Death At Dawn

By Arthur Day

'This book conveys the charming character and loveliness of sleepy northern New England towns and then rips everything apart with a shocking story full of remarkable characters".

Tran female Dianne Vargas and her partner, MJ McCaal, investigate the disappearance of a young girl caught in a white slavery ring and work to stop a killer from

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arthur Day
• Release date: Mar 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781955205054

Arthur Day

Arthur Day was born in Baltimore but raised in Connecticut. He currently splits his time between homes in Simsbury, Connecticut, and Greensboro, Vermont, with his wife and an old English bulldog named Rocco.

Book preview

Death at Dawn

Copyright © 2021 by Arthur Day

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

ISBN

978-1-955205-06-1 (Paperback)

978-1-955205-05-4 (eBook)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Pamela

MJ 2010

MJ 2005

Dianne

Buckmaster

McCaal

McCaal

Buckmaster

McCaal

Buckmaster

McCaal

McCaal

Buckmaster

Douglas Worth 2010

Buckmaster

McCaal

Buckmaster

McCaal 2014

McCaal

Douglas Worth 2014

Buckmaster

Jacob Warren 2013

McCaal

Buckmaster

McCaal

Doug Worth

Buckmaster 2014

Jacob Warren 2014

McCaal 2014

McCaal 2014

Buckmaster 2014

McCall 2014

Dianne

McCaal

Jacob Warren

Buckmaster

McCaal

Dianne Vargas

Dianne

Jacob Warren

Buckmaster

Buckmaster

McCaal

Jacob Warren

Douglas Worth

Buckmaster

McCaal

McCaal

McCaal

Dianne

PAMELA

The man came down upon Pamela hard, forcing her into the mattress forcing his weight upon her hips down and in though she could not see his face she thought she knew who he was and why he was doing this and why she was doing this with him and then he thrust and again and again hard without thought or love or even sex but to hurt and maim as an animal might in the midst of battle when two males meet and a decision is inevitable. She could feel his breath against her left cheek, hot, hotter than she had ever known a man’s breath to be, almost burning but still she could not see his face. She thought she knew his name but was not sure as she brought her legs up, a desperate prayer to the one above that went unanswered. The bed itself seemed to float as if a water bed yet not like that and there was a light in the air though it was night and the smell of lilies. He never tired and she could feel her body giving out, melting away with his heat and force until there was nothing left. Suddenly the weight was gone and she realized it was dark, darker than she had ever known darker than night or the dancing dark when she closed her eyes or her closet with the door shut and she heard a low, throaty animal-like growl from off to her left and she knew it was coming for her. She felt herself screaming.

And woke up breath coming in shallow jerks with the bedclothes wrapped around her in a sweaty tangle staring terrified at the dim mass of the wall across from her bed totally disoriented until her mind came back from the dark place and caught up with her eyes. It was always the same and afterwards she could never remember exactly who her dream attacker (she could not think of him or it as a lover) was or when she had known him or even if she had known him but she thought that she had. Perhaps he had written the note that had scared the crap out of her and caused her to yell at her neighbor. He was simultaneously a friend and a stranger. Slowly she disengaged from the bedding and wobbled slowly into the bathroom where she sat on the toilet with her head in her hands for several minutes until her breathing was even and her body was no longer trembling. Then she felt weak and exhausted as if she had just run a marathon and simply did not have the energy to get to her feet.

The mirror showed a pale face with black shadows under her eyes stands of greying hair hanging limp around her head. It was a face of someone long dead and recently dug up and a scrawny, aging body to go along with it. Damn woman you look awful. Good thing no one’s around to see you like this. How did I suddenly get so old? Spending nights with that awful dream that’s how. Need to call Carol and get in and get my hair washed and cut. That at least I can do. I’ll call her first thing. Right now need to get some sleep.

Looking through the living room window Pamela Pease could see the lawn with its lone white birch and beyond that the field leading down the hill to Compton Lake. It was a view she had seen thousands of times, first as a child and later as an adult though she had left it for foreign views for a number of years. It meant nothing to her, at least until she could no longer see it, and then she missed it as she missed Babo, her childhood doll with her spiky black hair and one eye hanging by a thread, and the taste of her mother’s puddings and the smell of her father’s pipe when she went into his sanctum sanctorum. It was a view that was part of her but that she could leave when more important events in her life intruded, demanding her attention and physical presence.

