Before He Wakes by Jerry Bledsoe

was after midnight, and she couldn’t imagine who would be calling.
    It was Barbara Ford, who had lived across the street from her for nearly five years. Mae, as most people called Ina Mae, was older than Barbara and wasn’t close to her. They usually spoke only in passing in their yards. All that Mae knew about Barbara came from her fourteen-year-old daughter, Diane, who often baby-sat for her and was fond of her and her two sons.
    Barbara sounded frantic. Larry had shot himself, she said. Could Mae come and get the boys and keep them while she rode to the hospital with Larry in the ambulance?
    Mae woke her husband, Edgar, to go with her, and they dressed quickly and hurried to help. An ambulance was pulling to a stop in the Fords’ driveway as they left their house.
    Barbara had directed the medical technicians to the bedroom by the time they got there. The children were in the living room. Bryan, who was nine, looked frightened and bewildered. The younger child, Jason, three, was crying. Mae took Jason from Barbara, trying to soothe him, and Edgar got Bryan in hand. The Hamblins left with the children before the medics came down to tell Barbara that there would be no need for a trip to the hospital. The Hamblins left the children with their daughter and went back across the street to see if they could be of further help.
    Larry was dead, they learned, and sheriff’s deputies were on the way. There was nothing to do but wait for them to arrive, and they sat with Barbara waiting anxiously, uncertain of what to say or do.
    When a deputy finally arrived, the medical technicians told him what had happened and took him upstairs.
    In the meantime, Brenda Monroe and her husband, Wayne, who lived several hundred yards beyond the Fords on the same dead-end street, had not been awakened by the clamor that had aroused many of their neighbors. Their phone rang around one o’clock and Brenda answered to find a neighbor, Arnold Farlow, on the line.
    He told her that an ambulance and the police were at the Ford house. He had talked with Edgar Hamblin, who told him that Larry had killed himself.
    Brenda told her husband to call their pastor to make sure that he was aware of what had happened. She knew that Barnie Pierce would come immediately. Brenda’s immediate concern was Bryan and Jason. She hurried to Barbara’s house to see if she could get them and bring them back with her.
    The emergency technicians and the sheriff’s deputy were upstairs with the body when Brenda arrived. The Hamblins were with Barbara, who curled on the living room couch with her feet tucked beneath her.
    Brenda hugged Barbara and sat on the couch beside her. She could feel Barbara trembling through the cushions. “I don’t know what we’re going to do without him,” Barbara said.
    The unspoken feeling among the assembled neighbors was that Larry had deliberately shot himself, although they had no idea why he would do such a thing. He and Barbara had seemed a loving couple with everything going for them. Nobody gave voice to those feelings, but they realized that Barbara must have sensed their thoughts, because several times she said, “Larry wouldn’t kill himself. He wouldn’t commit suicide.”
    When Brenda asked what she could do, Barbara asked if she would mind calling her parents and Larry’s. Brenda agreed to call Barbara’s parents because she knew they had been called already. But she didn’t think she could bring herself to call the Fords and tell them that their son was dead. She’d prefer to wait and let their pastor do that, she said.
    Brenda and the Hamblins had listened as Barbara told the deputy what had happened. Her story sounded plausible to them. It struck a special chord of truth with Mae when Barbara said she thought the sound she heard was the picture falling in the hall. Her daughter had told her that the picture had fallen on two occasions while she was baby-sitting, frightening her.
    As the deputies were preparing to