Page 12

I finish my coffee and rise with the cup, looking toward the brew pot.

“I can get that,” Henry says, pushing his chair back. “You should sit.”

I wave him down. I’m already walking, my gaze on that pot. It’s on the end of the bar. The patron sits between me and it.

My gaze falls to those boots. They look like the ones on the woman from the road, and what rises in my gut isn’t concern or relief. It’s a surge of inexplicable anger.

Inexplicable?

No, because I hadn’t nearly hit someone darting across the road. She’d been standing there, and she hadn’t moved, despite clearly seeing me coming.

I’m injured because of her. Henry and I are stranded because of her. And now, could she actually be just sitting here, drinking a beer and avoiding looking over at us?

I swing closer, lifting my empty mug to the bartender.

“Just grabbing a top—”

I feign a stumble, hissing as if my injured knee gave out. My mug strikes the patron on the shoulder.

“Oh!” I say, as they turn sharply, startled.

A woman’s face appears under the pulled-up hood.

The face of the woman from the road.

I jerk back with a gasp and fake-squeak, “Oh, my God. It’s you.”

She looks at me, but I’m not sure she actually sees me. Her expression is impassive, eyes empty. One brief glance, and then she turns back to her beer.

“You were on the road,” I say. “I almost hit you.”

“Keep driving,” she says, and her voice is so low, I don’t think I’m supposed to hear, and it’s so flat that rage bubbles up.

“Excuse me? I didn’t keep driving. I stopped. I hit a tree because I stopped.”

The bartender drops his pencil and hurries down. “What’s the problem?”

“It’s okay,” Henry says, striding over. “Ellie saw someone on the road, right before she braked and hit the tree.”

“Well, it wasn’t this lady,” the bartender says.

“Fits the description to a tee,” Henry rumbles.

“Uh…” The bartender makes a face, as if he really hates to argue with a customer. “She’s been here since the storm started.”

I shake my head. “This is the woman I saw.”

“In the pouring rain?” the bartender says. “She’d be soaked.”

I glance up and down the woman, who sits silently with her back to me. The hoodie is dry, but she hadn’t been wearing that when I saw her. Yet her jeans and boots also seem dry.

“Wait,” the bartender says. “You said you hit a fallen tree?”

“Yes…”

“Okay, not to freak you out, but my grandfather told me this story once, about a time when he saw a kid on the road. He braked fast … just before a truck coming the other way lost control. If he didn’t brake, he’d have been hit. Turns out there was no kid around. Granddad said it was…” He rubs his fingers together, as if ready to snap them, and then shakes his head. “Can’t remember the word. Some kind of folklore.”

“A fetch?” I say.