Don't Look Behind You (15 page)

“I thought that's where you'd gone,” she said, nodding at Porky. “I hope he didn't chew up everything in the car.”

“Of course not,” I said. “That's not one of Porky's vices.”

“It's nice to know he has one redeeming feature,” said Lorelei.

She finished putting on makeup without assistance, but allowed me to help with the buttons on her dress. Then I carried our bags back to the Porsche, and after checking out at the office, we drove around to have breakfast in the coffee shop. We were lucky enough to be seated next to a window, and the bright morning sunlight poured in across our table, flooding our plates and cups with molten gold. The coffee was hot and strong, and the rolls rich with cinnamon, and suddenly everything seemed much better. I considered telling Lorelei about my panic attack in the night, but the light of day made the whole adventure seem laughable. What was there to be gained by frightening my grandmother with a story about something I'd probably only imagined? It wasn't as though a key to our room had been missing. Everything at the office had been in order. There was always the possibility that the duplicate key had been borrowed and then returned, but it was far more likely it hadn't been taken at all.

So I sat and enjoyed breakfast with my grandmother, who was making a heroic effort to put the past behind her. When we got back in the car we made the discovery that we must have inadvertently packed the road map in one of our suitcases, so we had to stop at a service station to get another one. Our departure was further delayed by a stop at a convenience store to buy dog food, so it was after nine before we were finally under way. We stopped at noon for lunch at a Howard Johnson's and twenty minutes later were back on the road again.

It wasn't until mid-afternoon that I happened to glance in the rearview mirror to see that the car behind us was a black Camaro.

CHAPTER 16

There are thousands of Camaros in the
world, and out of those, a significant number must be black. It was nothing more than coincidence that the car behind us onthe freeway was the same make and color as one of the many cars that had been parked at our motel.

I recited those statements over and over in my mind as I worked to get the rearview mirror repositioned so it would reflect the person at the wheel. The problem was that the car was too far back. I glanced across at Lorelei in the seat beside me. Lulled by the rhythm of the road and the monotony of the scenery, she had nodded off soon after lunch and was now napping peacefully with her head tilted back against the headrest. I hated to disturb her for something as insignificant as another black car in a world that was filled with such vehicles. First, I thought I would try to draw the Camaro closer and see if I could get a look at the driver.

Experimentally, I eased up on the accelerator, letting my speed drop slowly from sixty-five to forty in hopes that the Camaro would decide to pull out and pass me. Instead, it too slowed down, continuing to hang well back, but still keeping pace with the travel speed of the Porsche. I accelerated, and the Camaro sped up also, although there was nothing strange about that, I reminded myself. It was natural when driving the freeway to pace yourself according to the car ahead of you. Actually, I had been doing the same thing myself. The moving van in front of us had been doing a steady sixty-five for the past fifty miles, and I had been adjusting my cruising speed to coincide with that. If the van had suddenly increased its speed to seventy, I automatically would have done so also in order to keep the distance between us constant.

Deciding to see what would happen if I altered the pattern, I abruptly changed lanes and pressed the accelerator down almost to the floorboard. The engine roared as the transmission snapped into high and the Porsche went shooting past the lumbering van. The driver turned to glare at us with disapproval as we left him lingering behind in a cloud of exhaust fumes.

I continued bearing down on the accelerator and watched the needle on the speedometer creep higher and higher until itseemed that the Porsche was on its way to becoming airborne.

The burst of speed had jolted Lorelei awake, and she leanedagainst her shoulder harness to regard me with bewilderment.

“What in the world do you think you're doing, April?!”

“I'm sorry,” I told her. “I didn't mean to wake you. I wanted to see if that car back there was tailing us.” I glanced in the mirror to see if the Camaro had passed the moving van and was following me at the speed at which I was now driving. It wasn't, but someone else was, which didn't surprise me, for I heard the siren one instant before I saw the patrol car.

“Of all the luck!” I muttered. “This would happen now!”

“What did you expect?” snapped Lorelei. “You're driving like a maniac!”

With a sigh of resignation, I reduced my speed to a point where it was possible to pull over onto the shoulder of the road. The patrol car came to a stop several yards behind us, and the officer got out and came over to confront me.

“I'd like to see your driver's license,” he told me. As I took it out of my wallet, he continued, “To say you were over the speed limit is putting it mildly. I clocked you at nearly ninety. May I see your registration too, please? This is a lot of car for a kid your age to be driving.”

