Sleep No More (6 page)

"Liar."

The sip of coffee she'd just taken made a U-turn. After she dabbed her mouth with a napkin, trying to recover ladylike composure after nearly spewing coffee out of her nose, she turned to him with a raised brow. "I beg your pardon?"

His teasing hazel eyes held hers. "Liar." He said it slowly and distinctly.

"Well, I heard what you said. I was giving you a chance to save yourself."

"Am I on dangerous ground?"

"Let's just say that the last boy who called me a liar got a black eye, and I got a trip to the principal's office."

He pulled a frightened face and held up his palms. "Let me restate. Something's on your mind and it's not fried chicken."

"Ooooh,
Doctor
Coble, I didn't know you were psychic, too."

He laughed and shook his head. "Sorry. Didn't mean to pry. I guess it's a hazard of the profession." He paused and his gaze grew softer, concerned. "It's just that you looked so sad." His hand came close to her face, as if he was going to touch her cheek. He hesitated, then withdrew and wrapped his hand around his beer.

She sighed and buried the tingle of anticipation she'd felt when she thought he was going to touch her.

"It's been a long day is all."

"Yeah, it has." He sounded as tired as she felt. And she hated the fact that she'd dragged down both of their moods.

Jason paid his bill. Then he picked her jacket up off the back of her bar stool and held it for her. "I'll walk you to your car."

She almost told him there was no need, but she wasn't ready to part with his company just yet. So she slipped into her coat with a nod of thanks.

He held the door for her and they stepped out into the dim light of the parking area. The moon was overhead, its light muted in the gauze of breaking clouds.

She said, "Looks like the rain's finished with us tonight."

He looked up. "Looks like it. Which way is your car?"

"Over there." It was nearly blocked from sight on the far side of a large bush where the parking lot merged with the woods.

Jason took her elbow and started that way. "I want to thank you," he said as they walked.

"Thank me?"

"For staying to have dinner with me. Next time I'll buy more than just your beer."

"Next time?" She stopped, tilted her head, and looked at him.

"Yeah, I'd like there to be a next time."

"Me, too." They stood there like a couple of teenagers for a long moment.

A car horn honked, making them both jump. Someone was trying to back out of a space; Abby and Jason were in the way.

When Jason's gaze broke from hers, she was relieved from the unexpected, and unsettling, intensity of the moment.

With a hand raised in apology to the driver, Jason moved them along toward her van. It was getting darker with each step away from the building.

"Don't you know a lady shouldn't park in a dark and hidden spot like this? What if I wasn't here to walk you out?"

"I take care of my own self."

"Seems I heard Maggie say the same thing to her uncle today."

"Ah, but I can back it up--remember the kid with a black eye."

A hand went to his chest in feigned shock. "What kind of Southern belle are you?"

"The cast iron kind that's used to ringing solo."

His laugh echoed off the trees as he opened the door to her van. The sound crawled deep inside her and nested near her heart, humming inside all the way home. She felt its presence as she went through her nightly routine. And when she crawled into bed a short while later, she placed her hand on her chest and swore that residual laughter was radiating a heat of its own.

A
wareness crept close, wielding a club which it used to pound the inside of Abby's skull.

A frog croaked incessantly, its voice like sandpaper on her brain. And it was close. So close. Under her bed?

She shifted and heard gravel raining from her ceiling.

Then she realized she was sitting--and listing to the right. Her feet were wet.

She opened her eyes--or eye; the left one refused. Raising her left brow to elevate the upper lid, she managed a useless slit. Her right eye began to focus. There was a greenish glow in front of her. A dashboard.
Her
dashboard.

The white deflated balloon of the airbag hung from the steering wheel.

A cool, damp breeze moved past, sending a clammy shiver down the back of her neck.

She lifted her hand to her head. With her movement, gravel ticked as it hit the interior of the van. Not gravel, she realized. Broken glass.

The windshield was intact. Dead ahead, the illumination from one headlight, the right one, glowed just beneath the surface of the brown water. Tendrils of mist curled from the water's surface, twining through clumps of tall marsh grass. The world beyond was wrapped in impenetrable darkness.

The window in the driver's door was missing, which accounted for the glass bits.

Her head throbbed with each sluggish heartbeat.

She touched her temple, then held her fingers close to the meager light from the dash. They were dark. Blood.

That frog continued to croak, louder.

"Shut up!" She was rewarded with a slice of fresh pain in her head, much worse than what the frog had caused. Nevertheless, she felt better for having yelled at it.

The clock on the dash said three-fifteen. The last thing she could remember was Jason Coble walking her to the van in Jeter's parking lot. Hours ago.

She tried to lean forward but the seat belt held tight.

With trembling fingers, she fumbled to release the seat belt buckle. It came undone, but did not retract. She slid it off her left shoulder and the metal plate on the belt clanked against the door panel, startling the frog into temporary silence.

With effort, she pushed open the driver's door. It moved cumbrously, not because of the pressure of water on the outside--it wasn't deep--but because she was fighting gravity. The van's right side was at least two feet lower than the left.

For a moment, she sat there, putting off getting into the water. She hated swimming in anything where she couldn't see what was swimming with her. She never got more than ankle deep at the beach. The marsh looked like something from a horror film, dark, misty, and endless.

