrison. There’s blue paint on the light pole at the intersection. Do you know anyone who drives a blue sports car?”
Harrison paused, looking confused. Then he let out a heavy sigh. “Clara… that blue paint isn’t from the hit-and-run.”
I blinked. “What do you mean?”
“The landscaping crew,” Harrison said apologetically. “They backed their big blue riding mower into that pole on Monday afternoon. Put a huge scrape on it. I had to file a maintenance report.”
The heavy silence in the lounge felt suffocating. My one piece of physical evidence wasn’t evidence at all. It was a mistake.
The bell rang, signaling the end of the school day. Students began flooding the hallways. I felt completely, utterly defeated. Brody’s lawyer was right. I had no camera footage. I had no physical proof. The paint scrape was a dead end, and Brody’s fabricated alibi was bulletproof.
My phone buzzed on the desk. It was the hospital.
I answered it with a trembling hand. “Hello?”
“Ms. Higgins,” a nurse’s gentle voice came through the speaker. “Your mother has woken up. She’s in a lot of pain, but she’s asking for you. And… she’s asking for her pink thermos. She said she needs her tea.”
Tears finally spilled over my eyelashes. She had just survived a massive surgery, and she wanted her thermos.
“I’ll be right there,” I whispered.
I hung up the phone and looked out the window. The sun was beginning to set again, casting the same long, haunting amber shadows over the parking lot. My mother’s thermos was probably still out there, rolling around in the grass where she had dropped it when the bumper shattered her bones.
I grabbed my coat. I had to go back out there.
CHAPTER 3
The hospital room was quiet, except for the steady, rhythmic beeping of the heart monitor.
My mother looked so incredibly small in the center of the mechanical bed. The tough, vibrant woman who stood down sports cars had been replaced by a frail patient hooked up to three different IV bags. Her face was pale, except for the dark, blooming bruises covering the right side of her jaw and temple.
I sat beside her, gently holding her left hand. Her fingers were cold.
“It hurts, Clara,” she rasped, her eyes squeezed tightly shut against the pain medication that wasn’t doing nearly enough. “It hurts deep inside the bones.”
“I know, Mom,” I whispered, kissing her knuckles. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry I couldn’t stop it.”
“He looked at me,” she whispered, her voice trembling with an emotion I had rarely seen in her: profound vulnerability. “I held up the sign. I looked him right in the eyes. And he smiled. The boy smiled right before he hit the gas.”
A hot wave of fury crashed through my chest.
“I’m going to make him pay for this,” I promised, my voice vibrating with intensity. “I don’t care how much money his father has. I will make him pay.”
My mother slowly opened her eyes. They were hazy from the morphine. “My thermos,” she mumbled. “I left my pink thermos in the street. Your father bought me that.”
“I know,” I said, smoothing her thin white hair. “I’m going to get it for you right now. Just rest.”
I waited until she drifted back to sleep before leaving the hospital. The drive back to Oak Creek High School felt like a death march. It was nearly dusk. The school building was mostly dark, save for the bright security lights illuminating the sprawling, empty parking lot.
I pulled my rusty Civic into a visitor spot and zipped my coat against the freezing autumn wind. The parking lot was desolate. I walked back toward the main intersection, the exact spot where my life had turned upside down yesterday.
The intersection was clear. No glass. No blood. The janitorial staff had thoroughly swept the asphalt.
I walked past the intersection, stepping onto the grassy meridian that divided the student lot from the staff parking. I turned my phone flashlight on, sweeping the narrow beam through the tall, frosted grass, searching for the dented pink metal of my mother’s favorite thermos.
I found it resting near the base of a small oak tree, about fifteen feet from the point of impact. The force of the crash must have sent it flying. I picked it up, wiping the cold dirt off the metal. It was deeply dented, but intact.
I turned around to walk back to my car, swinging the flashlight beam down near my feet.