Sister Anselm understood that had the incident been ruled a hit-and-run, there would have been far more urgency on the part of some law enforcement agency to identify the victim.
“By the way,” Nurse Mandy added, “the young man who hit her is just down the hall in the waiting room. He claims not to know her. Nevertheless, he’s beyond distraught. I tried to tell him he should go home—that there’s nothing more he can do here. Even so, he’s adamant about staying.”
“Do you think he knows her and is pretending not to?”
“Maybe,” Nurse Mandy said. “I’ve certainly seen that happen before, especially in instances of domestic violence. The assailant sits there and pretends ignorance while the helpless victim is unconscious and unable to say otherwise.”
“Why don’t I go speak to him,” Sister Anselm said. “After that I’d like to take a look at the victim’s personal effects; maybe I’ll find a clue that will help us identify her.”
She walked down the hall to a small waiting room. This was a part of the job she liked the least, approaching supposedly grieving loved ones and trying to suss out who was lying and who was telling the truth.
On one side of the room was a long window that allowed waiting room visitors to see inside the nursery. Several separate seating areas with chairs and love seats would have accommodated a fair number of visitors. At this hour of the morning, there was only one—a young man in jeans, hiking boots, and a Northern Arizona University Lumberjack sweatshirt. He jumped to his feet as Sister Anselm walked toward him.
“Are you the chaplain?” he asked anxiously.
“No,” she said. “I’m not the chaplain.”
“Is she dead?”
The anguish on his face seemed genuine enough. “No one has died,” Sister Anselm assured him. “My name is Sister Anselm. I’m a Sister of Providence. I’m also what’s called a patient advocate. I’m usually summoned when someone is hospitalized with no apparent next of kin and no way of communicating his or her wishes to medical practitioners. Part of my job is to help locate next of kin for, in this case, two patients rather than one.”
“Two?” he asked. “That means they’re both still alive?”
Sister Anselm nodded. “So far,” she said, “but would that be you, then? Are you their next of kin?”
“No,” the young man said. “Not at all.” His face, which had brightened momentarily, turned somber again. His shoulders drooped. “I’m the guy who hit them.”
Sister Anselm trusted her people skills. The young man’s anxiety could easily have been faked, but the naked relief that had flashed across his face at learning that both patients were still alive was absolutely genuine.
He sat back down, hard, shaking his head in obvious relief. “I’m so glad to hear they’re both still alive. When she told me her baby was coming, I thought, ‘Oh, no, I’ve killed them both.’ ”
“Well, you didn’t,” Sister Anselm said, taking a seat next to him. “Now, you know my name. What’s yours?”
“David,” he said. “David Upton. I’m a junior here at NAU.”
“I’ve heard only the barest outlines of what happened. I’d appreciate it if you could tell me your side of the story. I understand you were driving the car that hit . . . we’ll call her Jane Doe for right now. I also was told that the victim isn’t someone you know.”
David nodded. “That’s right. She’s a complete stranger. I’d never seen her before when she ran out into the road right in front of me. There was no time for me to stop. She was just there. I’ll never forget the sound of the thump when I hit her. She went flying through the air like a little rag doll. It was awful.”
David shuddered at the memory, and Sister Anselm gave his knee a consoling pat. “How about starting at the beginning,” she suggested. “Where did this happen, and where were you going?”
“I was on my way to Vermillion Cliffs,” he said. “Some of my friends go to school at BYU. We were going to meet up there for some rock climbing. It’s more fun to do that before the weather gets warm and all the warm-weather tourists show up. I’m studying chemical engineering. My big lab days are Tuesdays and Thursdays. I figured I could spend tomorrow climbing and then be back in time for classes on Thursday.
“That’s why I left so late in the afternoon. I have an afternoon lab, and then I had to do some other stuff before I could leave town. There’s a little gas station on Highway 89 about twenty miles from here. It closes around ten o’clock, so it’s sort of the last place for a pit stop and coffee when you’re headed north late at night. That’s what I was going to do—stop and get some coffee.
“I was starting to slow down when she ran across the road directly in front of me. All I saw was someone wrapped in an Indian blanket running into the beams of my headlights. There was nothing I could do. I tried to stop but there wasn’t time. I hit her dead-on.”
He paused and shook his head, as though the very memory of the incident was enough to leave him shaken all over again.
Finally he continued. “I got out of my vehicle and ran over to her. She was just a kid. She may have been wearing an Indian blanket, but she wasn’t an Indian. I don’t know any blond-haired Indians. She was lying there on the pavement so still that I thought for sure I’d killed her. There was blood coming from the back of her head. I didn’t dare move her for fear of doing more damage.
“I kept calling to her, hoping to get her to wake up, and finally she did. It was so cold, and all she was wearing was this lightweight jacket kind of thing. I had seen the blanket go flying when I hit her. I found it, brought it back, and used that to cover her. The whole time I had been with her, I had been so focused on her face that I didn’t notice anything else. It wasn’t until I came back with the blanket that I realized she was pregnant. She said something like, ‘don’t let them send me back, and don’t let them send my baby back, either.’ Call me stupid, but that was the first I realized she was expecting.”
He paused again and took a deep breath. “And that’s about the time her water broke. I mean it was like a flood. The next thing I knew, she was soaked and so was I. By then other people had turned up. The clerk from the gas station came out and started putting up flares because we were both still in the middle of the road. Somebody else called for an aid car and notified the cops. I don’t know how long it took for the ambulance to get to us. It felt like forever.”
“She spoke to you, then?” Sister Anselm asked.
David nodded.
“Did she say anything about who she was—what her name is or where she’s from?”
“I asked what her name was. She tried to tell me, but she was having a hard time talking. It sounded like something that started with an E—Edith maybe? She didn’t mention a last name. There was a lot of confusion when the EMTs got there. For a while, they must have thought I was her husband. That’s why, when they cut her hair off so they could deal with the wound on the back of her head, they gave me these.”
An athletic bag was stationed at his feet. He reached down into it and pulled out a clear Ziploc plastic bag. When he handed it over to Sister Anselm, she saw it contained long coils of braided and blood-soaked blond hair. The braids had been clipped off close to the scalp, but whoever had cut them off had first secured the top of each braid with a rubber band just below the cut line.
As Sister Anselm studied the braids, she was thrown back in time, thinking of another girl, years earlier, one who had also worn her long blond hair in braids just like this. Drawing a deep breath and forcing the memory aside, she turned back to the distraught young man seated next to her.