But it couldn't be endless. She'd driven her van into it. The road couldn't be very far.

She slid off the seat, her pencil skirt riding up her thighs. She eased lower, until her feet met with solid ground--solid being an overstatement. What was underfoot had the consistency of tapioca pudding. The cold water was deeper than she'd expected, up to her thighs.

Common sense said the road had to be on the left. Unless she'd been spun around. There were no visible lights in any direction.

She listened. Nothing but crickets and frogs. No traffic noise to orient herself.

The shock of the cold water began to clear her head. Her cell phone!

She turned around and boosted herself back into the tilted van by grabbing the door frame.

Her purse wasn't on the passenger seat. Reaching toward the passenger floorboard, she hit water almost immediately.

"Crap."

She started to shiver.

Groping blindly in the water, she located her purse.

Not much chance the cell would work. She dug through the soggy contents of her bag anyway and located the phone. She pressed several buttons before she gave up on there being a glimmer of life in it. She threw it back in her purse, opened the glove box, and retrieved a flashlight.

"Please let these batteries be good."

When her trembling fingers flipped the switch, the light came on. "Thank you, God."

With flashlight in hand and her purse on her shoulder, she once again lowered herself into the water. She swept the flashlight three hundred and sixty degrees. Nothing but tall grasses on the far side of the van. There was a fairly dense woods to the left, hulking trees draped with Spanish moss beneath which grew a tangle of undergrowth. That had to be the direction of the road.

Steadying herself with one hand on the open van door, she pulled her left foot out of the muck and her shoe was sucked off her foot.

Don't think of the snakes.

Slowly, she put her bare foot on the marsh bottom again.

She took another step that cost her right shoe. One more step and she wouldn't be able to steady herself with the van's door any longer.

No choice but to go forward.

Fighting the drag of the water and the pull of the mud, it was slow going. The more she tried to not think of all the things that lived in marshes and ponds, the more snakes and gators dominated her mind.

There! Did she hear something? She halted and held her breath.

Definitely. A rustling in the vegetation. The lap of a water ripple against something solid.

She held perfectly still until the chattering of her teeth told her she had to move--take her chances of attracting a gator or die of hypothermia.

There is no gator. Get moving.

Almost to the first scrubby tree. Just a few more steps--and she didn't hear a gator thrashing behind her.

Gators don't thrash until they have you--

Something bumped against her leg.

With a scream, she tried to run. The mud held onto her feet and she pitched headlong into the water, losing both the flashlight and her purse.

Her feet broke free and she flailed toward the trees, anticipating the painful chomp of a gator or the sharp sting of poisonous snake fangs.

Neither came.

She pulled herself out of the water and up a short slope by grasping handfuls of tall weeds and low branches.

Once at the grade of the narrow road, she took several loping steps, then collapsed onto the ground, gasping and spitting out brackish water.

After she caught her breath and was certain no gator was on her heels, she stood up and looked around.

Giant old-growth trees lined both sides of the road; ghosts of Spanish moss shifted in the breeze. Beneath the arching boughs, scrub and squat palmettos were so dense it was difficult to even see the water she'd just fled. Looking around, she couldn't believe she hadn't hit one of the thick trunks or gnarled low-reaching branches as she'd veered off the pavement.

Long fingers of fog rose from the marsh, reaching across the narrow road in several places. The road itself was unlined crumbling asphalt, barely wide enough for two small cars to pass one another. Definitely not the road between Jeter's and home, but it could be any one of a dozen roads in the general vicinity of Preston.

Had her van been in the marsh for hours and hours? It was impossible to see from the road; no one passing by would notice it without really looking for it.

Turning in a circle, she couldn't decide which way she should start walking.

Then, far down the road, she saw light. Headlights. The twin dots increased in size so quickly that she knew the vehicle was coming fast.

Help. Someone was here to help. It was a miracle out here at this hour on a weeknight.

Before the vehicle was close enough for its headlight beams to illuminate her, it stopped so suddenly she could hear the tires skid on the pavement.

"No!" She tried to trot that way, limping, waving her hands over her head. "Help!"

The headlights swung around in a reckless three-point turn.

Abby slowed, staring at red taillights that were receding as quickly as the headlights had been approaching.

"Come back... please..." She stood shivering in the center of the road; dizzy, barefooted, her wet blouse clinging to her.

Suddenly a strobe light reflected off the foliage around her. She spun around. An emergency vehicle, lights flashing but without a siren, was coming from the opposite direction.

"Thank God." She raised her hands and waved.

The police car stopped a few feet in front of her and its driver door opened.

Abby walked toward the officer who was no more than a silhouette against glaring lights.

"Miss?" he called. "Are you all right?"

"Pretty much," she said. "My van ran off the road."

"I'll radio for an ambulance."

"I'm really okay."

But her protest went unheard; he was already talking into the radio attached at his shoulder.

Then he said to her, "You can hang up now."

"What?"

"911 dispatch is still on the line with your cell. You can hang up; free up the line."

Obediently, Abby reached for the purse that wasn't on her shoulder. "It's in the water--dead."

His hand once again went to the microphone attached to his shoulder. "You sure that line is still open?"

Dispatch's crackling answer came over the radio. "Yes. I can still hear the frogs."