Beasts of the Field: The Blade

Episode X

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← In Episode IX: The Puzzle, Judith and Tim struggled to make sense of the disparate pieces of the case, and Judith stumbled into danger.

While Beasts of the Field can be read as a standalone story, you may appreciate the characters and their interactions more if you are familiar with Judith’s first adventure, Down in the Holler, in which she investigated a cold case in rural Kentucky. Click here to read Down in the Holler.

Judith didn’t even have time to scream. She stumbled backward, and a rush of air dusted her skin as the blade skimmed past. Falling against the wall, Judith flung herself sideways toward the living room.

She slipped on the floor and pitched forward. Her knee struck the hard wood, her cracked ribs shooting spasms of pain through her body with each gasping, panicked breath.

Clem’s footsteps were heavy and quick behind her, and Judith scrambled back to her feet, rushing for the locked front door.

A thumping footstep creaked on the floorboard just behind Judith. She darted aside toward the coffee table. There was a sound quiet as a breath, and a thin line of heat sliced down Judith’s arm.

Judith twisted away with a shriek. Hemmed in and cornered like a trapped mouse between the couch and Clem’s wide, solid form – so much bigger now, so much fiercer in the shadowy house than she had seemed in her quiet mountain garden – Judith pushed away, back toward the kitchen, but something caught her foot.

The glass-top coffee table rushed toward her as she fell, and she threw up her arms a moment before she crashed. There was a shattering – shards and shrapnel and pained ribs and the hard floor crunching beneath her.

Then something heavy settled on her, crushing the air from her lungs with a breathless whimper. Crackling daggers of broken glass stabbed through her shirt, grinding into her back. Clem’s weight pressed on Judith’s broken ribs as she loomed over her, one hand raising the long blade in the air.

Judith flung her hands up as Clem thrust hers down, and she grabbed Clem’s thick wrist with both hands. The tip of the knife quivered over Judith’s chest.

Clem’s other hand flew to the handle, and with her entire weight she shoved the knife downward. Judith’s arms gave way beneath the sudden force. She twisted sideways, and a sudden hot, wet pain pierced the soft skin between her neck and shoulder.

There was clanging, somewhere, then a crash, or was it just her own scream and her heartbeat throbbing in her ears, pounding through her body and deafening her to everything else? She gasped for breath as Clem jerked the blade out of her flesh and raised it again, but there was no room for air in Judith’s lungs, crushed under Clem’s weight.

If this was it, if she was staring down her last moments, if she was about to die in her living room, slick with her own blood –

Tim. Tomorrow, or in a few days, maybe, he’d learn that he had been mere minutes away, driving along to his hotel when she’d bled out. Whatever he may or may not feel about her, to have been so close, to know that she might have lived if their goodbye had gone differently, that would be something he wouldn’t get over.

Mustering all the determination she could dredge from her suffocating body, Judith held up her hands again in a flimsy shield. She was dizzy, the world tilting at an odd angle. Blackness crept around the edge of her vision. Her hands shook, and with nothing but her two exhausted arms, she couldn’t stop the full force of Clem’s weight and strength.

The silver-glinting blade hurtled downward. Clem clutched it with both hands, her teeth clenched in a bleak grimace. It seemed to move slowly, arcing through the air, slicing Judith’s palm as it stabbed downward.

Then suddenly, as if from nowhere, there were sharp teeth and a tangle of shaggy gray limbs. A shadow slammed into Clem, who tumbled off Judith, the knife vanishing with her into the dark.

Coughing and wheezing, Judith rolled to her side. Glass shards pricked at her arms and hands as she gasped for air.

Beside her on the floor, Clem flailed one arm at Orwell, who clutched her forearm in his teeth. The knife was gone from her hand – where was it?

Judith struggled to her feet and hauled herself along the back of the sofa as she staggered toward the door.

Clem roared with fury, her voice a distant, tinny echo in Judith’s pounding ears, and Orwell’s growl was savage and wild. Judith wrestled with the deadbolt, her fingers cold and numb and slippery. Floorboards creaked behind her, but she didn’t stop, didn’t look. She would get out. She was going to get out.

At last the deadbolt slid out of its shell, and the door swung open, setting the alarm system blaring. Judith lurched through the door, her legs faltering as she grabbed the porch railing and stumbled down the steps, landing hard on her knees on the cold concrete.

