Highway to Hell (5 page)

“Sure. Overnight to Corpus, then another day down here. That's the quickest we get things, missy. And tomorrow's Sunday besides.”

“Okay,” I said, trying to sound like I dealt with this kind of thing all the time. I'd gotten the Jeep—not new, but
reliable—when I'd gotten my license, and I'd never had so much as a fender bender.

“I'll load 'er up and get back to the shop. I'll know more when I get it up on the lift.” I must have failed in my attempt to look calm, because he put a hand on my shoulder. “It'll be okay, little missy. We'll get you set to rights.”

“Thank you, Mr. Buck.” And I meant it, despite the “little missy” part.

I waited for another Padre-bound car—the rear-window graffiti was a giveaway—to pass, then stepped out into the lane to take a picture of the blood on the road, and the skid marks of the Jeep.

In the daylight, I could see the trail the cow had left as it blundered through the fence and onto the highway. I wondered, briefly, if the tears on its skin could have been from the barbed wire, then discarded the idea. Instinct said no, and so did logic. The gouges had been too deep.

Zeke was stringing new wire with professional efficiency. Lisa stood on the dirt shoulder, staring at the ground with an intensely thoughtful expression.

I started toward her, and she said without looking up, “Watch your step. I think these are animal tracks.”

Treading carefully where the dry grass was undisturbed, I joined her. There was definitely some kind of imprint in the dirt, dramatically different from the cow's hoofs. “Does that look like a coyote to you?” she asked.

“How should I know?” I said.

“You were the Girl Scout.”

“I was a
Brownie.
In the first grade. We were too busy making macaroni art to do much wild animal tracking.”

“Too bad. It might have thinned the weak from the herd.”

“I wish I could tell when you're joking.” Crouching, I framed the footprint in the camera's lens and zoomed close. Maybe I was no Eagle Scout, but I could tell it hadn't been made by a canine type paw. The impression was sort of thin, with long toes and claws. It looked kind of reptilian, like the footprints in
Jurassic Park.

“Do you have a quarter?” I asked.

“Planning to make a phone call?”

“No. I want to put it in the picture for a measure of scale.”

Lisa dug into the pocket of her jeans. “You watch too much
CSI.
”

“I got that from a Jeffery Deaver novel, actually.”

“Nerd.” She placed the coin near the mini dinosaur track, which really wasn't that mini, except when compared with a T. rex.

I took several pictures, then lowered the camera. “Gila monster?” suggested Lisa.

“Iguana, maybe.” Except the print was the same size as my own foot. A five-foot-two iguana, then.

“Touch it,” she said. “Maybe you'll See something.”

“Geez, Lisa. Are you
ever
going to let me live that down?”

“I'm serious.” She crouched, facing me with the track between us. “Maybe you'll See what kind of animal made it.”

She was serious, all right. Her gray eyes were alight with studied curiosity. The kind of curiosity that made Ben Franklin tie a key to a kite string. Now I knew how the kite felt.

“You do remember there was barfing involved the last time I touched something icky?”

“How do you even know this footprint is connected with Bessie's untimely end?” Lisa's voice was reason itself. So
much so that it made me seem unreasonable for being such a wuss.

“I've never even tried a footprint before, only objects that have a long association with someone.”

“There are a lot of sympathetic magic spells associated with footprints. They're very symbolic.”

“Nice for them.”

“Come on. Aren't you even curious?”

Of course I was. And of course she knew it.

The tow truck started up with a bang. I jumped and Lisa did, too. She fell on her butt, her foot shooting out and obliterating the track. The chugging of the tow truck's winch, the creak of winding chain as it hoisted the Jeep, covered her curse and my laughter.

“What are you girls doing?” Zeke had to yell over the noise of the truck.

Lisa shot me a look I couldn't interpret, so I ignored her. “We found a weird-looking track. Doesn't look like a coyote.”

He left the fence and came over to peer at the ground. “I don't see anything.”

I thumbed back through the pictures, and held the camera out to him. Shading it with his gloved hand, he squinted at the view screen. “It's hard to tell from this. Could be anything.”

“It looked kind of like a lizard, but it was too big.”

He handed the camera back to me, his expression friendly but a little too careful. “Are you sure it wasn't a bird? It could have been a hawk, or a vulture looking for leftovers.”

On that lovely mental image, I let the matter drop, and Zeke went back to work on the fence. Lisa watched him go,
then turned to me, her voice covered by the engine of the tow truck.

“What are you thinking, Mags?”

I turned off the camera and looped the strap around my neck. “I don't know. I have a weird feeling about this.”

She gazed at me, her face inscrutable. “You mean, weirder than us getting stranded by two tons of hamburger in the first place?”

“Yeah.”

“Come on, Mags.” She made a gesture that encompassed the track and the gory spot on the road. “Some animal killed that cow. If not a coyote, then something else. This might be ranch land, but it's still wilderness. Just look around us.”

The highway had plenty of traffic, and there were clusters of houses dotted about, set far back from the road. But there was a lot of open ground, too, where anything could live.

The winch on the truck had stopped, and Buck was securing the Jeep in place. I lowered my voice so he and Zeke wouldn't hear. “I had a dream last night. I'm not sure how the cow ties in, but there is
something
going on.”

She pursed her lips. “You mean … magic?”

“Maybe.”

The crunch of Buck's boots on the dry grass stopped me from saying anything else. “You girls want to ride back with me, or stick around with Mr. Zeke?”

“We'll stay, I guess. Unless you need me to sign anything?”

“Nah.” He rearranged the toothpick in his mouth. “I figure you're not going anywhere.”

He certainly had that right.

“H
ey, Mom.”

“Hey, Magpie!” Mom's voice was cheerful. I could hear Brigid wailing in the background. Astronauts in orbit could probably hear her, too. “How is South Padre? Did you get a room with a view of the beach?”

