Lorelei’s prediction that we would make it to North Carolina that night was wishful thinking. We had been on the road for only three hours when the stress of the day caught up with me and I had to admit I couldn’t keep going much longer. In Petersburg, Virginia, we stopped at a motel with a lighted “Vacancy” sign, and I waited in the car with Porky while Lorelei went in to register. Behind the office window a sleepy-looking desk clerk blinked in surprise when Lorelei paid him in cash. He handed her two keys, and she gave one back to him and asked a question that required a one-word answer. Then she came out to tell me that we would be staying in room 129 and the motel coffee shop opened at seven in the morning.
I drove the Porsche around to the rear of the motel, where I unloaded my overnight bag and the smaller of Lorelei’s two suitcases. Released from his cramped quarters in the backseat, Porky headed straight for some bushes at the corner of the building. Then he came bounding back and broke into a frenzy of high-pitched barking at a black Camaro that had pulled into a parking space several units down from ours.
“We can’t have this,” Lorelei said. “Pets aren’t allowed here. You’re going to have to shut that dog in the car.”
“He’ll be all right once we get him inside,” I promised.
“No, he won’t,” Lorelei said. “I know how he behaves. Every time somebody walks past the door, he’ll start barking. Put him back in the car, and move it away from here. If it’s parked at the back of the lot, he won’t disturb people.”
I moved the car as she asked, with an apology to Porky, who looked so dejected I could hardly stand to leave him. Then I went back to the room to rejoin Lorelei. Once we were secured for the night, exhaustion overwhelmed us, and we didn’t even bother to turn on the television. Lorelei declined first use of the bathroom on the grounds that bathing with a cast on was such an ordeal that she didn’t want to have to face it until morning. I was too grubby to go to bed without a shower, and the water felt so good I stayed under it for ages. When I finally returned to the bedroom, I found my grandmother, still fully dressed, stretched out asleep on one of the beds.
I stood for a moment, gazing down at her, shocked at how much she had aged since the last time I’d seen her. The bulk of the cast accentuated her fragility, and her fine-boned face, slack with sleep and without the benefit of makeup, showed lines and shadows that were usually concealed by cosmetics. Most startling of all, to me at least, was the fact that her honey blond hair was coming in at the roots a stony gray.
Carefully, so as not to wake her, I removed her shoes and placed them on the floor by her unopened suitcase. The room was turning cool from the air-conditioning. I tried to pull up the covers, but she was on top of them, so I took the spread off the second bed and laid it over her, experiencing once again the uncomfortable feeling that she had become the child, and I, the adult. When I clicked off the overhead light and got into my own bed, I expected to sleep like the dead straight through until morning. Expected to, but didn’t, for the moment the room went dark, I came abruptly awake, shot through with the same odd chill that I had experienced in the parking lot at the bank. It was late enough so there were no sounds from adjoining rooms to disturb me, but I had the feeling that someone was awake and aware, reaching out with his mind to touch me in the darkness.
Sliding out from under the sheet, I got out of bed and groped my way across the room to the door. When I placed my hand in its center, I knew instinctively that somebody on the far side was doing so also. Inches away, separated from me by nothing more than a wooden panel, someone was standing on the doorsill, trying to make a decision about what to do next. The drapes across the window were double thick, so he could not know for certain that our lights were off. Still, enough time had passed since we had entered the room for it to be reasonable to assume we were asleep.
I was suddenly acutely aware of how noisy our room was. Lorelei had started to snore, a sharp, rasping sound that overpowered the monotonous hum of the air conditioner, and the thud of my heartbeat crashed like a drum in my ears, so loud that I was sure it could be heard for miles.
Then I heard the most frightening sound of all, the scrape of something metallic being cautiously slipped into the keyhole. My mind flew back to the sight of Lorelei in the office, refusing the second key that was being offered her. The desk clerk had obviously realized there were two in our party. Ifsomeone had gone to him later and identified himself as Lorelei’s companion, the clerk would not have thought twice about giving him the duplicate.
All this flashed through my mind in the fraction of a second it took for my hand to hit the deadbolt. The bolt slid into place with a sound like a gunshot, and without pausing, I leapt to the window and jerked aside the curtains. The security light by our door illuminated the section of pavement in front of the motel unit, but beyond that on either side lay pools of darkness.
From what I could see, the sidewalk appeared to be empty. In the room behind me, Lorelei continued to snore, undisturbed by my sudden burst of activity. Had anything actually happened, or had I imagined it? Was there a figure out there crouched in the darkness, or was I inventing terrors that had no substance? When I strained my eyes and stared hard into one of the shadow pockets, I could almost believe I could see a shift in the blackness as though there were somebody there who was changing position.
I let the curtain fall back into place, and in the deluge of heavier darkness the lighted dial on the telephone on the table between the beds glowed softly. I crossed the room to the phone and dialed the office. After a dozen rings, I hung up the receiver. I could only suppose the Vacancy sign was now off and the weary clerk had finally retired for the night. By this time I was too charged with adrenaline to sleep. I gotback into bed and lay there, rigidly alert, with my earsattuned for the slightest rustle at the door. Hours passed,while dawn crept closer and closer, and my mind churned with visions of vampire faces at the window and bloodstained talons picking surreptitiously atdoor locks. It wasn’t until I heard people beginning to stir in the units on either side of our own that I was finally able to relax enough to doze off for a while.
