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He was quiet for a long minute, breathing against my skin. “When we made the turnoff and it came up behind us—when it passed us—I saw something.”
His muscles were tense against me, hard as granite. He was holding his body perfectly still.
I remembered that he’d looked back as the truck passed, and when he’d turned back to the road he’d appeared shocked. “Did you see the driver?”
He lay tense and silent for another long beat, and then he let out a breath. “No. I don’t really know what I saw. Maybe nothing. You know that I see things sometimes.”
I put my hand over his on my waist, stroked the backs of his hard knuckles. “You used to. The doctors say that should go away with time.”
“Yeah, they said that. And it hasn’t happened in a while.”
He didn’t seem like he was going to continue, so I repeated, “Eddie. What did you see?”
“A girl.” His voice was so quiet that if he wasn’t right next to me, his breath against my ear, I wouldn’t have heard. “A girl with long hair, in the bed of the truck as it drove away.”
“In the truck bed?” I blinked in the darkness. “Was she lying down?”
“She was sitting up. Her hands gripping the side. She was a teenager, maybe. It was hard to tell because she was unclear, fading in and out. It’s hard to explain. She was...” He cleared his throat. “She was staring at us.”
Damn it. My mind raced. They’d prescribed medication for Eddie after his discharge, but he’d run out a long time ago. We’d hoped his problems were over. But a girl sitting in that speeding truck bed—was it possible? If she was real, why did Eddie think she was fading in and out?
“You think you really saw her?” I asked him.
“I don’t know.”
“Okay.” I kept my voice calm. I ran my fingers over his knuckles again. “It was just a shadow. There was no need to tell the police about that. But the truck—”
“I don’t want to tell them about the truck.”
“The truck was real, Eddie. I saw it.”
“So what?” His voice was rough. “We didn’t see who was driving. We didn’t see a make and model. We didn’t see a license plate. There’s nothing to tell.”
“It was chasing us.”
“Was it?”
I was quiet. The truck behind us had sped up—I had seen the lights get bigger. Hadn’t I? Rhonda Jean had said, He’s coming.
But I hadn’t seen a girl in the truck bed, fading in and out and staring at us.
“Eddie,” I said, “they think we did it. If we saw someone else, someone who might have seen something or done something, we have to tell them. They think we’re murderers.”
He was still tense behind me. “That detective, Quentin. He’s going to ask questions if we tell him. He’s going to think I’m crazy. Then he’s going to dig into my records. And he’s going to dig into you, too.”
“He won’t find anything,” I said, though my heart was pounding a hard beat in my temples.
“Are you sure about that? Are you willing to bet everything on it?” When I didn’t answer, he continued, “He isn’t stupid, and he’s some kind of higher-up. I know a commanding officer when I see one. Quentin is a bigwig who comes to a hospital in the middle of nowhere at a moment’s notice at three o’clock in the morning. He kicked out the local guy and took over within minutes. Minutes. What do you think that means?”
I pressed my fingers into my tired eye sockets. I didn’t want to contemplate it, but Eddie was right—I had to. “It means this isn’t the first time this has happened.”
“That officer, Syed, asked us if we picked up hitchhikers. It was his first question. He asked us about that road. And he wasn’t the one who called Quentin and his partner in—he was surprised when they showed up. April, we’ve walked into a situation here.”
I rubbed my eyes, thinking about other dead girls like Rhonda Jean. How many were there? What had happened to them? Eddie was right. When you looked at his past, when you looked at my past—if you looked closely—we weren’t as innocent as we seemed. If Detective Quentin was under pressure to find a murderer, he could make a case for pinning it on us if he wanted to. It depended on how determined he was.
“Do you have anything you want to tell me?” I asked Eddie.
“You mean, do I drive several hours out of Ann Arbor and kill hitchhikers in my spare time?”
