Ms. Norville laughed in an embarrassed but pleased sort of way. "My favorite actor. Had sort of a crush on him when I was a girl, if you want the whole truth. I got him to sign that for me ten years before he died. He was very old, even then, but it's a real signature, not a stamp. This is yours." For one crazed moment, Tess thought Ms. Norville meant the signed photo. Then she saw the envelope in those blunt fingers. The kind of envelope with a window, so you could peek at the check inside.
"Thank you," Tess said, taking it.
"No thanks necessary. You earned every penny."
Tess did not demur.
"Now. About that shortcut."
Tess leaned forward attentively. In one of the Knitting Society books, Doreen Marquis had said, The two best things in life are warm croissants and a quick way home. This was a case of the writer using her own dearly held beliefs to enliven her fiction.
"Can you program intersections in your GPS?"
"Yes, Tom's very canny."
Ms. Norville smiled. "Input Stagg Road and US 47, then. Stagg Road is very little used in this modern age--almost forgotten since that damn 84--but it's scenic. You'll ramble along it for, oh, sixteen miles or so. Patched asphalt, but not too bumpy, or wasn't the last time I took it, and that was in the spring, when the worst bumps show up. At least that's my experience."
"Mine, too," Tess said.
"When you get to 47, you'll see a sign pointing you to I-84, but you'll only need to take the turnpike for twelve miles or so, that's the beauty part. And you'll save tons of time and aggravation."
"That's also the beauty part," Tess said, and they laughed together, two women of the same mind watched over by a smiling Richard Widmark. The abandoned store with the ticking sign was then still ninety minutes away, tucked snugly into the future like a snake in its hole. And the culvert, of course.
- 5 -
Tess not only had a GPS; she had spent extra for a customized one. She liked toys. After she had input the intersection (Ramona Norville leaned in the window as she did it, watching with manly interest), the gadget thought for a moment or two, then said, "Tess, I am calculating your route."
"Whoa-ho, how about that!" Norville said, and laughed the way that people do at some amiable peculiarity.
Tess smiled, although she privately thought programming your GPS to call you by name was no more peculiar than keeping a fan foto of a dead actor on your office wall. "Thank you for everything, Ramona. It was all very professional."
"We do our best at Three Bs. Now off you go. With my thanks."
"Off I go," Tess agreed. "And you're very welcome. I enjoyed it." This was true; she usually did enjoy such occasions, in an all-right-let's-get-this-taken-care-of fashion. And her retirement fund would certainly enjoy the unexpected infusion of cash.
"Have a safe trip home," Norville said, and Tess gave her a thumbs-up.
When she pulled away, the GPS said, "Hello, Tess. I see we're taking a trip."
"Yes indeed," she said. "And a good day for it, wouldn't you say?"
Unlike the computers in science fiction movies, Tom was poorly equipped for light conversation, although Tess sometimes helped him. He told her to make a right turn four hundred yards ahead, then take her first left. The map on the Tomtom's screen displayed green arrows and street names, sucking the information down from some whirling metal ball of technology high above.
She was soon on the outskirts of Chicopee, but Tom sent her past the turn for I-84 without comment and into countryside that was flaming with October color and smoky with the scent of burning leaves. After ten miles or so on something called Old County Road, and just as she was wondering if her GPS had made a mistake (as if), Tom spoke up again.
"In one mile, right turn."
Sure enough, she soon saw a green Stagg Road sign so pocked with shotgun pellets it was almost unreadable. But of course, Tom didn't need signs; in the words of the sociologists (Tess had been a major before discovering her talent for writing about old lady detectives), he was other-directed.
You'll ramble along for sixteen miles or so, Ramona Norville had said, but Tess rambled for only a dozen. She came around a curve, spied an old dilapidated building ahead on her left (the faded sign over the pumpless service island still read ESSO), and then saw--too late--several large, splintered pieces of wood scattered across the road. There were rusty nails jutting from many of them. She jounced across the pothole that had probably dislodged them from some country bumpkin's carelessly packed load, then veered for the soft shoulder in an effort to get around the litter, knowing she probably wasn't going to make it; why else would she hear herself saying Oh-oh?
