Twenty minutes had passed.
Emma anxiously waited for a reply.
Not one vibration. Amidst her window, she heard the faint wail of ambulance sirens. Something was wrong. Her conscience warned her to follow the call. It reached to her in an unexplainable sense.
She ran out of the house barefoot with her keys to Scarlett (sloppily parked second in the driveway), jumped into the seat, and cranked up the rusted engine. The cold autumn mud stained her feet.
The night was cold and biting at her skin. Halloween was two weeks away, yet Emma's mother had already put out hay bales and bare pumpkins in the front yard.
Scarlett sputtered at first but came to life nevertheless.
It was almost as if it knew Emma was in urgency.
Scarlett screeched onto the road with almost complete accuracy.
The tires whined as Emma turned onto Oak Avenue leading to Pinedale's public square. She flipped the knob underneath the steering wheel and turned on her emergency lights.
She drove Scarlett through the public square as if she were flying a rocket, speeding in between the bundles of cars parked alongside the road, frightening pedestrians. She blew her horn in dismay.
Sixty-one miles-per-hour read the dash.
A police car started to follow behind.
Emma did not have free will to pull over.
She was focused on getting to Izzy and ensuring her safety, no matter what the cost. Both automobiles turned up road.
As she began up the mountain, Emma shifted into second gear and pushed down the gas pedal. The police cruiser continued behind her, flashing his lights. She was resisting a police officer.
Her heart pulsed multitudes of blood throughout her rickety body frame.
Izzy lived up the mountain overlooking Pinedale. It was a steep drive. The three miles up the road took at least ten minutes obeying the speed limit.
Scarlett's engine began to violently ker-clunk under the immense stress of Emma's right foot and appeared to die. She panicked.
"Oh Jesus, don't die-out on me. Not now."
Scarlett, in that one chief moment, shuttered and v-roomed immensely, powerfully forcing itself up the mountain road. Emma gave a short sigh of relief and glared at the police car through the rear-view mirror.
Izzy's house was the on the left side, near the end of the road, on the mountaintop.
It was a whitewashed clapboard farmhouse with a tin-roofed porch that wrapped around front. The two windows above were both illuminated. The left one was cracked open slightly.
Emma yielded to the bank of the road bordering the front yard.
It was just as Izzy described it.
The phrase "Die Fag" was spray-painted across the front door and the side window in red. Previously hanging shrubbery plants were thrown across the porch and laying in piles. Police cars and an ambulance van were parked on the lawn. All the flashing lights were surging and sparkling in the night sky.
Emma stared at the house with a worried look. She looked around for Izzy. The officer, who had parked his car on the road's shoulder, walked up to Emma's vehicle and confronted the teenager.
"Young lady," he called to her with his thick frontier accent, "You had a reason to speed. I'm not going to issue a ticket, but I do need to see your license and proof of insurance, if you please." Obviously, his generosity got the better of him and he failed to follow police protocol.
Emma looked at him. "They're inside the glove compartment." She jerked open the glove compartment door, gathered her legal papers, and, without haste, supplied them to the officer. He took a moment and walked to his car to verify the documentation.
Emma hopped out of Scarlett. Uncertain to the nature of her surroundings, she walked towards the center of the road, in silence, to gain a better view.
She strayed into the yard.
Izzy's mother was beside the mailbox, accompanied by the sheriff and her husband, crying.
What happened to Izzy?
Emma walked towards her. "Mrs. Deaton?"
As she turned to Emma, her eyes squinted.
"Where's Isabelle?"
Izzy's mother struck her fiercely. Mr. Deaton and the sheriff strapped their arms around Mrs. Deaton to restrain her as Emma fell to the ground and into the mud.
"It's your fault! You took my Isabelle! You did, you demon!" Mrs. Deaton screamed as if she were possessed.
"Hold her, Bob!" shouted the sheriff to Mr. Deaton. Her face bellowed heavily with rage and sorrow.
She began to moan and cry.
Emma quickly picked herself up from the ground, abused with burning red scratches across her cheek, and distanced herself from Mrs. Deaton and her insanity. Mud drenched her backside of her jeans.
She was confused.
She stumbled towards the front door. It was halfway open with blue polka-dot window curtains wafting in and out around it. The timeworn paint lined the door's façade in unorganized slivers and flakes.
She heard voices from inside the house, and the door freely opened all the way. Paramedics, all in white, wheeled out a rolling bed.
"What happened? Someone please tell me!" Emma yelled to the men with her hands on her knees.
They seemed to neglect her presence.
Finally, the gurney rolled completely outside, and on top was her girlfriend, covered by a white sheet. A hand hung out, with dried bloodstains branching out onto her palm. Inside it, a lock of gold hair.
Izzy had killed herself.
The world around Emma shattered as she clung to the railings of the gurney, denying everything she was witnessing. One of the paramedics wrapped his arms around her waist and yanked her away from her girlfriend's body.
Her world began to echo darkness.
The wind blew and pierced the wounds inflicted on her face. She stared as an ambulance sped out of the front yard and away from her. She began to breathe at a rapid and exhausting pace.
Her town had done this to her, she was convinced. Her friends, her family, her neighbors—they all took part in Izzy's murder—They all kept silent. No one would take the blame.
Tears moistened her cheeks and neck.
The narrow-minded folks of Pinedale made it clear that homosexuality would not be tolerated in their neck of the woods, and that could not live in there anymore. Izzy was made an example of.
They had made it obvious.
Murderers...
"I'm alone."
Emma fell to her mud-stained knees and hung her head in silence.
"No...no...no...no! My...my baby..." she screamed to the softened earth.
Black cottonwood leaves, turned yellow by the season change, rained around her. The piercing breeze blew against her face.
Emma lost consciousness and her body fell to the earth, right alongside her faith.....
