He shifted to a lower, slower gear, cautiously using the clutch, avoiding the brakes. Then he switched on the windshield wipers. I fiddled with the defroster in an attempt to blow more hot air on the windshield, which was rapidly crusting over. We were in the Jeep, so I wasn’t really worried, but I didn’t like it, either. Suddenly, I wanted nothing more than to be home.
And then, again just like that, things got worse.
A lot of red brake lights up ahead warned us to slow … slow … slow … until we found ourselves stopped dead in the right-hand, westbound, lane of the highway. Suddenly there was nobody going the other way. And there were cars cautiously forming a line behind us.
Geof released a string of expletives.
“I don’t fucking believe this.”
I knew what was coming next.
There was a police-band radio and even a cellular telephone in the Jeep, so he could have turned to either of those to find out what was going on up the road ahead of us—an accident, probably—but I knew he wouldn’t settle for that. He’d have to get out of the Jeep, walk down the side of the road, until he disappeared from my view in the snow, and satisfy himself with a firsthand view of the situation. He’d want to find out if they needed help, a hand from a fellow cop, a little traffic control … or worse … picking up bodies, helping paramedics, taking names …
He started pulling on his gloves.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked him.
He looked around, through the windows at the swirling white, as if seeking an answer for my question. There was a red stop sign about ten yards ahead of us, and we could barely make out the end of a gravel driveway a few feet beyond the sign. Past the driveway, all was black and white, because the highway dropped off down a hill, and then rounded a bend that straightened out onto a little bridge.
“When the traffic starts to move again,” Geof said to me, “why don’t you pull into that driveway, and wait for me, Jenny. Don’t come looking for me, because there might not be any good place for you to stop the car down there. I’ll walk back and find you.” He glanced at me for assent “All right?”
“Yes.”
Always prepared, Geof had heavy black rubber boots in the back, which he located and began to pull over his good brown loafers. From the floor behind us, he also pulled out a stocking cap that covered everything but his eyes and his mouth, and he put a battered old winter cap on over that He’d worn a long, stylish black overcoat to the party, so that was sufficient to keep the rest of him protected. When he was fully ready, he opened his door, letting a whirl of cold air and snow into the car.
“You know where we are?” he asked me.
He appeared weird and sinister in his stocking cap, and slightly absurd, when you considered the whole outfit.
I nodded. “Crowley Creek’s just over the hill down there,” I said. “And I even know who lives at the end of that driveway, Geof. It’s the Kennedys—you know, the people who own The Dime Store. If I start to freeze to death, I’ll go knock on their door.”
He leaned over to kiss me through the hole for his mouth, and then he was gone, a large black shadow bent into the wind at the right side of the road, quickly disappearing from my view.
It took forty minutes for the traffic to begin to move again.
And still, I didn’t know what had actually halted us. I could have turned on the police radio, or placed a phone call and found out. I still don’t know why I didn’t do either of those logical and natural things, but I didn’t. I simply sat alone in the silent car, and passively waited to find out. Maybe I didn’t want to hear the sense of crackling urgency that would have pelted me from the radio, not while I knew that my husband was down there.
I just wanted to wait, calmly. And then to see him.
When the car ahead of me inched forward, I did too. I didn’t stop at the stop sign, however, because it wasn’t really an intersection, and I didn’t want to take the chance of sliding or stalling. Instead, I cautiously turned into the gravel driveway, bumping over a stripped Christmas tree that lay across it. I assumed that the Kennedys had put it out for the trashmen to pick up the next day. This was only ten days past Christmas, mind you, only four days—or nights—into January.
I pulled out of the way of traffic and turned off the engine.
After another ten minutes passed and Geof still didn’t reappear, I decided that the Kennedys’ house looked warm and cozy and well-lighted at the end of the drive, and that maybe Nellie and Bill Kennedy might have a cup of hot coffee for a weary traveler.
And that’s where Geof found me a half-hour later.
I was holding a cup of hot cider in my hands, while Nellie anxiously paced her kitchen, stopping frequently to pull back her curtains and stare into the storm, both of us wondering what had happened … and if anybody was hurt or killed … and whether we knew any of them. Bill was asleep upstairs, but Nellie had been awakened by the terrible sound of vehicles crashing together, she told me. It was she who’d called 911.
“Three-car pileup,” Geof told us, as he stamped his boots on Nellie’s welcome mat. “And a pickup truck. Two people pretty seriously injured, the others banged up, but nobody’s dead. They got off lucky. One of those damn fools ran the stop sign, skidded down the hill into the other lane and hit the pickup truck, and then everybody else piled into them. It was a damn mess. Thank you, Mrs. Kennedy.”
She was coming toward him with a cup of cider.
It had involved nobody that any of us knew.
“I’m so relieved,” Nellie said.
We left her kitchen a half-hour later—when it was nearly three o’clock in the morning—and made it safely home an hour after that. The next day, when we found out that one of the accident victims had died, we took it kind of personally, having been there. But then it was over, apparently, and that was all there was to it.
Except that things connect—winter snow, spring rains, autumn leaves—in ways we never suspect, and nature never intended. And now I think that it may have been some unconscious connection with me—and that night—that caused Nellie Kennedy to break down in front of me, ten forgetful months later. After that, after Nellie cried, it seemed as if everything started to crash together, like vehicles sliding horribly out of control on a slick highway …
Look for Twilight
Wherever Hardcover Books Are Sold
mid-September 1995
NANCY PICKARD has won numerous mystery awards for her short stories and novels, including an Anthony Award for Say No to Murder, a Macavity Award for Marriage Is Murder, and two Agatha Awards for Best Novel, for Bum Steer in 1990 and I.O.U in 1991. She was also nominated for an Edgar Award for I.O.U. A former reporter and editor, she is a past president of Sisters in Crime, the international association of mystery writers and fans. She lives in Kansas, where she is working on a new mystery to be published by Pocket Books.
Nancy Pickard, Confession
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