Joyride

by Patricia Coughlin

  “The problem is you don’t tell me often enough. You keep going until you’re exhausted and have no choice but to take a break. It would be much fairer if we did as I suggested and worked out a schedule to drive in shifts.”

  “Are you finished?” he asked, acting as if he’d heard it all before, several times, which of course he had.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Because you still haven’t explained to me why you want to go to Baxter all of a sudden.”

  “It’s not easy to explain. It’s sort of a...feeling that I’ve been getting.” She paused while she searched for the right words. “I never thought about going there before now. I never thought I would want to see the place where they died, but all of a sudden, I do.” She shrugged self-consciously. “Like I said, it’s a feeling I have. Maybe it’s because it’s nearby.”

  She caught his sardonic glance and smiled ruefully as she added, “Relatively speaking, that is. All I know is that something inside is telling me I should at least see it once. I want to stand at the spot where it happened, maybe bring some flowers. Sort of a tribute. Is that dumb?”

  Bolt shook his head. She saw the cords in his throat flex as he swallowed hard, and she was touched by that small sign that he understood how she was feeling and what this side trip meant to her.

  “No, it’s not dumb at all,” he told her. “The opposite, in fact. I think it takes wisdom, and a lot of courage, to face up to the painful moments in your past. So do you know exactly where the accident happened?”

  She shook her head. “No. I could always call and ask Uncle Hank, but he’ll only worry more about me if I tell him what I’m planning to do. I’ve thought about it, and it seems to me that the local newspaper office might be able to help. That is, if they still keep copies of the paper back that far. I’m sure something must have been written about the accident at the time.”

  “I would think so, too. If not, the police should still have the accident report on file somewhere. Seventy-eight, was it? They might have it on microfilm.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that. I’ll start with the newspaper and if that doesn’t work out, I’ll check with the police. Thanks for the suggestion.”

  “No problem.”

  “And thanks for agreeing to take me to Baxter. I mean it, Bolt. I know I’m not in any position to go asking you for favors and expecting you to say yes and—”

  “Quiet.” He reached over and placed his finger against her lips to enforce the command. It worked. As soon as he touched her, Cat’s throat went dry and she couldn’t have continued even if she had been able to remember what she wanted to say. “Like I said, it’s no problem.”

  Not for him, maybe, but she’d never before in her life grown weak when a man touched her. Neither had she craved and dreaded a man’s touch at the same time. It was a big problem as far as Cat was concerned, and she had no idea what to do about it.

  Baxter, Virginia, was not at all what she had expected. At the risk of being macabre, if she’d had to envision a proper place for her parents’ exciting, glamorous lives to come to their premature end, it would have been somewhere in New York City, Times Square or Rockefeller Center when it was awash in bright lights for the holidays, somewhere as inspiring and unique as they were. Certainly not the parched, run-down outskirts of a hole-in-the-wall town like Baxter.

  Even if it did have to happen in a small town, she would have preferred someplace worthy of a Norman Rockwell depiction. Someplace with a town square bordered by flowers and where the houses were painted white with shiny black shutters. Baxter was more of a rusted-out-pickup-parked-in-the-driveway, pile-of-old-tires-in-the-side-yard kind of place. Cat found the sight disheartening.

  It made her even sadder, and more unsettled, to drive through what passed for the downtown area, a string of about six run-down shops and several boarded-up storefronts. It disturbed her to think that this might have been the last sight her mother and father saw. Seventeen years was a long time, of course, but something told her Baxter was the sort of place where nothing ever changed much.

  She kept her fingers crossed that this held true for the newspaper staff, as well. Maybe she would get lucky and find someone who remembered the accident and could give her directions to the site. She and Bolt located the newspaper office without too much trouble. It was actually a branch office of the county paper, housed in a two-story brick building about a block from the shopping area.

  Bolt stopped in front and shifted the car into park. “Are you going to be all right?” he asked her.

  “Yes.” Something in his manner gave her a sudden sinking sensation in her tummy. “Aren’t you going to come with me?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think so, Tiger. This is pretty personal and if you don’t mind, I don’t want to get any more personally involved than I already am.”

  Cat chewed her lip. She could hardly argue with his reasoning when she was the one who had made it clear she didn’t want to get involved with him in the first place.

  “I understand,” she said reluctantly. “So are you just going to sit out here and wait?”

  “This could take you a while. I thought I’d get some gas, maybe try and find a car wash and scout out a place to stay tonight. How about if I meet you back here in an hour?”

  They agreed that he would be waiting outside in an hour and if she wasn’t through, she would come out and let him know how much longer she needed. Cat got out of the car and climbed the concrete steps to the door of the newspaper office. At the top she paused, swept by an unexplainable premonition that made her shiver in spite of the late afternoon sun. She was a strong believer in premonitions.

  She quickly turned to the street, suddenly more than willing to swallow her pride and ask Bolt to come with her after all, but it was too late. She watched as he took the corner at the end of the block and drove out of sight. As usual he forgot to turn off his signal light after the turn and the Chevy’s old-fashioned blinker kept flashing as he drove off. As if, Cat thought, the old car was winking at her.

