Walking After Midnight

by Karen Robards

  “I think she’s saying she’s hungry.”

  “She’s saying she’s hungry? Give me a break. You’re not one of those dotty women who treat their dog like a kid, are you?”

  “She’s not my dog. She’s my mother’s. And she’s not dotty. My mother, I mean. Not Muffy.” Fatigue was tangling her tongue.

  “She’s not much like you, then. Your mother, I mean.” Frankenstein seemed to get the drift of her speech remarkably well. His eyes appeared briefly over the top of the trunk. “You don’t live with your mother, do you?” He sounded faintly alarmed.

  “No, I don’t. She moved to Santee, South Carolina, with my dad when he retired. He died five years ago. She still lives in Santee, but she travels most of the time.”

  “So what are you doing with the mutt?”

  “Baby-sitting.” Summer made a face. “My sister Sandra—Mom’s visiting Sandra—says her oldest boy is allergic to dog hair. Personally, I think she’s lying. Muffy doesn’t like Will, her husband.”

  “I just bet Will doesn’t think much of Muffy, either.”

  “Probably not.”

  Frankenstein slammed down the trunk, only to have it bounce up again, narrowly missing hitting him in the nose. He jumped back and shot Summer a look that dared her to grin.

  She grinned anyway.

  “Get off your lazy butt and get over here and help me with this.” He sounded disgruntled. Summer’s grin broadened.

  “Help you with what?”

  “We’re going to push the car over the cliff. Any questions?”

  About a million, but Summer only managed to sputter, “W-why?”

  “Because I think it’ll be fun. Why do you think? They saw it, that’s why. They can identify it. They find it, they find us. We would have had to get rid of it pretty soon anyway. There’s probably a BOLO out on it by now.”

  “A BOLO?”

  “Be on the lookout for. I told you, those guys back there are cops. At least, one of them is: the one with the mustache. He works for Cannon County. I used to see him around. Name’s Carmichael. He knows me, too.”

  Summer shivered. She was suddenly no longer amused. “Are you sure?”

  “Sure as a date with a hooker. Now, want to help me push this car?”

  Not really, Summer answered mentally, but she stood up anyway. Frankenstein opened the driver’s door, took off the emergency brake, and put one hand on the steering wheel. Summer walked behind the car and braced herself against the back bumper. She didn’t enjoy pushing, but she had done it before. The ’66 Mustang she had driven all through high school had had a carburetor problem. The engine had died almost every time she stopped at a traffic light. Until she saved up enough to get it fixed, she had done a lot of pushing.

  “Yo, Rosencrans!”

  Summer peered around the side of the car. It was impossible to see over it because of the defiantly upright trunk lid.

  “We’re on a hill. The transmission is in neutral. That tell you anything?”

  Summer pondered.

  “Get out from behind the car, doofus. Push from the front. That way, when it starts rolling backward, you won’t get run over.”

  Good point. Too tired even to take offense at being called “doofus,” Summer moved to the front of the car.

  “Ready?”

  Summer nodded.

  “I asked if you were ready?” It was a bellow.

  “Yes!” Summer bellowed back, after checking that Muffy was safely ensconced in the grass. Muffy was sprawled on her belly, her head on her paws, watching alertly. From the look of her, nothing short of a dish of Kal Kan was going to get her to move.

  Smart dog, Summer thought as her own stomach rumbled.

  “When I say let go, let go! Got that?”

  Summer nodded again. Then, remembering that he couldn’t see her, she yelled, “Yes!”

  Frankenstein muttered something that sounded vaguely uncomplimentary under his breath. Then the car started to roll backward.

  Very little pushing was required. The Chevy started slowly, but as Frankenstein maneuvered it across the road it picked up speed. At the end it was really rolling, so fast that Summer had to trot to keep up.

  “Let go!” Frankenstein yelled. Summer already had. He leaped away from the car and Summer watched, fascinated, as it sailed over the edge. For one glorious moment, it hung suspended against the backdrop of mountains and sky and trees, looking for all the world like a hideously overweight bat. Then its back end pitched downward, and it dropped from sight.

