But Ian stepped forward, bent over the freezing corpse, and took the rifle.
“What are you doing?” Marcus’ deep voice rumbled through the stillness.
“I think I’d just feel better having it with us.”
“You’re taking a murder weapon from a crime scene.”
“It was a suicide.”
“Tell that to the cops when they find
you
in his car with the gun that killed him.”
“I think we’re beyond the law here, don’t you?”
Marcus bit his lip. They couldn’t go to the police with any of this. If they went to the authorities bearing news of possessed mailboxes, haunted cell phones, and old muscle cars, the Law would laugh in their faces and then detain them while setting out to figure just how they
really
knew Charles, and what they were
really
doing out there driving north through the Adirondacks. He turned back to the car without a word and looked at his watch. 7:43.
Ian wiped the rifle’s barrel off in the snow and slung the weapon over his shoulder. He hurried after Marcus, allowing only a quick glance into the pressing woods, the sound of branches moaning beneath the added weight of snow urging him on.
When they stepped out of the woods, Heather and Ashley were standing beside the black Rover, arms crossed against their chests and their shoulders raised in opposition to the cold.
“Where the hell did you go?” Ashley cried out, leaving her station and sprinting for Marcus. She ran with a limp at first, her joints stiff and bruised.
“You scared the crap out of us,” Heather exclaimed, throwing her arms around Ian. “What happened?”
“Sorry.”
Heather noticed the rifle and released her grip on him. “Where’s Charles?”
“Shot himself.”
“What?”
Ashley frowned, saddened. “I had a feeling.”
“Wait.” Heather wasn’t catching on. “You’re saying that Charles
killed
himself out there?” She pointed to the woods.
“Put the gun in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.”
A tear twinkled in her eye.
Ian put his arm around her. “Come on. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Wiping her own eyes, Ashley said, “Snow’s gotta be almost a foot deep. You think we can drive in this?”
Ian shrugged and opened the Rover’s door. “I’m hoping the trees over the road caught most of the snow. We’ll see. It’s either that or we walk.” He swung the rifle off of his shoulder and stepped up behind the wheel.
Without another word, the rest of them joined Ian in the Range Rover, Heather up front next to Ian, Marcus and Ashley in the back. Ian turned and handed the rifle to Marcus, and Marcus carefully set it down in the small space behind his seat.
“Should we try calling the police?” Heather asked Ian. “We should tell someone…”
Ian fished his cell out of his pocket and handed it to her. “See if I have a signal.”
A second later, she was shaking her head and handing it back to him.
“Keep it. Maybe try emailing your parents. Tweet them or Facebook them or something.” He glanced down at the needles before him. “Half a tank of gas.” Turning down the radio, he asked Heather to bring up a map on his phone. Then he put the car in drive and gently applied the gas. The chains on the tires caught and propelled the vehicle forward. “Let’s get the hell outta here,” he muttered.
Marcus couldn’t keep from offering a silent amen to that.
Seventeen
Ian’s phone directed them over a bumpy road that cut a winding path through the watching woods. The morning light, gray and dreary as it was, came splintering down through the knotted canopy above. The large dome, fashioned from barked arms and a million interlaced, twigged fingers, had sheltered the path, sparing it the amount of snow the parking lot had received. The chained tires on the Rover had no problem with a trail long ago established by park rangers and campers. The vehicle rocked, bounced, and shimmied all the way to the end of the trail, where it finally turned onto a paved road. At least that’s what the phone said, anyway. With the amount of untouched snow covering it, it could have easily been a frozen riverbed. The phone, however, proved honest, and Ian had the vehicle heading west back toward I-81.
“How long until we reach 81?” Ian asked. He looked up into the rearview mirror and spent a second watching the two distinct, chained lines that were spreading away from them and going back the way they had come. The tracks stood out as a loud pronouncement of their being there, the only indication of
anything
having been there. Such evidence of their solitude slightly disturbed him.
Heather had her hair pulled to the side and over her shoulder. A black hair band appeared from somewhere and stretched into a wide O across her spread fingers as she prepared to tie off a morning ponytail. “Half hour,” she answered.