She stared out the picture window, her mind momentarily blank, filled with the view outside. The glass reflected a fuzzy image of her, an indistinct figure with long graying black hair tied back behind her head. Her face was angular, almost bony with thin lips and a long nose, a face that could have been beautiful or at least handsome if not chic when she smiled. Pam wasn’t smiling then. She rarely smiled anymore finding little in either man or nature to set her spirits on an upward track on which her lips would follow. She wondered briefly if she might be suffering from depression? Should see a doc when she went back home? Naaaa. She dismissed that thought and the dismissal even brought a smile to her lips. See? Nothing to worry about. See me smile. Pam stuck her tongue out at herself. At least she still had a sense of humor didn’t she? She definitely had reasons for not being a Pollyanna. Until MJ her choice in men had been bad and then she had screwed up her marriage.

Someone was watching her. She was sure of it, someone was watching and stalking her and, though they had been divorced for a while she wanted MJ there with her; his bulk and his experience would be as much security as she would need. She felt it but could not prove it. It was nothing more than a tingling feeling on her back as if someone had lit it up with a laser light, a feeling that she was not alone and that such feelings would not end well. She would be walking and suddenly turn around but no one would be there. She would hear the crunching sound of a car going along the dirt road that would lead to the paved road into the village of Compton and beyond that the town of Junctionville but they always passed the house on their various errands. They all seemed so normal but then she wondered if someone was watching what did that person look like? If she didn’t know that then it could be anyone passing by in a car or on foot. It certainly would not be a man in a black cape and mask driving a huge, shiny black Suburban. It was probably all nonsense, a tale of woe spun by an overheated imagination in search of someone with whom to share.

She always had a hard time putting on weight. Food and she simply didn’t play well together and her appetite had gone south many years before when her life had turned into a storm, a nightmare from which at the time she did not think she would ever awake. She shifted her weight to her other foot and her image wavered slightly in the glass. Image, image on the wall, she thought. Who is absent when I call? Where was Mike when she needed him? Where was anyone when she needed them but of course that was her life just as it always had been when she was a girl way back then way back when she skinned her knee well really it was a cut and it bled and she ran from her bike lying on the sidewalk and ran screaming to her house but there was no one there for her mother and dad were working and would not be home and Bertie was supposed to be there but no one answered when she called her brother and she had been so angry that she had stopped screaming and was limping up the walk with blood on her leg and on her hand as well and where was Bertie who was always around and always protecting her and then she found him across the street shooting hoops with Eddie Forster and later in her room with his arm around her shoulders and a Band-Aid on her knee sniffling and loving the closeness of him, the warmth of his arm around her even the light touch of his breath on her cheek as he said it’s okay now it will feel better I promise but he hadn’t been around that time.

Pamela had been so mad at him that time and at times since then but she knew she would now have only memories of her brother who had died in Iraq blown to pieces on some hardscrabble slope of some freezing, barren mountain by someone following the dictates of a madman (for so we believe since he had openly stated that he hated anyone who did not kneel to pray in the same way that he did and thought the worst of people whom he had never met or even seen and that is surely indicative of insanity), some enemy who, like her brother, only wanted to do his job and return to his family alive and in one piece (may Allah be praised) seventeen virgins or no seventeen virgins. She was not there for him as he was for her, but wanted to be, had tried to enlist but was rejected. Not her fault, her parents told her. Act of God. Do not be so upset, Pamela. Write Bertie a nice letter instead.

Pamela turned away from the window and thoughts of her brother. Long gone and far away and she must live in the here and now. She must boogie on but how long could she continue to do that without Michael? It was like hopping around on one leg. One could do it but it was not comfortable and not suited for long term happiness. Of course being married to a man who worked twelve hour days and kept going off by himself on various errands as he called them was hardly a great situation either. Now she knew how wives of police officers and firemen and soldiers felt. She never knew if he would come back and wrap her up in the huge hug of his (hi there my chickadee he would say and she would feel the scrape of his face against her cheek) or someone would knock on their door at an odd hour and with grim visage to tell her that she was once more alone. Ironically, she was alone now anyway. To hell with it, she thought. No sense worrying herself into a psych ward somewhere over something or someone she could not see and whose presence she could not even prove. If someone’s watching me then let them watch. Hope they like the view. Maybe I should strip in front of the window and see if anyone pops up out of the trees. Hah. Might be enough to scare him off. Time to get outta Dodge for sure.

