Sour Grapes

behind.

Chapter

9

    S avannah and Ryan nearly collided with Atlanta, who was racing down the hall, running away from her room. Thankful to see the kid in one piece, Savannah holstered her Beretta and held out her arms. Atlanta flew into them, sobbing.
    “What is it, sweetheart?” Savannah asked, trying to peel her sister off so that she could check her for injuries. “What’s wrong?”
    “Was it you who screamed, Atlanta ?” Ryan asked. He still had his gun drawn, but was holding it behind his thigh and out of sight.
    Atlanta nodded vigorously and tried to squeak out a couple of words, but she was crying too hard.
    Mrs. Lippincott came running up behind them, followed by half a dozen of the staff members. Excited and alarmed, they were all trying to talk at once.
    “What happened?” Mrs. Lippincott demanded. “What’s going on here, and why are you crying, Ms. Reid?”
    Savannah held up one hand in a manner that clearly said, “Back off.”
    “Wait there please,” she said. “Let us take care of this for the moment.”
    Mrs. Lippincott seemed to get the message, and she took a couple of steps backward. “Okay, okay,” she said to the staff, “quiet down. Everybody be calm while they figure this out.”
    Savannah put her hands on Atlanta’s shoulders and gently shook her. “Come on, honey, and take a couple of deep breaths. Do it. In. Out. That’s it. Now tell me what’s wrong.”
    Atlanta shivered, turned, and pointed to the door of her room, which was half-open. “In there,” she said, “on the bed.”
    Ryan hurried on down the hall, reaching the room just before Savannah. They positioned themselves on either side of the door, nodded to each other, and Ryan shoved it the rest of the way open with his foot, his gun lifted and ready.
    After a quick glance, they charged into the room. Expecting the worst—whenever that might be—Savannah had also drawn her Beretta. But the room was vacant.
    “What is that?” Savannah said. “What’s the problem that—”
    She didn’t need an answer from Ryan; by then she could clearly see the problem for herself.
    There on the bed next to the window—Atlanta’s bed—was a large pool of red ugliness.
    “Blood,” Ryan said simply.
    Savannah nodded and moved closer. When she was about a yard from the bed she could smell it, the thick, coppery stench, that was instinctively repulsive and set one’s nerves on edge.
    “There’s a lot of it,” Ryan commented.
    “Yes, definitely not caused by nicking your legs with a dull shaver.”
    Savannah heard Mrs. Lippincott at the door and turned around to see her entering the room. “Stop! Stop right there. Don’t come in here.”
    “But I have every right to—”
    “No! Nobody comes in here,” she said with an air of authority that wasn’t to be denied... even by the formidable Mrs. Lippincott. “Everyone stays out until we see what we have here. This may be a crime scene, and we don’t want it contaminated more than it already is.”
    The two lamps in the bedroom weren’t particularly bright, but they gave enough light for Savannah to see that there was more than just blood on the bed. The stain itself was three to four feet across and in the center of it was a fist-sized hunk of some sort of bloody, fleshy tissue.
    “What do you suppose that is?” she asked Ryan in a voice too low for those in the door to hear.
    He shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t think I want to know.”
    “Have you got your flashlight?” Savannah said.
    Ryan handed her a small, but powerful penlight. She shined the beam into the center of the gore. In the doorway she heard Atlanta gasp. She felt she should offer her some words of comfort, but under the circumstances, none came to mind.
    Ryan moved closer to her, and after looking at the mass a while whispered, “A fetus?”
    “That’s what I thought,” she said, “but I don’t know for sure.” She pointed to the wall over the bed, just beneath the window, where a word had been scrawled in blood on the rose-covered paper. “What do you make of that?”
    He squinted at the writing. “T-U-L-S? Tuls?” Savannah cocked her head sideways. “No, I don’t think so.”
    “Some of the letters are backward,” Ryan observed. “I guess that means our offender is dyslexic or—”
    “It’s upside down. It’s been written upside down. It says S-L-U-T. Not very friendly.”
    “Not friendly at all. Who do you suppose wrote it?”
    “It was Barbie,” Atlanta