Authors: User
“You’ll see when you’re ready.” The voice wants to change the subject. “Your fax machine went off. Who faxed you?”
“How’d you—” Sue starts to ask, but realizes he probably heard it in the background. She doubts he’ll explain himself anyway.
She glances at the rolled sheets of paper tumbling over the passenger seat. It’s the corrected bank agreement for tomorrow’s meeting about Sean’s pub space. Without looking at it too closely she guesses that Brad has gone through and anticipated her questions, marking the places where he needs her signature. Burning the midnight oil, making sure she’s got a hard copy waiting in her car for the morning meeting, and none of it could matter less to her right now.
“It’s a contract for a meeting,” she says. “My office manager wants me to fax him back.”
“You know the rules, Susan. No outgoing calls, including faxes.”
“If I don’t reply he’ll suspect something.”
“It’s two in the morning, Susan. I doubt that.”
She gathers the papers up in her fist. Even if she were going to try and fax Brad some distress signal, what would she write?
Veda kidnapped by a person in a gray van?
She doesn’t even know the license number. And while she’s not convinced that following the orders will get her daughter back, she’s certain that disobeying them will get Veda killed. It’s like faith but the opposite, a kind of sacred terror.
“Ashford,” the voice says. “Forty-one miles. It’s a long drive. Better get started.”
She puts the Expedition into drive. Backing up, her headlights catch the patch of snow where the kid’s body still lies, faceup. Even from here she can tell he’s dead, something in the angle of his head.
Sue pulls the map out of her pocket. She settles it on her lap again and pulls out of the parking lot.
One last glance into her rearview as she pulls away.
The kid’s body is gone.
2:26A.M.
Following the map, Sue heads southeast through the night. The road has no name. The only reason she knows it’s the right road is that periodically, when it flattens and straightens and the snow isn’t falling too hard, she’ll catch a glimpse of the van’s taillights up in the distance. She likes seeing the taillights because she knows that Veda is in there. And she knows it’s the van because once she got close enough to see its dented back door staring back at her like an ugly face.
Then the van speeds up and she can’t see the taillights at all.
She hits the gas, taking it up to seventy, then eighty, waiting for them to appear. Visibility isn’t an issue at the moment but she still sees nothing. Maybe the van turned off and now they’re behind her. She checks the rearview. Nothing back there. Not only are there no other cars on this route, there aren’t any signs—no billboards, speed limit signs, or mile markers, just the endless pipeline of the night.
She finds herself thinking about the route, what it’s done, and the two bodies in the back of the Expedition. If it’s true that driving through these back roads can resurrect the dead, then what about Marilyn? What about the other, the thing she dug up under the bridge?
She tilts the mirror down and turns on the dome light. She can’t see beyond the backseat, nor can she hear anything over the sound of the engine and the tires on the road. But if a hand were to reach up over the seat, followed by the body itself slinking into the dark space behind her, she could see that. If she were looking, that is. If she weren’t looking, or listening, she might not hear it until one of those cold hands slipped between the two front seats and clamped over her mouth. And then she’d hear the voice, right next to her ear. Would it ask her to take it farther down the road, she wonders. Or would it say something else, maybe some old poem about a man who traveled from White’s Cove to Gray Haven, to paint the Commonwealth with blood?
She decides to keep the light on for now.
She drives another fifteen miles, watching for the next sign that will indicate her turn for Ashford. It’s harder to see with the interior light on, but she leaves it on just the same. She remembers how Phillip always hated driving with the light on. Whenever they went anywhere, he would drive and she would navigate, and she always thought it was less about the light and more about her insistence on consulting a map as they went. If it were up to him, he would’ve found his way by sense of smell.
Why couldn’t you be here now to help me get through this?
At some point she finds herself thinking about him in a deeper sense, and his sudden departure a year and a half earlier, the way he walked out of her life with almost no warning, leaving the details to his attorneys and accountants. In the brief and awkward telephone conversations that Sue’s had with Phillip since then—the last one was several months ago—he always said that he wasn’t ready for the obligations of parenthood, that he was afraid he’d be a bad father. For a long time Sue refused to accept that.