Ashley was biting her fingernails, which she tended to do when she was nervous or troubled about something. Heather’s pregnancy was one of the things driving her fingers into her mouth, the shadowy figure in the bathroom another. There was also the text message. GIVE IT TO US. Just what in the hell did that mean? Give what to whom? And yet, she kept finding herself offering pensive glances at the road behind them, expecting to see that black car on the prowl. But that didn’t make sense, did it? Such a correlation?
A crescent moon detached between her teeth, ripped free from her hand, and she spit it on the ground at her feet, onto the floorboard of Charles’ car. Charles. The nice fellow who first saved their lives and then blew his brains out.
Merry Christmas
.
Marcus rested a firm hand on her thigh and squeezed it once, reassuringly.
But the affectionate act came with a sharp pain, like there was something sharp in his hand.
Or something in her pocket.
She remembered the ring she’d found in the glove compartment of the Taurus. She’d forgotten all about it, unsure as to what even made her grab it. She reached for it, slipping her hand beneath the weight of her boyfriend’s concerned touch, and got it out after a minor scuffle with her tight-fitting jeans.
“What’s that?” Marcus asked.
She held it up to the window, studying its craftsmanship. “I don’t know. It was in the glove compartment of the car.”
“The Taurus?”
“Yeah.”
Heather and Ian turned in their seats to get a look.
“Maybe it belongs to the guy who’s missing,” Heather wondered. “Tossed his wedding ring in there before picking up the mistress…”
Ashley didn’t think so. It didn’t look like any wedding ring she’d ever seen before. The band was bronze, and a black gem sat fixed to its face. It seemed ancient, something that had been dug up in the desert and belonged in a museum. There was some kind of language inscribed across the metal. The dark stone was…deep. A bottomless chasm contained by its rounded edges, ripples of power leaping forth and splashing against the glass-like prison. As if that made any sense, it pulled her in, luring her with its mystery and hypnotizing her with its energy. For a second, she thought it might open up and swallow her, condemn her to the bottom of some dark, eternal ocean. But the sense of power was—
The night of her rape flashed in her head, her face twisted in terror suddenly paused against her mind’s eye like some token Polaroid that her attacker had returned with, shoving it in her face and mocking her with the memory of his triumph.
She flung the ring away from her, the damn memory with it. It bounced between the two front seats and came to rest at Heather’s feet. It sat there, innocent. Inanimate.
“What’s wrong?” Heather leaned over to pick it up.
Ashley had no answer for her. She didn’t know what was wrong or what had just happened, only that she was trembling. It wasn’t the image alone that had imprinted itself on the backside of her eyes—seeing her own face screaming in protest, the vantage point that of an observer—but also the
feeling
of it. The violent intrusion, the
horror
… In that split second, during the fathomless descent she somehow took down into the gem, she had been raped again.
“Nothing.” She closed her eyes and focused on ridding herself of the memory, of the feeling. She ordered herself to—
breathe!
“Nothing,” she repeated.
Heather turned the ring over in her hands, setting her own blue stare into its center. Her gaze followed the eloquent lines of the inscription, not understanding any of it but somehow fascinated all the same. The morning light and falling snow reflected off the dark gem and swam circles through the metal. “Strange,” she whispered, feeling something.
“Heather,” Ian said.
She kept staring, unresponsive.
“Heather,” he repeated.
Still she sat transfixed by the ring.
“Heather!” Ian snapped.
Heather blinked and came out of the fugue that had ensnared her. Reaching forward, she opened the glove compartment and tossed the ring inside, slamming the door shut after it. Then she leaned back and away from it, as if the door might not be able to protect her from whatever force was emanating from the old ornament.
Ian stared at her, questions of confusion transmitting wildly through his hawkish glare. “What the hell? You okay?”
She pinched her eyebrows, staring at the glove compartment. “Yeah.” Then she abandoned whatever was bothering her and leaned over to turn on the radio. “See if we can get a weather report,” she deflected.