A phone. Did she have hers? No, her pockets were empty. It must have fallen, inside – she needed to find a phone. Orwell –

From somewhere nearby came a screech like tires on asphalt, but the sound was strange to her ears, off-kilter. Judith started to stagger to her feet, then fell again, crumpling on the winter-brown grass of her yard.

She needed to find a phone. She had to, somewhere.

Shirley. She’d have a phone. But her house – which way was it, right or left? Once more Judith tried to push herself up from the ground.

Suddenly strong hands grabbed her arms and pulled her upward. With a scream, Judith wrenched herself back, but the hands held tight.

“It’s me, it’s me,” came Tim’s voice, low and tense. “Are you all right? Is she still in there?”

Tim – how was he here?

Judith’s eyes finally focused in the dim orange glow of the streetlamps. It was Tim. He was here, somehow he was here.

Then he gasped, the quiet sound louder to Judith’s ears than Clem’s roars had been moments ago inside the house, and his eyes widened in the faint light. Judith’s gaze fell on her own forearm and hand. They were pockmarked with cuts, tiny crystals of glass embedded like ticks in her skin, rivulets of crimson blood sliding down her arms.

Then, all at once, she felt it. The gash down her arm; the glass shrapnel ground into her back, into her arms and hands; the slice on her palm; the hot, wet, seeping wound in the soft flesh beside her neck. She was covered in blood, her own blood.

The warmth leeched from Judith’s skin. Her teeth chattered, clanging against each other. Her pain receptors, late but forceful, sent fiery spasms through her body, and she started to shake, her arms and legs trembling violently.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Tim said. He reached a hand toward her face but grabbed her arm again when her wobbly knees buckled. “Judith, you’re gonna be okay. An ambulance is coming.”

He was saying she was okay, but he was repeating himself. His voice was urgent, anxious. This didn’t seem okay. She didn’t seem okay.

A light flicked on nearby, and Tim threw his hand in the air. “Shirley!”

An arm around Judith, Tim hurried her across the crunching grass. Shirley, her worn robe flapping around her ankles, scampered onto her porch.

“What on earth happened?” she said, gray hair swinging in loose ringlets over her shoulders, her eyes huge and round behind her reading glasses.

“Can we come in?” Tim said. “The police are on their way.”

Judith tried to coordinate her shaking legs to navigate the stairs, but her body was clumsy, disobedient. It wouldn’t move properly. Then without warning, her legs were scooped out from under her, and Tim carried her up the porch steps and into the house.

“Orwell’s in there.” The words stumbled over Judith’s chattering teeth.

“Do you have a first aid kit?” Tim said to Shirley, who hovered, pale and nervous, by his elbow. As Shirley fluttered to a back room, chattering a startled frenzy of exclamations, Tim bent to lay Judith on the couch, but the moment the cushion touched her skin and pressed the tiny, jagged remnants of her coffee table further into her flesh, she arched her back with a strangled gasp and jolted to sit up. Tim leaned to check her back and sucked a startled breath through his teeth.

“What happened?” he whispered.

Her whole body shook with such force that Judith wasn’t sure she’d be able to form any intelligible words, but she pushed an answer from her aching lungs. “I have – had – a glass coffee table.”

His lips pressing to a thin line, Tim yanked off his coat and held the sleeve to the seeping gash beside Judith’s neck. With his other hand, he reached for an afghan that was draped across the back of the couch and started to pull it around Judith’s shoulders.

“No, you can’t use that,” Judith said through shivers.

“Why not?”

“I’ll get blood on it.”

“Shirley can wash it,” Tim said.

“It’s handmade. It might be an antique.”

Tim shot a bewildered, searching look around the room, in which every piece of furniture was piled with beautiful handmade blankets. Then, shaking his head as if fancy blankets were the least of his worries, he wrapped the afghan around the less-bloodied parts of Judith, avoiding her left arm and shoulder.

Red and blue flashed through Shirley’s window blinds, casting fast-blinking colors on the walls.

“Can you hold this here for a minute?” Tim said, standing up and waving Shirley over as she scurried back into the room, armed with a large, suspiciously vintage-looking first aid kit. Shirley switched places with Tim to press the blood-stained coat sleeve to Judith’s neck.

Tim squeezed Judith’s hand. “I’ll be right back, okay?”

Orwell, Judith wanted to say, but her teeth were chattering and her lips were numb.

