“Religion was on the outside,” Keri answered, “not on the inside. My mother and… her husband spent years demanding that I follow the straight and narrow path. The same path I always believed they walked. Then… I find out that Mister and Mrs. Jacobson, upright members of the tiny white church on a hill, lived nothing but a lie.”
“I think it’s possible for people to change,” he stated in a calm manner she’d become comfortable with. “The Christian thing is all about change… the change we take on after accepting forgiveness and maybe they really thought withholding the truth from you was the right thing to do.”
“Sometimes that might be the case,” she responded, “but at other times our sins are too great… and we don’t deserve being forgiven.”
His head turned to look at his passenger, taking his eyes off the busy road. The taste of her bitterness over not being fed accurate facts of her conception clung to the air. She heard his soliloquy on sin, but listened to nothing about truth. Her anger, although immature, had a certain sensual appeal to it.
Even though they obviously walked different roads in life, he was glad he’d been subjected to dreams about her. Glad he’d listened to some inner voice he had only just begun to hear clearly. Keri Jacobson, rebellious, radical, Baptist daughter of two average people who couldn’t face the world without their chosen mask.
Ahead, red tail lights signaled brakes being applied. The squeal of vehicles forced to abrupt stops filled an otherwise silent void before the first sounds of crunching metal replaced it. Time froze in front of them as the early morning world they knew came to a screeching halt.
***
It wasn’t until they were pulling out of the rental car terminal that Candice realized the vehicle they’d been given could easily have been Zak’s flaming casket in her dream. She looked out over the hood of the Mercury Grand Marquis and made every effort to suppress the rising panic in her chest. This car, was it the same as the one in her dream, the one she witnessed engulfed by a ball of flame?
“Zak… I don’t like this car,” she blurted out. A part of her wanted to unleash the actual reason for her fear, but she held it inside, trapped along with the pulsing blood in her arteries.
“So… it’s a rental,” he responded.
“Let’s bring it back. I want to bring it back… rent a red one.”
“Don’t be silly,” he said with a tinge of irritation in his voice. It had been a long trip through the friendly skies. Zachary Wells wanted to simply reach their destination and achieve a vegetative state for a few hours.
“I insist.” She childishly pouted, “I don’t like gray cars. I think they’re ugly.”
“And you have a reputation to keep up,” he stated sarcastically, “one that clearly states that Candice Goddard must only be seen in her red Porsche. Sometimes darlin’ we must lower our standards in order to truly be happy.”
“It’s not that…”
“Then tell me,” he interrupted.
“It’s…” Pausing in her quest to explain, Candice sought the right words. “I’ve had a dream. One of those that returns… recurring, you know.”
“Never had one,” he shot back as he moved the vehicle into the left hand passing lane and accelerated.
“Maybe it’s just stupid,” she responded doubtfully.
“Maybe!”
His exclaimed agreement slapped her face like a cold hand. If Zachary Wells wasn’t such a phenomenal personality in the movie making business she would have left him months ago. Candice needed him; in the same way a substance abuser needs the cash that buys him the drug of his addiction. Zachary Wells was her ticket to a level of stardom she knew deep down she didn’t deserve.
***
Without thought James Lansing turned the Winnebago sharply to the left. In one slow motion moment the camper rocked on the fringe of disaster. The shoulder to the right side of the road would have embraced his vehicle with a summersault. As James decided against the fate of a gymnast, the left hand lane opened as if Moses had raised his staff. Screeching tires and a few angry blasts from horns announced to James that his lane change had not been perfectly safe. In his side view mirror he saw one car come to rest in the grassy median divider. James muttered a quick prayer of thanksgiving for the driver’s safety.
Keri braced herself against the dashboard when she was finally able to grip reality. She wasn’t buckled into her seat and having her legs folded under her, as the amusement park ride began, didn’t add to her ability to keep balanced.
