Worn out from an after-school snowball fight and the beginning of his own indoor soccer season, Adam was asleep in the back, slumped sideways in his seat belt. Tim left the car idling in the circle but he immediately came rushing back out. “Girls, we might have to leave without her,” he said, pulling the van off to one side as not one but two ambulances, the Boone and Cole County fire department vehicles, swung into the bay. Frozen, fascinated despite the ugliness of the lights against the dark-denim mackerel sky, the twins and Adam watched as the medics threw open the doors and ejected two men roughly bound to stretchers. Both of them wore vests of hunter orange with tufts of stuffing like cotton candy at the places the paramedics had cut away buttons and sleeves. Bags of the liquid Mally and Merry knew was called Ringer’s were attached to their hands by needles. Campbell rushed out, another nurse behind her. “Okay, what have we got here?” she asked. She seemed to see her children but not to look at them.
