Mountains of Dawn

"Ms. Caldwell, would you like me to call a nurse?"

Tanya sighed and fell back against the pillows again. "No. No, I'll be fine," she said.

"Could you please start at the beginning, and tell us exactly what happened?"

"I'll try." She shifted in bed, trying to get comfortable, but her discomfort wasn't entirely physical. Her mind went back to earlier that morning, when life seemed so much simpler.

She had just dipped a brush into the red oil paint, then leaned against the drawing board to support her arm, and sketched a triple row of shingles on the roof of a mansion. The sunlight glowed on the mansion roof and highlighted the vines along the walls. "I was working on a painting, a mansion mentioned in a letter. Kathy came in…" Tanya could hear Kathy's voice in her mind, see her standing there, a tall, thin girl in jeans, a jacket, and a baseball cap. Kathy's long brown hair, bound into a ponytail, poked through the opening in the back of the cap.

"She said, 'The house and terrace look very realistic, Tanya. Are you going to include the glycine?' We talked about it, discussed the letter's comment about the delicate glycine rambling over the mansion's walls."

She paused, took a deep breath. "It was all so normal, you know? Just like any other day. But then, she asked to borrow my car. She said her car wouldn't start, and she had to pick up her parents at the airport. I hesitated, not sure if I should give it to her." Tanya was silent, looking into the past.

"And then? Why wouldn't you loan her your car, if she needed it? Was there something wrong with your car?" Detective Warner asked.

"Well, it ran," Tanya said. She pushed a strand of damp hair from her cheek. "It looked really bad, but it did run. I was concerned about what her parents would think when they saw it. Kathy laughed, said she'd tell them I'd taken up stunt driving."

"How was your car damaged?"

"It had been bumped from the back and the sides. It was hard to open the doors, especially on the passenger side. It looked a bit like a car out of a cartoon." Tanya gave him a tiny smile. "Except the way it happened wasn't funny."

"And what was that, Ms. Caldwell?"

"I think, now, someone tried to push me off the road. Before today, I wasn't certain." She watched Detective Warner write in his notebook. Constable Halliday stood near the window, his gaze on the street below. "I was bumped from behind and into the mountain side. Steep. Rocky. I forced my car between the mountain on the left and a boulder on the right." She chewed on her thumbnail, her expression intent. "I didn't know if the accidents were accidental or not. But now…"