Chapter 1
It was a perfectly normal day until Erin was bowled right off her feet.
She had finished her shift at Auntie Clem’s Bakery and was on her way over to The General Store to see Mary Lou about some more jam. The Jam Lady jams were always a good upsell to go with her handcrafted gluten-free breads, and she felt good about supporting a friend in the community as well. It was a win-win-win. Good for her and her business, good for Mary Lou and her family, and good for the customers, who went home with a yeasty, delicious loaf of bakery-fresh bread and a jewel-toned jar of blueberry jam.
Erin had been hoping that The Jam Lady, whose identity was known to only a very select group of people in Bald Eagle Falls, would be able to start making jam again. She had been excited to receive part of the first batch produced after the Jam Lady’s lengthy convalescence.
Maybe Erin’s head was in the clouds as she dreamed of a taste of the sweet blueberry preserve and wasn’t watching where she was going. But Bald Eagle Falls was a sleepy little town, and she didn’t usually have to worry about being run over. It wasn’t the big city. And it wasn’t like she was walking on the road. She should have been safe from harm on the sidewalk.
And it wasn’t a car. They all stayed on the street where they were supposed to and, when Erin was blasted from behind, she had no idea, to begin with, what had happened.
One minute, she was on her feet, and the next, she was slammed into the very solid wall of the building next to her. It felt like being hit by a truck. She was hit in the back, and then her face and head hit the wall, followed by the rest of her body.
She was too startled to even shout out in surprise; she just went down in a heap.
Someone else was there, swearing and tangled up with her, their legs flailing to separate and get a purchase on solid ground again. Erin’s head hit a solid surface again, this time the back of her head on the pavement. Not really hard, but hard enough that it hurt.
A hoarse voice swore at her, or maybe the other party was just upset by the collision and was hurt himself. Or herself. Erin couldn’t really determine the gender to assign to the low growl. She saw a flash of black cloth as the other person involved in the accident extricated himself, and then heard an electric whir.
Then she was by herself on the sidewalk. She was sweating, though it wasn’t as hot as it had been lately. Her clothes were sticking to her in the warm Tennessee air. Her purse had been upset, items scattered across the pavement. Erin gathered the bits and pieces together in a daze, jamming them back into the cavernous safety of her shoulder bag. Her planner. Her sunglasses, a compact, feminine items, several pens, her keychain…
“Erin, are you okay?”
Mary Lou hurried up to Erin. Erin had never seen Mary Lou in a hurry or disarray before. Mary Lou was always perfectly groomed and manicured, every line of her shirt and pants lying exactly as it should without a wrinkle, her short blond-turned-gray hair coiffed and styled to perfection. She didn’t rush or get upset, even when her personal and family life had been in shambles.
“I saw it all through the window,” Mary Lou told Erin, reaching down to her and helping her to her feet. She peered into Erin’s face worriedly. “Those contraptions should be banned! I can’t believe they are allowed on our sidewalks.”
Mary Lou handed Erin her planner, which she jammed into her shoulder bag.
“What contraptions?” Erin asked vaguely, looking around. Everything seemed slowed down and weirdly out of place. Like she was out of step with the rest of the world.
“Electric scooters. They are all over the city now. Part of the whole trend to make the city walkable. How is it walkable when you could be mown down by one of those things at any moment? Are you okay, Erin?”
“Yes, yes, fine,” Erin murmured. She looked around herself. “Is that what it was? A scooter?”
“I don’t know why anyone would go down the sidewalk that fast. Even if they are allowed, there should be some kind of regulation of the things! Speed limits. Yielding to pedestrians.” Mary Lou shook her head. “It’s all this tourist traffic. People just don’t know how to behave in a small town. How to slow down.”
Erin supposed that she was partly responsible for the increase in tourist traffic. Ever since Gerald Montgomery had died of an allergic reaction to one of Erin’s muffins, his fans and followers had been traipsing to Bald Eagle Falls to try out the breakfast muffin for themselves. The steady stream of visitors had slowed, but there were still a lot of people in Bald Eagle Falls who Erin didn’t know, and who didn’t know the town or its unwritten rules.
“Sorry,” she apologized to Mary Lou. She straightened her shirt and ran her fingers through her short, dark hair to smooth it back neatly into place. She probably looked like a mess. She looked at her wet fingers, sticky with blood.
“You’re hurt,” Mary Lou observed. “Here, sit back down.” She helped Erin to sit on the curb, ignoring her protestations that she was fine. “Where’s Vic? Where’s Terry?”