  Seconds later the crash came, or rather a series of crashes. Then silence. No explosion. Nothing spectacular at all. The Chevy didn’t even catch fire.

  Of course, they’d been out of gas.

  “Can’t see it from the road.” Satisfaction was plain in Frankenstein’s voice as he glanced around at her. He still stood on the rocky shoulder, looking down. His eyes flickered over her once, then moved beyond her up the road.

  “There’s a car coming, Rosencrans. Get out of the way.”

  Summer glanced over her shoulder. A white Honda had just come around the bend. It was bearing down on them cheerily. She walked to the side of the road to stand beside Muffy and the jumble of items Frankenstein had removed from the Chevy.

  Her heart began to pound. The Honda was getting closer—surely it couldn’t be the goons again. She was getting mighty sick of the goons.

  Suddenly Frankenstein was beside her.

  “Do you think they …” she began, glancing anxiously up at him.

  “Shut up,” he said, and slid one arm around her shoulders and the other around her waist. Twisting her so that his back was to the road and her head was on his shoulder, he covered her mouth with his.

  17

  The earth didn’t move. Bells didn’t ring. Stars didn’t explode inside Summer’s head. Wrapped tightly in Frankenstein’s arms, tilted backward, she clung to a pair of very broad shoulders to keep from falling on her butt, suffered the feel of hard, warm lips mashed against hers, and waited the kiss out. He didn’t even use his tongue.

  It was clear that Frankenstein’s mind, like her own, wasn’t on what he was doing.

  Finally he lifted his head, glanced cautiously up and down the mountain, and set her back on her feet.

  “All clear.”

  He sounded as unruffled as if he’d been kissing a department store mannequin. To Summer’s amazement, his unconcern pricked her vanity.

  “Good.” If her voice was cool, well, it was better than being hot. And hot was what she was starting to feel. Hot with disgruntlement. Not that she meant to let him know it. After all, she hadn’t been floored by his kiss either. And if he had tried to use his tongue, she would have bitten it!

  “It was just tourists. A family. The backseat was chock-full of toys and kids.” He grinned at her suddenly. “When they saw us lovebirds, the mom and dad averted their heads. I think they even speeded up. Mustn’t shock the kiddies.”

  That kiss wouldn’t have shocked Shirley Temple. Summer was still ruminating on it—had she lost her looks to that extent? was he gay?—as he bent over the pile of items by the road.

  No, he couldn’t be gay. The scandal with his friend’s wife precluded that. It must be her. Something about her just didn’t turn him on. Summer couldn’t have felt more affronted if he’d called her a foul name. In fact, she would have preferred it.

  “Hey, at least we eat.” Frankenstein held up an unopened eight-pack box of peanut butter snack crackers for her inspection. Summer eyed them sourly. Muffy responded with more enthusiasm. At the sight of the box, she came to her feet and yapped.

  “Later,” Frankenstein told her, and dropped the box back on the pile.

  Besides the crackers, the trunk had yielded a gym bag containing an orange muscle shirt, black nylon shorts, white athletic socks rolled into a ball, another pair of enormous sneakers, and a basketball. There was also a tattered quilt, a tire iron, and a roll of breath mints. Combined with the map, and th
e items from the backseat, it was quite a haul.

  Summer reflected that her dentist friend wasn’t real hot for her either. She’d had an IUD inserted on his behalf, and hardly needed it. Face it, she told herself, you are thirty-six years old. Over the hill. Long in the tooth. Not a sex kitten anymore.

  That she didn’t want to have sex with Frankenstein, wouldn’t have sex with him if he begged her, if he offered her a million dollars like Robert Redford had to Demi Moore in that stupid movie Indecent Proposal, was beside the point. For her pride’s sake, she wanted him to want her. She was not required to want him back.

  And if that didn’t make any sense, that was just too bad.

  The scowl on her face would have terrified a bull moose.

