Dark Lie (9781101607084) (5 page)

“God, why?” This time it was more of a complaint than a prayer. “Why do I keep getting this miserable, neurotic, paranoid feeling she's not happy with me?”

That was not a good way to end his consultation with his invisible passenger, but there was no more time. He turned the Silverado onto the street where he and Dorrie lived.

There. The house. Kind of rustic with a real fieldstone fireplace and chimney, big tulip poplar trees, five bedrooms, three baths, three-car garage. Real estate was the most secure investment, and anyway, Sam considered himself a family man. He'd planned on kids. Dorrie joked at him sometimes about the size of the place, said if he wouldn't get her a cleaning service, she'd pay for it herself by opening a bed-and-breakfast—

Sam stiffened and stared, his grip tightening on the steering wheel.

Dorrie couldn't have put the car in the garage. She always parked it outside, because she couldn't raise the garage door manually, not with her messed-up back. He kept meaning to fix the garage door opener, or get her a new one if he ever saw one on sale.

It was getting dark. Dorrie's car should have been in the driveway.

But it wasn't.

THREE

I
lunged into motion, reacting more than thinking: I grabbed my car's hood and tried to yank it off the roof and windshield.

Naturally, it refused to move. The metal was a bit stronger than I. It cut my hands.

A female voice called from behind me, “Are you all right?”

Automatically I yelled, “Yes, I'm
fine
,” the socially correct lie at such times, as I turned to see who it was: a weary-looking woman in an ancient Hyundai, with several kids piled into it, their round eyes staring over her sagging shoulders. People in stylish cars zoomed past without a glance, but this harried soul had pulled over on the median shoulder to check on me.

I hollered at her, “Call the police!” Too panicked and angry to be sensible, I neglected to tell her anything about being in pursuit of a predator who had abducted a teenage girl. Somehow this woman's motherly ESP was supposed to have picked up all she needed to know about Juliet and me.

She flapped a hand out her open window in reply. “And a tow truck,” she yelled. “Will do.” She pulled away.

What? She was thinking in terms of a disabled vehicle, nothing more? “Wait!” I screamed after her.

Too late. She was gone.

Irrationally my anger turned on her. Dim bulb, she could just go ahead and call her contemptible tow truck, but by the time it got here, I'd be
gone
. I marched to the Kia's trunk.

Struggling to exert leverage with various inscrutable tools, I gradually freed my car's passenger compartment of the rumpled hood's embrace. Some time later I managed to slam the hood down, but it no longer fit the car the way it was supposed to; it had turned inside out, with its edges up in the air. I whammed at them with a folding shovel from the trunk, waxing more furious and stubborn with each blow. If I'd been thinking, I would have abandoned the Kia, tried to flag down one of the vehicles whizzing by, and borrowed a cell phone or begged a ride. But I didn't. Juliet's abduction had solidified a kind of atavistic compulsion in me, more desperate than obstinate, that made me stand there hammering at my car's ruined hood. The despicable thing refused to lie flat. I wanted to tear it completely off the car and fling it aside, but my body, yowling with pain, gave me pause.

Okay, I needed a different approach. Tie the hood down with something.

Scowling, I peered into the back end of the car, looking for wire or whatever, suddenly aware that it was getting hard to see what was in there; day had turned to dusk. My God, how long had I been fooling around in the middle of this godforsaken highway? Sam was going to be worried about me—not that he didn't always worry anyway. It was funny sometimes to watch his worry at war with his stinginess. He'd equipped my car with a safety gadget, a combination flashlight/tire gauge/air pump I was supposed to plug into the cigarette lighter, but he'd found it at a yard sale, and the cord was too short to let the thing reach all the tires—

But that electric cord was plenty long enough to tie down the hood.

And strong.

I grabbed the ingenious device, then wasted more time trying to find something I could use to cut its cord off. Sam had given me one of those everything tools to keep in the glove box, but I'd lost it as quickly as possible because it had included a sharp knife. Knives, ick. I would tolerate spiders, admire snakes, pick stranded earthworms off the pavement after a rain, but knives made me profoundly uncomfortable, even afraid. I hid my very few kitchen knives deep in a drawer, and I used them as little as possible. I bought my veggies presliced and my stew meat pre-diced and anything else in a freezer bag. Trying to help me get over my childish phobia, Sam kept giving me cute little pocketknives, sometimes disguised as key chains, and I kept “accidentally” dropping them down storm drains.

