At the time, she'd thought it was an odd question. How could she have been lost? She was standing right there. Even then, in a city with no name and an alley with no hope, Grace hadn't felt an inkling of that impending panic others felt in unfamiliar surroundings, or when they didn't know precisely where they were. You were alwayssomewhere, right?
So she didn't understand the apprehension that had crept into Annie's voice as they drove deeper into a maze of twisting, empty country roads that coiled through the northern Wisconsin wilderness. "We're not lost, Annie, it's just a detour."
"So said Hansel to Gretel," Annie grumped. "And we turned off the detour an hour ago to go see that silly ol' barn, which, incidentally, was almost the very last sign of human habitation I've seen. Lord knows where we are now."
"My fault." Sharon gave her a sheepish shrug. "Mea culpa."
"Oh, honey, don't apologize. That barn was the most amazing thing I've seen since the day Roadrunner took his shirt off. I just didn't realize it was the gateway to hell."
Annie looked out at the tunnel of towering white pines that crowded the strip of tar like silent spectators at a parade. The thick trunks seemed to swallow the light, offering occasional strobe-light glimpses of what lay within. She had no idea what might be lurking out there in the shifting shadows, but she was quite certain it was unpleasant. "This is absolutely the spookiest place I have ever been in my life. I never heard of anyone famous from Wisconsin, and now I know why. Nobody lives here."
Sharon turned around in the front passenger seat and lowered her sunglasses so Annie didn't look orange. "Ed Gein was famous. He lived here."
"Never heard of him."
"He used to kill people, grind them up, and eat them."
"Hmph. Well, apparently he ate them all."
Sharon smiled at her, and the pull of muscles puckered the small, circular scar on her neck. Every time Annie noticed it, she remembered a pool of blood on the floor of the Monkeewrench warehouse, a smeared trail leading away where Sharon had crawled on her belly to get upstairs and save Grace.
"There aren't many people up here," Sharon said. "Mostly state forests. This far north, they just seem to go on forever."
"Speaking of which, I've been keeping an eye on that little ol' compass up there on the dashboard. It's been pointing north an awful long time, and I just don't think Wisconsin is all that tall. Maybe we should see if we can't find a right turn before we hit the North Pole."
"Looks like we're about to get a chance to do just that," Grace said, tipping her head toward a small sign coming up on the right that read, "Four Corners ->2 mi."
"Praise Jesus." Annie sighed. "Civilization." She patted the dark bob that had become her signature hairstyle over the past year, then fished a compact and a tube of lip gloss from her purse. From what she'd seen at the Holy Cow Diner, more than a few of the Wisconsin country women rivaled her in girth, but they didn't know beans about presentation. It was Annie's job as a fashion missionary to show them the way.
She had the lip gloss at a critical point in the application when the Range Rover suddenly backfired, then lurched, sending a streak of magenta across her upper lip. "Damnit, Grace. What'd you do? Run over a reindeer?"
But Grace didn't answer her. Sharon was looking curiously at the gauges on the dash, and Annie suddenly noticed the kind of silence that didn't belong in a moving car. She looked out at the trees passing ever more slowly. "Oh, for God's sake. Did this thing just up and quit?" This was flabbergasting. Grace's car would never break down. It wouldn't dare.
"Looks that way," Grace said calmly, adjusting her left hand on the wheel to compensate for the sudden loss of power steering, trying to restart the car with her right. There was no response when she turned the key, and the only sound in the car was the muted hiss of the tires on the road.
Grace never actually frowned, at least not like other people. But something showed in her eyes, even as her face remained expressionless, almost as if they were turning inward to examine the emotions that others rarely saw. It wasn't a conscious thing-just a lesson learned long, long ago, that if you kept your feelings to yourself, people couldn't use them against you. At the moment, her dominant feeling was rage, directed toward her mechanic in particular and internal combustion engines in general.
You can't control everything.A smug, condescending psychiatrist had said that to her ten years ago, demonstrating his mastery of stating the obvious. Of course you couldn't control everything. Grace had learned that when she was five. But you could anticipate and prepare for any eventuality your imagination could come up with, and she was very good at that. The worst-case scenario was her specialty.
Not once did she consider that the Range Rover would start again, or that some Good Samaritan would come along to lend a hand and give them a ride. These were things that happened in some perfect, predictable world, but Grace had never been there. In her world, they were going to end up walking, and that's what she prepared for.
Her eyes scanned the side of the road for anything resembling a turnoff as the Range Rover slowed. They'd almost exhausted the last of their momentum when she spotted a dirt track making a doorway into the woods on the right. "Is that a driveway?"
"Maybe . . ." was all Sharon had time to say before Grace turned the wheel and the Range Rover shot forward on the track's initial downward slope. Pine boughs slapped against the windows as the car lumbered around one sharp turn, then another. They were well into the woods by the time the car coasted to a stop. The shiny Range Rover sat in the middle of the shaded greenery like a black mistake, and for a moment, the only sound was the engine ticking as it cooled.
"That was exciting," Sharon finally said. "I liked the part where we zoomed down that little hill and almost ran into that tree. You know, I'm not sure how it works in the city, but over here if you're having car trouble, you just pull onto the shoulder."
Grace unbuckled her seat belt and popped the hood. "If we have to leave the car, I want it out of sight. We've got a fortune in hardware back there, most of it one of a kind."
Annie was peering out her window, her breath fogging the glass. "This is not a driveway."
"It could be an old logging road," Sharon suggested. "And it looks like it might cut through the woods over to Four Corners. I bet we could walk it easy."
Annie was horrified. "You meanoutside? It's a million degrees out there, and you want me to go hiking through the woods? Have you seen my shoes?"
But by then Grace and Sharon had both opened their doors, and a wave of heat had rolled into the car, obliterating what was left of the air-conditioning. "Oh, for God's sake," Annie grumbled, following them out, catching her breath when the full force of the afternoon heat hit her. She fluffed out her dress and minced her way to the front of the Rover, careful not to let the spiky heels of her pumps touch the forest floor. "Well, open this thing's mouth so we can fix it and get out of here."
"Annie, you don't know a thing about cars," Grace reminded her. "I know you look under the hood when they break. Besides, I'm an intelligent woman, and it's just an engine-how hard could it be to figure out? Maybe one of the gerbils died."
Grace raised the hood and stood back a little, amused by Annie's look of concentration as she peered inside.
"This is so disorganized. Is it supposed to look like this?" "Sort of." Sharon leaned forward, then tipped her head to look at Grace. "What are you thinking?" "That we need a tow truck."