Erin shook her head. She usually drove with Vic the few blocks from the bakery to the house she had inherited from Clementine, but Vic had only put in half a day and had gone into the city with Willie for a doctor’s appointment.
Terry, her handsome cop boyfriend, was probably out walking a beat as usual, with K9, his German shepherd, at his side.
“I’m fine,” Erin told Mary Lou. “I don’t think it is anything. I’ll just wash up when I get home.”
“You hit your face too, I saw when he ran you down. Why would anyone be going so fast on the sidewalk?”
A police car gave a short whir of its siren and pulled up next to where Erin was sitting on the curb.
“Did you see what direction he went?” Stayner demanded, rolling down the passenger side window to talk to them.
“That way,” Mary Lou motioned in the direction the scooter rider had taken off in, “I think he turned right onto First—”
Stayner pulled away again with a screech of tires. Erin stared after him, still feeling stunned from the collision. She had expected him to stop to help, to see how she was, sitting there bleeding on the curb. Erin supposed that as a cop, it was important for Stayner to see if he could catch the perpetrator, but it seemed like he should at least make sure Erin was okay first. Maybe he had assumed that since Mary Lou was there, she could take care of anything Erin needed and he didn’t have to stop.
Mary Lou muttered something under her breath that Erin suspected was not too complimentary.
“He’s not the best with people,” Erin commented, putting her face in her hands and her elbows on her knees to steady herself. In that position, she felt stable and wouldn’t just fall over at the slightest breeze.
“Officer Piper?”
From Mary Lou’s tone of voice, Erin knew that she was calling Terry on the phone, not seeing him approach, so she didn’t take her face out of her hands to look.
“Erin was knocked down. She’s hurt. I think you should come and see to her.”
“I’m not hurt,” Erin mumbled. “Just a little bruised. You’ll scare him.”
“She’s scraped up,” Mary Lou amended. “It isn’t an emergency. Though with how hard that guy hit her, she should probably see a doctor. Make sure there isn’t anything serious.”
Erin couldn’t hear Terry’s reply but, by Mary Lou’s quick goodbye and no further conversation, Erin assumed Terry had told her he was on his way.
He could drive Erin home, and then she could lie down until she felt less shaky.
Chapter 2
What exactly happened?” Terry demanded as he walked up to Erin. “Erin, are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” Erin mumbled through her hands. She knew that she should pull her hands down and let him look at her face, but she felt comfortable in the position she was in and didn’t want to move.
“There was a scooter,” Mary Lou explained. “One of those electric ones. And the… what do you call someone who rides a scooter…?”
“I don’t know,” Terry’s tone was clipped. “A scooterist?”
“Scooterist?” Mary Lou repeated dubiously. “Okay, the scooterist was going down the sidewalk way too fast. If he’s going to go that fast, then he should be on the street, not on the sidewalk. And he ran Erin down. Just came out of nowhere and crashed into her. Knocked her into the wall, and fell and got tangled up with her, and then he took off without even helping her out. I don’t think he even said anything to her, did he, Erin? Did he even say he was sorry?”
“He was swearing.”
“Oh, lovely,” Mary Lou cleared her throat. “This is the generation we are raising now. Kids who swear at someone they knock down instead of apologizing. Zipping around here on those contraptions. It’s dangerous!”
“Male?” Terry questioned. “Teenager?”
“I don’t know,” Mary Lou said. “I assumed so when I saw him, but I didn’t get a good look. Officer Stayner went after him; maybe he’ll have better luck. I just thought… well, it wouldn’t be a woman, would it? Or an older person?”
“Lots of people ride electric scooters,” Terry said with a shrug. “Helps people get from one place to another more easily. Especially those who aren’t up to walking long distances.”
“Hmm.”
Erin could feel Terry sit down on the curb next to her. He rested his hand on her back to begin with. A light touch. Warm. Reassuring.
“Erin. Can you let me look at you? See if you’re hurt?”
“I’m okay,” she assured him. “Just bumps and bruises.”
“Let’s see. I’ve got a first aid kit in the car. I can clean you up, get you bandaged up and on your way.”
“I’ll just go home,” Erin told him, finding it more difficult than she expected to pull her face away from her hands and let him look at her. “Have a hot shower and lie down for a while.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “That sounds good. Once I’ve had a chance to look at you. I’m sure you’re right and it isn’t anything to worry about.”
