"Del?"
The girl sighed faintly. "Del is his older brother. You don't remember anything about that night in Phoenix, do you, when you and I first met? That was at Del's house."
Pat pulled his feet free from her near-caress and swung them to the floor, where he started fumbling them into his shoes.
Helen told him: "I wouldn't be a bit surprised if Ellison is making plans to get rid of you tonight. I don't know why else he would have let you sack out in his house like this. He doesn't like boys the way Del does sometimes. He just wanted to check with Del first, or with Gliddon, about what they want to do with you. Maybe they'll want to find out how much you know."
"Oh my God. I'm gonna split." Somehow Pat doubted that the girl was making any of this up, just for fun or just to get him out of the house. There was something about that huge old dude, her stepfather, that made Pat believe he could be capable of murder; Anyway, even if Helen was making it up, it wasn't a situation Pat wanted to prolong.
But even now he couldn't just leave without trying once more. "Helen? Tell me where Annie is. I know she's right around here somewhere."
Helen shook her head, and appeared to be annoyed. But then she reached over and with cool fingers touched Pat on the cheek. It was almost like the way that Annie had used to reach and touch him sometimes. "Pat, I know you liked her, and she liked you." Helen paused there, looking at him with strange eyes in the dusk. "She was there on that night in Phoenix, too. She met you the same time I did. A lot of things got started on that night."
"I don't really give a shit about that night in Phoenix any more." Pat was jerking on his shoelaces to get them tied. One lace broke, and he just let it go. He stood up. "Where is she now?"
"I was trying to tell you." Helen, sounding irritated, stood up too. Pat could see now that she was barefooted; still she stood a little taller than Annie. "The bad news about her. She was just a runaway from somewhere, and she didn't count for much. Anyway, you see there was another real bad night at the house in Phoenix, a few months after you were there. I mean the night when Del was supposedly kidnapped. Something went wrong with the scheme and Annie was killed. Almost everyone thought that I was the girl who died. Just as they thought that Del was dead—he wants everyone to think that, of course. But really he had another body ready, the body of a fat old man, that would look enough like Del after it had been blown up in the truck. And he even faked dental records and everything, just in case. You can do a lot, when you have as much money as Del has. And—"
"I don't wanna know about all that, I wasn't there. I'm gonna leave."
"Sure. You'd better get out of here now. But what are you going to do, just walk the roads? You'll be picked up, that way."
Something in the way she said it made it a special warning. "Picked up?"
"I don't mean just by the law. Look, Pat, I'll give you a ride somewhere, okay? I know Annie would want me to look out for you if I could. She thought you were something special, you know. She talked about you quite a lot."
"She did?"
Helen didn't answer, but moved away. His backpack dangling from one hand, Pat followed her on tiptoe through several darkening rooms. They came to a heavily grilled back door, where Helen bent to do something to the lock.
"Where are your folks now?" Pat whispered near her ear.
"Sometimes they don't seem much like my folks," she whispered back. "They're around. Be quiet. Here now, I've got to hold this—you go on out."
The door swung open to a small patio. Pat had been in mansions before, enough to know something about alarm systems. He went out quietly. Helen delayed behind him, doing something to a mechanism attached to the heavy door, then closing it carefully behind her when she was out too.
After that she led Pat along the side of the house, over a brick walk, to an outside entrance to the garage. Again there was a brief delay, while she used keys and stealth for a tricky opening. They were inside the garage then, where it was very dark. Helen led Pat past two cars to a third smaller one and unlocked the right door for him. When the dome light came on he could see he was getting into a Subaru, one of the small station wagon models that he thought usually came with four-wheel drive.
Helen walked around and got in on the driver's side. It was cold in the garage. The engine purred, headlights came on, a garage door rolled itself up ahead of them, and now somewhere an alarm bell was ringing stridently.
"Now they're going to wonder what's going on," Helen said, a certain satisfaction in her voice. The Subaru leaped into the night.
* * *
She drove Pat in a direction that must have taken them away from the center of town, for the roads remained up-and-down-hill gravel. You might have thought you were already way out in the remote countryside, except there were so many mailboxes along the road, and gravel driveways curving away from the road uphill and down. There must be a fair number of houses tucked just out of sight. In the dark it was hard to tell.
Gradually the driveways and mailboxes thinned out, then finally ceased to appear at all. They were really getting out into the boondocks now.
"Where we going?" Pat asked, beginning to get curious.
Helen didn't answer right away. "There's something I think I want to show you," she said at last.
A lot of road was going by in the lonely headlights. Traffic, that had never been heavy, had thinned out now to nothing. Pat wondered, and couldn't tell for sure, whether or not they might be driving in some great circle, and it was all a hoax, a joke on him.
"Sometimes," he said, to be making talk, "I feel like I been on the road a hundred years."
"Don't talk like that. I feel that way too much myself."
"You?" He sighed. "Actually you've just tried it once, right? With Annie to Chicago? And now you're home again."
Helen turned on the car radio. Rock music came in. But then almost at once the music began to fade, as if they were far and getting farther from the station. At last she said: "Yeah. Just that once."
"And that's where I met you. Right?"
"No." Now her voice was remote, and there was something in it that frightened Pat. "I told you where we met. It's no good just trying to forget what has happened, Pat. You can't change things that way. You met Annie and me both that first night in Phoenix. Uncle Del was giving a party—that's what he liked to call it, anyway. You were invited. I mean Gliddon brought you in, along with a few other road-kids that he collected somewhere. He's good at collecting. And he likes that kind of party too."
"Helen? Maybe you could just take me back somewhere near the center of town, and let me off. I'll do okay getting a ride from there."
"But you got stoned so early you probably really don't remember anything. Dear Uncle Del and his parties. And that one was especially bad because someone got killed. And did you know, we were all in a movie that night? You're such a movie freak, I bet you remember that much anyway if you tried hard."
Pat had an inward feeling, terrible and indescribable, that he got usually when a bout of mental illness was about to strike. But he knew what was going on. No way he was going to be lucky enough to get out of that.
"Or most of us were in a movie, anyway," Helen amended, turning off suddenly onto an almost invisible side road. "On some of us it wouldn't take," she added obscurely. The car jounced violently. The road, or track, was badly rutted here and obviously little used. A branch dragged across the windshield. Then the bottom of the car scraped hard on a rock or graveled hump projecting up between the ruts. Helen drove on as if she hadn't noticed the noise. Apparently no serious damage had been inflicted.
"Was Annie in the movie?"
Helen didn't answer.