by user
Sue looks in at the corpse in the passenger seat staring back out at her. The lifeless thing that used to take care of her daughter, the friendly, slightly chubby girl who once nursed equal passions for Heath Ledger and Heath Bar Crunch and had been Veda’s guardian and daytime companion for the last year and a half. The grief that she anticipates is still too deeply submersed in shock to make itself known.
“There’s a blanket in the backseat,” the voice says. “If you don’t want to look at her like that. I wouldn’t blame you. Death is pretty darn ugly, isn’t it?”
“Fuck you.”
“Fuckme ? You’re getting downright feisty, Susan. Maybe it’s time for me to wake up your daughter so you can hear her scream again. What do you think?”
“No,” Sue says, “no, no. I’m sorry. I won’t—I shouldn’t have said that.” And despite what has just happened to Marilyn, right now all she feels is relief at the notion of Veda sound asleep through all of this. It is an irresistibly alluring thought.
“Get in the car.”
Sue climbs in with the phone still pressed to her ear, takes the blanket from the backseat, and with her right hand spreads it clumsily over Marilyn’s lap. Now she does cry a little bit, but silently, sparingly, like a few droplets of condensation leaking out from a high-pressure valve.
“Look at the note that I left you.”
“I saw it.”
“Look again.”
Sue makes herself look at the bloody message stuck to Marilyn’s chest. The sheet of paper that it’s written on is actually a map, and when she looks more closely she realizes that it’s a map of eastern Massachusetts. It starts just west of Worcester and covers the state line right to the coast. The ragged edge of the map would seem to indicate that it had been torn out of a spiral-bound road atlas.
“What is this?”
“This is your route for the rest of the night,” the voice says. “Are you ready to ride, Susan?”
10:38P.M.
Sue peels the map from Marilyn’s chest and lays it on the dashboard. Above the wordPUNISHED she can see that a route has been highlighted in careful yellow marker, the lines ruled into an upand-down zigzag pattern across northern Massachusetts beneath the New Hampshire border.
On first glance the route defies logic. It is made up of a combination of country roads, grinding its way in a general northeastern direction from Gray Haven toward the coast. It is by no means direct—rather, it wobbles and bobs erratically through an apparently nonsensical symphony of detours, as if someone were following a bumblebee overland, back to its hive.
The only thing that lends any degree of order to the route is the string of small northern towns that it connects, none of them large enough to warrant red letters on the map. There are seven of these towns strung together by this jagged yellow NASDAQ line, starting with Gray Haven. From there the line meanders through communities named, in order from west to east: Winslow, Stoneview, Ashford, Wickham, and East Newbury before ending at someplace called White’s Cove, which perches on Cape Ann just west of Pigeon Cove.
Sue has never heard of any of these towns before, despite the fact that she’s lived in Massachusetts most of her life. She certainly can’t remember ever seeing any of them on a map. Of course there are literally hundreds of crappy little burgs scattered throughout New England that no amount of regional familiarity could possibly make her aware of, but it’s somehow unsettling just the same.
Although let’s face it, that might be due to the partially draped corpse of her nanny in the passenger seat, not to mention the stinking, Glad bag–draped thing stowed in the back.
“You’ve got your route laid out for you,” the voice on the phone says. “You’ve got your cargo in the back and you’ve got nine hours of night left. If you get started now you should be back in White’s Cove by seven thirtyA.M . tomorrow.”
Instinctively Sue’s eyes go to the fuel gauge. Thank God she filled the tank after leaving work.
“Why do you want me to do this?”
“You’ll figure it out as you go.”
“What happens when I get to White’s Cove?”
“You’ll know by the time you get there.”
“And that’s when I get Veda back? Alive?”
“Always keep my promises, Susan.”
Sue wishes that she could believe him. Right now she wishes it more than anything. “Where will she be?”
“The address is Eleven South Ocean Avenue. But fair warning, Susan: If you come even one minute late—or if you get there using any other route but the one marked in this map—you can still have her back. The only difference is that she’ll be dead. Do you understand the terms of this agreement?”
“Eleven South Ocean Avenue,” Sue repeats, “White’s Cove.”
“Look for the statue.”
“Statue?”
“And just a reminder in case you were thinking about somehow alerting the police—”
“How do I know you’re telling the truth?”
“You don’t.”