Brake lights in the left lane glowed momentarily as the traffic slowed but didn’t come to a complete halt. James could see two vehicles on an off ramp, one having driven up the bumper of the other. The rushing traffic, late for all kinds of affairs, had taken time out to gawk.
“Shit!” Keri exclaimed as she gained her equilibrium again. “Didn’t think somethin’ this big could maneuver like that.”
“Neither did I,” he commented back.
The Winnebago slowed to less than thirty miles an hour. Necks of commuters bent in synchronization to view the chaos to their right, never knowing how close they’d come to having an oversized camper enter through their trunks.
The blue Ford, beginning to speed up in front of them, had two back seat riders. James hadn’t noticed them before, two children, most likely sister and brother, looking out the back window from a kneeling perch. James didn’t believe an eyelash had been flicked by either of the two pre-teens.
“Guess you should keep your eyes on the road,” Keri teased once the moment had gained stability, “If you weren’t busy checkin’ out this hot piece of woman flesh, you wouldn’t have had to nearly break our necks to keep this thing on four wheels.”
James checked out his passenger one last time and received a firmly pointed finger guiding his eyes back to the road. Keri was a ‘hot piece of woman flesh’. James Lansing sensed her warm sexual passion at first touch, since then the heat had only increased in temperature.
Warnings to slow for tollbooths decorated the roadside like advertisements. The Adirondack Northway was coming up. James lifted his bottom off the seat to retrieve his wallet. One toll to cover the entire trek through New York state, it was a better option than stopping every few miles.
He handed his wallet to Keri. “Pick out enough t’ cover our freight,” he said.
He watched his passenger, through his peripheral vision; dig into the billfold of a High School English teacher’s secrets. Nothing would take her by surprise, a well used credit card, a few crumpled bills, nothing larger than Alexander Hamilton graced twenties and a driver’s license verifying his identification.
Keri thumbed through the currency and counted out enough to cover the cost of the toll. Wordlessly he accepted the fanned greenbacks from her.
“You’re more prone to walking in God’s path than you think,” she stated.
James chose not to take his eyes off the road this time.
“Isn’t this the same conversation that nearly got us involved in an accident?” He asked before adding, “Notice how I haven’t taken my eyes off the road to check you out in the last thirty seconds.”
“Told you I was brought up a church goin’ Baptist… remember, just because I haven’t walked the straight and narrow for a while doesn’t mean I don’t recognize someone who tries to. That minister… Noah Cote… he’s got the outer shell of a man of God. There’s a demon inside him though.”
“We all have demons… little things about our lives we wish to shield others from, as for Noah Cote, the only person who saw the reverend as he clearly is now resides in the morgue.”
“What if his demons aren’t just little things?”
“Then I imagine there’d be an extra burden to bear… being a man of God and all.”
“Not that all ministers… or priests for that matter, are men of God,” she added as the Winnebago began to slow for the tollbooth ahead.
***
John Carver was gone from Noah Cote’s life. The last being
on earth who could link him to the photographs taken during his years in college. The attractive blond woman from the university’s administration office and the handsome playboy Johnny Carver, as they called him then, subjects of photographs taken. Frozen images of lingering embraces, kisses given where no one should have seen. An unmoving pose still clear in Noah’s mind after all these years, a single black and white glossy worth a jealous husband’s reward, depicted Mister Carver with a full handed grip on the cheating wife’s breast through her white sweater. An erotic creation captured on film.
There had been times when Noah harbored desires for this chain of events to unfold, but now that all was unfurled his guilt seemed intensified. Fear of his past being discovered was replaced with guilt for his sins.
“Three deaths are your responsibility,” he said out loud to himself, making an effort to portray the role of God in his confession. “Three people who were not ready to leave the world… taken by your actions.”
“Forgive me Jesus. I am worse in your sight than Judas… worse than Pilate… worse than the Roman guard who pressed the crown of thorns onto your head.”
