Annie looked at the obviously useless engine as if it were a puppy that had just wet on the rug, then flounced back to the car and snatched her cell phone from the backseat.
"Not a lot of towers around here," Sharon said, but that didn't stop Annie from waving the phone around like a magic wand as she spun in a slow circle, trying to snatch a signal out of the hot, heavy air. She tried Grace's phone, too, just in case hers was in some way inferior, then let her hands drop to her sides, thoroughly indignant. "This is outrageous. It's the twenty-first century, we're in the most technologically advanced country in the world, and I cannot make a phone call. How do people live like this?"
For a moment, the three of them stood quietly, looking around. There was a deep, unnatural silence to the shadowy forest, as if it weren't a real forest at all, just a movie set. It was Grace who finally uttered the words Annie dreaded most.
"I guess we walk."
Annie looked down helplessly at her beautiful, fluttery silk dress and her beautiful four-inch heels.
"I've got some extra tennies in my bag," Sharon offered.
"Thank you," Annie said, then thought about it for a minute, considering what was really important. "What color are they?"
As it turned out, they were lavender high-tops, and as Annie looked down at the rounded toes, damned if she didn't like what she saw.
"You look ridiculous," Grace said.
"I refuse to entertain fashion criticism from a woman with a hundred black T-shirts. Besides, you put some heels on these things and they just might work."
The logging road, if that's what it was, quickly deteriorated to a narrow dirt path pocked with the sliced prints of deer. Eventually, even the tracks of animals disappeared under a thick carpet of crackling, rust-colored needles. On either side, the forest thickened and darkened, with the lacy fronds of giant ferns quivering at their passage.
Annie eyed the foliage suspiciously, thinking it looked entirely too prehistoric for her taste. And it wasn't just the tropical heat or the mutant ferns that reminded her ofLand of the host-everything about this little excursion had set them back ten thousand years. "This is absurd," she mumbled, shifting the strap of her voluminous shoulder bag. Grace had tried to talk her out of taking it, but the day Annie went anywhere without her makeup would be the day they put her in the ground. "An hour ago, we were three intelligent, successful women in a seventy-thousand-dollar car with cell phones and some of the most advanced computer equipment on the face of the earth, and now we're slogging through a primordial forest like the Barbarella triplets."
Sharon laughed. "Nature's the great equalizer."
"Nature sucks. It's hot and sticky, and it smells like dirt out here. And by the way, would you two waifs slow down? You're with a size-large woman who's wearing flat shoes for the first time in her life, and this path is a death trap. There are tree roots poking out everywhere. Somebody should pave this thing."
The ninety-degree heat made short work of Annie's laundry list of grievances about the great outdoors, and silence closed around their little parade. The farther into the woods they went, the more the forest seemed to press down on them as giant pines linked boughs overhead, creating a dark, aromatic canopy. The silence was as dense as the tightly packed carpet of dried needles underfoot, and as oppressive as the weight of air so still it almost seemed to have substance.
Eventually, the trees seemed to thin a bit, and then abruptly, the woods opened before them, like a door onto a lighted room. They took a step out of the trees onto a circle of old, broken asphalt that formed a crude cul-de-sac. It narrowed into a strip of potholcd tar that intersected a road a hundred feet ahead.
"Thank God," Annie muttered, fanning her perspiring face with a plump hand. "Damn woods is like a sauna." Then she raised her hand to shield her eyes from the bright afternoon sun and looked around. "Good heavens. Is this supposed to be a town?"
There was an old frame house nearly backed into the woods on their right, a pair of concrete-block buildings up on each corner, and not much else.
"At least there's a gas station," Sharon said, nodding at the rusting hulks of old cars jammed together behind the building on the left.
"Well," Annie said, plucking at her bodice. "Good luck to us all if that's the Range Rover service center."
Sharon smiled. "You might be surprised. Some of these smalltown mechanics can fix just about anything."
Grace stood very still for a moment, watching, listening, trying to shake the feeling that she'd just crept uninvited through someone's back door. "All we need is a phone," she finally said, and started toward the gas station.
Up at the intersection, they all hesitated and squinted up and down the empty two-lane road. The woods on the other side looked almost solid, like a living green glacier moving inexorably to swallow whatever puny structures man had erected here. To the left, just past the gas station, the road curved quickly out of sight into the thick woods. It disappeared just as quickly to the right over the crest of a small hill. There was no movement and no sound. Grace could almost hear herself breathe.
Annie looked around, irritated. "Four Corners my foot. There are only two corners in this town. Talk about delusions of grandeur." The silence seemed to swallow the echo of her voice, and she frowned abruptly. "Damn, it's quiet here."
Sharon chuckled. "You've never spent much time in the country, have you?"
Annie snorted. "Of course I have. The country's what you drive through on the way from city to city."
"Well, this is what it's like when you get out of the car. It's a hot, lazy, summer Saturday in a little nowhere burg, and quiet is one thing you get in abundance in a place like this."
Grace thought about that. Sharon was the native, the country deputy from Wisconsin, and as alien as this kind of quiet was to Annie and Grace, Sharon accepted it as perfectly normal, and Sharon would know. Still, she felt uneasy.
It wasn't just that there were no people in sight-that wouldn't have been so odd in a little town where the census takers probably counted on their fingers-but there was no evidence that there were people anywhere. No radios, no dogs barking, no muted laughter of children in the distance-no sound at all.
She looked at the building to their right, at the sign hanging from a wrought-iron bracket with letters spelling out "Hazel's Cafe." To the left was the gas station, obviously showing its best side to the highway. The two old-fashioned pumps squatted on a concrete island between the building and the road, their metal cases polished and oddly clean. A faded blue sign hung on a tall metal post, advertising "Dale's Gas" in white block letters. At least the door was wide open, suggesting that someone might be inside, out of the heat.
Her boots clicked on the concrete as she crossed the apron toward the door. It seemed strange not to hear the syncopated accompaniment of Annie's omnipresent high heels next to her, just the soft slap of the borrowed high-tops and the leather squeak of Sharon's laceups. It bothered her that she could hear these sounds so clearly.
The gas station was as empty and still as the town itself. Grace stepped inside, listened for a moment, then moved toward an interior doorway that opened onto a darkened, deserted garage. Her nose wrinkled at the ripe smells of old oil, gasoline, and solvents, advertising that this was a working garage, even though the picture didn't match the smells. From what she could see in the shadowy garage, the entire place was coated with layers of grime that could probably count the years like rings on a tree. But the inside of the station proper seemed almost spit-shined. Hands that touched an oil can apparently never made it to the register. There wasn't a single greasy fingerprint smeared across its keys or the white Formica countertop it sat on. Even the inside of the window bore the streaked circles of a recent washing, which seemed strange since the outside of the glass was still spotted from the last rain.