She got to the top of the hill, but even from there, the Chrysler wasn’t visible. Just the trees. In her running and crawling through the night woods, she’d made it farther than she’d thought. The smell of rain was heavy in the air. She could find no clear track to show her how to get back to where she’d started, and she decided that following the stream made as much sense as anything. She started along it, walking uphill, breathing hard and fighting for each step, thinking, Maybe when I got out, that evil kid got scared and ran, and Hank’s still back there, tied to the chair and hurt, maybe, but alive. Waiting for help. For me.
When she crested the next rise, struggling to keep her footing on the slick leaves, she finally saw her car.
It was punched into an oak’s trunk and wedged between pines, and she was bizarrely pleased by how far she’d made it into such dense trees before getting hung up. When she stepped closer, she could see the dangling airbag visible through the shattered glass. Everything about the car was as she remembered.
Then she saw Hank’s body in the passenger seat.
Abby froze, then took a wavering step forward, knees going weak, and cried, “Hank!” Her voice was broken and hoarse. “Hank!”
Hank Bauer wasn’t going to answer. His head lay unnaturally on his left shoulder, and the right side of his face was swollen and bruised, his eyes open but unseeing. Abby wrenched open the passenger door, and Hank’s head dropped bonelessly forward, chin down on his chest, eyes still open, his neck obviously broken.
Abby stepped back and sat down in the wet grass. She rubbed a filthy hand over her face. She breathed with her eyes closed, then opened them and looked at Hank once more.
“What happened?” she said aloud.
Hank offered no insight.
The way he sat there, slumped in the passenger seat with the wound on the right side of his head and the broken neck, made it look as if he’d been in the car when it hit the tree and died on impact, when in reality he’d been dead before he was brought here.
Or maybe not.
Maybe he’d been alive and trying to stay alive by obeying orders, the kid saying, Get in the car, holding a gun to his head. Abby could picture him climbing into the wrecked car, hoping for mercy, only to have his skull smacked off the windshield, his neck snapped.
Abby looked up the road then, searching for either help or threat, finding neither. It was peaceful and quiet and lonely. When the wind gusted, raindrops fell from the trees like a fresh shower. Hank’s house was the last one on the isolated camp road. Nobody would have heard the crash. The kid would have had time to go back and bring Hank down here and not be rushed, but still, it seemed a reckless choice because Abby had been out there in the darkness, free.
He knew you were going to be down for a while, though. He was sure of that. He wasn’t rushing because he knew he didn’t need to.
Thanks to whatever was in the whiskey, the kid knew he had time. Maybe he even thought Abby was dead. Plenty of time, then.
Why move Hank’s body, though? Why bring him down here and put him in the passenger seat? Even if he’d thought Abby was dead, that arrangement didn’t make any sense, because there was no driver.
Abby looked at the empty driver’s seat, and suddenly she understood.
I didn’t realize your academic record was as poor as your driving record, the kid had said.
It was Abby’s car, and Abby had wrecked it. The physical evidence would say that, because it was the truth.
Hank hadn’t been riding shotgun when the Chrysler went into the trees, and he hadn’t broken his neck in the crash, but if the police found this scene and then found Abby dead in the woods, uninjured but with drugs and alcohol in her bloodstream, what would they think?
The kid was panicked and tried to rig the scene. A bad plan, but he needed something.
Was it that bad, though? When Abby called this in, she was going to have to tell the police that she’d been poisoned and that while she was sleeping it off in the woods, a teenager with a gun had killed Hank Bauer and belted him into the passenger seat. That was the truth, but it was going to be an awfully strange story to tell and an awfully hard story for a detective to believe. And if the detectives who heard it happened to know that Abby had ended up back in Maine working for Hank Bauer because of another night that went a lot like this one...
Just call them. Let them figure it out.
The man had been murdered, and Abby knew who’d killed him. In that case, you called the police. Period.
When she stood up and reached for her phone, she realized it was gone, and only then did she remember the kid taking it and tossing it onto the kitchen counter after he’d looked at the photograph of Luke on the home screen.
He’d known Luke was dead. He’d known what had happened. So this scenario, this scene he’d built with Hank, was maybe a little bit better than Abby wanted to imagine.
I can tell the police the truth. They’ll need time to verify it, but they’ll believe it.
Hank’s dead eyes stared through the shattered windshield. California isn’t the only problem, those eyes seemed to say.
True. Police would learn quickly that Abby had also been arrested in Maine, and for stealing a car from Hank Bauer, no less. Never mind that Hank hadn’t pressed charges; whatever police records still existed from that, either on paper or in memory, would show yet another night very similar to this one — Hank Bauer had a fast car, Abby Kaplan had a thirst for speed, and it had ended badly.
It’s easier to believe than the truth, she realized. Either Abby Kaplan fucked up for the third time behind the wheel or a hit man disguised as a Boy Scout killed an insurance investigator in rural Maine. Which would you pick?
She needed evidence. At least one shot had connected with the car, and it went through the driver’s window. That would prove she wasn’t crazy, maybe even indicate the caliber of the bullet and the distance of the shot.
She walked around the front of the car, stepping over a torn tree with white-pulped flesh protruding from shredded bark like an open fracture.
The driver’s window was gone. Not just cracked with a clean hole through the center, but completely shattered. The sunroof was also demolished. So was the passenger window. Wherever the bullet might have left its mark, the kid had seen it and taken care of it.
That doesn’t matter. It’s a weak-ass attempt to cover things up, but it won’t stick, and the faster you get the police out here, the faster you’ll be done.
But she could imagine the cops’ faces as she told them about the kid with the gun and the bottle of Gentleman Jack. What would they look like when she got to the part about how she’d started the Chrysler with the remote and Hank had fallen on the gun, still tied to the chair, and from there it was all question marks and darkness...
That was the truth, yes. And the truth should always be enough, yes.
But she wasn’t so sure that it would be.
What does the house look like? she wondered. If it looks like the place I left, then my story is fine. If he took the time to clean it up, though...
She looked back at Hank. There was no need to rush for him. They didn’t use sirens and flashers when they were taking you to the morgue.
Abby closed the door on her friend’s corpse and walked up the road. She followed the rain-filled ruts left by her own tires until Hank’s house came into view, and then she stopped and stared.