My Deja Vu Lover (39 page)

And kept right on waiting. No one expected me anywhere until morning. I made the right choice because next thing I knew, the car came purring down the alley, its headlights chasing the dark away from hidey corners.

He drove through twice, then stopped, got out, came through my back gate and circled the house, went up the back steps to the kitchen door, tried the knob. Knocked. Pounded.

Keep it up, Billy Goat Gruff, I thought. Wake up the troll under the bridge.

A really big weird dude rented the basement apartment in my house and he worked nights, so maybe he wasn't home. I hoped he was and hoped Darryl woke him up in a bad mood. Far as I knew, the troll was non-violent, but he did not look non-violent.

Darryl pulled out his cell phone, punched in a number and said, “Not here. Yes, probably. Light's on so she must be coming back. I'll swing by first thing in the morning.”

I spent another hour feeling the damp spread across my ass and soak its way up through my jeans, with the only distraction the burning in my knee. By the time I decided to move, I was almost too stiff to unfold. Then, very quietly, cautiously, I slipped back to the alley, stayed in the shadows, made my way to the street and headed out on a five mile hike to Roman's house.

Buses don't run in Mudflat after evening commute.

Okay, I made it before sunrise, much to everyone's amazement, got stuck in the middle of the backseat of Roman's old car between a couple who were mad at each other, and curled my damp self around my damp backpack and went to sleep.

I wish I could sing the joys of camping but it was far worse than I had imagined. It took us about four hours, what with a ferry ride and two bridges, to reach the Olympic Mountains, which are centered on a peninsula and surrounded by a narrow band of flat land and beaches and saltwater and the whole thing stretches west to the Pacific Ocean where there's a line of windswept beaches and a rain forest, and some people actually think of it as vacationland. Tourists love misery.

We didn't go that far. Quick geography lesson here: the Olympic Mountains are a fairly spectacular cluster, high and pointy and snow-topped most of the year. A few roads go up the edges to lookout areas. The best known is Hurricane Ridge.

The roads do not cut through the range because it isn't as though anyone needs to shortcut across a peninsula at the end of the world. So the center is kept wild, though I guess naturalists prefer words like pristine, which means no paving. Nothing that goes putt-putt or vroom-vroom is allowed to enter. It is open past the road's end and the ranger stations on a permission basis to the sort of folks who hike where there is no trail. The permission thing is required because I guess the park service gets really tired of searching for lost hikers.

Around the outer edges, on the lower slopes, there are picnic areas and camp grounds and that's where we ended up, sleeping in stupid canvas bags on bare dirt while the rain dripped slowly on our soggy cocoons.

The others warmed themselves with some slightly illegal and, some highly illegal, substances, the food supply ran out and the liquor was nonstop.

Sick of the lot of them, I took advantage of the first sunny day. I peeled out of my wet jeans and sweat shirt and switched into tee shirt, shorts, sandals, tucked my pony tail through the back strap of my baseball cap, and shouldered my pack, which contained very little but I didn't trust any of them to stay out of it if I left it. I was down to my last clean tee shirt.

While Roman and the others stretched out on the ground and on the picnic table, snoring themselves into oblivion and sunburns, I decided to find the road and see if I could possibly hitch a ride to somewhere, anywhere. My credit card was good for a motel room, a hot shower and food, oh yes, please, black coffee before I died from caffeine withdrawal.

The one small flaw in my plan was my lack of any sort of sense of direction. I was absolutely sure that if I took a shortcut it would get me to the road in twenty minutes, forty tops.

After three hours of pushing my way through thickening undergrowth, all I'd found were a few prickly berry bushes. I dug out my Swiss army knife, one of those great red things that someone once gave me and I never expected to use, and managed to cut off a small spray. The berries looked ripe but were hard and sour. My arms and legs were crisscrossed with scratches. I tucked the knife through the belt on my shorts and then stumbled into a shallow stream to cool my burning feet.

A stream had to go somewhere, right, and I was beginning to suspect I'd been walking in circles. So I stayed in the stream and waded through the knee-deep cool water until weariness slowed my pace to a full stop.

Every inch of me, from my knees up, itched with sweat. I took off my hat, stuffed it into my pack, and ducked down into the stream until its coolness soaked through my clothes to my skin, then stood and bent over and managed to get my long hair and sticky scalp thoroughly wet.

Let me say here than I don't know which of us was most surprised.

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