She had always been an active person. She had always jogged in her youth and now went for long walks around the lake. Activity seemed to clear her mind as it exercised her body and when fears and worries beset her she would always find her walks would push them back for a while. Early morning was the best time. The summer sun would just be hanging above the pines at the front of the camp and the slight ground fog would reflect the light into a rose tinted fantasy as beautiful as it was ephemeral. The fog would hang just above the hay fields on the farms surrounding the lake turning them into a blurry dreamlike sheet of greens and greys that seeped into her mind and brought forth memories ranging back to childhood to yesterday to the days above and beyond the yesterday until her thoughts flew free of her muscles working, working and she looked down at the books on the shelves to her right most from the eighteenth and nineteenth century bought and read and put on the shelves by generations of Peese reading during the evenings after supper if there was not chess or bridge or Oh Hell or drunken Monopoly battles in progress.

Enough. She moved into the back part of the house, shedding her jeans and put on the old, worn gray shorts that she used for her exercise walks. Slipping through the front door she went down the drive to the dirt road leading to the village. She felt young and strong, her muscles worked with smooth strength, used to this routine, expecting it and enjoying it. There were no problems that she could not overcome. She had no need for a husband. That was so nineties. She was woman. She was in control. She was all powerful. The road unraveled before her pumping arms like brown string and ahead she saw the paved road to town and beyond that Rickett’s hay field with a patchy blanket of ground fog quickly retreating before the morning sun. With her body in motion her mind was set free to wander where it would and it chose the time when she had first seen MJ.

He had been alone in the crowd at the Carroll’s party standing stiffly off to one side trying to be inconspicuous and miserably failing but simply making himself more noticeable. If his size and obvious discomfort were not enough he seemed to draw young ladies of all sizes and descriptions. Pamela saw him and decided he was just eye candy and determined to ignore that part of the large room entirely.

Cute, isn’t he? Cindi Morton waved her glass of Merlot, perhaps her second or third.

Who? Pamela asked even though she thought she knew to whom her friend was referring.

Whattdya mean who. Cindi giggled, a high-pitched sound Pamela had not heard since her childhood. That hunk in the corner behind you. Can you spot any other man here that comes even close?

Pamela smiled and made the conscious decision not to turn around and look. Oh that man. She flicked her fingers through the air as if to shoo away a fly.

Cindi rolled her eyes towards the ceiling. Christ, Pam. If you ignore men, particularly single men, you will spend the rest of your life getting over Jacob Warren.

And I suppose that your philosophy worked. If it has pants and a dick then fuck it, Pam shot back. How’s that doing for your marriage?

I don’t think Oliver knows and, if he does, doesn’t care as long as his shirts are pressed, Carolyn has the latest fashion for school and I don’t bring scandal down upon our house. I have often thought I should line naked women up in our living room just to see if it inspires my husband to think of something besides work. You want to volunteer to be first? Cindi glanced sideways at Pamela, a twisted smile on her face, her eyes full of desperation and just a hint of something else.

Cindi may have avoided scandal but it was simply a matter of time, Pamela thought. Through other friends she had heard stories of other parties not of the cocktail variety but murkier or maybe less conventional would be a better term and that Cindi’s beamer had been seen in other parts of town where the free sex of the sixties had carried on into the nineties. Oliver was bound to know and if he hadn’t said anything it was probably for reasons of his own not because he didn’t care. Pamela knew he loved his daughter more than anything else. She laughed off Cindi’s invitation. If I were the first I’d also be the last. Oliver would never think of sex again.

Don’t keep putting yourself down, girl. You’re not ugly. I don’t know why you feel that way but if you keep talking like that you’ll never attract a man but at least you’re no longer with Jacob Warren. That man is flat out crazy. All he wanted was a toy doll that he could show off and then put on a shelf until he wanted her again.