“That’s your
excuse
?” she asked, during a particularly awful phone call last August, to which he replied, “It’s my reason, Sue. And it’s better this way. You’ll just have to take my word for it.” He refused to go into it any further than that. Ultimately it became easier just to believe him. Her husband, despite the fact that he always seemed like a stand-up guy, had run away from his life with her and Veda simply because he didn’t think he was up to the challenge.
But what if he was running from something else? Something he couldn’t possibly tell her about, for her own protection? And what if whatever it was caught up with him, within the last two months, and that was why the phone calls finally stopped?
She’s still wondering about that when, behind her and approaching quickly, the blue-and-red police lights begin to flash.
3:03A.M.
“Ma’am?” The approaching officer is medium height, with a Jersey accent and tired eyes. He holds the flashlight up next to his head, shining it low enough that it doesn’t blind her. The name on his tag readsO ’DONNELL. Sue can see his partner sitting in the cruiser, and hears the dispatcher’s voice on the radio. “Are you having car trouble?”
Sue stands next to the Expedition, staring back at him, not answering. Her fear levels are still off the chart and she’s afraid that if she opens her mouth she might start screaming. And she won’t be able to stop.
“Ma’am?” Now the flashlight goes into her eyes and she hears the cop’s voice grow more concerned. “Is something wrong?”
No. No. Just say the word. Send him on his way.
Sue’s head goes forward, mouth twitching. It probably looks like she’s about to throw up. The cop stands there waiting until she finally gets the words out.
“I’m f-fine.”
He shines the light on the Expedition, across its tires and license plate. “No trouble with your vehicle? What are you doing out here in the middle of the night?”
“I didn’t—” Her voice sounds strained and awful. She clears her throat, swallows and tries again. “I thought I saw something run across the road in front of me.” She sounds a little better now, clearer if not steadier. “It was a deer or something, I swerved so I wouldn’t hit it.”
The cop shines the light on her tire tracks, running smooth and straight to the shoulder. Then back to her face again. “Where are you headed?”
“Ashford.”
“Are you aware that there’s a winter storm warning in effect for this area for the next twelve hours? You’re not supposed to be on the roads unless it’s absolutely necessary.”
“It’s an emergency.”
“What happened?”
“Excuse me?”
“What kind of emergency is it?”
She stares directly into the flashlight beam, beginning to feel a balloon of apprehension inflating within her. “My daughter. She’s—she may be in trouble. She’s with her father. I got a phone call asking me to come pick her up. He told me to take this route. I’m not from around here.” She’s aware that her voice is rising in pitch as she talks, becoming shrill, but she can’t do anything about it. “I mean, I am, but not this immediate area, so I was following the directions he gave me. I just have to get to Ashford.”
The light leaves her face. There’s a pause. She realizes that he’s looking at her hands, bare and encrusted with dirt and dried blood from digging. He shines his light on the Expedition’s broken window. His voice becomes formal again. “May I see your license and registration?”
He waits a good ten feet behind the Expedition while she goes back through the passenger’s side to take them out of the glove compartment, all the while anticipating the noise or movement that will make him shine his flashlight through one of the windows. But nothing moves or shifts and he just stands back there, waiting. When she brings him her license and registration, he takes them from her.
“Return to your vehicle.”
Sue goes back to the Expedition, opens the driver’s side, and gets in, eyes riveted to the rearview. She can see both cops clearly inside the car, one of them talking on the radio, the other typing on the dash-mounted keyboard.
Sue stares at the phone, waiting for it to ring. It doesn’t. Her eyes go to the wadded-up fax pages accumulated across the floor, a small pile of discarded paper, the detritus of her night thus far. The phone remains silent.
But in her mind she can hear the voice telling her not to say or do anything that might jeopardize Veda. It gets tangled up with Phillip’s voice, the two of them merging into one, telling her to stay calm. She supposes this is the point, the voice eventually infecting her head so thoroughly that it doesn’t need to call her anymore, it’s just there.