There was a clack-thump-thud beneath her as chunks of wood flew up against the undercarriage, and then her trusty Expedition began pogoing up and down and pulling to the left, like a horse that's gone lame. She wrestled it into the weedy yard of the deserted store, wanting to get it off the road so someone who happened to come tearing around that last curve wouldn't rear-end her. She hadn't seen much traffic on Stagg Road, but there'd been some, including a couple of large trucks.
"Goddam you, Ramona," she said. She knew it wasn't really the librarian's fault; the head (and probably only member) of The Richard Widmark Fan Appreciation Society, Chicopee Branch, had only been trying to be helpful, but Tess didn't know the name of the dummocks who had dropped his nail-studded shit on the road and then gone gaily on his way, so Ramona had to do.
"Would you like me to recalculate your route, Tess?" Tom asked, making her jump.
She turned the GPS off, then killed the engine, as well. She wasn't going anywhere for awhile. It was very quiet out here. She heard birdsong, a metallic ticking sound like an old wind-up clock, and nothing else. The good news was that the Expedition seemed to be leaning to the left front instead of just leaning. Perhaps it was only the one tire. She wouldn't need a tow, if that was the case; just a little help from Triple-A.
When she got out and looked at the left front tire, she saw a splintered piece of wood impaled on it by a large, rusty spike. Tess uttered a one-syllable expletive that had never crossed the lips of a Knitting Society member, and got her cell phone out of the little storage compartment between the bucket seats. She would now be lucky to get home before dark, and Fritzy would have to be content with his bowl of dry food in the pantry. So much for Ramona Norville's shortcut... although to be fair, Tess supposed the same thing could have happened to her on the interstate; certainly she had avoided her share of potentially car-crippling crap on many thruways, not just I-84.
The conventions of horror tales and mysteries--even mysteries of the bloodless, one-corpse variety enjoyed by her fans--were surprisingly similar, and as she flipped open her phone she thought, In a story, it wouldn't work. This was a case of life imitating art, because when she powered up her Nokia, the words NO SERVICE appeared in the window. Of course. Being able to use her phone would be too simple.
She heard an indifferently muffled engine approaching, turned, and saw an old white van come around the curve that had done her in. On the side was a cartoon skeleton pounding a drum kit that appeared to be made out of cupcakes. Written in drippy horror-movie script above this apparition (much more peculiar than a fan foto of Richard Widmark on a librarian's office wall) were the words ZOMBIE BAKERS. For a moment Tess was too bemused to wave, and when she did, the driver of the Zombie Bakers truck was busy trying to avoid the mess on the road and didn't notice her.
He was quicker to the shoulder than Tess had been, but the van had a higher center of gravity than the Expedition, and for a moment she was sure it was going to roll and land on its side in the ditch. It stayed up--barely--and regained the road beyond the spilled chunks of wood. The van disappeared around the next curve, leaving behind a blue cloud of exhaust and a smell of hot oil.
"Damn you, Zombie Bakers!" Tess yelled, then began to laugh. Sometimes it was all you could do.
She clipped her phone to the waistband of her dress slacks, went out to the ro
ad, and began picking up the mess herself. She did it slowly and carefully, because up close it became obvious that all the pieces of wood (which were painted white and looked as if they had been stripped away by someone in the throes of a home renovation project) had nails in them. Big ugly ones. She worked slowly because she didn't want to cut herself, but she also hoped to be out here, observably doing A Good Work of Christian Charity, when the next car came along. But by the time she'd finished picking up everything but a few harmless splinters and casting the big pieces into the ditch below the shoulder of the road, no other cars had come along. Perhaps, she thought, the Zombie Bakers had eaten everyone in this immediate vicinity and were now hurrying back to their kitchen to put the leftovers into the always-popular People Pies.
She walked back to the defunct store's weedy parking lot and looked moodily at her leaning car. Thirty thousand dollars' worth of rolling iron, four-wheel drive, independent disc brakes, Tom the Talking Tomtom... and all it took to leave you stranded was a piece of wood with a nail in it.