I awoke several hours later to the sound of water running in the bathroom and opened my eyes to find that the bed across from me was empty. Dragging myself out of bed, I pulled on my clothes and opened the door of our room to a blue and gold morning and the realization that it was much later than it ought to be. Except for the black Camaro that Porky had reacted to so violently, the cars on our side of the lot had all departed, and two girls in shorts were pushing a housekeeping cart along the sidewalk and dashing into rooms with clean towels and sheets.
I shut the door behind me and walked around the side of the building to the office. When I entered, I found that the clerk from the night before had been replaced by a plump young woman with frizzy hair.
“Good morning!” she chirped in greeting. “What can I do for you?”
“My grandmother and I are in room one twenty-nine,” I told her. “We’re getting ready to leave and can only find one room key. Neither of us can remember how many we had. Is there a second key we ought to be looking for?”
“I don’t know,” said the girl. “I just came on duty this morning. I’ll check and see if any of the duplicates are missing.”
She turned to inspect a board of pegs on the wall.
“No, as far as I can tell, they’re all here.”
“Good,” I said. “Then we don’t have to do a room search.” The relief in my voice was far from manufactured. After leaving the office I stopped by the car to get Porky, who immediately made a dash for his favorite bushes. Then I took him back to the room, where Lorelei, now bathed and dressed, was putting on lipstick.
“I thought that’s where you’d gone,” she said, nodding at Porky. “I hope he didn’t chew up everything in the car.”
“Of course not,” I said. “That’s not one of Porky’s vices.”
“It’s nice to know he has one redeeming feature,” said Lorelei.
She finished putting on makeup without assistance, but allowed me to help with the buttons on her dress. Then I carried our bags back to the Porsche, and after checking out at the office, we drove around to have breakfast in the coffee shop. We were lucky enough to be seated next to a window, and the bright morning sunlight poured in across our table, flooding our plates and cups with molten gold. The coffee was hot and strong, and the rolls rich with cinnamon, and suddenly everything seemed much better. I considered telling Lorelei about my panic attack in the night, but the light of day made the whole adventure seem laughable. What was there to be gained by frightening my grandmother with a story about something I’d probably only imagined? It wasn’t as though a key to our room had been missing. Everything at the office had been in order. There was always the possibility that the duplicate key had been borrowed and then returned, but it was far more likely it hadn’t been taken at all.
So I sat and enjoyed breakfast with my grandmother, who was making a heroic effort to put the past behind her. When we got back in the car we made the discovery that we must have inadvertently packed the road map in one of our suitcases, so we had to stop at a service station to get another one. Our departure was further delayed by a stop at a convenience store to buy dog food, so it was after nine before we were finally under way. We stopped at noon for lunch at a Howard Johnson’s and twenty minutes later were back on the road again.
It wasn’t until mid-afternoon that I happened to glance in the rearview mirror to see that the car behind us was a black Camaro.
CHAPTER 16
There are thousands of Camaros in the world, and out of those, a significant number must be black. It was nothing more than coincidence that the car behind us onthe freeway was the same make and color as one of the many cars that had been parked at our motel.
I recited those statements over and over in my mind as I worked to get the rearview mirror repositioned so it would reflect the person at the wheel. The problem was that the car was too far back. I glanced across at Lorelei in the seat beside me. Lulled by the rhythm of the road and the monotony of the scenery, she had nodded off soon after lunch and was now napping peacefully with her head tilted back against the headrest. I hated to disturb her for something as insignificant as another black car in a world that was filled with such vehicles. First, I thought I would try to draw the Camaro closer and see if I could get a look at the driver.
Experimentally, I eased up on the accelerator, letting my speed drop slowly from sixty-five to forty in hopes that the Camaro would decide to pull out and pass me. Instead, it too slowed down, continuing to hang well back, but still keeping pace with the travel speed of the Porsche. I accelerated, and the Camaro sped up also, although there was nothing strange about that, I reminded myself. It was natural when driving the freeway to pace yourself according to the car ahead of you. Actually, I had been doing the same thing myself. The moving van in front of us had been doing a steady sixty-five for the past fifty miles, and I had been adjusting my cruising speed to coincide with that. If the van had suddenly increased its speed to seventy, I automatically would have done so also in order to keep the distance between us constant.
Deciding to see what would happen if I altered the pattern, I abruptly changed lanes and pressed the accelerator down almost to the floorboard. The engine roared as the transmission snapped into high and the Porsche went shooting past the lumbering van. The driver turned to glare at us with disapproval as we left him lingering behind in a cloud of exhaust fumes.
I continued bearing down on the accelerator and watched the needle on the speedometer creep higher and higher until itseemed that the Porsche was on its way to becoming airborne.
The burst of speed had jolted Lorelei awake, and she leanedagainst her shoulder harness to regard me with bewilderment.
“What in the world do you think you’re doing, April?!”