He merged onto the Northern route as he bypassed Albany. Traffic seemed to thin out for a moment as he backed off his gas pedal and slowed to the Fifty-five miles an hour speed limit.
A gray car pulled into the right lane in front of him and slowed to a speed matching his own. Noah had noticed the car hugging the left side of the hi-way. A non-descript vehicle, typically the oversized and boxy method of travel used by upper middle classed senior citizens. Noah signaled for the left lane and accelerated to pass. He possessed no desire to follow grandma and grandpa vacationer on their trip through northern New York.
As his vehicle pulled parallel to the gray car, Noah sought a quick peek into the world of those he passed. The man behind the wheel wore more years on his frame than the minister, but he wasn’t what Noah would have considered elderly. The passenger was young, maybe the daughter of the driver. Noah took note of the passenger’s bleached blond hair and Hollywood features. He wondered how much of the woman in the neighboring car was real.
He turned his eyes back to the road. His inattentive moment had consisted of nothing more than a glance. An instant too long when a vehicle is moving at hi-way speed. Before his eyes unglued from the interior of the gray car the passenger sat upright and pointed a finger of recognition from her world to his.
Chapter 10
Out in front of their rented vehicle Candice witnessed pure chaos, a poorly choreographed dance on blacktop. A pick-up truck with a blown tire inflicted at highway speed, the loss of control by a driver on the verge of boredom. All this led to the crunching metal and screaming rubber of a collision. Zachary did his best to avoid the four-wheeled catastrophe, as did the vehicle passing them in the left hand lane. Candice had recognized the male driver of the vehicle moving past them. She’d witnessed his face in the many nightmares of Zachary’s death.
Their gray rental car spun. Candice was forced to watch the panoramic view spin through the passenger side window. Her body whipped. Her momentum stopped abruptly due to the collision of her head with the window on her side of the vehicle. Zachary held the steering wheel in a white knuckled grip. Candice realized her consciousness was vacating her mind. She floated on a cloud, her body giving way to the centrifugal motion of the surrounding world.
No sound, no squealing tires, no angry cries of steel chewing steel. Candice’s world became silent. She caught Zachary’s expression, a grimace, pain and ecstasy mixed in one moment of awareness. Zachary Wells, the old man who could take her to new heights of popularity, wore the combined look of struggle and gratification, similar to the expression gracing his face when they made love. She often thought he could die of a heart attack in her arms after sowing his oats inside her.
He grabbed at his chest and all that had once been Zachary Wells, the wealthy man of enviable power, vanished from his face. As Candice faded into darkness, she knew her future was going to change drastically.
***
The front wheels of Noah Cote’s Ranchero caught the median as he tried in vain to turn away the whipping tail of the Chevy pick-up. The passenger side of the vehicle had lifted off the ground before Noah was aware of the impending roll. His equilibrium merged into a world without a central point of gravity. Once onto his car’s roof, he slid to a complete stop while the windshield imploded, leaving tiny fragments of glass through-out his vehicle’s interior. He feared being struck from behind by another out-of-control vehicle, an eighteen wheeler barreling along on the grassy divider, crunching the same pastor who had just been given reprieve from his sins.
When his inverted car remained un-victimized by another vehicle he struggled with the latch of his seat belt and lowered himself onto the interior of the roof. The passenger window was shattered, but remained within its frame. A contorted spider web offered a warped view of the outside world. He pushed out the broken fragments of glass with his feet and crawled through the empty frame. Noah caught sight of his haggard appearance in the cracked side view mirror and paused to inspect a bruise on the left side of his forehead. During the roll he must have hit his head against the window on the driver’s side. Keeping his grip on consciousness had been a fortunate outcome of the disaster.