  Frankenstein paid no attention. He was busy bundling everything except the basketball, cap, and tire iron back into the bag. He bounced the basketball on the pavement once or twice, his expression wistful. Finally he heaved it over the cliff, watching its downward trajectory with what looked like real sorrow. Then, without so much as a word to her, he clapped the cap—it was black, with Bulls written in red across the front—on his head, picked up the bag and tire iron, and headed into the forest.

  “You coming or not?” he paused at the edge of the trees to demand over his shoulder when Summer just stood there glaring at his back.

  “I’m missing a shoe,” she told him, only then remembering that pertinent fact herself. Apparently the monster didn’t hear. He was moving away, already just one more shadow among the dark trunks.

  A rumbling warned Summer that another vehicle was headed in her direction. Snatching up Muffy, muttering imprecations under her breath, she hurried after Frankenstein.

  The forest floor was as prickly and mushy and unpleasant under her bare foot as she had thought it would be. For a moment or so, as she followed him deeper and deeper into the trees, she could barely see. Finally her eyes adjusted to the gloom.

  She found herself in a primeval forest. It was beautiful, lushly green, with vines snaking up from the ground to twine around gnarled branches and sunlight slanting down in shimmery columns through openings in the leafy canopy overhead. It was also eerie. There was a kind of hush in the air, a sense of time having stopped. Summer had the feeling that she had stepped through the looking glass into another world. A world where she—and Frankenstein and Muffy—were very much the intruders. A world not meant for humans, but for creatures like the bushy-tailed squirrel who watched her warily from an overhead branch, or the lizard who scrambled across a rock as she passed it. A place where the golden empty cicada shells that clung to the rough gray bark had eyes that could see, and the droning music made by their former occupants grew louder with each step she took deeper into their domain.

  She had never been a nature enthusiast. The forest gave her the jitters.

  “Would you wait?” she exploded at Frankenstein’s disappearing back, and practically ran to catch up with him. It was amazing how fast he could move even with his limping gait.

  “Jesus, you’re slow.” He glanced down at her in disapproval as she came panting up beside him.

  Summer was too winded to do more than grit her teeth. Muffy, for all her deceptively small size, weighed a ton. And the trek, so far, had been all uphill.

  She set the dog on the ground and plowed on beside Frankenstein. Muffy followed reluctantly.

  “What now?” she asked.

  “What do you mean, what now? Now we walk.”

  “Where to? Do you have a plan? Or do we just walk until we fall off the end of the earth?”

  “Jesus, you talk a lot.” He stepped up the pace.

  “Just tell me one thing: Why should I stick with you? I’d probably be safer on my own.” She stopped walking and stood, arms akimbo, glaring after him.

  Frankenstein stopped too, turning to face her with a shrug. “It’s your call, Rosencrans. You might be safer on your own. If you think you can find your way back to civilization without me, and if you think they won’t catch up with you as soon as you do and try to pry my whereabouts out of you. I don’t want to rain on your parade, but if I were you I’d think back on what the bad guys did to those two other women just because they happened to be in your house. Just because they thought that one of them was you.”

  Summer shivered. She had been doing her best not to remember the fate of Linda Miller and Betty Kern. Every time she recalled Linda’s limp, bloody body, the question that popped into her mind was: Had it hurt much, to die like that?

  Of course it had hurt.

  Summer shied away from the thought. It was too horrible. Her protective barriers went up once more. She would not think about it. If she did, she feared she would curl up into a whimpering little ball right there and then, and refuse to budge ever again.

  “You think I’m taking you with me just for the pleasure of your company, Rosencrans?” Frankenstein’s voice was hard. “If you do, think again. Now that we’re on foot, I’ll get where I’m going a heck of a lot faster if I leave you and that mutt of yours behind. I’m letting you tag along because I owe you. You wouldn’t have gotten involved in this mess if it weren’t for me. So I kind of feel responsible for you now. You want to take over responsibility for yourself, feel free.”

  He turned and lurched off through the trees.

  As his words percolated through her brain, Summer stared after him for a moment. Then, galvanized by the memory of the two women who had died in her place, she trotted after him.

  “Could you at least tell me where we’re going, please?” she panted meekly when she caught up.

  He didn’t seem at all surprised to see her. He didn’t seem particularly pleased, either.

