Dead Echo

  Chapter 25: Signs and Portents

  Janie Todd was a small woman with a big heart. Always the nice girl, yes. Everybody loved her. Never married but nonetheless first to volunteer at Lower Baptist Church’s every social function. Taught Sunday school. Worked out of her house as a seamstress right around the corner from the house Patsy Standish (a woman she did not know), bought and paid for by her daddy almost twenty years ago. When she’d been in her twenties…

  She looked into the mirror and watched the tears falling from her eyes and leaving streaks down her cheeks. Just tonight she’d missed her weekly bridge club meeting and that was a rarity. She was too big on pleasing people for the agony of believing she’d let someone down by not honoring an obligation. She’d heard the phone ring about an hour ago on three different occasions. All within five minutes of the others. The third, a message. Wondering where you are and blah, blah, blah.

  The whole time Janie had sat stock-still, staring into the mirror and fingering the trigger well of her late father’s Colt .45.

  She stared down at the opened box of razor blades lying on the counter. Stared down at the floor and wondered how it would look.

  The phone rang again and this time when the answering machine picked up the caller broke the line immediately.

  All the happiness she’d ever known was gone. She knew, for good, now. She reached over for the prescription bottle sitting amid the razor blades. She picked it up and looked at the label. Her name right there in black and white. Hydrocodone, it said and listed a quantity of one hundred capsules. Said Take For Pain. She looked back at the mirror and took off the cap. She dumped roughly half the pills into her hand and stuffed them into her mouth. A few fell out to the tile floor. She leaned over and drank from the faucet, losing more to the sink but still managing to fight back a great many. She leaned away from the counter, grabbed a double handful of razors and began to rake them along her arms and legs until she was a gaping, dripping mess gasping for breath in the close confines of the bathroom. She’d left her face alone so she could see it in the bathroom mirror. She pulled the .45 from its bloody pool alongside the sink and pulled back the hammer the way her dear father had taught her so many years before.

  She put it to her head, smiled a ghastly final knowledge at the mirror, and blew her brains over the interior of the small bathroom where she’d shared her great heart with no one. From outside it sounded like a transformer blowing, which (considering the heat of the day) struck no one as being uncommonly strange or worthwhile to examine.

  She would not be found for a full week.