It was mid October and Jenny was running along her favorite path in the park. She could hear the soft whisper of the wind rustling through the leaves as she sped along the tree lined trail. The autumn colors of crimson, orange and amber brightened her mood; it is her favorite time of the year. As she approached a bench on the north side of the park she noticed a man reading a newspaper. She smiled as she jogged past him; he did not return the smile and just continued on with his reading.
Jenny was nearly finished her early morning run when she saw something in the bushes on the side of the trail. At first she thought she had imagined the outstretched arm clutching a notebook from under the foliage, but as she came closer the realization of what she was seeing frightened her. She bent over the opened notebook and read the name across the top of the page. She was startled to recognize the name of her childhood friend. She saw a gash across the top of his bloody brow and checked his wrist to see if he was alive, his pulse, though faint, was steady. “Mike, can you hear me?” she said as she attempted to get a response from her injured friend. She reached into her pocket for her cell to call 911 and alert them of her findings.
As she dialed her phone there was a movement in the bushes and then suddenly a tall man with gray hair in a light blue shirt leaped out at her and knocked her over, in horror she screamed, “Oh no” as she slammed her head on the hard ground. The operator beckoned, “Please state the nature of the emergency” as her attention slowly came back to the voice on the other end of her cell. “I found someone injured in the park and I think I saw their attacker running away”, she said. She gave them the necessary information to find them and waited for assistance to arrive.
The minutes seemed like hours as she waited, worried and dismayed by the lack of response from her friend. She kept whispering, “Don’t worry Mike, help is coming” uncertain if it was more to sooth him or herself. She was trembling and cold. She had removed her jacket and covered the injured man with it to keep him warm until help arrived. As she sat waiting for the paramedics to arrive, Jenny thought of all the fond memories her and Mike had shared when they were children here at the parks Fall Carnival with their friends. Mike, Claire, Tim, and Jenny would race to ride the Tea Cups and spin them until they felt they would be ill. The smells of the candied apples, funnel cakes and cotton candy would fill the air. Jake would refuse to leave the fair without his candied apple and Nora would insist on knocking over the bowling pins until she won her prize. They would go from ride to ride and stand to stand together laughing all the while. Now her heart grew sad as she sat by her childhood friend who lay dying in her arms, when will help arrive?
The white and red ambulance came rolling across the lawn with its siren blaring and its blinding lights, Jenny stepped back as the paramedics began to do their work. A young officer pulled her aside to ask her about the scene she had come upon and the gray haired man who had thrown her down and ran off down the wooded pathway. Jenny was distracted by the paramedics’ deep concern for their new patient. She knew something was terribly wrong. The officer led her away as they rushed Mike to the hospital and asked her to come down to the station to give her formal statement. When she had given them all the information she could they sent her on her way.
The following day was Saturday; Jenny awoke early and made her usual bagel and cream cheese for breakfast. She went about her morning chores in sort of a daze. She had already decided she would skip this morning’s park run. The horror that this had happened in her lovely neighborhood had deeply unsettled her.
She was getting ready to go to the hospital to check on Mike, when a knock came at the door. She opened it and found two officers. They asked if they could come inside and discuss the previous day’s ordeal with her once more. As they sat at her kitchen table they gently broke the news of Mike’s passing during the night. Jenny thought of how several of her and Mike’s childhood friends had recently come to their untimely deaths. Tim had been killed in an accident when his breaks had given out on a deadly serpentine road. Jake and Nora were killed just a few weeks ago by a suspected serial killer. Claire too had been taken just two days ago, when someone attacked her with a straight razor while she was walking home from the subway after work. Now that Mike was also gone she slowly realized that she was the last of them. She thought to herself, “Could that man who knocked her over in the park be the killer the police have been looking for, will he be coming for me next”?
Then the officers began to explain their findings in the contents of Mike’s notebook and how it described in great detail the deaths of each of their friends. Jenny was horrified, “No it can’t be true” she thought. Then they opened the book to the final page, there she clearly saw in Mike’s writing, “Jenny runs through the park every morning, I think she will be the easiest one yet”. The man with the gray hair and blue shirt who had attacked Mike while he was waiting for Jenny to run by had unknowingly saved her life.