Chapter 5: The Passenger Seat and the Quiet Streets
"You didn't have to wait," I said, keeping my hands deep inside my jacket pockets as the damp wind whipped a stray strand of hair across my forehead.
"Get in the car," Vance replied, his voice flat, carrying no room for argument or debate. He pointed a thumb toward a dark sedan idling near the curb, its headlights cutting twin cones of white through the misty drizzle.
"I can take the bus," I answered, shifting my weight back toward the direction of the transit stop, though my legs ached from the endless hours on the ballroom floor. "My shift is over. In every sense of the word."
"My mother is at Saint Jude's Memorial," Vance said, taking another step closer so that the ambient streetlight caught the sharp line of his jaw and the quiet desperation underlying his rigid posture. "The doctor who gave us that useless diagnosis has already been locked out of her room, but the attending physicians want to know what you saw. They need to know what you did before I pulled you away."
The mention of the hospital settled the argument better than any threat could have. I looked from his face to the idling sedan, measuring the distance between my exhaustion and the unanswered question of whether the woman in the dark dress was actually breathing on her own tonight. Without another word, I walked past him and pulled open the passenger door of the car. The interior smelled of fine leather, rain-damp wool, and faint cedar, a stark contrast to the grease and bleach of the banquet kitchen.
Vance slid into the driver's seat a moment later, putting the vehicle in drive without a glance in my direction. The tires hissed against the wet asphalt as we pulled away from the curb, merging into the sparse midnight traffic of the city. For several blocks, neither of us spoke. The windshield wipers moved in a rhythmic, sluggish sweep across the glass, clearing away the fine mist that settled with every stoplight.
"Her name is Eleanor," Vance said suddenly, his eyes fixed on the red tail-lights of a delivery truck ahead of us. His hands gripped the steering wheel with a tension that turned his knuckles white. "She raised me alone after my father died. For the past year, these fainting spells started. Dr. Harrison told us it was just stress, aging, mild vertigo. He prescribed sedatives to calm her nerves when the spells hit."
"Sedatives," I repeated, the word tasting like iron in my mouth. "When she couldn't breathe. He was slowly suffocating her."
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"When you stopped me," Vance continued, his voice dropping an octave, rough with a realization he was only now willing to admit aloud, "you weren't just being difficult. If I had dragged you away for another two minutes, she would have gone into full cardiac arrest." He glanced sideways at me for a fraction of a second, the streetlights flashing across his profile. "How did you know?"
"My mother was a nurse in a county clinic before the hours broke her," I said quietly, watching the blurred neon signs of storefronts slide past the passenger window. "You learn to look at the throat, not the label on the medical chart."
