Murder Road (12 page)

The storm hit as we left Rose’s. The lowering skies opened and huge raindrops pelted the windshield, washing away the old road dust. I had the passenger window cranked down, trying to keep the blood smell to a minimum, and my arm and shoulder immediately got wet.

Our bags were in the trunk of the Pontiac, Eddie was driving, and I was sitting cross-legged, my bare feet tucked under my thighs. The scene was almost exactly as it had been the night we arrived—except for the rain, the ripped upholstery, and the smell of blood. We had wiped up as much of the fingerprint dust as we could. The back of Eddie’s neck had a pink sunburn from his hour doing yard work.

Eddie flipped on the wipers as we stopped at the light turning onto Atticus Line.

“There’s probably another route out of town,” I said.

He didn’t answer. The light changed, and still he didn’t move.

“Eddie?” I asked.

He stared straight ahead, motionless as the rain spattered on the roof of the car. There was no car behind us, no other car visible. There was only us, sitting in the intersection at a green light, the wipers moving back and forth in the silence. Eddie’s gaze was unfocused, suddenly strange. I felt a chill deep in my stomach.

Then, as the light changed again, Eddie pushed the gas and we drove through the empty intersection onto Atticus Line.

I watched him warily as he accelerated on the slickening pavement. I didn’t like the way his body was too still, the way he wouldn’t look at me. “Eddie,” I said again.

He frowned and looked at me. “Yeah?”

It was just him, my husband. There was nothing wrong with him at all.

I shook my head. “Nothing.” I turned away, not caring that the rain was blasting into my window. I needed the fresh air.

The sky got darker, and lightning flashed high up in the clouds, followed a few minutes later by thunder. Eddie turned the headlights on.

“Hold on,” he said. “We’re going through a storm.”

The road was a tunnel in the increasing darkness, the trees flecked with yellowy-gray shadows. The wet smell from the hot pavement was electric. I could nearly taste it. I parted my lips and took a deep breath of it as Atticus Line flew by beneath our tires.
This road
, I thought.
Why are we on this road?

Eddie eased off the accelerator a little as the wipers worked hard. Wind gusted, blowing fat, warm drops of rain into the car, wetting my hair and the side of my face. I felt water running down
my neck, soaking my shirt, and I couldn’t bring myself to care. I felt detached, like I was leaving not only Coldlake Falls behind, but a part of me as well.

I didn’t believe in happy endings—far from it. I didn’t believe that Eddie and I would drive off into the stormy sunset in our bloody car and never have a problem again. My guard was incapable of truly going down. I had wanted so badly to get out of Coldlake Falls, as if that meant Eddie and I could go back to normal, whatever that was. But something wasn’t right. I had the familiar feeling that whatever we were driving into, it was going to be bad.

If Eddie felt the same, he gave no indication. He stayed focused on the road, which was harder and harder to see. His jaw was set firmly, as if he was determined.

“Jesus, it’s dark,” he said.

I tilted my head toward the window and looked up. The sky was uncanny. The sickly lemon tinge was fading, blotted out as if with ink. With every second that passed, it felt more like night. Like the night we had driven into town, except for the rain.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” I said as rain ran down my forehead and my face. “It’s barely dinnertime. It shouldn’t be this dark.”

“The rain is getting worse.”

I licked water from my lip and made myself say the words. “Should we turn around?”

Eddie’s voice was hoarse. “No. We just need to get through this.”

So he felt something, too, then. Something very, very wrong. Suddenly, I agreed with him. We’d come to town on Atticus
Line—we’d leave the same way. If the road wanted to issue us a challenge, we were up for it. All we had to do was drive. What could a road do to us, after all?

I wiped rain from my cheek. And then I saw the light in the trees.

A dim glow, as if from a lantern. It grew stronger, then waned again.

“Did you see that?” I asked Eddie.

“We’re not turning around.”

“No,” I said. “We’re not.”