  An omen, she told herself, taking a deep breath as she opened the door to the building. Obviously she was meant to handle this one alone.

  The receptionist, a sweet lady wearing a pink ruffled blouse, listened to Cat’s inquiry about back issues and directed her to the newspaper’s morgue in the basement. Trying not to dwell on the official name for her destination, Cat hurried down the stairs and followed the signs through a maze of corridors. It was much cooler down there, with its old cement block foundation that was a capable fore-runner of modern air-conditioning.

  The morgue was located at the far end of the building. She gave a perfunctory tap on the windowed door and pushed it open. The door creaked, announcing her arrival, and a man who could have been anywhere from sixty to eighty glanced up from the index cards that covered every square inch of his desk. He was slightly built, his wispy gray hair circling his head like an open-topped cap, a pair of Ben Franklin spectacles perched on his nose.

  “Well, hello there,” he greeted her. “What brings a pretty little lady like you down here on such a beautiful day?”

  Cat returned his broad smile. “Hello. The receptionist told me this is where I might find back issues of the paper.”

  “Depends,” he said, scratching his forehead as he slowly got to his feet and approached the chest-high counter that separated them. “How far back are we talking?”

  “Nineteen seventy-eight.”

  He grinned. “You’re in luck. Nineteen seventy-eight was a very good year. No basement flooding, no mold, even had the humidifiers working full steam by then, pardon the pun. Yes, sir, this is your lucky day. Now if you had asked for seventy-five, or worse even, eighty-three, I would have had to send you down to the big morgue at the main office and let you squint up your eyes and try and read off their fancy microfilm machine.”

  Curbing her impatience, which was strong now that she was actually standing there, about to confront the events of that long-ag
o night for herself, Cat smiled at him. “Great. So how do I go about finding the papers I want to see?”

  He chuckled. “You don’t. Only one person goes messing in those stacks,” he told her, inclining his head toward the rows of towering metal shelves across the room that stretched out of sight in the dimly lit recesses of the basement. The windows were tightly covered in the area, and Cat could hear the steady drone of the humidifiers he’d referred to.

  “When it comes to the archives here, I designed ‘em, I stacked ‘em, and I take care of them. Now you just tell me what you want and I’ll go find it. Do you have a particular date you’re interested in seeing? Or just a general subject?” He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Seems to me seventy-eight was a big year for protesting the nuclear power plant they talked about building over by the lake. Had that scuffle with the police where that college girl ended up in the hospital. That what you’re looking for?”

  Cat shook her head, her smile bemused. “No, but your memory is absolutely amazing. I’m interested in the paper from July 12, 1978. In particular a story about a car accident that took place somewhere around here. It happened late at night, at a crossroads. It was raining hard and—”

  “And that young couple from up north was killed,” he broke in urgently. “I remember it, all right. He was a musician, I think...”

  “Magician,” Cat corrected.

  “That’s it. Magician. They were headed over to Virginia Beach, to one of the big hotels there, to do a show.”

  “That’s right.” She nodded excitedly. “Do you remember exactly where the accident happened?”

  He squared his shoulders indignantly. “Of course I do. It happened right out there where Route 10 splits into Ashland Road. It’s a bad turn even on a clear night.” He shook his head. “Damn shame, it was. Those two being so young and all. I said it back then and I say it now, too often lately it seems, only a fool mixes drinking with driving.”

  She stared at him, startled. “The man who caused the accident was drinking?”

  “As I recall. There was something else about that particular...” He rubbed his chin again, squinting his eyes as if that would help focus his memory. With a sudden frown, he said, “But then, there have been a lot of accidents out there over the years. Best for you to read the facts for yourself, seeing as that’s what you came here for in the first place.”

  “Yes, of course,” she replied, wondering why Uncle Hank had never mentioned that the other driver, the man who had hit her parents’ car practically head-on, had been drinking.

  “If you like, I can bring you the papers for the week or so following the accident, too,” the man behind the counter offered. “Sometimes there are follow-up stories.”

  “Yes, thank you, I’d really appreciate that.”

  “Won’t be a minute,” he said as he disappeared into the stacks.

  He returned shortly with a pile of about ten newspapers, the paper yellowed.

  “Be gentle,” he said as he laid them on the counter before her. “They’re old and fragile, sort of like yours truly.”

  Cat managed a smile.

  “There’s a desk in there that you’re welcome to use,” he told her, nodding at a small room behind her. “Make yourself at home. Of course, there’s no clipping coupons or anything of that sort allowed.”

  “I understand.”

  “Good luck,” he said in an oddly gentle tone. “And take as long as you need. Just make sure and bring them back to me when you’re through.”

  “I will,” she promised, picking up the papers, her tense smile slipping as soon as she turned away. It surprised her a little that he hadn’t asked why she was so interested in an accident that had happened almost two decades ago. She knew she would have asked if she’d been on the other side of the counter. But then, she reasoned, he probably met lots of people looking for information about lots of strange things from the past. Maybe he’d simply lost his curiosity after a while. Or maybe, she thought, he’d discovered that sometimes it was better not to know.