Something happens in Sue’s brain. A neurological event that she does not anticipate, a thing that begins where fear ends, a mother’s outrage coupled with an ambulance driver’s low-bullshit threshold. “All right.” She is not yelling. She is being very quiet. “I’ll do what you ask. I’ll drive through these towns with this thing in back. I won’t call the police or anybody else. I’ll be there tomorrow morning to pick up my daughter.But you listen to me. ” She pauses to take in a breath. It is a little disorienting to hear her voice sounding like this. As if some other persona has reemerged from a few years of civility, affluence, and good manners to remind her that, at one point, she understood with adolescent ruthlessness that the world ran on blood. “If you kill my little girl tonight then you better make goddamn sure that you kill me as well. Because you’re taking away everything I have in the world. And I will spend every waking moment for the rest of my life tracking you down. When I do, I promise you that you will die in a way so horrible that even a sick, sadistic son of a bitch like yourself would have to spend weeks trying to come up with something more painful than what I’ve got planned for you.” She breathes. “Now do you understandthose terms, you cocksucker, or do I have to make it clearer?”
It is a good moment—it almost makes her feel human again—but she is greeted with nothing but a puff of cottony silence from the phone and she knows that he has hung up on her yet again. At this precise instant, however, Sue Young does not care. There are welcome times when the truth spills out of our mouths because holding it back is like suicide. This is one of those times.
She puts the Expedition in drive and, gripping the map in her right hand, starts to turn around and head east.
10:48P.M.
Ten minutes later she is flying back through Gray Haven with her foot on the accelerator, the map on her lap. It’s the kind of automotive sleepwalking that people do on the most familiar roads, the roads that carry them to their jobs, to school and church, the neighborhoods of their friends and family, back and forth through the towns they’ll grow old and die in. The years she spent away from here might never have elapsed—she feels as if she knows every pothole and curve from Townsend Street to the outskirts of town.
She glances down at the map, at the route and the remaining six towns that lie ahead of her. Clearly they’ve been combined in this order for some reason, though any attempt to find logic in a system devised by a man who kidnaps infants and plucks the eyes out of their nannies is, to say the least, ill-advised.
Still, she goes over them in her mind, one at a time, seeing the names, trying to make them add up to something.
Gray Haven.
Winslow.
Stoneview.
Ashford.
Wickham.
East Newbury.
White’s Cove.
Six towns she’s never heard of and one she knows inside and out.
It doesn’t make any sense.
Maybe it’s not supp
osed to make any sense.
She’s near the end of Townsend when another car pulls out of a side street in front of her. Sue hits the brakes. The Expedition goes into a skid, its back end coming around and finally stopping less than five feet from the other vehicle. Sue’s heart stops.
It is the old farm pickup.
It sits perfectly still in front of her, its engine burbling, its headlights on. Before Sue has time to react the door opens and the driver jumps out.
This time he’s standing directly in her headlights and she sees him clearly, the outline of his body as clear and bright as a life-size cardboard cutout of a pop star in a record store. But even so, the disconnect between what she’s expecting and what her eyes actually report is surprising enough that it still takes the data a moment to percolate through her consciousness.
He’s just a kid.
No, she thinks, not a true kid, but young and lean, late teens, with a long face, short-cropped hair, and no expression. His eyes are cups of shadow. He’s wearing a T-shirt that hangs out over his jeans, and no jacket. And he’s headed toward her.
Sue is still fumbling for the wheel even as he runs over to the Expedition and comes right up to the passenger side, yanks the handle, and opens the door. He actually tries to climb inside before realizing that there’s something in the way.
“What the hell is this?” He’s got a surprisingly deep voice for someone his size and age, and a big Adam’s apple that goes up and down as he talks. He yanks the blanket off so Marilyn’s face is exposed. “Holy shit!” He jumps backward, practically tripping over his own feet, and stares past Marilyn at Sue. “There’s a dead girl with no eyes in your front seat!”
“Who are you?” Sue asks.
“There is a dead fucking girl with no eyes in your front seat!”
“That’s my daughter’s nanny, Marilyn,” Sue says, and she sounds so calm saying it that she too is having some difficulty believing all of this is unfolding quite the way it seems to be. “You don’t know anything about that?”
“It’s already happening. Oh shit, I knew it, it’s already too late.” Now the kid is opening the door to the backseat, climbing into the Expedition on the right side behind Marilyn’s body, and crouching down with his head low as if anticipating a mortar attack. “Come on, we’ve got to get out of here.” This doesn’t come off as a demand so much as a plea, as if he’s on a mission as urgent as hers. “I’m serious, lady! Let’s go!”
“Who are you?” she asks again.
“I’ll tell you later, just hit it.”
“Hold on,” she says. “You’ve been following me. You’re telling me that you don’t have anything to do with my daughter’s kidnapping?”
“Not me.” The kid shakes his head and points. “Him.”
Sue is about to turn around and ask the kid who he’s talking about when she sees another car coming toward them from behind, rolling down the middle of the snowed-over road toward the pickup. She sees it clearly now. It’s a van, the old-fashioned rectilinear model of no particular color.
“Who is that?” she asks.