Lightning flashed overhead again, illuminating the rain-slicked road. This horrible, dead, empty road where no one ever drove. How many people had died here, trying to hitchhike in or out of Hunter Beach? Rhonda Jean, Katharine before her, more. The thought slid into my mind like a whisper:
Those are just the ones they found.

Were there bodies on this road still? There were no hikers here, no dog walkers or neighbors. How many hitchhikers had gone missing over the years, never to be seen again? How many of them were just past the weeds at the side of the road? They would be scattered bones by now, a jawbone, a scrap of jeans. Would anyone ever find them?

As if he was reading my thoughts, Eddie drove faster.

The hiss of the tires on the pavement was loud. I was starting to get chilled from the rain, goose bumps rising on the skin of my neck. I put my hand on my neck to warm it, and my hand was cold. But I didn’t roll the window up.

The wipers whirred loudly as they sloshed rain from the
windshield. Ahead rose a glowing light, white like the light in the trees. But this glow was much bigger.

“What the hell is that?” Eddie asked.

It wasn’t headlights; there were no beams. It was just a glow, the edges fading into the darkness. My skin got icy; there was nothing natural about that light. I put my hand over Eddie’s on the steering wheel. “Drive through it,” I told him. “Fast.”

He swore, and I saw his throat work as he swallowed. He didn’t take his foot off the gas, but he said, “April, what if it’s a person?”

“It isn’t,” I said.

“It could be. Last time, it was Rhonda Jean.”

“It isn’t Rhonda Jean. It isn’t anyone.
Keep going.
”

Eddie’s knuckles were white, the tendons in his arms tight as violin strings. I kept my hand over his, as if I could steer the car for him. If I could have pressed his foot harder, I would have.

Ahead, the glow got closer, brighter. It reminded me of
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
, a movie I had thought a little ridiculous when I saw it. If there were aliens, they wouldn’t bother sending signals to Richard Dreyfuss. They would annihilate us, and it would be over in a flash. Simple.

But this wasn’t an alien spaceship. This light was
cold
. It was a void in the darkness, even though it was technically light. Somehow, it wasn’t light at all.

Eddie didn’t brake, and the car flew into the cold light. We were blinded for a second, and all sound stopped except the rain pounding the roof. Then the glow was behind us, the darkness closing in again. Lightning streaked the sky, and in its flash we
saw a woman in the middle of the road ahead of us, her back to us as she ran down Atticus Line in the rain.

“Jesus!” Eddie swerved and braked to avoid hitting her. The car skidded on the wet road, the tires skating. Eddie spun the wheel, trying to right us. I was thrown against the passenger door, and I twisted to put my back to it, my hands reaching fruitlessly to grasp at nothing.

The Pontiac kept skidding over the road. Through the rain I could see the girl in the light from the headlights. She was soaked, her brown hair wet down her back. Her T-shirt stuck to her skin. She was barefoot below the frayed hem of her jeans, and her legs pumped as she ran down the middle of the road, right along the faded yellow line.

There was a screech of tires on gravel, and the car spun to a stop on the shoulder of the road. The rain pounded on the roof. Lightning flashed again, but we were out of sight of the running girl.

Eddie lifted his hands from the wheel and pressed them over his eyes. “My God,” he said softly, as if to himself. “What’s happening?”

I was leaning against the passenger door, where I’d landed when the car stopped. The motor was still running. My hand was gripping the edge of the open window so hard my nails were about to break. I took a breath and forced my hand to unclench.

Eddie still had his hands over his eyes. I’d seen him like this before, when he woke up from the worst nightmares in the middle of the night. I swallowed in my dry throat, unbuckled my seat belt, and sat up.

“Eddie,” I said. He didn’t answer.

I leaned over and unbuckled his seat belt, too. A gust of wind blew and rain washed into the window, waking me up, reminding me where I was. I was on a deserted road, I had just seen something that couldn’t be real, and I had to help my husband.

