In the Circumstances



Mark tried to judge Ally's character, and decided that she was a livewire girl who was in need of frequent entertaining. This was not going to be a walk in the park, he could see that.

"Well, it doesn't matter that you can't use the defibrillator, does it?" Mark enquired. "I mean, I'm sure that there is plenty of other stuff that you could do."

"Like what?" Ally asked shortly.

At that moment, Mark's beeper sounded. He looked at it, and hurriedly said, "sorry Ally, I've gotta go. This is important. I've got a couple of games on there, go knock yourself out." After pointing to the computer, he headed out of the room.

Ally sighed. She was feeling at home again. When she was living with her father, it was always, "Sorry Ally. I've got to go, Ally. It's important, Ally," she muttered, mocking her father's voice.

Why hadn't she been so upset about her father's death? He was never a real father for Ally. From a young age, she had to do a lot of stuff herself, otherwise it was never done. All her Dad did was bring home money. Ally never asked where he got the money from.

At the age of ten, Ally began to rebel. She had never been taught right from wrong, and had little notion of what she could and could not do. That's when she took her father's car.

"Alicia," Skelley had growled when he eventually found her, in a drive-thru restaurant. He had taken her home and sat her on the sofa. "Why did you take my car?"

"I was hungry," Ally said.

"You have two legs. Couldn't you have walked?"

"What's the problem with taking the car?" Ally had asked.

"If you were caught, then they'd take you back here and see me," Skelley had explained. "The cops, Ally! If the cops had caught you, they'd have recognised me and put me in jail!"

Ally had a hard time trying to work out what was right and what was wrong, but from being at school, she had learnt enough by the time she got to Jesse's house.

The girl ambled over to the computer. She found a card game and set her mind to work.

It was not long before he mind wandered away from the game, and she began to wonder about something. She remembered the gash in her father's head. Nasty, that was. But, she remembered that it was on the top of his head. Right on the top.

At first, Ally assumed that he had caught his head on the counter when he fell, but he could not have hit his head and fallen into the position that she had found him in.

She also wondered if she saw any sign of blood on the counter. She didn't remember any. Ally wished that she could go back to her apartment, but it was a long way away, and also Pasco and his men might be on the lookout for her.

"Wait a minute!" Ally exclaimed. A thought had struck her. What if Frankie Pasco had killed Skelley? What if they just made it look like a suicide?

Ally shook her head in order to start thinking rationally. She decided against this theory, knowing that Frankie Pasco's main objective would be to shoot them point blank and lay low. If he killed Skelley, then that would mean writing a suicide note, and actually finding out a load of things to put into the note, such as where Jesse lived, where he worked, and they would have to have known that she took his car when she was two years younger.

But the theory that Skelley's death was not a suicide did not leave the girl's mind. She considered that it could be someone else. "That would make sense, actually," she murmured. "If I were someone else, I'd make him or her write a suicide note and include one or two people to suspect."

"That's the first sign of madness, you know," Mark said, entering the room. "Talking to yourself, that is."

"I bet you do it all the time," Ally replied. "I mean, it's the only way to get a decent conversation sometimes."

"That's true," Mark laughed. "And yes, I do talk to myself at times. Funnily enough, I tend to talk to myself about what you appear to be talking about."

"What's that, then?" Ally asked.

"Homicide investigations," Mark told her.

"What makes you think I was talking about that?" Ally asked him.

"Because, the last sentence is something that I would probably say to myself."

Ally's mind thought fast. "But, you're the doctor, right?"

"Right," Mark said, wondering where she was going with the conversation.

"Jesse said that he had three friends, two friends who are doctors and one who is a policeman."

"I am a doctor-friend," Mark told her. "But, Jesse probably did not mentioned that I am also a consultant with the police department."

"No, he definitely did not mention that," Ally said. "If he did, then I'd have been this confused earlier."

Mark laughed. "Don't worry," he told her. "Once you see all three of us together tomorrow, everything will fit."

"Do you mind Jesse taking care of me like this?" Ally blurted out.

"Mind?" Mark asked, feeling that the question was rather random. "I didn't have a lot of say in the matter, because by the time he told me you'd already been living with him for about a month. But, why should I mind? If he wants to look after you, that's his decision, and no one else's."

"What would you do in his position?" Ally persisted the subject.

"I would have probably done the same thing as he did," Mark admitted.

"Really? Even in my circumstances?" Ally asked in surprise.

"What circumstances?"

"How much has Jesse told you?"

"How much more is there to the story?"

"He hasn't told you everything, I'm assuming."

"He said that there were other things that he was going to tell the three of us tomorrow, I'm guessing that the circumstances are the parts of the story that he left out."

"He'll tell you in his own time," Ally told him, and left it at that.

Mark nodded, knowing in time he would know the whole story.