I took in the scenic view from the balcony of the Artesian Manor—the highway, the Duck Inn, the town square, with its dilapidated gazebo, and the water tower looming over all of it. “Not exactly.”

“Oh. That's too bad.” I could tell she'd gone to pick Brigid up; the baby's cries were even louder, and Mom's voice came
in spurts, like she was bouncing her while she talked. “I love the beach. It was such a shame that you never did. After that one trip, we never tried to go again.”

I hate deep water. My folks found this out the hard way after they'd shelled out for a Florida vacation when I was six and someone had had to stay onshore with me at all times.

“Well, it's not going to be a problem here.”

“Too much other fun stuff to do, I'll bet.”

I could see Buck's garage, where the Jeep was up on the rack like a surgery patient. “Here's the thing, Mom. I don't want you to panic. Everyone is okay.”

Brigid started crying louder, as if I needed a barometer of Mom's escalating tension. “Magdalena Lorraine Quinn. What's going on?”

I winced at the full-name whammy. “There was a cow in the road. I tried to avoid it, but there was a lot of damage to the Jeep.”

She took several deep breaths, audible despite the crying baby. “But you and Lisa are okay?”

“Not a scratch.”

“Where are you?”

“A little town called Dulcina. Not much more than a water tower and a motel. There's a mechanic here who can fix the Jeep. I've already called the car insurance people, and the owner of the pasture—the one the cow escaped from—is going to pay the deductible.”

I said this all as quickly as I could, trying to show her that I was responsible, that I'd thought of everything. As I talked, Brigid's cries tapered off, and I figured I'd been moderately successful.

“You have someplace to stay?” Mom asked. “Someplace that I don't have to worry about you?”

“Yeah.” I rattled off the address and phone number, in case she needed to get in touch and my cell wasn't working. The two-story motel was the high point in town, and reception had been decent here so far, but spotty out on the road. “We're the only guests, so they'll know who we are.”

“Artesian Manor. How fancy.”

“Oh, Mom. You would have to see it to believe it.”

“Well …” She floundered for a moment, as if finding her bearings. “I feel like I should be more upset, but it sounds as if you've already got things under control.”

Her subtext was strangely poignant. “Why do you say that like it's a bad thing?”

“I don't know.” I could hear a sad smile in her voice. “Because you didn't need your dad or me to fix this.”

Guilt closed my throat. I had carefully avoided telling her that the accident had happened in the middle of the night, which would mean confessing my initial lie. “Say that again when the car insurance rates go up.”

“You can't help hitting a cow.” She sighed. “So, what are you going to do in that tiny town?”

“I might try and take some pictures, poke around.” I didn't mention anything about investigating weird footprints. “Since I can't write about South Padre, maybe I can get a regional or historical article on this place.”

“Or you could have the Jeep towed to the nearest city. At least you'd have things to do there.”

On Monday, the garages in Kingsville or Corpus Christi would be open. For that matter, we could continue down to
Brownsville and still get to Padre Island. I hadn't seriously considered the option to decamp, though, for practical reasons. “The insurance won't pay for a tow that far.”

“Well, I will, sweetie. This is your first college spring break, and you should enjoy it.”

Mom's deep denial regarding the weirdness that happens around me forces her to cling to the idea that I should have normal coming-of-age experiences, like parties and dates and things. This completely overlooks the fact that I never did have parties and dates and things, even before I encountered the forces of darkness.

Her next words proved I had accurately followed her train of thought. “I suppose I'm relieved it was just an accident, and not anything
weird
this time.” A pause, while the baby made a gurgling sound. “It
is
just an accident, right?”

“What else would it be?”

She took the evasive question as rhetorical. “Your dad just came in. Do you want to tell him yourself?”

“Uh, no.” I wouldn't be able to keep Dad completely in the dark about my suspicions that there was something going on here. It isn't that my dad is any smarter than my mom— they're both sharp—but Mom is more determined to think the world is a reasonable place.

“Then just keep us posted. And you and Lisa be careful.”

“We will. Love you, Mom.”

“You too, Magpie.”

Lisa came back from the Stop & Shop with Zeke, her arms loaded with plastic bags. He'd lent us an ice chest so that we could keep sustenance—mainly Diet Coke—in the room, and
now he carried, with impressively little effort, a ten-pound bag of ice, which he dumped into the Igloo.

“How did the scavenging go?” I asked, looking up from the book I was reading. It was one of several scattered around me on the bed, along with my laptop.

“We won't starve.” Lisa pulled a box of Pop-Tarts and a bag of Tostitos out of the sack. “I see your reconnoiter was equally productive.”

“I went to the library before they closed for the day.” I neatened the books into a stack. “The librarian already knew our story, and took pity on me.”

Zeke looked askance at the laptop. “You brought your computer on vacation?”

I raised a quizzical brow. “Doesn't everybody?”

Lisa was loading cans of soda into the cooler, and handed one to Zeke and one to me. “I don't think they're as addicted to their electronics down here, Mags.”

“We have high-tech stuff.” Zeke popped the tab on his Coke. “Mostly on hunting equipment. Buck has a GPS on his four-wheeler, Gus has an electronic fish finder.”

“How about wireless Internet?” I asked. Needless to say, the Artesian Manor wasn't set up with broadband networking. “Any hot spots in town?”

“No. The library has a connection, but they don't open again until Tuesday. You can come into the ranch office on Monday and use our network.”

Forty-eight hours without the Internet. I felt a little queasy. “If I'm not dead from withdrawal by then, I'll take you up on that.”

He glanced at his watch. “I'd take you now, but I've got to
get back out to the Big House. My grandmother expects everyone there for Saturday dinner.”