But of course they all had nails, she thought. In a mystery--or a horror movie--that wouldn't constitute carelessness; that would constitute a plan. A trap, in fact.
"Too much imagination, Tessa Jean," she said, quoting her mother... and that was ironic, of course, since it was her imagination that had ended up providing her with her daily bread. Not to mention the Daytona Beach home where her mother had spent the last six years of her life.
In the big silence she again became aware of that tinny ticking sound. The abandoned store was of a kind you didn't see much in the twenty-first century: it had a porch. The lefthand corner had collapsed and the railing was broken in a couple of places, but yes, it was an actual porch, charming even in its dilapidation. Maybe because of its dilapidation. Tess supposed general store porches had become obsolete because they encouraged you to sit a spell and chat about baseball or the weather instead of just paying up and hustling your credit cards on down the road to some other place where you could swipe them at the checkout. A tin sign hung askew from the porch roof. It was more faded than the Esso sign. She took a few steps closer, raising a hand to her forehead to shade her eyes. YOU LIKE IT IT LIKES YOU. Which was a slogan for what, exactly?
She had almost plucked the answer from her mental junkheap when her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of an engine. As she turned toward it, sure that the Zombie Bakers had come back after all, the sound of the motor was joined by the scream of ancient brakes. It wasn't the white van but an old Ford F-150 pickup with a bad blue paintjob and Bondo around the headlights. A man in bib overalls and a gimme cap sat behind the wheel. He was looking at the litter of wood scraps in the ditch.
"Hello?" Tess called. "Pardon me, sir?"
He turned his head, saw her standing in the overgrown parking lot, flicked a hand in salute, pulled in beside her Expedition, and turned off his engine. Given the sound of it, Tess thought that an act tantamount to mercy killing.
"Hey, there," he said. "Did you pick that happy crappy up off the road?"
"Yes, all but the piece that got my left front tire. And--" And my phone doesn't work out here, she almost added, then didn't. She was a woman in her late thirties who went one-twenty soaking wet, and this was a strange man. A big one. "--and here I am," she finished, a bit lamely.
"I'll change it forya if you got a spare," he said, working his way out of his truck. "Do you?"
For a moment she couldn't reply. The guy wasn't big, she'd been wrong about that. The guy was a giant. He had to go six-six, but head-to-foot was only part of it. He was deep in the belly, thick in the thighs, and as wide as a doorway. She knew it was impolite to stare (another of the world's facts learned at her mother's knee), but it was hard not to. Ramona Norville had been a healthy chunk of woman, but standing next to this guy, she would have looked like a ballerina.
"I know, I know," he said, sounding amused. "You didn't think you were going to meet the Jolly Green Giant out here in the williwags, didja?" Only he wasn't green; he was tanned a deep brown. His eyes were also brown. Even his cap was brown, although faded almost white in several places, as if it had been splattered with bleach at some point in its long life.
"I'm sorry," she said. "It's just that I was thinking you don't ride in that truck of yours, you wear it."
He put his hands on his hips and guffawed at the sky. "Never heard it put like that before, but you're sort of right. When I win the lottery, I'm going to buy myself a Hummer."
"Well, I can't buy you one of those, but if you change my tire, I'd be happy to pay you fifty dollars."
"You kiddin? I'll do it for free. You saved me a mess of my own when you picked up that scrapwood."
"Someone went past in a funny truck with a skeleton on the side, but he missed it."
The big guy had been heading for Tess's flat front tire, but now he turned back to her, frowning. "Someone went by and didn't offer to help you out?"
"I don't think he saw me."
"Didn't stop to pick up that mess for the next fellow, either, did he?"
"No. He didn't."
"Just went on his way?"
"Yes." There was something about these questions she didn't quite like. Then the big guy smiled and Tess told herself she was being silly.
"Spare under the cargo compartment floor, I suppose?"
"Yes. That is, I think so. All you have to do is--"
"Pull up on the handle, yep, yep. Been there, done that."