Pamela felt uncomfortable and not for the first time on this subject. She knew she was not beautiful and did not have a good figure being all skinny and angular like boards poorly joined and looking as if they would separate at any moment but trying to use that as a shield did not work with Cindi. Pam should have known better. She did not feel that she had to attract a man. She was doing quite well all on her own, thank you very much. She definitely did not feel like flirting with the hulk behind her even if she knew how. Besides, she would hardly be any competition with the women currently clustered around him. Oh do be quiet, she snapped at her friend and walked off towards the bar that had been set up in the next room.

The party continued. Well educated, well dressed people, knowledgeable on current events, politically popular views, bon mots of the day, the best investments for the current market conditions, what schools were in favor and what schools to avoid gathered in small clusters banding and disbanding as people saw others that they simply had to greet with just the right degree of enthusiasm. Elizabeth Carroll was an expert at throwing such parties. She always insured the a few unknown but interesting people were invited so that one could come away from one of her parties talking to their spouse or significant other about the fascinating painter who had been there and currently had a show at that new gallery in Hartford and wouldn’t it be fun to go there soon and maybe buy something to help him out. Carroll also liked to mix her generation with those from the next. Pamela suspected that was the reason for her invitation along with a few other young people.

She was bored and casually glancing at her watch to see if she could politely get the hell out of Dodge without embarrassing her parents currently in deep conversation with Roderick Carroll and go back to her apartment where she could strip down and lie on her couch listening to a little soft CSNY. She took a sip from her glass but the tonic and lime had gone warm and a little flat. Yecch. Time to go.

Excuse me.

Pamela turned towards the voice and found herself looking up into a face that seemed to go on for miles topped by black hair cut unfashionably short almost a military cut. The hunk, she blurted before she had time to think about it and immediately wished that she had not opened her mouth. She felt the hot flush of embarrassment on her cheeks and looked down at her shoes as if inspecting them for any trace of dirt.

The man laughed, a deep throaty sound of amusement. Believe me I’ve been called worse. My name’s Mike McCaal. What’s yours?

I’m so sorry. Pamela. Pamela Peese. She held out her hand and it was instantly swallowed up in his. His grip was surprisingly warm and gentle. He smiled down at her and she could not help but return it still wondering why he would want to introduce himself to her in the first place but feeling comfortable now that he had done so.

Pamela felt sweat breaking out on her forehead as she turned left off the road onto a dirt road that circled the lake and the many camps along its shore. She strode past a patch of woods and then looked to her right at the small white farmhouse owned by somebody named Newhouse according to the name roughly painted on the mailbox. It was an old box. The lid was rusted and slightly sprung and it was attached to a cedar post that tilted slightly to the left. As she walked past Pamela wondered how many people had passed by that box, how many hundreds of letters had been pushed into it over the years, for how many harsh winters had it stood there? She dismissed the box as she looked to her left where a couple of ruts led down the hill towards the lake. She wasn’t sure who had that camp. No sign. No box. Probably picked up their mail at the post office in town or maybe had it held at the place where they spent the winter. An empty Lays potato chip bag lay in the shallow ditch on the left edge of the road just past that turn-off. Some people are just plain pigs she muttered. She picked it up but, having no pocket in her shorts, she stuffed the bag into the back of them feeling the paper scrape against her butt. She glanced down briefly at her cross trainers flashing in and out and listened to the crunch of small rocks and pebbles as she went up a slight slope and came out with a view down the hill to the lake beneath, a postcard scene for sure, she thought. Behind her she could hear Doug puffing away like a freight train on a steep slope. He insisted that he could walk with her even though she’d told him that he was out of shape and could not keep up. What an asshole and a drunk to boot. Why he insisted on walking she had no clue but she had to give him credit for at least trying but she still didn’t like the man. He was physically and, more importantly, emotionally loud, crude and rude. Pam grimaced remembering the scene in her apartment a few weeks previously and she thought he had been stalking her before that. Hard to believe that he was the son of the old man in the wheel chair whom she had assisted for several months. Out of respect for Andrew she would not turn the law on her cousin but if he died of a heart attack on the road behind her she would not mourn his passing.