Rushing out the door toward the flashing lights, Tim ran out of Shirley’s house, and the door slapped shut, leaving behind a blast of chilled night air.

Through the gaps in the blinds, Judith watched Tim run up to the officers piling out of the cars, watched him gesture to her house and Shirley’s as he spoke to one of the men, watched a group of officers surge on quiet feet toward the black-windowed house that concealed a crazed woman with a razor-sharp knife.

Orwell.

Why was the house so quiet?

As the officers quietly opened the door of Judith’s house, it suddenly burst outward, and a shape surged past their legs.

From the yard, Judith caught Tim’s voice, the animated voice he used only for animals and small children. Moments later, Shirley’s porch steps creaked, and the door opened. Tim held the door as a long-legged creature, its tousled fur gleaming orange in the light, barreled into Shirley’s house.

Running up to the couch, Orwell pushed his sturdy head under Judith’s hands, and she wrapped her arms around him, burying her fingers in his shaggy gray fur.

---

“This’ll do for now, but you’re gonna need some stitches,” one of the EMTs said as she secured the last dressing, covering the gash on Judith’s arm. She gestured to the stretcher crowding Shirley’s living room. “Think you can walk to the gurney?”

Judith nodded. The shaking in her arms and legs had faded to a weak tremor, though when she caught a glimpse of herself in Shirley’s antique mirror, her skin was a sickly white. Even her lips were pale.

Orwell nudged her hand with his nose and rested his chin on her knee. With a faint smile, she ruffled the fur behind his ears.

The EMT helped her to her feet. Judith took a few hesitant steps forward before Shirley’s front door opened with a gust of cold air, and Tim appeared in the doorway. Without slowing down, he closed the distance between them and put his arms around Judith, pulling her into him. Tensing, she stifled a pained breath.

“Sorry,” he said, loosening his grip but not letting go.

For a few moments, Judith’s mind went blank, panicking like a blown fuse. Then, slowly, she let her arms wrap around Tim, and, in spite of the blood crusting her clothes and the sharp pain needling throughout her body and the disapproving sigh of the EMT, the tension in her taut muscles eased.

“Judith, I’m so sorry,” Tim said into the top of her head.

“What are you talking about?”

“I should’ve checked the house,” he said, his voice ragged with self-reproach. “I never should have let you go in there alone.”

“Noah was in jail. You had no reason to think I was a target anymore.”

“We suspected there was more going on.”

Rebuttals came to Judith’s mind – You’re not a superhero. You can’t hold yourself responsible for everything. – but other thoughts, other sensations, drove them out. Like the fact that Tim cradled the back of her head in his hand, that his chest was warm and comfortable as she leaned into him, that the brittle chill of the night air permeated his shirt, that at some point she’d tightened her arms around him. Judith opened her eyes to see Shirley standing in a corner of the room, a wide smile overtaking the worry in her face, and she felt her cheeks flush with heat.

A pointed cough came from behind Judith. “She needs stitches,” the EMT said. “I’m not trained to do ’em, so we gotta get her to the hospital.”

“Yeah, of course.” Tim relinquished his hold on Judith, which, she was surprised to note, gave rise to a quiet rush of disappointment inside her. He stepped back, and he and the EMT each held one of her arms as she moved to sit down on the gurney.

As the EMT fastened the safety straps, Tim put his hand over Judith’s. “She’s gonna be okay, right?”

“She’s lost a decent amount of blood, but the wounds themselves are pretty superficial,” the EMT said. “She’s borderline as far as whether they’ll want to give her a transfusion or not. We’ll see what the doctor says when we get there.”

At the mention of blood, Tim’s grip on Judith’s hand tightened.

Orwell padded up beside the gurney and poked his nose at Tim’s hip. Tim squatted down beside him and rubbed his hands behind the dog’s ears and along his shaggy belly. “Good boy. Good boy, Orwell.”

“He can stay with me tonight,” Shirley said from the corner.

“You don’t have to –” Judith began, ready to begin the polite social process of initially resisting help that she would eventually accept. She found the ritual to be a waste of time, but Constance claimed it was expected in many cultures, including the more rural parts of Appalachia.

“I’ll feel safer anyway.” Shirley waved a hand, cutting Judith off. “You just focus on getting fixed up.”