“This happens to be my car, young man,” Lorelei informed him with dignity. “My granddaughter is driving it for me because I've had an injury.”

“I'm sorry, ma'am,” the officer responded politely. “I'm afraid, though, it's our policy to check registration. Cars like this one have a habit of disappearing from their owners' driveways. If that happened to yours, I'm sure you'd be happy we do this.”

So Lorelei hauled the registration out of the glove compartment, and I handed over Valerie Weber's driver's license. Then we waited while the patrolman checked both documents and took them back to his car to radio headquarters.

In the meantime, the moving van passed us, creeping along at a snail's pace in honor of the patrol car, and I caught a snapshot glimpse of the driver, smirking self-righteously out at us through the rolled up window. The officer returned with our documents and wrote out a speeding ticket.

“I see you've had your license for only a month,” he said. “It's a rite of passage for every new driver to have a fender bender, but if you continue to drive like this you'll end up in the morgue.”

I murmured a few contrite statements and accepted the ticket.

A few minutes later, when we were back on the freeway, Lorelei suddenly said, “You may have been right about that car. It should have passed us while we were stopped, but it didn't.”

“There was an exit a mile or so back,” I said. “He might have gotten off there.”

“Or he might have pulled over and waited so he wouldn't lose us by getting ahead of us. If that's the case, he'll probably try to catch up with us.”

We fell into silence, both watching the road behind us. Sure enough, it was not long before the black Camaro came into view, barreling along well over the speed limit in the fast left lane. It started slowing down before it came up next to us and then casually shifted over into our lane, pacing itself behind us as though it had been there always, attached to our rear bumper by an invisible cable.

“There should be another exit coming up soon,” Lorelei said. “He won't be expecting you to take it. That's probably our best chance of getting away from him. Pull over into the fast lane and start speeding up. You may be able to trick him into overshooting it.”

I nodded, following her meaning without need for elaboration. This time when I changed lanes, the Camaro did too. I again began to accelerate, keeping an eye on the car in the mirror, as the Camaro increased its speed to keep it consistent with ours. It was close enough now so I could see that the driver was a man who was wearing sunglasses. The exit to Weston Road loomed up ahead of us, but I didn't brake to indicate that I was aware of it. Instead, I checked in the mirror to make sure that all the lanes to my right were empty and continued to increase speed until we were practically flying. Then, without hitting the turn signal, I whispered a prayer and gave the steering wheel a hard twist to the right. The Porsche leapt diagonally across the three vacant lanes and landed on the exit ramp, where it went careening around the loop like gum in a gumball machine.

I was so occupied with the task of keeping the car on the road that I didn't dare lift my eyes to look in the mirror.

“What happened?” I managed to gasp. “Is he still behind us?”

Lorelei swiveled her head. “I think he missed the exit.” I could tell she was struggling to keep her voice steady. I let the car lose momentum before touching the brake and then gradually began to tap it down into a manageable speed. It wasn't until we were stopped at a four-way light that I discovered I had been gripping the steering wheel so tightly the blood had left my fingers. I peeled my hands off the wheel and flexed them to get the circulation going again, and then, feeling a little light-headed but back in control, I turned left onto Weston Road and drove at a sensible and legal thirty miles an hour into Tutterville, South Carolina. Tutterville, with its tree-lined streets and neat pastel houses, resembled a movie set for a G-rated film laid in Normaltown, U.S.A. Everywhere you looked there were men washing cars in their driveways and housewives in shorts and halter tops pruning roses. Children romped in sprinklers, and older people were rocking on porches or chatting with neighbors on sun-dappled sidewalks. It was a restful, summer Saturday in a town so postcard-perfect that danger seemed a concept too ridiculous to contemplate.

“Maybe we just imagined it,” I said shakily. “Maybe he wasn't following us at all.”

“He was following us,” Lorelei said. “No two ways about it. He must have been right on our tail when we left the condo.”

“But how could he have known we were leaving?” I asked. “I hadn't been in Norwood more than two hours.”

“Obviously, my phone was tapped,” Lorelei said. “He heard you say you were coming and was ready for whatever we decided to do next.”

Her down-to-earth acceptance of what had happened convinced me she was tougher than I'd thought, and I decided to share the experience I had been withholding.

“Last night I thought I heard someone trying to get into our room,” I said. “When I looked out the window, nobody seemed to be out there. I checked at the office this morning, and no keys were missing. I've been trying to make myself believe I only imagined it.”