At last the officer comes back with her paperwork, but he doesn’t hand it back to her yet. He shines the light on her face again, not speaking for a long moment. “Ms. Young, are you sure there’s nothing you want to tell me?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t think so.”
He leans forward. There’s no expression in his eyes, but they are green and alert, and they seem kind as well, waiting for some sign from her, any indication of distress. “There’s nothing I can do for you?”
“No, thank you.”
He sighs. “All right. I’m going to…” Then, almost as an afterthought, he shines the flashlight into the back of the Expedition, Sue’s eyes traveling with it to the still-bright bloodstains all over the backseat, the kid’s blood sprayed everywhere like modern art. The cop instinctively takes a step back, face stiffening, the flashlight in Sue’s eyes again, his voice cold and abrupt.
“Ma’am, step out of the car and keep your hands where I can see them.”
3:27A.M.
Sue steps out of the car again and sees the cop signaling his partner without taking his eyes off her. A moment later the other cop is out with his flashlight aimed into the Expedition, following the bloodstains across the upholstery.
“Ma’am, what happened here?”
“The deer, when I hit it…” She falters and gives up, unable to weave even the most rudimentary strands of the story together. “Please, can’t you just let me go? I have to get my daughter.”
Neither of them answers her. The first cop circles around the back and Sue sees him shining a light down inside, then opening the door. There’s a rustle of blankets being pulled aside. Then an awful, staring silence.
“Jesus H. Christ.”
The second cop, standing in front of her, reacts immediately to the alarm in his partner’s voice, glancing over his shoulder. “Rich? What’s going on?”
“Cuff her.”
The second cop frowns, straining to see beyond the bloodstained backseat without turning completely away from Sue. “What is it? What’s back there?”
“Cuff her, cuff her now!”
The urgency in his voice is contagious and for an instant Sue is irrationally compelled to make a run for it, jump back in the Expedition and go screaming off into the night. Of course this is idiotic, only morons try to outrun cops, and morons with dead bodies in the back
never
get away. Besides, the second cop is already turning her around, pulling her arms together, tightening cold steel at her wrists. He leads her around the back of the Expedition and Sue watches him join his partner, both of them shining their lights down on Marilyn’s corpse sprawled on its back, mouth open, eyeless sockets facing up.
“Holy fuck.”
“Yeah.”
“Holy
fuck.
”
Without speaking another word to Sue, the second cop takes her back to the cruiser. Inside it’s warm and smells like coffee. She steals a glimpse at the dashboard clock, feeling the minutes flash by. She tries not to think about this but knows she can’t help it. Where has the time gone? The night which just moments ago seemed endless is already draining away from her at an alarming speed, and Veda is that much closer to dying.
Eventually another cruiser pulls up, along with an ambulance and a tow truck. An unmarked sedan is the last car to arrive and she sees an older man with a beard step out, wearing a parka and holding a cup of coffee. He talks to the cops, looks in the back of the Expedition, then glances in Sue’s direction. She watches as he scratches his beard and gets back in his car. The tow truck driver hooks the Expedition to the winch, and the others all return to their cars. The whole process takes a little over twenty minutes.
The sedan leads the procession back to town, followed by the ambulance, the other cruiser, and the tow truck hauling the Expedition. The two cops and Sue bring up the rear. They drive in silence for several minutes until, up ahead, Sue sees the sign along the side of the road:
ASHFORD
ESTABLISHED1802
They drive past the sign, the road winding lazily into town. Unlike the other towns on the route, Ashford is still populated. The windows have glass in them. The streetlights work. The houses and shops along its main drag are dark, of course, but neon shines down from either side—shoe repairs and tanning salons—and the roads have been cleared recently. Two churches stand guard on either side of the main intersection, glowering down at the local Blockbuster. There’s a park up ahead and Sue sees the statue exactly where she expects it, the man on his pedestal, except this time the figure is not only missing both arms, he’s also minus a leg. He holds his head cocked proudly, like some flightless seabird.