Pool Of Blood

After getting the employees into their jobs for the day, Alfred came back to the shop to take care of some other business. He found a circular pool of congealed blood on the floor of a workroom near the main office. Its center had a print like the back of woman’s head.  He saw blood spatters, like red polka dots, on most of the walls, but he did not see his wife, Lucille. By then, confusion and fear were tearing at his mind. He called for her; “Lucille—where are you?” He looked in place—after place, ever fearing what he might find. “She may be in the rest room; is this, her blood? Please, God—help me find her.” Red hand prints were on the rest room walls and all over the mirror and the lavatory, but he did not see Lucille; he was almost overcome by the sight of so much blood. As he turned to leave, his adrenaline took over; he spotted her. She was lying on the floor in a dimly lit corner of the room. She was conscious, but incoherent. Her clothes, and her matted hair, looked as if she had been doused with a bucket of red paint. 
In near panic, he leaned her against a wall and called the dispatcher at the sheriff’s office. As he held her against his chest and silently waited for help to come, he could feel her chest pulsate with the irregular rhythm of her heart. He counted the beats, anxiously hoping that it would not stop. A cascade of pictures of what might have happened flooded through his mind; pictures of present possibilities and past pleasures flooded by too. Because of a pact they had made years earlier, he wondered where he might find her living will. The ambulance came quickly, but to Alfred the wait was an eternity. The paramedics, whom he knew, tried to console him while they worked feverishly at getting his wife ready for transport to the hospital. By that time, they knew she had severe head injuries, and they talked about the golden hour and their need to hurry. Alfred watched, and prayed in his heart, “please, let her live.” 
The sheriff and his deputies came with questions about what had happened. Alfred thought that it was some kind of accident; “maybe she slipped and fell?” The investigator from the state crime bureau thought that it was not an accident; something a lot more sinister has happened here. He mentioned robbery and rape as possibilities. One of the deputies held a broken brick he had found outside the front door. It was stained with blood, like the blood on Alfred’s hands and clothes. From all of the hard questioning by the authorities, Alfred thought—”do they think I did this?”
At that moment, he was torn between, helping the police get started on their work, and following the ambulance to the hospital. He knew that what had happened was a severe threat to the life of his partner of near fifty years. “I want to see her as soon as possible, but I want to put down any misplaced suspicions that might delay any investigation into the cause of her hurt.”
On Lucille’s desk, the investigator found a voided check written to an itinerant worker she had hired to do some cleanup around the shop. The name on the check struck a chord in the investigator’s mind; he and one of the deputies left immediately to search for the suspected assailant. By then, Alfred was fretting to go to the hospital; he gave the office keys to the sheriff, and, except for his flood of thoughts, started the forty mile drive alone—not knowing, if he would see Lucille alive again.

Advertisement