  The small room contained a single desk and straight-backed wooden chair designed with utility, not comfort, in mind. It didn’t matter. Cat was so anxious she wouldn’t have been able to get comfortable in a feather bed. Besides, she didn’t plan to be there long.

  The news accounts would just reiterate what she already knew. She was mostly interested in visiting the scene itself. Thanks to Uncle Hank, she’d always felt close to her parents, but for the past several days, ever since it occurred to her to make this side trip, she had had the unmistakable feeling that coming here would make that mystical bond even stronger.

  Her palms were damp and her fingers shaking as she unfolded the paper dated July 12, which was actually the day after the accident. She didn’t have to look far. From the bottom of the front page the headline jumped out at her.

  Two Killed in Late Night Crash

  She closed her eyes briefly, whispering a short, familiar prayer. Then she focused her gaze on the story below the painfully blunt headline, which began like hundreds that appeared in newspapers every day, promising to be formal and to the point, an orderly presentation of facts.

  “An accident at Route 10 and Ashland Road last night claimed the lives of two out-of-staters.” Cat took a deep breath and read on. “The one-car accident occurred just before midnight as the victims’ vehicle, a late-model van, approached a difficult turn in the road where numerous accidents have prompted nearby residents to call for reduced speeds and a traffic light.”

  Cat forced herself to finish reading the sentence all the way to the end, in spite of the fact that the first few words had turned her bones to ice.

  One-car accident? That had to be a mistake, she told herself, wondering what kind of shoddy reporting had been done on this story. There had been two cars involved, the van her parents used to transport props to shows and the car that had smashed into them. She ought to know, she’d heard the story often enough. Uncle Hank had told it to her the day after the accident and then again and again afterward, whenever she asked why her mommy and daddy couldn’t be with her anymore.

  Gripping the edge of the wooden desk with stiff fingers, she hurriedly read the rest of the article, finding it riddled with even more ridiculous errors. According to the reporter who wrote the piece, her mother was actually outside the van when the accident occurred, walking at the edge of the road. The van supposedly hit her from behind and then swerved into a tree, resulting in the instantaneous deaths of both “victims,” as the reporter repeatedly referred to them.

  Her parents weren’t victims, she thought, resentment like an icicle at her core. Unlucky, yes, whimsical and perhaps a bit too reckless, but not victims.

  Her breath was coming in short, rapid pants. How could anyone have gotten it so wrong? These weren’t just typos or minor mistakes, these were...discrepancies, she thought, biting her bottom lip. She tasted blood without feeling any pain. Absently she dabbed with her fingertip at the marks her teeth had left in her soft flesh.

  Discrepancies. No, worse than that. A difference in the time of the accident between the news account and her uncle’s would be a discrepancy, or the use of a different route number, something factual that it was possible to mix up. This... She glared at the paper in horror. This was no mix-up. This was an entirely different story from the one she’d been told by her uncle.

  The paper was wrong, she thought defiantly, straightening in the chair. It had to be, it was that simple. Because if the paper was right, then Uncle Hank was wrong, and that she knew with every fiber of her being was impossible. Uncle Hank might be rigid and overbearing at times, but in her entire life she’d never known him to be flat-out wrong about anything that mattered.

  Why, the man was an absolute stickler for facts and details, for heaven’s sake. How many times, she asked herself, her throat so dry it hurt to swallow, had she arrived home from a date to find him waiting at the door to remind her that twenty-three hundred hours meant exactly tha
t, twenty-three hundred hours, not one minute past twenty-three hundred hours. He didn’t overlook details and he didn’t make mistakes.

  Especially not about something like this. Hank Hollister had adored his baby sister. He had flown to Virginia early the morning after the accident and had accompanied the bodies of her and his brother-in-law home. If it happened the way the paper said it did, he would have known.

  He would have known, she told herself again. He would have known the truth about what happened out on that dark, slippery road that awful night.

  He would have known.

  Cat clung desperately to that thought, but still she couldn’t keep others from seeping into her head.

  He would have known, but would he have told the truth to a little girl who had gone to bed secure in the love of two parents who doted on her and woke up an orphan?

  Or would he have told her something that would make the loss easier to deal with? A less ugly, less painful version that, once told, could never be corrected or taken back.

  Trembling violently, Cat reached for the paper dated two days following the accident and hurriedly read the follow-up story, which included statements from witnesses who had seen her parents in a local restaurant about an hour before the crash. According to the eyewitnesses, they had stopped for coffee and directions and had argued loudly in the parking lot afterward.

  There were other witnesses who had seen the van slam to a stop on route ten and a woman jump out. The article also included remarks from police officers who had been at the scene, who theorized that the argument in the parking lot had continued in the van and that the woman had either gotten out in a huff or been pushed out and left alone on the roadside. The van had then been seen speeding away, only to make a U-turn several minutes later. It was as the van traveled in the opposite direction on Route 10, toward the town of Baxter, that she was struck from behind.

  The police report stated that the poor visibility that night, the angle at which the woman was struck and the open bottle of vodka found inside the van were all taken into consideration in determining that both deaths were accidental.