The emergency medical team from the ambulance made us all move back, put an IV in Ken's arm, did their best to stabilize him, then carefully placed him on a stretcher that they then carried to the ambulance.
“Can I go with him?” I asked. “I'm a friend of the family.” That wasn't exactly a fib; after all, I'd had dinner with his daughter-in-law only a few days ago.
“I guess,” one of the EMTs said, and I climbed into the back of the ambulance before he could change his mind.
I leaned out of the door. “My horse!”
“I'll take care of Maizie,” Charlotte called. “Please call and let me know how he's doing.”
As the emergency vehicle bounced across the field, the EMT asked me, “What happened?”
“Somebody was shooting in our direction. I heard at least two bullets. I was right next to Professor Naka-mura, talking to him, when he was hit.”
“Lots of boulders in Devil's Den. The shooter could have been hiding out there. I'd better call the park service and have them search the area.”
“He's had plenty of time to get away. We were all so busy tending to Ken that we wouldn't have seen him.”
“I wonder why this happened,” the technician said. “Was it some nut protesting the protest? Or a hunter taking advantage of the confusion to bag himself a deer?… Does Professor Nakamura have any enemies that you know of?”
“I don't really know him all that well,” I admitted. The medic looked sharply at me. “I'm more of a friend of a relative.”
At the hospital, I hung around outside the emergency room until Moonbeam arrived. “My ex is on the road with the high school football team, so I can't even let him know.” We hugged, then she went inside to see how Ken was doing. I promised to wait for her.
Soon I was approached by two policemen who said they wanted to ask me some questions. One of them whipped open a notebook and asked my name.
When I said, “Tori Miracle,” the two men exchanged glances I didn't understand. I proceeded to tell them everything I had seen and heard just prior to the shooting, which wasn't much. “I didn't even realize what was happening, until I saw Ken Nakamura bleeding from the chest.” I couldn't even tell them what direction the shots had come from.
The man with the notebook wrote down everything I said. When I was finished, he said, “Are you Tori Miracle from Lickin Creek?”
“Why, yes, I am. How did you know that?”
“I have a report on my desk from the park service. There was a Tori Miracle caught acting in a suspicious manner around the exhibit cases at the visitor center yesterday. Was that you?”
I acknowledged that it was indeed me. “But I wasn't doing anything wrong. I was only trying to see how difficult it would be to steal something.” They exchanged those glances again, and I realized that had not been a smart thing to say.
“And you don't think that's odd behavior?”
“I wasn't charged with anything.”
“I know that,” the policeman said, snapping shut his notebook. “But you'd better be aware we'll be keeping a close eye on you from now on.”
Moonbeam came out of the ER, looking terribly downhearted, and answered a few questions about why her father-in-law had been on the battlefield. “I understand you have a close relationship with Woody Woodruff,” one said.
“I do.” Moonbeam looked defensive. I couldn't blame her.
“He's in jail, isn't he? For another shooting?”
“No, he isn't. I bailed him out last night.”
After a few more questions, the police seemed satisfied that they'd gotten all there was to get from us, and left.
As soon as we were alone, I asked, “How could you afford to post bail, Moonbeam? You said you had no money.”
“I used my house as collateral. It's all I had. Don't look at me that way, Tori. He'll pay me back.” She appeared so dejected, I didn't tell her what I thought of her boyfriend. “You don't think they're going to blame this on him, too, do you?”
“Just because he had the opportunity doesn't mean he had a motive. I don't think there's any reason to worry.”
“Please don't leave me,” Moonbeam said. “I don't want to wait alone.”
Ken was transferred to the Cardiac Care Unit, and Moonbeam was allowed to visit him for five minutes every hour. Once, while she was in there, I took a chance on going down to the lab to see if I could get my biopsy results. “Sorry,” the woman behind the desk said. “We send those reports to your doctor. You'll have to get them from him.”
“My doctor is a she. And she's dead. Can't you please-”
“It will be sent to his, I mean her, office, and that office will forward them to the doctor who takes over the practice. You'll probably hear something in a week or two.”
I grumbled and snarled all the way back to the CCU, but there was absolutely nothing I could do. Moonbeam thought I was upset about Ken, and took my hand and tried to console me by saying, “He's going to be fine, Tori. I know he is.”
Finally, a doctor came out and told us Ken was stabilized. “Why don't you go home and get some rest,” he said to Moonbeam. “We'll call you if anything changes.”
She nodded, and we walked slowly to the door. “Can I ride with you to Lickin Creek?” she asked. “I need to feed Dad's pets, and I don't think I'm up to driving alone.”
For either of us to get to Lickin Creek meant I had to go back to Shoestring Hill Farm to retrieve my car.
Moonbeam drove, and Charlotte met us in the parking lot.
“How is he?” she asked. “I've been so worried.”
“Stable,” Moonbeam told her. And she added optimistically, “He's going to be all right.”
We transferred to my car for the trip back to Lickin Creek. Moonbeam sat quietly next to me, sniffing occasionally into a Kleenex. Once we were in the borough, she directed me to Ken's house, which was in the historic district near the college.
She had a key to the back door. We walked through a small vestibule into the large, sunny kitchen, which was swarming with small dogs and cats. “Gloria knows what a softy Dad is,” Moonbeam said as she began to open cans of cat food. “If she rescues a small animal that nobody wants, she knows she can always count on him to take it in.”
A small white dog with fluffy hair, black-rimmed eyes, and a curly tail put his paws on my knees and begged to be loved. I picked him up and was surprised to find he weighed a lot less than my Fred. “I saw some dogs like this at an Amish farm recently. Only not groomed. In fact they were a disgusting mess. I told Gloria about it. I hope she follows through. What is he?”
“He's a bichon frise. I think they're distant relatives of the poodle family. Very popular and expensive, right now. The farmer's probably making a lot of money supplying pet stores with bichon puppies.”
I reluctantly put the sweet little ball of fur down and helped Moonbeam by scooping dog food into a row of bowls along one wall of the kitchen, while she tended to the ferrets in the next room. There were birds and guinea pigs upstairs, a black-and-white gibbon in the living room, and a snake in a terrarium in the dining room.
“Having to look at that every mealtime would be enough to make even me give up eating. Come to think of it, maybe I should get one, I might actually stick to my diet.”
“I understand they eat snakes in China,” Moonbeam said.
“They do. There's a place in Taipei called Snake Alley where you can pick out a live snake, and they'll skin it and cook it for you right there. I think of it every time I go to a restaurant that has live lobsters on display for customers to choose from. That makes me sick, too.”
Finished with the feeding, we went back into the kitchen. The cats and dogs were chewing with relish. Each animal had its own dish, and I was glad to see there was no fighting.