She’d never gotten over that need to call him when a storm came up. Make sure he was all right. Just as she had when she was raising him her last two years of high school.
Sometimes, Richie resented this kind of oversight. Other times, he seemed amused by it in a sentimental way. You never could tell how Richie was going to react to things. A lot of it depended on if he’d been drinking.
She decided against calling him.
He was a big boy now. Too big, in some ways, she thought, recalling this afternoon and seeing fifteen-year-old Darcy in his arms.
Richie still held the belief that he was invincible. Oh, he might take a few knocks, but nothing could really hurt him. Which wasn’t true, of course. The world was a perilous place for even the toughest of people. And given Richie’s fondness for the bottle, he was anything but tough.
After a bathroom run, Amy came back to the living room and sat on the couch again.
And picked up the phone.
She just had this feeling was all.
She dialed his number.
She was being foolish.
No, she wasn’t. She was just being cautious, and there was nothing wrong with being cautious.
Her self-debate proved pointless.
Richie didn’t answer his phone anyway. He was one of those people who hated answering machines.
Leno’s second guest was Steve Martin. She’d always liked Martin. He was one of the few handsome actors perfectly willing to make an utter ass out of himself.
After Martin came a country singer she’d never heard of.
She used the song time to try Richie again.
She punched mute as she dialed.
Rain lashed the roof, howled in the eaves.
There was still no answer.
She wondered where he was, whom he was with, what he was doing.
She loved him so much.
Conan O’Brien came on next. She always liked the first of the show, when it was just Conan and his sidekick, Andy, better than the guests.
She watched the opening segment and then tried Richie’s number again.
No answer.
What was she so nervous about?
Richie was probably dazzling some sweet — but legal — young thing he’d met in a bar somewhere. He was still numero uno with the ladies of this town.
And wouldn’t he be embarrassed when he got inside his cottage door, his lady all primed for a night of amore, and here his sister was calling him up and checking on him like he was a little kid or something?
She sighed, put the receiver down.
Richie was fine.
She just had these terrible feelings sometimes.
Sort of like... premonitions, she supposed.
But she was being crazy.
Richie was putting the moves on some lady right now. And he was probably drinking, too. But at least he was all right. That, she was sure of.
Wasn’t she?
A few minutes later, she picked up her new Patricia Cornwell novel and went to bed.
She hoped she had a romantic dream about Sam tonight. Those were her favorite dreams of all.
3
“I can’t see.”
“Turn on the defroster.”
“It’s goddamned seventy degrees out and I should turn on the defroster?”
“It may be goddamned seventy degrees out, David, but there’s steam all over the window.”
“It’s not steam.”
“Well,” Helen said, “whatever the hell it is.”
“You never were worth a shit at science.”
“Well, you were never worth a shit at staying out of trouble, so I guess we’re even.”
“I think I can smell her.”
“Oh, God, now who’s the one who doesn’t know anything about science.”
“I just said—”
“I know what you just said. A, she hasn’t been dead for even an hour yet, and B, she’s in the trunk. So you couldn’t smell her even if you wanted to.”
“Yeah, that’s what I want to do, Helen. I want to smell her.”
Helen reached up and smeared her hand across the window, cutting a swatch of clear glass on the windshield.
“A fifty-thousand-dollar car and you can’t see out of the window.”
“It was forty-five thousand.”
“If I were you, David, I’d just keep my mouth shut.”
“I just thought—”
“Did you hear me? About keeping your mouth shut?”
They drove.
They were going up a very steep hill. The thing was, after getting rained out at Hartson Bridge, she replanned their whole trip. They swung west. This way, they’d come in from the east. It meant extra miles. But what choice did they have?
What she didn’t plan on was the condition of the county roads. By now, so soaked, so sodden, they were little better than mud puddles.
Even a big-ass car like this one was sluicing through the mud and fishtailing all over the place.
A couple of times, he’d almost gotten them stuck.
She supposed she should have driven, but she wasn’t up for taking on his ego any more than she had to.
He would take very personally her suggestion that maybe, just maybe, he was a shitty driver.
They drove.
“You can’t possibly see through all that steam on the window.”
“I told you,” he said, “it isn’t steam.”
“You’re going to get us stuck.”
“Not if you shut up.”
“Oh, yeah, like I’m going to talk us into going into the ditch.”
They drove.
He couldn’t see shit.
A couple of times, the big Lincoln slid over to the side of the road and its rear tires sank into the mud.
He gave it a lot of gas fast and that seemed to do the trick.
He didn’t get stuck.
He said, “I’m going to turn on the defroster.”
“Finally.”
“Now you can relax.”
“Right, we’re riding around with a dead girl in the trunk and I can relax.”
After a while, he said, “There’s Carlyle Woods.”
“Thanks for pointing that out.”
“I’m going to feel better when we get rid of her,” he said. Then, “That sounds pretty cold-blooded, doesn’t it?”
And that’s when it happened.
When he was telling her about how cold-blooded he felt.
The rear right wheel reached a large pothole and sank half a foot into deep mud.
One moment he was driving along, and then he wasn’t driving at all.
He was trying to fight his way out of the hole.
The middle of nowhere. Late at night. The rain slicing down in silver sheets. The windshield fogged over even with the defroster working. A dead girl in the trunk.
My God.
“Shit,” he said.
“Shit is right.”
“We just have to stay calm.”
“Go forward a little bit.”
“What the hell you think I’m trying to do?”
“Try it again, then.”
He tried it again, the big engine throbbing, pushing, but the right rear wheel sunk deep in the muddy hole.
“Shit,” he said again.
“Try reverse.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Try reverse.”
“That won’t do any good.”
“Try it,” she said.
He put his hand on the gearshift and brought it down to R.
The gear whined a little. The car moved scarcely at all. He got even less traction in R than he’d gotten in D.
“Not that way,” she said.
“Not that way what?”
“You’re doing it like an old lady.”
“What’re you?” he said. “An Indy 500 driver?”