If I’d died out there, it might have taken weeks for anyone to find my corpse. It made me wonder how many other sets of bones might be spread out in those gloomy trees, never to be found again.
“Hey man?” Spud broke the silence. “You see something up there?”
I sat up straight. Spud’s headlights were weak and their flashlight-level radiance hardly penetrated much of what was in front of us. But far in the distance, around the bend we were taking, I could see a gravelly spot on the side of the road. And parked there, like a lonely hitchhiker resting for the night, was a silver Maserati.
“Holy…” I couldn’t finish. The closer we got, the more the lights shone on the car’s gleaming sides. When Spud’s headlights brushed with those of the car, the bulbs reflected like giant eyes, and all at once my fears were confirmed.
Like the flipping of a switch, I immediately returned to all of my original beliefs that the officers and my mom had done a good job of burying. Spud, so much in shock that his face had gone paler, pulled his truck onto the side of the road and faced the car, wrestling the stick shift into park.
Both of us sat wordlessly, the truck’s engine buzzing against our pounding heartbeats.
“Is that it?” Spud said. I nodded.
“I think so.” Part of me still didn’t want to believe it.
“So what’s that mean?” he said. “The whole murder thing? You didn’t hallucinate all that up after all?”
“I… I’m not sure,” I said. All along, I hadn’t expected to see the car there. But now that it was sitting in front of me—a real, three-dimensional proof of the things that’d happened…
I jolted out of my thoughts and pushed the door open, the sound of my footsteps against the rocky ground bringing back memories of twenty-four hours earlier. I hurried to the car, walking around the side as my reflection appeared in its tinted windows. It was the same car, no mistake. No one would have left something this expensive sitting this far in the middle of nowhere, not if they didn’t want it stolen. Not if they were still alive.
Spud appeared beside me, cupping his hands around his eyes so that he could see through the glass. I did the same. It was hard to see much. The seats inside were leather and the beige material had tightened back into shape long ago, since its driver had never returned. There was a briefcase in the passenger seat and a half-full bottle of water in the cup holder. I slid to the back window but the other seats were empty.
“Your clients are filthy rich,” Spud exclaimed.
“That reminds me,” I said. “He never paid before he tried to kill me.”
“Priorities, Scrooge,” Spud reminded me. He circled around the back of the car and to the other side, trying all the doors with his hands wrapped in the edge of his shirt. The doors were locked though. Adrenaline pumped through me so strongly that I didn’t care about making a proper entry. So I walked back to Spud’s truck, picked a long baseball bat from the assorted junk in the bed, and returned.
“Wait, what are you—!” Spud started to protest, but I swung the bat without letting him finish. Its heavy end cracked hard against the window glass but didn’t break through. Spud dashed to stop me but I slammed it again, and this time it worked, the entire panel crumbling like an eggshell.
“Are you insane?!” Spud shouted. It looked like he was about to pass out. “People can hear that!”
“No they can’t,” I told him, passing the bat into his hands.
“You’re lucky the alarm isn’t armed,” Spud hissed. “That’s all we need. W-what are you doing now?”
I’d gone back to Spud’s truck and retrieved a pair of work gloves from the tool compartment, which I slipped on. Careful to leave no fingerprints, I held my arm steady through the glass of the car window. My fingers found the lock and I pulled the door open, while Spud watched with a dumbfounded face.
Even the inside of the car smelled new, the scent of the leather having overtaken the enclosed space under the beating sun all day. I couldn’t slide to sit into the seat though, because now it was covered in glass. So I leaned my arm against the headrest, managing to snatch up the briefcase.
“I knew I was right,” I insisted, a thrill driving me as I dug through the glove compartment, finding nothing but a flashlight and the car’s owner manual. I lifted myself out and dropped the briefcase hard onto the car’s hood.
“Do you take diabolical joy in ruining precious cars?” Spud said, waving his hands. I didn’t reply, snapping both of the already-set combination locks. I clicked on the flashlight I’d taken and shone its beam down as I lifted the lid.
The briefcase’s meager contents were painstakingly organized: two pens hooked on a leather pocket and a single file folder encompassing crumpled papers. I accidentally picked the folder up by the wrong edge and a mishmash of printouts and photographs fell out.
Something immediately caught my attention. I passed the light to Spud.
“That’s you,” he said, aghast. On the top of the pile had fallen a sharp color photograph of me, in the motion of getting into my former car. It was bright daylight outside and I was in front of my house, the photo taken from far down my street.
“It sure is…” I confirmed sourly. I lifted the photo only to find another like it below, this one of me walking from the parking lot to school, and then another beneath that of me at the Santa Monica Pier, camera in hand. There was an entire album of photos of me, all from the past two days. Mr. Sharpe hadn’t simply been a deranged lunatic: he’d been stalking me.
Under normal circumstances, I should have felt violated. But I was far past feeling like someone had invaded my personal life. Too many other disturbing things surrounded this man, so that I only slid the photos aside and started to brush through the other papers.
I found a map of the Valley, showing a path in red marker that I suspected to be the drive I’d taken from home to school, then another tracing a path to the lot on which I stood. I found another scrap beneath that, the scrawled notes illegible to me. Then finally, a large strip of paper.
It didn’t belong with the others, a clipping from a San Francisco newspaper not sturdy enough to stand straight without me holding it at both ends. The page had been cut to show part of a single headline, ink faded and smudged at the ends. There was a row of four photographs in the middle, showing a middle-aged man and a woman, and beside them two nearly-identical boys with matching hair and gray eyes, much younger than my sister. They were obviously a family, all blonde except the father, who had black hair and a thin, graying beard.
But above the four, there was a distracting picture that almost leapt out at me the moment my eyes met the page. The face of a girl. She was about my age, with dark chocolate-colored hair that hung over her forehead, the rest pulled back behind her ears, skin lightly browned like most of the people at school who lived close to the Pacific coast. Her eyes were a shining blue, saturated like a photo editor had enhanced them unrealistically, a center of flaring gray that raced out in a bursting star. They should have been nearly indiscernible in the cheap newspaper ink, but they flashed with an almost unearthly vibrancy. She stared into my soul from the paper, through the camera lens… the Glimpse.
Ten thousand thoughts lay behind her eyes, but no words could describe them. It threw me off. With that much clarity, I should have been able to read her emotions precisely, but somehow I’d become too boggled to do it. I managed to pick out a few: amusement and happiness and joy. But there were thousands more hidden inside her. I could have studied them for hours.