  “My dad and I had a fishing camp up in these mountains, okay? That’s where we were headed before we ran out of gas, which wasn’t such a bad thing, now that I think about it. We’re probably safer on foot. They won’t expect that; they’ll be watching the roads. The camp’s about a three days’ walk due east. Nobody ever went there but the two of us. I figure we can hide out for a few days while I try to think this mess through. There’s got to be a way out. I’m just too tired to see it.”

  “Maybe we should …” But Summer found herself talking to his back as he set off again. Clearly he was not interested in her suggestion, which involved calling her sister who was a lawyer in Knoxville. But then, she decided as she trailed after him, she didn’t really want to get her sister involved in this, anyway. People who got involved in this seemed to wind up dead.

  A fishing camp, she thought. He was taking her to a fishing camp. At least he had a destination in mind.

  Taking a deep breath, she decided to follow where he led. What else was she going to do?

  Some time later, his attention apparently drawn by her minutes-long silence, he glanced around at her. His pace slowed as he watched her hobbling to catch up.

  “What’re you limping about?” he asked.

  “I only have one shoe.”

  He kept walking, but at least allowed her to close the gap. “How’d you lose the other one?”

  The thought of bopping him over the head with the nearest solid object occurred to Summer, but that would be even more exhausting than explaining. Clearly he had not noticed that she had been only half shod throughout their entire acquaintance.

  “Don’t ask.” She wasn’t up to explaining either.

  A plaintive whimper from behind them made Summer glance over her shoulder. Muffy, who’d been trailing farther and farther behind, now sprawled flat on her belly in the leaves.

  “Come on, Muffy,” Summer coaxed.

  Muffy wagged her tail.

  “Here, Muffy.” Summer stopped walking and snapped her fingers. Muffy didn’t budge.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” Frankenstein groaned. “I have to be out of my mind, saddling myself with Chatty Kathy and her fleabag. Why the hell couldn’t you have left the damned mutt back at your house? They wouldn’t have tortured her.”

  “I could
n’t leave Muffy,” Summer said, shocked.

  “Then either get her to walk or carry her.” Frankenstein moved off again.

  “Come on, Muffy. Here, Muffy. Please, Muffy.” But Summer’s cajoling was in vain. It was obvious Muffy had no plans to move again.

  Summer went back to fetch her.

  They walked until Summer’s legs ached. The last straw came when she stubbed her bare toes on a large rock that, thanks to the carpet of fallen leaves, she hadn’t seen protruding from the trail.

  “That’s it,” Summer said through her teeth, and dropped to the ground, not caring any longer if Frankenstein left her or not. Stretching her legs out, she massaged her injured toes while Muffy panted in the leaves beside her. When the pain lessened, she leaned back against a tree and stared up into its ruffled branches, trying clear her mind of everything except pleasant thoughts.

  Frankenstein’s battered face leaning over her got in the way of her concentrated effort to chill out.

  “What’s with you?”

  Summer glared up at him. “I stubbed my toe. I have not had any sleep for twenty-four hours. I’m hungry. I’m scared out of my wits. I have badly chafed wrists, a bumped head, a bruised jaw, an aching rib cage, a broken bra strap, and a lost shoe. To top it off, I’m stuck here in a primeval wilderness with a murderer who looks like something out of a monster movie while even worse murderers hunt for me so that they can kill me. That’s what’s with me.

  “Is your toe all better?”

  Summer nodded.

  “Then do you think we could get going again?”

  “I’m not taking another frigging step.”

  Frankenstein looked down at her for a long, thoughtful moment.

  “Suit yourself,” he said, and headed off again.

  Wait! That was not how it was supposed to work! He was supposed to realize that she was really, truly exhausted and sit down with her and reassure her and feed her some peanut butter crackers and offer to carry the damned dog.

  He was not supposed to abandon her in the wilderness with nothing but a hairball for protection and vicious killers on her trail.

  “Damn you, Steve Calhoun,” she said to his retreating back as she struggled to her feet. By the time she scooped up Muffy and headed after him, he was almost out of sight.