He gently pulled her shoulder back, coaxing her hands away from her face. Erin blinked in the bright light. The sun was getting lower in the sky, but it was still too hot and too bright for Erin’s eyes and the headache starting to form behind them. She blinked back tears and rubbed at the corners of her eyes.
“Just hold still a second,” Terry advised, holding her chin gently with one big hand. His handsome face took on a look of concern. K9 whined, his head almost at a level with Erin’s.
“I’m fine,” Erin told K9. “Just a little bump.”
Terry prodded the sore spot on the front right corner of Erin’s head. “That’s not such a little bump. It’s swelling up pretty good, and you might need a couple of stitches across there. Where did he hit you? How did you fall?”
“He hit me… in the back and side. Knocked me into the wall. I hit there, and then fell down, and he fell down, and I hit my head—”
“You hit it a second time?”
“In the back,” Erin explained. She felt for the sore spot in the back of her head. There wasn’t as much of a goose egg there. Not as serious. It was bleeding, but scalp wounds always did.
Terry poked around some more, moving her hair around to get a good look at her scalp. He leaned back away from her again. “I think I should take you to the hospital.”
There was no hospital in Bald Eagle Falls, so that meant a trip to the city. Erin didn’t feel like going all that way for nothing. She’d had a collision on the sidewalk. It wasn’t the end of the world. People had minor accidents all the time. She would go home with a few cuts and bruises and be back at work like she was supposed to be tomorrow.
“Terry… it’s nothing.”
“You can’t see it. I think it is severe enough to warrant looking at it.”
“It’s just a bruise.”
“Exactly how hard did you hit the pavement?”
“I was just walking. So I wasn’t moving fast. And I hit the building first, so that absorbed most of the shock. I just hit my head when I landed because it happened so fast and I wasn’t braced for it.” She cleared her throat. “It wasn’t that hard,” she asserted. “I didn’t lose consciousness. Mary Lou was right here. She can tell you that. I’ve been coherent.”
Terry looked at Mary Lou, who agreed. There was a murmur of voices closing in around them. Erin had a knot in her stomach as she realized people were gathering to watch her, whispering to each other, speculating as to what had happened and how badly hurt she was. She raised her hand as if shielding her eyes from them would prevent them from seeing her.
“Any dizziness?” Terry drilled.
“No. Maybe just a little.”
“Double vision?”
“No.”
“Nausea?”
“No.”
Not really. She wasn’t feeling great, but that was because of all the attention, not because of the head injury.
“Tiredness?”
Erin laughed weakly. “Well, yes. I’m tired. I’ve been up since the wee hours of the morning working. What do you expect? I’m tired and I don’t want to have to drive to the city and then sit around in the hospital for hours until a doctor has a chance to look at me, wave his finger around in front of my face, and then tell you that I’m perfectly normal and should go home to bed.”
“It would make me feel a lot better.”
“Well, not me. I want to go home and have a shower and a bite to eat and then veg in front of the TV until bedtime. How about I do that instead?”
“Someone should be watching you.”
“Then why don’t you come over and watch me?”
Terry gave her a slow grin, the dimple appearing in one cheek smudged with five o’clock shadow.
“I’m not supposed to be off for a couple more hours.”
“And if you had to take me to the hospital in the city, wouldn’t you call Sheriff Wilmot and tell him that you needed the time off? And wouldn’t Stayner or one of the others cover for you?”
“Of course,” he admitted.
“Then tell them that you need to take time off to watch me and make sure that I didn’t suffer any ill effects from the accident. It isn’t like they won’t know what you’re talking about. You’re not skipping out of work. I was in an accident.”
Terry had a strong sense of duty that Erin had to work against. He put in more than his share of time with the Bald Eagle Falls police department, and taking a couple of hours off early one evening was not a problem. No one would object.
“You really should take the time off and keep an eye on her,” Mary Lou advised, her expression serious.
“Yes,” Terry agreed, drawing the word out, still unsure whether he would tell the sheriff he needed to take the rest of the day off.
“Brain injury is nothing to fool with,” Mary Lou told them.
And Mary Lou was someone who knew that better than most. She spoke with authority.
“Okay,” Terry agreed finally. “I’ll let the sheriff know that I’m clocking out early. I’m still around if there is an emergency and they send out a call.”
Erin relaxed. It would be nice for both of them to be home for the evening. With nothing to do but cuddle in front of the TV and enjoy each other’s company.
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