Anyway, I carried nothing that resembled a knife in my car, and there I stood beside the darkening highway trying to yank the electric cord off the air pump with my bare hands. I never did get it off. Eventually I somehow managed to tie down my hood with the electric cord while the bulky gadget dangled between my front wheels.

At last, I thought, I could get going. I ran to the driver's seat, keys in hand, hurled myself behind the steering wheel—

And realized I could not possibly see the road through the crazed safety glass of the windshield.

Grabbing my purse, swinging it by the strap, I flailed at the shattered windshield. Glass lumps sprayed outward as I walloped a considerable hole to see through.

Finally.

I turned my key in the Kia's ignition just as headlights pulled in behind me.

Annoyingly strong halogen headlights high off the ground, glaring into my rear window. And overhead, an official-looking yellow light going flashy flishy flash.

“You need help, ma'am?” a male voice called from the near-darkness.

I wanted to smack him; I felt so furious that he had shown up now that I had done all the hard work. And he was just the tow truck operator. I needed a cop.

“May I use your cell phone?” I screamed back.

“No, ma'am, it's against company policy, but—”

“But nothing.” Retaining just enough sanity to turn on my headlights and my hazard flashers, I gunned my miserable car up the slope of the median and back onto the interstate.

* * *

Within moments I realized I was an idiot who should have asked the nice man in the tow truck for a ride to a police station. On my own, I was pathetic. With no functioning windshield, I had to mosey along at thirty-five miles an hour, and even at that poky speed the force of air in my face whipped tears from my eyes. I could barely see where I was going. Didn't notice I'd just passed an exit until some cowboy in a pickup truck merged in front of me. I'd missed my chance to find civilization, and maybe God knew how far it was to the next exit, but I sure didn't. I had no idea where I was.

By now it was dark. Traffic whizzed past me as indifferent as ever. Anybody could see I had my blinkers going, but nobody seemed to notice or care that I was driving with a rumpled hood, an air pump dragging between my front wheels, and no windshield. Nobody was likely to offer me help again.

I wanted to cry, and the stinging heat at the back of my eyes made me realize that there was something wrong. Physically, I mean. Or more so than usual. I felt weak. Light-headed.

Catching sight of a highway sign in my headlights, I slowed down and blinked my eyes clear in order to read it.

EXIT
, it said,
APPLETREE, 2 MILES
.

Appletree. My hometown.

I had never been back.

In that moment my emotions felt as wide open as my windshield, blown around like my hair. Just the sight of that town name,
APPLETREE
, spun me into a flash of memory as vivid as a fever dream:

* * *

Blake, my dark love angel Blake, and he has taken me a little further each time until here we are on a sofa in a back basement lounge of the Appletree Public Library. Somehow Blake knows the back stairwell that says
EMPLOYEES ONLY
. He has taken me down to a mostly underground room I have never seen, where muted light filters in from a single small window right up at the ceiling. This lounge, the place where the librarians go for lunch or on break time, is empty at this time of day, because school has just let out, kids need this, that, and the other for their homework, all the librarians are busy upstairs. As Blake positions me on the sofa, I look at that window and see people's feet go by on the parking lot, feet in sneakers, in Docksiders, in high heels. It would be funny if the sneakers were on a businessman, the Docksiders on a kid, the high heels on my mother. She would never wear fashionable shoes. She wears black stockings and black oxfords.

Lying on the sofa, I turn my face away from the window, averting my eyes from the light.

My mother would die on the spot if she saw me here.

I wonder whether Blake's mother wore high heels. When he had a mother. He has no parents anymore. When I asked him about grandparents, he said he had a grandfather, but then he laughed in a way that stopped my questions.

“Grandpa knows all about it,” he had said.

All about what? Us?

Like God, the white-bearded grandpa in the sky, watching?

Kneeling on the floor beside me, deftly Blake sets my nipples yearning with hands and mouth. When he does that, I forget all thoughts of Mother, others, the window, the light. I start to pant with desire; I cannot help it. He is touching my breasts, yet I feel that touch in the most private sanctuary of the temple that is my body, and he knows it. With one hand he reaches under my skirt.

“No,” I whisper, panting. “No. What if someone comes down here—”

“Even more exciting,” he murmurs.

“No, Blake—”

“You like it, Candy.” He slips his fingers under my panties. “Don't try to tell me you don't like it.”