“Look,” the kid says, “I’m telling you for your own sake as well as mine, we’ve got to get out of here right now, okay? The dead travel fast. Just get us the fuck out of here.”
“First tell me why you’re following me.”
“Toprotect you!” he explodes. “Now come on, let’s go.”
Sue puts the Expedition into drive and starts moving east down what’s left of Townsend Street. At the same moment, on the other side of the street, the van is pulling up alongside the kid’s pickup, where it creeps to a halt. She sees movement inside the van, dark and indiscriminate, and then they’re too far away to see anything else.
“Who was in that van?” she asks, as Townsend Street trails away and becomes Route 117 in her rearview mirror. “Was that the man who kidnapped Veda?”
The kid crouched behind her in the backseat doesn’t say anything. She can hear him breathing, cornered-animal style, and it sounds like he’s trying to keep every nerve in his body from bursting through his skin all at once. Sue keeps her eyes on the road. She flashes back through everything that just happened and sees it all clearly, though it doesn’t make any more sense than when it first happened. There’s no question that the old farm truck was the same truck she saw out on the road an hour or so earlier, when she was first trying to dial Phillip’s number in Malibu. It’s the same truck that flagged her down after the night at the pumpkin patch. Probably the same truck that chased her out of the Prudential Center. And those are just the times shenoticed it. So the kid has to be an integral part of it whether he admits it or not.
“Why did you run away the last time you saw me?” she asks.
No reply. Sue looks back. Then she sees the headlights coming up behind them fast. Right away she knows it has to be the van.
It’s approaching fast, and she doesn’t see any particular reason to try to outrun it, especially not with the roads the way they are. So she just lets it get up close behind her, until the kid cowering in her backseat realizes that it’s there too and starts freaking out again.
“Wait a second, what are you doing?” he asks. “He’s getting too close. He’s going to see me.”
“Then keep your head down,” Sue says, and pulls the wheel hard to the right, giving the van plenty of room to pass. Sure enough, the van swings into the oncoming lane, right alongside them, and the kid in her backseat shuts up, ducking his head. Sue is aware of the looming dark shape of the van holding at fifty miles an hour to her immediate left. Then a flashlight beam sweeps out of the driver’s side of the van, trained directly on Sue’s face, and it’s so bright that when she looks over she can’t see anything but white light that makes her eyes ache.
“Don’t look at him!” the kid’s voice pipes up from behind her. “Don’t let him see your face!”
For about half a second she considers hitting the brakes to get the light off her face and then disregards the idea—again, why bother? The van’s driver apparently sees whatever he was looking for, a scared woman in her thirties with a dead body partially uncovered in the passenger seat, and the flashlight beam goes off, leaving spots flashing in Sue’s eyes. The van’s engine revs and it goes blasting up ahead of her, disappearing around the next curve.
“He’s gone,” she tells the kid. “You can come up now.”
“He’s not gone.” He sits up, climbing and unfolding himself into the backseat right behind her head. “He’s just playing with you.”
“Who is he? Who areyou ?”
“My name’s Jeff Tatum.” He tosses it out there so offhandedly that it has to be the truth. “You don’t know me. I live in Gray Haven.”
“You’ve been following me for months.” This is just a guess but she’s pretty sure that if she’s wrong, he’ll tell her. “What do you want? How do you know me?”
Big surprise, the kid doesn’t answer. Sue realizes that he’s reached between the seats and grabbed the map with the route planned out on it. He stares at it. “Where did you get this?”
“It was stuck to Marilyn’s body.”
“Punished, what does that mean?”
“It means he was punishing me. Killing Marilyn and leaving her body here was my punishment. Why—”
“What did you do?”
She turns around, looks at him. “I’m done answering questions here. So far you haven’t told me anything.”
But Jeff Tatum is just staring at the map, reading the names of the towns aloud. “Winslow, Stoneview, Ashford, Wickham…” He jerks his head up at the road in front of them. “Whoa, wait a second. You’re not actuallyfollowing this route, are you?”
“Yes.”
“Oh hell no. You can’t. You can’t do that.”
He starts to crumple the map up and Sue grabs it back from him, stuffing it down between her knees, then turns around far enough to look him straight in the eyes. “Leave it alone. I don’t know who you are or what you wa
nt but so far all I’ve seen you do is jump in my car and come unglued. It’s been an insane night so far and unless you start telling me what you know about my daughter you’re bouncing right out of here even faster than you came in, and I don’t care who you’re running from.”
“Listen to me, Sue, Ms. Young, seriously—” The earnestness that comes into his voice now is almost as alarming as the fact that he knows her name. “I’m sorry about earlier, when I stopped you up the road. I figured that you were calling the police, or even worse, on the phone with him, and I knew if I tried to say anything to you, he’d hear me. I panicked and got back in the truck and drove away.”