“I’m sorry,” I told her. “I didn’t mean to wake you. I wanted to see if that car back there was tailing us.” I glanced in the mirror to see if the Camaro had passed the moving van and was following me at the speed at which I was now driving. It wasn’t, but someone else was, which didn’t surprise me, for I heard the siren one instant before I saw the patrol car.
“Of all the luck!” I muttered. “This would happen now!”
“What did you expect?” snapped Lorelei. “You’re driving like a maniac!”
With a sigh of resignation, I reduced my speed to a point where it was possible to pull over onto the shoulder of the road. The patrol car came to a stop several yards behind us, and the officer got out and came over to confront me.
“I’d like to see your driver’s license,” he told me. As I took it out of my wallet, he continued, “To say you were over the speed limit is putting it mildly. I clocked you at nearly ninety. May I see your registration too, please? This is a lot of car for a kid your age to be driving.”
“This happens to be my car, young man,” Lorelei informed him with dignity. “My granddaughter is driving it for me because I’ve had an injury.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” the officer responded politely. “I’m afraid, though, it’s our policy to check registration. Cars like this one have a habit of disappearing from their owners’ driveways. If that happened to yours, I’m sure you’d be happy we do this.”
So Lorelei hauled the registration out of the glove compartment, and I handed over Valerie Weber’s driver’s license. Then we waited while the patrolman checked both documents and took them back to his car to radio headquarters.
In the meantime, the moving van passed us, creeping along at a snail’s pace in honor of the patrol car, and I caught a snapshot glimpse of the driver, smirking self-righteously out at us through the rolled up window. The officer returned with our documents and wrote out a speeding ticket.
“I see you’ve had your license for only a month,” he said. “It’s a rite of passage for every new driver to have a fender bender, but if you continue to drive like this you’ll end up in the morgue.”
I murmured a few contrite statements and accepted the ticket.
A few minutes later, when we were back on the freeway, Lorelei suddenly said, “You may have been right about that car. It should have passed us while we were stopped, but it didn’t.”
“There was an exit a mile or so back,” I said. “He might have gotten off there.”
“Or he might have pulled over and waited so he wouldn’t lose us by getting ahead of us. If that’s the case, he’ll probably try to catch up with us.”
We fell into silence, both watching the road behind us. Sure enough, it was not long before the black Camaro came into view, barreling along well over the speed limit in the fast left lane. It started slowing down before it came up next to us and then casually shifted over into our lane, pacing itself behind us as though it had been there always, attached to our rear bumper by an invisible cable.
“There should be another exit coming up soon,” Lorelei said. “He won’t be expecting you to take it. That’s probably our best chance of getting away from him. Pull over into the fast lane and start speeding up. You may be able to trick him into overshooting it.”
I nodded, following her meaning without need for elaboration. This time when I changed lanes, the Camaro did too. I again began to accelerate, keeping an eye on the car in the mirror, as the Camaro increased its speed to keep it consistent with ours. It was close enough now so I could see that the driver was a man who was wearing sunglasses. The exit to Weston Road loomed up ahead of us, but I didn’t brake to indicate that I was aware of it. Instead, I checked in the mirror to make sure that all the lanes to my right were empty and continued to increase speed until we were practically flying. Then, without hitting the turn signal, I whispered a prayer and gave the steering wheel a hard twist to the right. The Porsche leapt diagonally across the three vacant lanes and landed on the exit ramp, where it went careening around the loop like gum in a gumball machine.
I was so occupi
ed with the task of keeping the car on the road that I didn’t dare lift my eyes to look in the mirror.
“What happened?” I managed to gasp. “Is he still behind us?”
Lorelei swiveled her head. “I think he missed the exit.” I could tell she was struggling to keep her voice steady. I let the car lose momentum before touching the brake and then gradually began to tap it down into a manageable speed. It wasn’t until we were stopped at a four-way light that I discovered I had been gripping the steering wheel so tightly the blood had left my fingers. I peeled my hands off the wheel and flexed them to get the circulation going again, and then, feeling a little light-headed but back in control, I turned left onto Weston Road and drove at a sensible and legal thirty miles an hour into Tutterville, South Carolina. Tutterville, with its tree-lined streets and neat pastel houses, resembled a movie set for a G-rated film laid in Normaltown, U.S.A. Everywhere you looked there were men washing cars in their driveways and housewives in shorts and halter tops pruning roses. Children romped in sprinklers, and older people were rocking on porches or chatting with neighbors on sun-dappled sidewalks. It was a restful, summer Saturday in a town so postcard-perfect that danger seemed a concept too ridiculous to contemplate.
“Maybe we just imagined it,” I said shakily. “Maybe he wasn’t following us at all.”
“He was following us,” Lorelei said. “No two ways about it. He must have been right on our tail when we left the condo.”
“But how could he have known we were leaving?” I asked. “I hadn’t been in Norwood more than two hours.”
“Obviously, my phone was tapped,” Lorelei said. “He heard you say you were coming and was ready for whatever we decided to do next.”
Her down-to-earth acceptance of what had happened convinced me she was tougher than I’d thought, and I decided to share the experience I had been withholding.