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The truck’s engine gunned again, and it made a turn toward the exit. I put the Accord into gear and hit the accelerator, heading for Eddie. I braked next to him just long enough for him to get into the passenger seat. Then, as he slammed the door, I took off after the truck with the girl in it, heading for Atticus Line.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Tell me you saw that,” my husband said.
The truck had made the turn off the side road toward Atticus Line, and I tried to keep it in my sights as I chased it. “I saw it.”
“Say it.” He sounded shaken, the only time I’d ever heard him sound like that. “I need to hear it.”
“A girl in the truck bed,” I said, hitting Atticus Line and accelerating. “Brown hair. Hands on the side of the truck bed. Staring at us.”
I’d seen a lot of bad things in my life—maybe more than my share. But I had never seen anything as terrible as that girl, as her face, as her undead hands. She was a dark, cold hole in the fabric of reality, punched through with a naked fist. The word that came to mind was unholy, though I had never been religious a day in my life. I had never imagined something could be as vibrantly, furiously dead as she was, and I never wanted to see her again. And yet I was chasing her down Atticus Line.
Eddie’s hand gripped the door handle next to him, his knuckles white. Over the sound of the engine, I heard him breathing. He’d thought he was seeing things, that his problem had come back. He was trying to understand that the girl in the truck bed wasn’t a hallucination.
And if she wasn’t a hallucination, she hadn’t been last night, either.
“Which is worse?” I asked him, my eyes still on the road and the truck in front of us. “That she isn’t real, or that she is?”
“I don’t know.” His voice was torn. He took a breath and gathered himself. “He’s making a turn up here.”
In a wink of sunlight off chrome, the truck disappeared from the road ahead. There must be either a driveway or a side road up there. I couldn’t go too fast, or I’d miss it and waste valuable seconds having to reverse. I couldn’t go too slow, or I’d lose the truck.
“Steady,” Eddie coached me as I approached where the truck had vanished. “Here. On the right.”
There was a narrow dirt road leaving Atticus Line. Was it a road or a driveway? I couldn’t tell. I swerved onto it, hearing the Accord’s tires grind in the dirt and gravel as we headed into the relative dimness of the trees. Unless someone had a driveway several miles long, this was a road. There was no truck in sight.
Eddie cursed. “There has to be a driveway ahead,” he said. “It can’t be far. Keep an eye out.”
I couldn’t speed too fast on the dirt road, not without spinning my wheels in the gravel. I had to ease off the gas to keep control. The truck would be better on this road, surer and faster.
We cruised down the dirt road, farther and farther away from Atticus Line, the harsh light dappling through the trees overhead. Where the hell had the truck gone? It was too big to easily hide.
“There.” Eddie pointed to a dirt driveway that branched from the road. An old mailbox at the foot of the driveway had a hand-carved sign: shandler.
I turned onto the driveway, and we bumped along its rough surface. The trees opened up and we could see we were on a piece of farmland. There was a farmhouse, its white paint dusty and peeling, and a barn behind it. A lone horse was in the field beyond, drowsing and twitching its tail in the shade of an old tree.
The black truck was parked in front of the farmhouse, its front tires on the worn-out grass. The engine ticked in the silence. There was no movement.
I parked, and Eddie and I got out of the car. There was a second in which we both paused, looking at the truck. Now that the engine wasn’t running it had lost some of its menace, but though it wasn’t growling it crouched in silence, as if waiting. The sun beat down on my head and sweat started to bead between my shoulder blades.
Eddie moved first. He strode toward the truck, his gaze fixed on it. He wasn’t shaken anymore.
I followed, my flip-flops shuffling in the dirt and gravel of the drive. I didn’t feel cold, the way I had at the Dollar Mart; instead I felt hot, my chest tight. I made myself go round to the back of the truck. If the woman was still here, I’d be able to see her.
Eddie had gone to the truck’s cab to look in the windows. “No one here,” he called to me. There was no sound from the driveway behind us or from the house. Whoever had driven the truck had disappeared.
Trying not to flinch, I moved closer to the tailgate and rose onto my toes to look into the bed. There was no woman. But there was something else.
“Eddie,” I said. “Look.”
He came around the side of the truck and looked into the bed. He didn’t have to lift to his toes to do it. “Oh, shit,” he said.
It was a backpack, made of dark blue weather-stained canvas, a pack that had been well used and had traveled a lot of miles. I could see patches sewn onto it, also faded: an American flag, another patch that said Lollapalooza. The backpack was stuffed full and zipped shut, as if whoever had been carrying it had simply dropped it in the truck bed and disappeared.
Whose pack was it? The truck owner’s? The woman’s?
Was it Rhonda Jean’s? Mitchell had seen her with a backpack. She hadn’t had a backpack on her when we picked her up.