Like it? I love it so much I can't stand it. I could weep with ecstasy.

But his touch goes away and he stands up, looming over me. “Unzip my pants.”

This has not happened before. I freeze, staring up at him, air cold on the wet bits of my naked chest.

“You have to do it, Candy,” Blake orders. “Unzip me. Take my pants down.”

“No, Blake. What if—”

“What if I kill myself?” He pulls something out of one pocket and flips it open. It is a jackknife. A big one. My gaze fixes on the blade, a thin grooved hungry metal animal with a stark spine. Blake is saying, “I have to have you, Candy. I'll kill myself if I can't have you.” He raises the knife. “If you love me, you'll do it, or I'll slit my wrists right here, right now. You must do it or it would be rape. Unzip me.”

His passion aggrandizes him, makes him seem like a hero in an old movie, the white-hat cowboy seizing the rich rancher's virginal daughter. The girl is supposed to be frightened; her fear heightens the drama of her surrender. Terrified and exalted, transported into a more vivid life where only he can take me, I do as Blake says. But I am not quite brave enough; I can't really look. As he lies on top of me, pushing my panties to one side, I close my eyes.

What he does with me hurts a little, but that's only because it is my first time, Blake tells me. Next time I'll adore it, I'll come to him with a spasm of rapture; he knows how to make me come that way. “Take your panties all the way off,” he murmurs to me, “and give them to me for a souvenir.”

I shake my head. My mother will want to know what happened to them; she inventories laundry items.

“But I need to have a souvenir, Candy!”

“Something nicer,” I whisper, slipping out from under him and sitting up, blinking, dizzy. “I'll think of something.” My heart pounds. The world looks strange, incomprehensible, the seemingly bodiless feet passing at the window strangest of all. My own hands look alien to me, disconnected, as I straighten my bra and smooth my dress.

When I get home late from school, my mother gives me the usual welcoming snack—today, warm molasses cookies—but also a hard look. “Candor, where have you been?”

“At the library,” I tell her. I know she would see it in my face if I lied, but I am safe, because I am telling her the truth.

The next day I try to play sick, but my mother will not allow me to stay home. At school I try to avoid Blake, but he hunts me down. He kisses me in the hallway, with other kids watching, in defiance of school rules. I know now that he carries defiance of school rules in his pocket. The knife. And I know how much defiance he hides in his black jeans. “Candy,” he murmurs, “my Candy, my love. Meet me after school. You know where.”

I am a coward. “No, Blake, I . . .”

He puts a finger to my lips. “There's even more we can do. I'll open you like a red rose. Be there.”

“But—”

“Be there, Candy, or that is the place where they will find my dead body, and I will write your name on the wall with my blood.”

* * *

Every day for the rest of that week and into the next, I remembered, I went with Blake to the library after school. But my habitual daydreams did not include every detail of those days. My memories of that time had been washed out by a kind of white light.

EXIT
, read the highway sign,
APPLETREE, 1 MILE
. I needed to get off at that exit, of course, and find a telephone, and my mother and father didn't have to know, but still, I felt my buttocks tighten, cringing. I'd been forbidden ever to enter that town again.

That was the way my parents had done things all my life. Sometimes they had let me get away with little things out of kindness, but when push came to shove, they had laid down the law. No explanations. No discussion.

The exodus from Appletree had been that way, a no-questions decision made by my parents, although even for them it had been quite abrupt. I had come home late one afternoon from school—well, from the library—and I'd found my mother and father in a fury of activity, piling boxes and suitcases into the old station wagon. My father should have been at work. My mother should have been in the kitchen giving me chocolate-chip cookies soft and warm from the oven as she started supper. Neither of them was acting normal, but neither of them offered any explanation or even so much as looked at me.

My mother ordered, “Get in.”

“What's going on?”

“Shut up.” My father had often spoken to me harshly, but never so vulgarly. “Get in the car.”

I needed to go to the bathroom, and I wanted to put down my schoolbooks, put on the sweatshirt and baggy slacks I was allowed to wear at home, and have my snack; why was I not to be allowed my usual snack? But I did not dare to talk back. I crawled into the backseat of the station wagon, and with a clash of metal my father banged a box of pots and pans onto the seat next to me. They grated like the sound track in a movie when the jail cell clashes shut. My father slammed the car door and barked at my mother, “Let's go.”