Ashley watched from the backseat as Ian observed his fiancée with concern. Heather had sensed something ominous about the ring, too.
Give it to us…
And somehow Ashley knew, just
knew
, exactly what the dark man had wanted.
Heather found a local station just in time to catch a weather report already in progress. Something about another storm front heading in, one even worse than last night’s.
Though it seemed Ian was having little trouble keeping the Rover on the road, the memory of his cries from behind the wheel of the Taurus as the rental had picked up speed and propelled them into a moose was still too fresh. She didn’t want to be driving in these conditions any more than Heather did, not with that sort of dark magic in the air.
Magic?
She dismissed the thought and watched from the corner of her eye as it disappeared into a tall, borderless field of the unexplained. “I have a friend that lives in Syracuse,” she said instead. “Maybe we should think about spending the night at her place.”
“You think she’d mind?” Ian asked. It was obvious from his voice that he wasn’t all that thrilled about driving through this either, as if at any moment the brake pedal might sink to the floorboard with no results.
“Let me call her.”
Marcus leaned his head against the cold glass window beside him. “A hot shower, something to eat…”
Ashley looked at her phone, praying silently that it would work. “One bar.” She dialed. “Voicemail,” she reported. And then, “Hi, Joyce, it’s Ashley. From school. It’s been a long time, I know…but I’m actually in the area and wondered if you’d mind us stopping in to say hi. ‘Us’ as in my boyfriend and my sister and her fiancé. We’re north of Watertown right now, so give me a call as soon as you get this. Thanks, Joyce. Look forward to seeing you again. It’s been too long.” She hung up and leaned back against the seat with a sigh.
A series of commercials, their terrible jingles like some Gitmo torture track, came selling weed killer, natural breast enhancement, and used cars. Heather spared their ears by shutting them off. But after a few moments of silence, driving through the white-washed world of eerie solitude, the quietness began to weigh on them and the ache for some sense of the outside world returned.
“Why don’t you find some music to put on,” Ian suggested.
“I’m kinda sick of Christmas music,” Ashley said, playing with the zipper on her jacket with one hand while chewing away the fingers on the other.
“Me, too,” Marcus echoed.
Heather looked around and found a CD in the door pocket beside her. “Charles, my man… Who woulda thought?”
“What?”
“Bob Marley.” She couldn’t help but smile as she slid the disc into the player, and a second later, their frozen frontier was thawing beneath the happy notes of some warm island music. The happy feelings of summer days lit a beach fire in their souls and brought smiles to their faces as they all sang along. The morning light and the Jamaican singer had the events of yesterday seeming rather silly. Though it was a feeling they knew not to trust, even as their bodies swayed automatically to the music, Syracuse their new destination.
****
“I think you should stop and ask,” Heather said. They were coming up on a little gas station.
“Why? We have the phone.”
“I don’t trust the phone.”
Ian frowned. “Fine, we’ll stop. Maybe they have coffee.” He turned off the road and drove into the recently plowed parking lot of the gas station. A yellow salt-stained backhoe loader sat off in the corner of the lot, sleeping beside two mountains of snow.
“Might as well get gas while we’re at it,” Marcus said.
Ian pulled the Rover up alongside a pump and threw the door open. Ashley and Heather did the same.
“I got the gas,” Marcus insisted. “Get me coffee if they have any.” He stepped out into the lazy snow, zipped his jacket, and pulled his wallet from his jeans as the others all went to the shop. After removing the gas cap, swiping his credit card, choosing the grade, and removing the nozzle, he set the auto-flow latch on the handle and thrust his hands into his pockets. He stepped away from the Rover and peered across the lot, into the shop’s frosted windows. He could see the shapes and colors of his friends all huddled around the counter and conversing with a fourth shape that was positioned behind it.
A brisk wind shattered the stillness, flying across the parking lot and blowing little tornadoes of snow across the ground. Marcus shivered and turned his back to it. Checking on the status of his purchase, curious just how thirsty the Range Rover was, he came face to face with the pump’s digital display.