“Eddie,” I said again. I used the only tactic I knew, the one I used when he woke up from nightmares about whatever had happened in Iraq. I crawled across the console between us and wrapped my arms around him, curling against his body.

He wasn’t weeping. He wasn’t even shaking. He was just still, his hands over his eyes. As if he’d left his own body for a minute, made it shut down until he wasn’t dangerous anymore. I felt him take a shallow breath.

I ran a hand up the back of his neck, into his hair. “Eddie,” I said again, repeating his name, over and over. I touched him wherever I could, letting my chilled hands run over his forehead, his neck, his tense arms. I rubbed him gently, repeating his name, until he finally lowered his hands.

The words he said then broke my heart. “April. Did that really happen?”

“Yes,” I said, stroking my hand over his cheek. He was looking straight ahead; he hadn’t turned toward me yet. He couldn’t. I knew he needed me to say it. “That happened. There was a bright light, then a girl running down the middle of the road in the rain. I saw it. If you’re crazy, then I am, too.”

“It was her, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“What does she want, April?”

I let my palm run over the tight tendons of his neck. “I don’t know. Take a breath, honey.”

Eddie took a shaky breath deep into his lungs. Some of his muscles loosened a little. “April,” he said. “Do we—”

The Lost Girl came running toward us from the dark road, through the veil of rain. Her face was pale and terrifying in the headlights, her eyes black. Her mouth was open. She was screaming.

I could
hear
her. She was screaming.

She ran toward my side of the car, and—too late—I remembered that my window was open. I tried to grasp the roller, but it was slick with rain, and the Lost Girl was already there. Her long, white fingers grabbed my windowsill, and for an awful second I just stared at them in horror, so close to my face.

“Help me!”

Her voice was high and reedy, mixing with the rush of rain.
That wasn’t real. She isn’t real
, I told myself, and then she screamed again.

“Help me! Please!”

I raised my gaze from her hands—everything was too fast and too slow at once—and I saw the livid purple bruises on her pale neck, the thick trickle of blood from one ear. The blood was smeared in her hair and across her cheek, and it was still pulsing slowly out of her, dark and viscous. Then Eddie’s big, powerful hands gripped my shoulders and pulled me away from the window.

I fell back across the console, scrambling away from the window in fear as Eddie lunged across me for the window roller. He gripped it and cranked it around once, making the window squeal as it pushed against the Lost Girl’s hands.

“Please,” she begged. Her dark eyes were huge, her lips painfully cracked. “
Please.
”

Eddie cranked the window roller again. And the Lost Girl reached into the car, gripped his wrist, and pulled him toward her.

He gave a surprised grunt, and I felt his entire body slide partway out of the driver’s seat and across the console. I hadn’t known that anyone could be strong enough to drag Eddie. His foot left the brake, and the car lurched, trying to drift forward but held back by something. Was the Lost Girl doing this? Was she pulling my six-feet-four husband with one hand and holding back the car at the same time?

She pulled again, and Eddie’s grunt was more of a growl. He was trying to free himself from her grip. The car lurched again.

I scrambled over him, into the driver’s seat. It was messy, with his legs in my lap, but I slid beneath his weight and put my feet down. I felt the brake against my bare foot.

“Hold on,” I said, and stomped on the gas.

The car gave a deep, frustrated roar. The back end had gone into the weeds, and I felt the wheels skid. Pieces of gravel pinged against the car’s body. The rain pounded down, and another flash of lightning lit up the sky. I spun the wheel and stomped on the gas again.

This time, something gave. The back of the car fishtailed left, then right. I spun the wheel and gassed it again, and it gave more.

In the passenger seat, the Lost Girl still had a grip on Eddie’s arm. She was screaming again, begging us to help her, to get her out of there. Her hand was the white of death against Eddie’s tanned arm.

The car loosened from whatever had trapped it and lurched forward. I looked at Eddie, who was still struggling.