Free Dead in the Water by Glenda Carroll Page B

instead, she accelerated and drove right off the cliff. A swan dive. The bumper hit the sand and the car flipped over on its roof, then flipped again onto its side, her side, the driver’s side. It skidded along the beach and when it hit the water, it was pushed back on its roof again. Then it slipped into the ocean.”
    I could hear the deep ‘thup, thup, thup’ of a helicopter moving toward the accident scene. It was an air ambulance and it had found a very wide stretch of beach not far from the parking lot. Jackie was quickly transported away from her twisted and crumpled car to the medical copter.
    “Where are they taking her?” Mike asked one of the EMTs standing close to him.
    “SF Memorial.”
    “There’s no place closer?” he asked.
    “Sure, but some of the hospitals don’t have helipads or don’t specialize in trauma victims, people who have been seriously hurt, like this. SF Memorial has both.”
    With that he joined a firefighter and an EMT and they jogged toward the copter. Police had stopped traffic in both directions and had cordoned off much of the beach. The helicopter started up again. The noise was deafening and the power of the rotors tossed the beach sand in every direction. It lifted straight up into the sky through the fog and disappeared.
    It was an eerie sight.
    Up on the cliff, near Highway 1, the onlookers were starting to get back in their cars. In less than fifteen minutes, the fog would erase everything around us.
    “Are you okay?” I said to Mike.
    “I’m going home,” was all he said.
    Not me, I thought. I’m going to San Francisco Memorial.

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    9
    On the drive back, I punched in Terrel’s phone number at the hospital.
    “Hey, girl, really can’t talk now. On my way in to see an injured nine-year-old soccer player.”
    “Look, a swimmer’s been hurt. She’s being helicoptered in.”
    “Who is it? What happened?”
    “Long story. I’ll tell you when I get to the hospital. Should be there in about forty-five minutes.”
    I hung up, and turned off on a feeder road that would lead me away from the coast to Highway 280 and a faster route.

    By the time I reached the ER, Jackie was in an operating room, the young soccer patient had gone home with a blue and yellow cast and Terrel was out in the hall talking to the lab technician.
    Terrel glanced up at me as I trotted down the hall toward him and the tech.
    “You didn’t tell me your swimmer was in a car accident,” he said. “I was expecting something completely different.”
    “Sorry about that.”
    “The EMTs said that she drove off a cliff. How’d that happen?”
    I explained what I knew, which wasn’t all that much.
    “The only thing that seemed odd was Mike’s description of her following him up the coast. She kept slowing down and when Mike called to check on her, she mentioned something about the car being hot, her windows steaming up and that she felt nauseous.”
    “Maybe she had wet things in her car, a wetsuit and some towels. If they were thrown over the front seat, there might be condensation on the window. But that is easy to take care of,” said Terrel.
    “Right, just open the window or put on the defroster,” I said.
    “Let’s continue this in a minute, I need to finish up here,” Terrel said, turning back to the lab tech.
    While the two men were talking, a colorful collage of children’s drawings in a display case by the door to the ER caught my eye. Very clever, the triangular-shaped display was in layers, each layer smaller than the one below it. It cheerfully displayed generations of families. At the top, the pinnacle of the triangle, was one picture of a boy and a girl holding hands.
    Cute, I thought. Wait a minute…who was just talking about triangles? Somebody. It was Justin Rosencastle, the guy I met at the Santa Cruz swim. He said that Jackie was the apex of the romantic triangle with Dick Waddell and Mike Menton.
    “Terrel, do you think that Waddell’s death and Jackie’s