by John Saul
Still Conner hesitated, and for a moment Tiffany was afraid the vague promise of something yet to come wasn’t going to work. But then, letting out his breath in a long sigh, he shrugged.
“Yeah, sure. I guess I can wait.”
He turned the key in the ignition, and the engine roared to life.
Chapter Twenty-six
“Maybe Tiffany didn’t see you,” Nick said, picking his way through the underbrush as fast as he could. It seemed to be getting colder by the minute, and though the canopy of the forest was catching most of the snow, enough was getting through that the flurries beginning when they left Shutters were now a steady fall.
“She saw me, all right,” Sarah said, her voice as grim as the thoughts spinning through her mind. “She and Conner were in the backseat and she looked right at me. And she knew I saw her, too.”
“So what?” Nick countered. “What’s she going to do—tell her mom she was making out with Conner West and you saw her?”
“You don’t know Tiffany,” Sarah said, stopping to let the pain in her hip ease and to catch her breath. “She’ll get home before I do and make up some story. And then they’ll call Kate Williams and she’ll send me away.” Her bad leg suddenly threatened to give way, and she instinctively reached for Nick’s hand to steady herself. “What am I going to do?”
“Right now, let’s just concentrate on getting out of here,” he replied. “The main road is that way,” he went on, pointing to the right, “but if my dad comes out, that’s the way he’ll come. And Conner and Tiffany are on the old road. But if we keep going straight ahead, we’ll run into an old construction road that connects those two. If we stay on it, it goes all the way into town. It’ll take us longer to go that way, but at least we probably won’t run into anyone.”
“Okay,” Sarah sighed, starting to walk again, but with her limp worse than it had been a few minutes ago. “Just tell me it’s flat.”
“It is,” Nick assured her, and a few minutes later they emerged from the woods onto a narrow dirt road already covered with a thin layer of snow. An old stone retaining wall bordered the road to the north, and both sides of the worn track fell off into what was left of two drainage ditches.
“Know what you’re going to say to the Garveys?” Nick asked.
Before Sarah could answer, headlights flashed through the night from behind them, casting their long shadows onto the white road in front of them.
“Hide!” Nick yelled, dashing to one side of the road. But when he glanced back, Sarah had moved to the opposite side, where the ditch was shallower and the stone retaining wall offered no shelter at all.
“Sarah!” he yelled over the sound of the approaching car. “Over here!”
Sarah heard Nick’s voice and turned to see him waist-deep in the ditch on the other side of the road and waving frantically at her.
What should she do?
The ditch next to her was barely deep enough to hide her even if she lay down. She looked down the road at the approaching headlights, and time slowed as her mind flashed back to another night. A night that seemed to be part of another life …
She was on her bicycle again, pumping the pedals hard, hunting for her father.
Headlights ahead of her—headlights coming toward her.
Just like now.
She was swerving toward the ditch, but there wasn’t going to be time and—
“Sarah!” Nick screamed, climbing out of the ditch across the road and starting toward her.
But she didn’t move. Caught in the grip of her memory, she stood frozen in the road.
It was going to happen again—she could feel it. She closed her eyes, unable to move, unable to do anything to save herself.
“I don’t believe it!” Tiffany howled, staring through the windshield. “It’s her! It’s that skank, Sarah!”
“What?” Conner said, turning up his windshield wipers. “It can’t be!”
“I told you she was out here,” Tiffany shot back. “Want to give her a scare?”
But Conner wasn’t listening. Instead he was hunched up over the steering wheel, peering intently through the windshield. “And there’s Nutty Nick,” he whispered more to himself than to Tiffany.
An idea came into Tiffany’s head, and she started giggling. “Let’s act like we’re going to hit them!”
But Conner West was way ahead of her. “Oh, I’ll do a lot better than that,” he replied, an image of his dying dog rising out of his memory. He pressed down hard on the gas pedal, clicked on his high beams, and headed directly toward Sarah Crane and Nick Dunnigan.
“It’s Conner!” Nick yelled as the car accelerated. He grabbed Sarah’s hand. “Come on!”
At Nick’s touch, Sarah snapped back into the present, but as the headlights of her father’s truck vanished from her mind, those of the oncoming car grew brighter and brighter, lighting up the night like some great blazing—
Fire!
A new memory leaped into her mind, this one of the picture she’d drawn while Nick was in the hospital. She could clearly see the flames it had depicted, hanging before her against the night sky.
Then one of the voices in Nick’s head screamed out, and his mind exploded with the memory of the hallucination he’d had in the hospital.
Flames!
Flames everywhere!
But not just flames. Flames he could direct, flames he could control, flames he could use, just as he’d used the phantom weapon when Conner West’s dog had been leaping at Sarah.
He raised his arm, as he’d raised it that day …
The laughter died on Tiffany’s lips as she realized what Conner was going to do. “Conner, don’t,” she cried, reaching for the wheel to try to turn the onrushing car aside before it struck Sarah and Nick. But just as her fingers touched the wheel, something happened.
Suddenly, the road was on fire.