The road slipped beneath her feet as her mind travelled back and forth as if it was a leaf on a windy day turning around and around before settling only to fly up and around again. New sneaks these are wearing out be walking on my socks pretty soon not so bad now but winter is coming definitely don’t need that expense so maybe I’ll wait a bit longer. Walked a lot as a kid in the big pink house up and down running around the back yard all hill up and down playing hide n seek and playing house with that huge doll house on the third floor it had lights and everything but the dolls didn’t light up not at all and the little people in the house never spoke except when the dolls were sleeping beside me in my bed and then I could hear their little squeaky voices as they moved about from room to room. There was Marty who was our neighbor at least that’s what my dad called him and there was Flo I have no idea where that name came from and I pretended that there was a little girl like me and I named her Rebecca because it sounded romantic. They were scared of the dolls who were much bigger of course and I could never understand that because the dolls simply sat around staring off into space and ignoring Marty and Flow and Rebecca totally just like my parents who walked back and forth without looking at me except when there was company and then my nanny would get me all dressed up in my prettiest dress and I would go into the big room where everyone was sitting and make a curtsey and say good evening to everyone and all the grownups would smile and say what a pretty girl I was and what wonderful parents I had and how did I like school. Lots of dumb questions especially since I hated Miss Ethel’s Day School where they nicknamed me PeePee after my initials I guess but I would get on the big yellow bus and sit in a seat looking out the window and trying to become invisible but it wasn’t so bad in retrospect not as bad as some things like what my father told me once about a big scandal in the family but he never went into detail but simply said that part of what I was and what I might hear when he and mom died was due to that time in the family history but I was in college and not interested in what I considered ancient history so I did not press him for details for I thought all families have problems and I never thought my parents or their parents or their parents’ parents were any different than anyone else’s family and it was not until I was fully grown that I realized that my family was very different and that I had been brought up much differently than most and that would be part of my life until I died and then part of my children’s lives and on and on.

The road sloped gradually upwards curving gently to follow the lake below. Pam could feel the sweat on her face and her ears where it escaped from below her cap. Family memories always ended up depressing her. They always ended up with the conversation that she and her father had shortly before his death. He asked for her and she had gone into the master bedroom where he was propped up on pillows, a skeletal pale shadow of the man who had raised her. She hated being there looking at what he had become. She had been a freshman in college then. Brash and judgmental as most children are, reacting to fear by lashing out at it, reacting to doubt by asserting a view through a small window as that of the whole world, messy and belligerent, eager to shock people around her.

Hi Pam. He turned his head towards the door and stared at her. His eyes seemed to burn right through her and she could not look at him but stared at the wallpaper above his head.

Hi Dad. How’re you feeling?

Her father gave a ghastly caricature of a grin. Okay, thanks. He weakly gestured to a chair beside his bed. Have a seat.

Thanks but I’m okay like this.

Sit. You may thank me for the chair before we are through.

Mom said you wanted to see me. Pam walked slowly across the room and sat down in the chair. She glanced at her father and then immediately down into her lap. She couldn’t stand the sight of him and by extension of herself.

Not pretty is it? The question was almost a soft whisper, a soft hiss of rain on a night breeze unseen, unknown almost unheard. Her father pushed himself further up the bed, his eyes widening in pain with the effort. For this part of your inheritance you may not thank me because not everything we get from our parents or their parents is good. He collapsed back into his pillows gasping for breath.

Dad.

No. Listen. Just listen please.

Pam sat there listening to the silence, to the rustle of the sheet as her father moved his hand slightly, to the hum of a car passing by on the street outside, to a tapping noise that she could not identify, to the soft thump as a door banged shut on the first floor. She thought she could almost hear the clock change from one minute to the next even though it was electric and noiselessly passed the time of day for anyone attending to it. The sun outside moved a fraction in relation to the earth and a shaft of sunlight shot through the window by her father’s bed lighting the floor and illuminating dust motes in a descending array. Pam wondered if dust motes made a sound even if one could not hear them. Having stared at the sunlight she could not help but look up and found her father looking at her, his gaze so direct and thoughtful that she felt smaller and more compacted in mind and body somehow larger in spite of this as one might feel in the presence of a thought larger than oneself that you could not define but that you knew was true.

In any family, he began in almost a whisper, there are good people and not so good people. The human condition does not discriminate. He wheezed slightly and then fell silent.

Dad, Pam said softly and touched his shoulder

Dad?

But her father was beyond all earthly calls.

