Free Friday Edition, The by Betta Ferrendelli

and followed the trail of blood with her eyes until it came to a stop at the bathtub. Robin saw it too.
    Their mother’s left hand dangled over the rim, dripping blood. Drip. Drip. Drip. Slowly, steadily, one drop after another formed at the tip of her mother’s finger and fell to the floor. Robin stood in the middle of the bathroom floor behind her sister. The sisters tried to measure what they were seeing. But it was too much for such young, fresh minds to see, much less to comprehend.
    “Stay here,” Sam said in a firm voice that Robin knew to obey.
    Sam placed her hands on the bathtub rim. It was cold to the touch and the stark feel of it made her shiver. Her mother’s body was nude. There was as much blood in the tub as on the floor. Sam looked at her mother. She had a funny fixed stare on her face, but wasn’t looking at anything in particular. Her mouth was relaxed and open, as were her eyes. Sam thought it was strange that her mother would sleep with her eyes open. Then it came to her. Quickly she pulled Robin from the bathroom.
    The sisters didn’t remember much about the rest of that Christmas Day, only that a lot of men and women, some in police uniforms, others in dark suits and ties, stayed in their mother’s bathroom a long time. They would both remember one sentence. “The mother bled out in the tub.”
    But they would never know who said those words, only that it belonged to one of the men in the dark suits, with faces they couldn’t see. They stood over the girls like redwoods. Sam would remember the feel of her sister’s small hand in hers. They stood at the top of the stairs and watched as the men took their mother’s body out of the bathroom and away, covered in a dark bag.
    Sam looked at Jonathan. The look on his face registered no emotion.
    “Robin had one last memory from that Christmas Day,” she told him. “The present. The doll she wanted. It remained beneath the Christmas tree, unopened.”
    There was a long silence between them. Jonathan leaned forward in his chair and rested his hands on the desktop
    “Now you know,” Sam said.
    “And the promise between you two? When did that happen?”
    “A few years later, when Robin was old enough to understand. We were at Nona’s ranch for Christmas, sitting by the tree. We talked about that morning we found mom, really¸ for the first time in detail. We made our promise to each other then that no matter how bad our lives got, we would never do to each other what our mother did to us.”
    Sam stopped a moment and said firmly, “So, please don’t ask me another thing about it. It’s not something I like to spend a lot of time talking about as you can see.”
    “I’m sorry,” he said.
    She ignored his comment. “Thanks for the info on the drugs. It helped.”
    “What about the article?” he asked.
    “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said with a reply that was distant and empty of conviction. She opened the door and left the office.
    Outside the police station, a raw, stiff wind greeted her, cold enough to make her shiver. The near-gale force pushed her back against the building. On the way toward her car, she thought of the information she found searching Robin’s office.
    As Sam drove from the Grandview Police Station, she could see the digital number in Robin’s pager in her mind’s eye. She was angry with herself for being too scared and too nervous last night to dial the number. What was the matter with me?
    Sam visualized the pager still clipped to the waistband of her sweatpants, which she took off the moment she had arrived home. She pictured it lying in a heap of clothing on the floor in front of her bedroom dresser. She drove past her office and headed for the apartment. She would not let her fear consume her any longer. She would do nothing else until she called that number.
    But the pager wasn’t the only thing on her mind. She couldn’t help thinking of Robin’s suicide note. Something about it just