Not just on fire, but blazing with a fury Tiffany had never witnessed before. It was as if Hell itself had appeared before her, and her cry of protest rose to a scream of pure terror.
As the flames seemed to rush toward him, Conner jerked his foot away from the accelerator and slammed on the brakes.
The car began to fishtail.
Tiffany grabbed at the door handle to steady herself before she was thrown into him, and the door flew open as the car went into a full spin. Before she even knew what had happened, she was hurled out of the car onto the dirt road, rolling into the ditch next to the retaining wall.
Trying to steer out of the skid, Conner jerked the steering wheel the other way. The car hit the ditch, glanced off the stone wall, bounced back, spun around, and stopped in the middle of the road.
Nick and Sarah still stood side by side and hand in hand. No more than five yards away, the flames still rose from the road as if the dirt track itself had caught fire, but they felt no heat from the roaring inferno.
No heat, and no fear, either.
And then Conner West’s car exploded.
Tiffany ducked her head and covered it with her arms as both doors flew open. For an instant she felt herself being pelted with shards of broken glass and splashes of burning gasoline. She rose up, intent on trying to crawl to whatever shelter she could find, but before she could move any farther, her eyes met Conner West’s.
He was still strapped in his seat belt behind the wheel, staring at her through the shattered windshield of his car. She could hear him screaming as the fire consuming his car began to consume him as well.
A moment later his screams faded as his face began to blacken, and then—
Her mind rejecting what she was seeing, Tiffany dropped back to the ground, rolled over into the ditch, and lay still.
Sarah stood frozen where she was, listening to Conner’s screams until the heat seared his lungs and his throat and his howl of agony finally died away. Only when his cries were overwhelmed by the roaring of the flames engulfing his car did Sarah, still holding Nick’s hand, stumble backward, away from the
flames, away from the nightmarish sight.
“Let’s go,” Nick whispered, his fingers tightening as he pulled her away from the inferno. “There’s nothing we can do.”
Sarah was about to protest, but as the flames flared higher, she realized that he was right.
Whatever had happened—whatever actually caused the car to burst into flames—there was nothing either one of them could do now. But before she followed Nick back into the woods, she looked back one last time.
What was it?
What could have happened?
The flames she and Nick had seen weren’t real—they couldn’t have been.
And yet they must have been. Conner must have seen them, too. Seen them, and been so frightened that he tried to turn the car away before it hurtled directly into the fire.
Instead he’d succeeded only in spinning it around and slamming it into the stone wall and …
And dying in the fire the car crash had caused.
Shuddering, Sarah let Nick pull her deeper into the forest.
The faint glow from somewhere off to the left barely penetrated Mitch Garvey’s consciousness. Though his body was steering his truck along the road from the correctional facility—a road so familiar that he could have made every turn blindfolded—in his mind he was already at home, stretching out in his Barcalounger with a beer in one hand and the remote to the new TV in the other.
But when the glow exploded into a tower of flames, he was jerked out of his reverie and pulled the truck to the side of the road. Getting out, he glanced around to get his bearings. Maybe he should just ignore it—there weren’t any houses out here, so how bad could it be? He’d much rather just go home to Angie’s supper and a quiet evening watching whatever was on the tube. But that impulse vanished almost the moment it arose. It wasn’t that easy to see a fire and just walk away from it. At least it wasn’t for him. As long as he could remember, he’d always loved fires. There was something about watching a house burn down, and listening to the roar of the flames as they consumed things you’d never think would burn at all, that aroused things in him that only Angie used to be able to rouse. Indeed, as he gazed at the flames now, the excitement began rising inside him.
But where was it?
And what was burning?
He looked around again, then spotted one of the mileposts. He was still two miles from Warwick, and given the way the road he was on turned through the next mile and a half, he knew where the fire had to be.
Somewhere near the old construction road.
Angie, supper, and TV could wait.
Just past the old inmate cemetery, Mitch turned left onto Fox Hollow Road, which was covered with an undisturbed layer of snow. He switched the windshield wipers onto high and slowed down—no need to end up in the ditch, especially with snow starting to come down steadily.
He reached for the cell phone that always lay on the passenger seat when he was driving and dialed 911.
“Do you have an emergency?” the 911 operator asked after she answered on the second ring.
“This is Mitch Garvey. I’m on my way home on the main highway and there’s something burning off to the north. I just turned onto Fox Hollow Road, and it looks a little bit east.”
“A house?”
“Can’t be—no houses out here. Think it’s got to be on the old dirt road. Maybe a car or something.”
“We’ll send a truck right away.”
Mitch closed his phone and slowed the pickup as he approached the turnoff onto the old construction road, then made the right turn onto the narrow road, which was already covered with snow. Mitch sighed—for years the town had been dithering about turning this into a jogging and biking path, but year after year nothing happened, and more kids came out here to get into mischief.
And practically every year, at least one of the girls came home pregnant. Still, at least he didn’t need to worry about that—Tiffany was a good God-fearing girl.
The glow in the sky was getting brighter. Mitch slowed even more, came around a turn, and there it was. A car—or at least what started out as a car—was on fire. It was slewed crosswise, its front crushed against the retaining wall, the rest of it almost completely blocking the road. The windshield was shattered and the one door he could see was flung wide open, its window as ruined as the windshield.