As the gurney trundled down Shirley’s porch steps toward the ambulance, Judith squirmed against the safety straps, trying to keep her weight off her glass-prickled back, while the EMTs urged her to hold still. Police cars still lined the street in front of Judith’s house, their lights a visual cacophony of red and blue. Through the darkness, in one of the cars Judith could just make out Clem’s form, shoulders slumped and face grim in the back seat. Judith strained to see her face more closely, but the dark, cloudy night swallowed it.

With the panic in her body quieting, Judith’s thoughts lurched slowly back into gear, her mind twisting through Samantha’s death, Dr. Tierney’s death, her own twice-attempted murder. Try as she might, there were facts and – though she hated to admit it – feelings, gut instincts, that wouldn’t quite fit together, like pieces from two different jigsaw puzzles dumped in the same box.

Something wasn’t quite right.

---

“You really don’t like hospitals, do you?” Judith said as Tim drove them back through the midnight darkness toward her house.

He’d handled blood just fine in an emergency, putting pressure on Judith’s wounds without batting an eye, but the moment a doctor had pulled out a suture needle, Tim’s face had turned white and he’d had to look away. When the doctor had picked each bloodied shard of glass out of her back and dropped it with a clink into a bin, Tim had seemed more viscerally upset than Judith, and she suspected he’d held her hand as much to receive emotional support as to give it.

“They’re not my favorite,” Tim said.

Judith gnawed on her lip, watching the houses blur past under puddles of light cast by the streetlamps. “How did you know?”

She felt, more than saw, Tim’s face turn toward her in the low light. “About Clem?”

Judith nodded.

“Her truck was parked at the edge of your neighborhood,” he said. “I just drove by it at first, figured it was a coincidence that somebody had the same kind of truck. But I couldn’t get it out of my head. So I turned around and ran the plates.”

“And called the police?”

Tim gave a slow nod. “I could think of only a few reasons for her being in your neighborhood unannounced at night, and none of them were good.”

Judith’s shivering started up again as they turned onto her street, and she hugged her arms around herself. The nurses at the hospital had had to cut off her shirt to get at the torn flesh of her back, so she wouldn’t be seeing that old t-shirt again. When hospital staff had brought the discharge paperwork along at an ungodly hour of the night, Tim had pulled a sweatshirt from his overnight bag. She’d had to roll the sleeves up several times just to be able to use her hands, but it was warm and soft and smelled like Tim’s laundry detergent.

Tim pulled his car up to her house, and the questions which had been peppering Judith’s mind hit their boiling point.

“It doesn’t make sense,” she said.

“What doesn’t make sense?”

“This. The knife.” Judith tried to turn toward Tim for emphasis, but the movement pulled on her stitches, sending sparks of agony into her skin. She held still, breathing hard. “Samantha’s death and Dr. Tierney’s death, and even my wreck – they were all precise and confusing. They were meant to look like an accident or like they were Noah’s doing. But every way I look at the evidence, the only explanation I can find is that Clem was pulling the strings the entire time.”

“That’s my theory too. I think she bribed or blackmailed Noah to run you off the road and kill Heather.”

“So why was this time so different? She had a knife and wasn’t even wearing gloves. She knelt in the broken glass, so even if she’d managed to kill me and get away, her blood and DNA and fingerprints would have been all over my house. Why would someone who’s been so careful, who’s been running circles around law enforcement – no offense – suddenly try to commit a murder in such a messy, dramatic way? There’s no way she would get out of this without being caught.”

“Are you saying she was trying to get caught?” Tim said.

“I’m saying it doesn’t make sense. Based on the available evidence and what we know about her capabilities, it seems out of character.” Judith paused, weighing her words. “I think she’s protecting Leon. He killed Samantha, and all the rest of it – Samantha’s body appearing where it hadn’t been before, Dr. Tierney lying on the autopsy, the murder and attempted murders – was designed to cover it up.”

“Leon.” Tim scrubbed his hand over his forehead. “I didn’t want to think it was Leon.”

“Why not?”

“I’ve suspected him off and on for the past couple weeks. But he’s the kind of guy who’s just never able to catch a break. You know, he was just a couple years behind me in high school. He was bullied really badly, the whole time I knew him there. There was only one time he ever did anything in response. But the one time he fought back, he put the bully in the hospital. Almost killed the kid. People mostly left him alone after that.”

“Maybe that incident was the start of a pattern.”

“Maybe,” Tim said, letting out a noisy sigh. “We’d better get you inside.”