As he ambled around to the back of her Expedition with his hands tucked deep into the pockets of his overalls, Tess saw that the door of his truck hadn't shut all the way and the dome light was on. Thinking that the F-150's battery might be as battered as the truck it was powering, she opened the door (the hinge screamed almost as loudly as the brakes) and then slammed it closed. As she did, she looked through the cab's back window and into the pickup's bed. There were several pieces of wood scattered across the ribbed and rusty metal. They were painted white and had nails sticking out of them.
For a moment, Tess felt as if she were having an out-of-body experience. The ticking sign, YOU LIKE IT IT LIKES YOU, now sounded not like an old-fashioned alarm clock but a ticking bomb.
She tried to tell herself the scraps of wood meant nothing, stuff like that only meant something in the kind of books she didn't write and the kind of movies she rarely watched: the nasty, bloody kind. It didn't work. Which left her with two choices. She could either go on trying to pretend because to do otherwise was terrifying, or she could take off running for the woods on the other side of the road.
Before she could decide, she smelled the whopping aroma of mansweat. She turned and he was there, towering over her with his hands in the side pockets of his overalls. "Instead of changing your tire," he said pleasantly, "how about I fuck you? How would that be?"
Then Tess ran, but only in her mind. What she did in the real world was to stand pressed against his truck, looking up at him, a man so tall he blocked out the sun and put her in his shadow. She was thinking that not two hours ago four hundred people--mostly ladies in hats--had been applauding her in a small but entirely adequate auditorium. And somewhere south of here, Fritzy was waiting for her. It dawned on her--laboriously, like lifting something heavy--that she might never see her cat again.
"Please don't kill me," some woman said in a very small and very humble voice.
"You bitch," he said. He spoke in the tone of a man reflecting on the weather. The sign went on ticking against the eave of the porch. "You whiny whore bitch. Gosh sakes."
His right hand came out of his pocket. It was a very big hand. On the pinky finger was a ring with a red stone in it. It looked like a ruby, but it was too big to be a ruby. Tess thought it was probably just glass. The sign ticked. YOU LIKE IT IT LIKES YOU. Then the hand turned into a fist and came speeding toward her, growing until everything else was blotted out.
There was a muffled metallic bang from somewhere. She thought it was her head colliding with
the side of the pickup truck's cab. Tess thought: Zombie Bakers. Then for a little while it was dark.
- 6 -
She came to in a large shadowy room that smelled of damp wood, ancient coffee, and prehistoric pickles. An old paddle fan hung crookedly from the ceiling just above her. It looked like the broken merry-go-round in that Hitchcock movie, Strangers on a Train. She was on the floor, naked from the waist down, and he was raping her. The rape seemed secondary to the weight: he was also crushing her. She could barely draw a breath. It had to be a dream. But her nose was swollen, a lump that felt the size of a small mountain had grown at the base of her skull, and splinters were digging into her buttocks. You didn't notice those sorts of details in dreams. And you didn't feel actual pain in dreams; you always woke up before the real pain started. This was happening. He was raping her. He had taken her inside the old store and he was raping her while golden dust motes twirled lazily in the slanting afternoon sun. Somewhere people were listening to music and buying products online and taking naps and talking on phones, but in here a woman was being raped and she was that woman. He had taken her underpants; she could see them frothing from the pocket in the bib of his overalls. That made her think of Deliverance, which she had watched at a college film retrospective, back in the days when she had been slightly more adventurous in her moviegoing. Get them panties down, one of the hillbillies had said before commencing to rape the fat townie. It was funny what crossed your mind when you were lying under three hundred pounds of country meat with a rapist's cock creaking back and forth inside you like an unoiled hinge.
"Please," she said. "Oh please, no more."
"Lots more," he said, and here came that fist again, filling her field of vision. The side of her face went hot, there was a click in the middle of her head, and she blacked out.
- 7-
The next time she came to, he was dancing around her in his overalls, tossing his hands from side to side and singing "Brown Sugar" in a squalling, atonal voice. The sun was going down, and the abandoned store's two west-facing windows--the glass dusty but miraculously unbroken by vandals--were filled with fire. His shadow danced behind him, capering down the board floor and up the wall, which was marked with light squares where advertising signs had once hung. The sound of his cludding workboots was apocalyptic.