He pulled as close as was safe, then got out of his truck.
And recognized the car.
Acid flowed into his belly and up his chest as he watched it burn, the usual excitement of seeing flames clawing at the night sky fading quickly away.
A bad feeling growing in the pit of his stomach, Mitch backed away from the intense heat, opened his phone again and dialed Dan West’s home.
The first faint wailings of the fire engine’s siren floated through the night as he leaned against the front fender of his truck while he waited for either Dan or Andrea West to answer.
Ed Crane couldn’t get Mitch Garvey out of his mind.
More than an hour ago he’d put his empty chow tray onto the conveyor belt that took it back into the kitchen and started toward the common room. He was looking for nothing more than an empty seat to watch some television before going back to his cell for the night.
He caught a glimpse of a dark blue uniform out of the corner of his eye, but hadn’t thought much about it until a hand landed hard on his shoulder and pulled him backward, spun him around, and slammed him into the wall.
It was Mitch Garvey, who put a palm on his chest, keeping him pinned to the wall. Prisoners filed by, and Ed didn’t have to look at them to know their eyes were staring straight ahead, none of them willing to get involved with whatever was going on between him and the screw.
“Sarah’s becoming a problem,” Mitch said, his voice low and his face too close to Ed’s. “And you’re part of Sarah’s problem. You and Bettina Philips.”
“How could I be a—”
“I’m doing the talking here,” Mitch interrupted, his face hard. “So listen up. Maybe I can’t keep you from seeing Sarah, but I can damn well keep you from seeing Bettina Philips. Problem is, I don’t want to have to fill out all that paperwork. So I’m telling you right now that if Bettina Philips comes here to see you again, you just refuse to see her. Got it?”
What the hell was he talking about? Ed wondered. How could Sarah’s art teacher be part of whatever “problem” Sarah might be causing?
Then he’d gotten it: she wasn’t a problem for Sarah—she was a problem for Mitch Garvey.
“I don’t think I—” Ed began.
“Listen to me!” Mitch said through clenched teeth as he pressed Ed even harder into the wall. “Maybe we can’t stop her from going to art class, but that’s it! There’s something wrong with the Philips woman. She’s not Christian, and I won’t have your brat having anything to do with her. Not as long as she’s under my roof. Got it?”
Ed had gotten it, but his nod apparently hadn’t satisfied Garvey.
“You want her safe and happy, right?”
Ed nodded again.
“Then you do as I say.”
Ed nodded a third time, and after staring into Ed’s eyes for a few more seconds, Garvey abruptly dropped his hand away from Ed’s chest and sauntered down the hall.
Ed had watched him go, barely contained rage threatening to send him after the guard and at least take a shot at beating him senseless.
But that wouldn’t be good for anyone.
Instead, he went to the common room, where a half-dozen inmates sat in a semicircle watching a sitcom. But whatever was on the set couldn’t penetrate his fury. A few men were playing cards, and a chess game was going on over in the corner, but Ed couldn’t get interested in either one.
So he’d sat in a chair at a table, alone, and stared at his hands, outwardly calm, waiting for his fury to subside.
It finally did, and then he knew exactly what he had to do.
Somehow, some way, he had to get Sarah out of the Garveys’ house, a
nd there was only one person who could do that.
He jumped up from the table, went back to his cell and retrieved the business card he’d forgotten he even had until yesterday when he’d found it stuffed in his Bible, the only book they’d let him keep in his cell. He grabbed the card, then walked down the hallway to the cubicle where the prisoners’ phones were kept.
“Too late,” the guard said as he pointed at the clock.
“What do you mean?” Ed asked, looking up at it.
7:01.
“I mean it’s too late. Phones close at seven. Make your call tomorrow.”
“But it’s important,” Ed said.
The guard snorted. “It’s always important. It can be important tomorrow, too.”
His shoulders slumped as, for at least the twentieth time that day, the full weight of life in prison descended on him. Yet again he felt the infuriating powerlessness, the absolute impotence, the complete lack of control he held over anything.
And now he couldn’t even make a phone call to the one person who could make sure that his little girl was safe.
Chapter Twenty-seven
“Nick, stop!” Sarah grabbed the sleeve of his jacket, gasping for breath. “I can’t go this fast or I’ll trip and fall.”
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Nick said. “C’mon, I’ll help you.”
“Slow down!” Sarah gulped air into her burning lungs. “Where are we going?”
“Away from there,” Nick said, pointing back at the firelight still filtering through the trees. “We’re going to be blamed for that, just like we were blamed for killing Conner’s dog.”
“But it wasn’t our fault,” Sarah argued. “Conner was going to run over us.”
“We both saw what happened, Sarah,” Nick said, his eyes fixing on hers.
She knew exactly what he meant, but shook her head. “He hit the wall,” she insisted. “He went off the road and then his gas tank exploded or something.”
Now it was Nick who shook his head. “If anybody finds out we were there, nobody’s going to be looking at his gas tank.”