Looking through the dark at her silent house, Judith pressed her lips together and clutched her arms tighter to stifle her shuddering.

Tim turned off the engine, and dark silence filled the car. “I think I should stay.”

“What?”

“I can sleep on the couch. Keep an eye on things, so you can feel safe. Or safer, anyway.”

“What about your conference?”

Tim laughed, then, and a little bit of warmth made its way past Judith’s shivers. “Judith, I’m not going to the conference.”

“Are you allowed to do that?”

“You came within an inch of dying, we apprehended a dangerous criminal who’s going to be transported back to McFerrin tomorrow, and I just spent half the night watching doctors poke you with sharp things and pull bloody glass out of your back. Trust me, they don’t want me at some conference.”

“So,” Judith said, “you just…skip it?”

“You’ve never skipped anything before in your life, have you?”

“I’ve not attended things before, when I’ve been ill or circumstances have made it impossible, but I always inform the necessary people.”

“I’ll let somebody know tomorrow. Probably. But,” Tim said, angling himself toward Judith, “you’re procrastinating.”

“Procrastinating with what? I don’t procrastinate. I’m very efficient.”

“You don’t want to go inside.”

Judith clenched her icy fingers inside her sleeves. Her teeth were chattering again, though the car still clung to its warmth.

“You started shaking again the minute we turned onto your street,” Tim said. “I can stay. It’s really not a problem.”

Excuses flitted into Judith’s mind, then disappeared before she could grasp them. Instead, all she could manage was a nod.

---

In the stark brightness of the overhead light, Judith’s living room was a disaster. The Lexington PD had collected all the evidence they needed, but splatters of Judith’s blood were crusted brown on the floor and smeared across the back of the couch. The shattered remains of her glass-top coffee table were strewn like a jagged jigsaw across the floor, mingling with her dried, sticky blood.

“It’s all still here,” Judith said, her voice small and flat, horror and disgust roiling in her stomach.

“If you have good homeowner’s insurance,” Tim said, “they may cover the cost of bringing in a crime scene cleaning company. There are also charities that pay for it for crime victims.”

His individual words were all familiar, but Judith couldn’t string together any sensical meaning to them. With a jolt of panic, she realized that her arms and legs were shaking again with the same awful, jerking tremble.

“Sorry, not the thing to focus on right now.” Tim stood between her and the bloody glass shards and steered her toward the back of the house.

As they neared the archway into the kitchen, Judith’s heartbeat rushed to her head, throbbing through her body, and her vision started to shrink, hedged by black. Tim was saying something, was half-carrying her down the hallway, but she couldn’t make sense of anything except the cold flooding her body and the roaring in her head.

Then suddenly she was sitting on the edge of her bed with Tim beside her, and as the pounding quieted, she caught a few of his words.

“Do you want me to call Constance?”

Her movements sharp and clumsy, Judith shook her head. “It’s the middle of the night.”

“I’ll check the whole house, and I’ll be right out there on the couch.” Tim looked at her for a long, quiet minute, but Judith, shaking and shivering, couldn’t bring herself to meet his eyes. “Are you gonna be okay in here?”

Judith nodded, keeping her eyes on the floor.

Tim pressed his hand onto Judith’s. “I’ll be right outside.” Standing up, he slipped out of the room and closed the door behind him, and Judith was alone.

She heard his footsteps creaking up and down the hall, walking through the kitchen, making their way around the living room, opening the door to the backyard and crunching through the dead grass, then following the same path once again.

She needed Orwell back. When he was back with her, he would sleep in her room. How would she ever be able to sleep again without him right next to her bed?

A moment later, there was a soft knock at her door. “The house and yard are clear. I checked them twice,” Tim said through the door. “Are you doing okay?”

“Yes,” Judith called back, her voice quivering.

“Okay. Seriously, if you need anything, just holler. I’m right here.”

As Judith bumbled through her nightly routine, trying to wash her face and change into pajamas without bending her back or moving her slashed arm and shoulder, the sudden tinkling of glass sent a wave of chills through her body, and a sheen of sweat broke out on her skin. Then it came again, with a soft, whispery sound, and Judith realized what it was.

Out in her living room, in the middle of the night, Tim Morrissey was sweeping up the broken glass.

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Thank you so much for taking time to read Beasts of the Field! If you enjoyed this story, let me know with a like, comment, or restack!

→ Keep reading! Episode XI: The Pieces

← Episode IX: The Puzzle

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