“Maybe you did, and maybe you didn't,” Lorelei said. “Doors can be opened with other devices than keys. The important thing now is we seem to have shaken the Camaro. The driver must have a low opinion of our intelligence or he wouldn't have taken the risk of following so closely. I imagine now he'll expect us to keep driving south and to get back onto the freeway the next chance we get.”

She was silent a moment as she studied the road map.

“What I think we should do is reverse directions and take the state highway north instead of south.”

Relieved to have the decision made for me, I did as she suggested and drove north on Highway 15 to a town called St. George. There we reentered the freeway and drove back south again for four more hours until we crossed the state border into Florida and stopped at a motel in St. Augustine for the night.

At least, that was our plan. It didn't work out that way. After we checked into our room and I napped for an hour, Lorelei and I had dinner at a seafood restaurant. Then we returned to our room, and I brought in our bags. That was when we realized something was missing. It was Lorelei who first became aware of it as she rummaged through her suitcase.

“I don't have the map,” she said. “Is it in your bag?”

“No,” I said. “I thought it got packed in yours.”

There was a pause. Then my grandmother said, “Make a search for it. Maybe it got shoved down under some of your clothes.”

“I know I don't have it,” I said. “We must have left it in Petersburg. Does it really matter? There's a second map in thecar.”

“That's not the point,” Lorelei said. “I marked our route on the original map. If it didn't get packed, then it must have been left in our room.”

“You mean—you think—” I realized where she was headed and felt a sharp pang over my heart. “You think that man may have gotten into our motel room?”

“The maids were doing the housekeeping chores when we left, and the doors to all the units were standing open. Anybody could have walked into any one of them. We must have been in the coffee shop for half an hour. That was plenty of time for someone to have checked our room to see if we'd left anything meaningful behind.”

“But if he had a marked map, he wouldn't need to follow us,” I said. “Wouldn't he just have driven on through to Grove City?”

“He'd still have had to locate your parents when he got there,” Lorelei said. “He doesn't know where they live or what name they're using. It would take time to find that out, and since he knew we were headed there anyway, the simplest thing would have been to let us lead him.”

“Newcomers stand out in a town that small,” I said. “If he asks around, he's bound to find someone who's noticed us.”

On the screen of my mind I saw my parents and Jason, seated in the living room playing Monopoly, with the figure of a vampire poised in the doorway. Or worse, the creature would come for them while they were sleeping. I pictured the front door swinging silently inward while the fans in the windows covered the sound of footsteps. As always, the doors to the bedrooms would be standing open to the hall to allow the air to circulate through the house. Mike Vamp could walk straight into my parents' bedroom without even having to place his hand on the doorknob.

By the time I had gotten that far, the phone receiver was in my hand and I was frantically dialing the number of our house in Grove City. The phone rang over and over without an answer.

“They're out,” I said. “That's weird, because they never go anywhere.”

“Maybe they've gone to a friend's house,” Lorelei suggested.

“They don't have friends,” I said. “They keep to themselves.”

We sat on the motel beds, across from each other, each seeing her panic reflected in the eyes of the other.

“Nothing has happened to anybody yet,” Lorelei said, trying to make the statement sound reassuring. “Even if he drove nonstop from the time we left the freeway at Tutterville, there hasn't been time for him to have reached Grove City.”

“Tom Geist is the person to call, but his number's unlisted,” I said. “We have it at home, taped to the base of the telephone, but I never thought of copying it and carrying it with me. I guess we'd better get back in the car and start driving.”

“You're worn out,” Lorelei said. “We've been on the road all day. I'll drive the first few hours so you can rest.”

“You can't do that with that cast on your arm,” I objected. “You said yourself you can't manage one-handed driving.”

“I retract that statement,” said Lorelei. “I'll manage fine. It can't be as dangerous as your daredevil stunt on the freeway. Besides, we don't have a choice. If we don't warn your parents, that monster who broke my arm may injure your mother.”

So we got back into the car and took off again, with Lorelei driving the first two hours, and me, the second two.

As the road unrolled like a long, black ribbon before us, I comforted myself with the knowledge that when the Camaro arrived in Grove City the driver still would not know how to find our house. Even if he was able to get our address, the lack of street signs and curbside numbers would make it almost impossible to locate it at night. We'd had a hard enough time finding it ourselves, even with written directions and a map to guide us.