MJ 2010

I can’t say how it all came about, my time in Mays Corners when I knew Dianne at least as much as I would ever know her and the events that occurred there. There are moments in our lives that define us and that we remember down to the last detail and there are other times when our lives change but we neither recognize or remember those times and indeed we seldom know that anything had changed at all. Such was the situation when Pamela disappeared.

I should start at the beginning, well not the actual beginning because I can’t remember back that far but the time when Pam Pease and I first met or ran into each other at the party if that is the current expression for meeting someone accidentally and becoming infatuated or maybe even in love within a minute or so. Time compresses to meet the demands of the emotions so it could have been seconds or perhaps less. She could have been just another face in the subway, indifferent, detached, mindless until her stop came and life once again flooded into her face as it did for the other mindless bodies both sitters and strap-hangers of whom I was one. I can remember every detail of that moment when I looked over the shoulder of another middle-aged gentleman in a tan trench coat that hung on either side of his limacine middle and saw one blue eye staring out mindlessly, emotionless at a point on the subway wall advertising a new skin cream guaranteed to make you look years younger. If it can be said that a person could be hooked by an eye then I was. I tried to shuffle my way forward to see the other eye along with the rest of her face but the cars came to a halt at the next station and she disappeared. I came out onto the platform as quickly as the crowd allowed but she was gone and I stood there as the crowd surged around me heading for apartments, wives, kiddies and cocktails not always in that order. The best I could do was note the station stop, the time and the local subway number and hope for the best. I felt a sense of loss somehow that I had found something and immediately lost it like a kid who sees his kite soar into the sky only to catch a downdraft into a tall tree. I stood there for what seemed like forever turning slowly around trying for just a glimpse of her but there was nothing to see except a sea of grey, red, brown, yellowish blank faces pushing by, an unending kaleidoscope of flesh none of it of any interest to me.

It was weeks before I saw her again, days of riding that particular train that was always jammed at rush hour enduring grunts and elbows and curses as I tried to move from car to car in search of her eye. Had anyone known my mission they would have categorized me as one of the thousands of nut jobs that inhabit a metropolis of eight million souls. Businessmen with their ties loosened, sweat standing out on their heads, briefcase in one hand and the other holding the strap, professional women in black tops and gray pantsuits their hair coming slightly loose after a long day below the glass ceiling, secretaries, house fraus, kids holding onto mommie’s hand and young men staring with great determination at the floor of the car or the ads placed in holders above the seats. The cars always stank of sweat, smoke and perfume and male pit stink. I breathed in recycled air full of onions, garlic and poor dental hygiene, or no dental hygiene in a few cases. It was all for naught and I was beginning to despair and wonder why I was spending so much time on a fool’s errand when I saw her again. She was at the other end of the car, of course, but I caught a glimpse of her cheekbone and one eye through the packed bodies and felt instantly alone with her and only her and I neither saw nor felt the bodies between us as I pushed my way to where she was strap hanging with one arm sheathed in a sage cotton jacket and the other clutching a book, a thick one full of verbose intentions by the look of it and I wondered for part of a second whether the manuscript on my computer would turn out to be a similar size and then I was beside her balancing perilously and reaching back to place my hand against the wall of the car between a large black lady with a tiny black velvet hat and a thin man probably in his eighties sitting hunched forward as if at stool.

Hello, I began turning my head to the right and looking at her.

Pamela did not reply. Indeed, she did not even acknowledge my greeting but stared straight ahead as the train pulled into her station with a squeal of brakes and a chuffing of air. The packed lump of humanity stirred in anticipation; I wanted to put my arms around her to avoid losing her in the mob but contented myself with making sure that I was right behind her as we shuffled forwards to the open doors.

Once on the platform she hurried towards the stairs looking straight ahead, her stride simultaneously hurried and determined so that from behind it looked as if she was goose stepping. Excuse me, I tried again hurrying to catch her and walk beside her up the stairs.

Pam still did not answer. Okay, talking with strangers in a subway station may not turn out well but I thought that I appeared as innocent and friendly as possible. My name is Michael, I tried. What’s yours?

She stopped and turned to look at me as if I had exposed myself right there in the middle of the station. If you don’t leave me alone I’ll mace you, she snapped and unslung her hand bag from her shoulder as if to reinforce her warning. I smiled and held up my hands in a gesture of surrender. We were much too close for her to pull anything out of her bag before I had taken it from her. I think perhaps she