Chapter 27: One Question

"I didn't touch her," I said.

Nobody was listening to me.

Mitchell was already down on the wet sidewalk beside her.

"Where does it hurt? Blair. Where?"

"Everywhere." She grabbed his coat with both fists. "She shoved me off the step. You saw it. Tell them you saw it."

The laundromat door banged open.

Two women came out with laundry baskets on their hips. A man in a delivery jacket stopped on the corner.

"Somebody call an ambulance!" Blair screamed. "She's killing my baby!"

One of the women already had her phone to her ear.

Nathan came down the stairs behind me two at a time.

He looked at Blair on the sidewalk. Then at me in the doorway, a full step above her.

"Val. Did she fall?"

"She sat down."

"Okay." He put his hand on my back. "Okay. Don't say anything else to anybody."

My mother was at the top of the stairs with the baby against her shoulder.

"Go back inside, Mom."

"I'm not leaving you down there."

"Somebody has to stay with her. Please."

She looked at Blair for a long second.

Then she went back in and shut the door.

The ambulance came in six minutes. A police car came right behind it.

Blair screamed when the paramedics tried to move her hands.

"Don't touch my stomach! Nobody touches my stomach until my own doctor gets here!"

They lifted her onto the stretcher with her hands still spread over the bump.

Mitchell stood by the stretcher with the ring box in his coat pocket.

A young officer with a notebook came up the steps to me.

"Ma'am. Your name?"

"Valerie McCallum."

He wrote it down. Then he stopped writing and looked up.

He knew the name. Everybody in Silverport knew the name now.

"Mrs. Thornton says you pushed her."

"I didn't. She grabbed my sleeve. I pulled my arm away and turned around. I never touched her."

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