He stood, surveying the damage on the northbound lane of the highway. The small truck, which seemed to have caused the whole bout with tragedy, was parked a few hundred feet further down the highway. The large gray car Noah had been in the process of passing, at the worse possible time, set in the breakdown lane, parallel to his position on the median divider. There was obvious damage to the gray car’s front fender. A woman in hysterics came out to the road from the passenger’s side of the vehicle. He’d seen her in the passenger seat when passing, an attractive woman in the company of an older man. In Noah’s mind he began to seek reasons why she couldn’t possibly be the driver’s daughter.
Two other vehicles had remained on the roadway after colliding. The tangled mass of metal smoked and would be heroes where desperately trying to free those trapped behind twisted steel.
“He’s dead.”
Noah heard the shout from the highway. The woman slammed the top of the gray sedan with an angry fist. He moved around the rear of his wreckage, amazed that he didn’t feel any pain in his body. The woman looked at him and again repeated her chorus.
“He’s dead… damn him.”
An unfeeling eulogy by a poor actress, she disgusted the part of him which was still clinging to his role as a man of God.
Excited shouts from the two vehicles to his south took hold of his attention, stealing his interest from the woman who cursed the dead. Three people, one limping badly ran from the wreckage of their vehicles. A spark, a flame, and for an instant Noah saw the faces of the heroes along with the face of the victim saved. The brief moment evaporated when the flame kindled a world-deafening explosion.
***
“Shit, that doesn’t look good,” Keri’s reaction came in response to the flaming wreckage ahead.
James applied the breaks to the lumbering Winnebago. The war zone viewed through the windshield captured the attention of all northbound traffic. Passage ahead was blocked by two late model cars engulfed in flames. James brought the camper to rest on the wide gravel shoulder of the highway. Keri opened the door on her side of the vehicle and beat him to the ground before the idling engine ceased. She ran on ahead, like an emergency worker at the scene of her expertise. James followed.
Amid the chaos three actors in a script gone off course sat a safe distance from the blaze. One of the three was a woman in her forties, a cut across the right side of her forehead. The other two were teenaged boys. They both seemed to be uninjured and more than willing to help the woman out.
Further down the highway Keri saw two men walking back up the black top from a pick-up truck which had pulled over. On the median a car rested upside down, its driver was presently on a course across th
e highway to a car where a distraught woman waited.
James moved ahead of her as a proclamation of someone being deceased carried through the still morning air. She recognized the man crossing the interstate from the median as Noah Cote, the minister from the restaurant who had been given another opportunity to amend his life.
“Didn’t think we’d run into him again… this soon,” she said to James.
“He is responding to the woman at the gray sedan ahead,” he commented. “Someone is either injured… severely, or dead.”
Keri knelt down to the woman being attended to by the teenaged boys. She estimated that one of the teenagers was old enough to have recently got his license. This was a hell of a way to be introduced to the realities of the highway.
“You okay?” She asked.
The woman nodded her head in response. One of the boys wore a terrified look on his face. The other seemed calmer and in control of the situation.
“They’ve got this under control,” James insisted, “let’s go see if we can help up there.” He pointed to Noah Cote, the woman and the gray car.
Noah was trying to free the driver’s side door on the vehicle. As they moved closer the damage from impact with the pick-up truck became obvious. Noah called out for help without recognizing those he beckoned to. The woman at the gray sedan turned toward James and Keri, a couple approaching from the backdrop of hell. Keri sensed that she and her new friend were recognized by the woman and somewhere in the background of her thoughts the instant’s familiarity crept into the foreground.
***
Lights of the emergency vehicles flashed into the horizon of the approaching midday, heading south in direction of New York’s capital city. Zachary’s body occupied the back of one ambulance; Candice decided another chapter of life had passed along with the shell of the man she didn’t really love. Her bruises had been treated by a young and good looking paramedic. The option was taken on her part not to submit to treatment at the hospital. Zachary’s next of kin would be notified. She missed joining the horde, making up his family, by a matter of months.
Dark Places of the Soul: Dark Soul Trilogy - Book 1 Page 6