She flopped the shirt over the shower curtain rod.
After drying her hands on a towel, she turned off the bathroom light and walked through the dark trailer until she found the switch by the front door. She flicked it. A lamp came on beside the sofa.
In the kitchen, she opened a drawer and took out an old dish drying towel. The flimsy white cloth had ragged edges and a couple of holes in it. Also, it was white. But she didn’t have any dark ones.
This’ll do, she thought.
She shook it open and tried to wrap it around her chest. It was too short for that. But it was long enough to hang from her shoulders to her waist, so she attempted to tie its comers together behind her neck. They wouldn’t reach far enough. She took care of the problem with a six-inch bit of string she found in a drawer. In less than a minute, the dish towel draped her front like a large, flimsy bib. Her shoulders and back remained bare, but that was fine; the towel covered her front and it was clean and dry.
Now, all she needed was a weapon.
The weapon she wanted was Agnes’s butcher knife.
After using it on Slade, she’d dropped it to the floor beside his body, hurried across the room and taken Eric into her arms.
If she wanted it, she would need to return to the bedroom.
“A knife’s a knife,” she muttered. She didn’t believe it, though. Not really.
Agnes’s knife was special.
Now that she’d used it herself, it almost seemed to possess a protective magic. It had saved her from Slade. Maybe it would save her from
“Bull,” she said.
Besides, she was pretty sure that she wouldn’t really need a knife. This was a secret mission to retrieve Slade’s car. The whole idea was to be sneaky and not have to fight anyone. A knife would just be a precaution.
There were several on a rack above the kitchen counter. She chose one that was just as large as Agnes’s.
Knife in hand, she walked silently back to Eric’s room.
She stopped outside his door and listened. She heard the slow, easy hiss of his breathing. From the sound of it, she knew he was submerged in the depths of sleep.
She returned to the living room, opened the front door, and stepped outside. Though the day had been sunny and warm, the night was cool—chilly enough for a heavy shirt or windbreaker. She shivered a little as she shut the door and made her way carefully down the stairs.
The old, makeshift stairway wobbled. Its wooden planks felt damp and slippery from the moisture in the air. Sandy had fallen off it a couple of times in the month since moving into the trailer, but she didn’t fall tonight.
The ground at the bottom of the stairs felt cool and wet. As she hurried along, pine needles clung to the bottoms of her feet.
She walked completely around the trailer, being careful not to trip over its hitch, bump into her barbeque grill, water tank, or propane tank, or collide with her clothes line. There was no sign of Slade’s car, or anything unusual. Except for the patches of moonlight, the clearing that surrounded her trailer looked dark. The forest looked even darker; only flecks of moonlight made it down through the branches.
She found her way to the old tire tracks and started following them down the hillside. She’d been using the twin trails as footpaths ever since moving into the trailer, hiking downhill each morning on one side and hiking uphill every evening on the other. Weeds had grown high in the middle, but the paths were fairly clear and easy to see in the darkness.
She stayed in the one on the right.
Around every bend, she half expected to find Marlon Slade’s car. But she rounded one bend after another without running into it.
Sandy didn’t mind the hike. She was eager to find his car and get out of town, but she really enjoyed being out like this. She liked the free, exciting way it felt to be wandering the night in nothing except her shorts and the draping dish towel. She liked the feel of her moving body, and the fabric brushing softly against her skin. She liked the cool touch of the moving air. She liked the feel of the moist earth under her feet.
Her footfalls were almost silent. She could hear the wind sliding through the trees, the squeal of seagulls and the murmur of the distant surf.
Wherever we go, she thought, it has to be a place like this.
We’ll find a nice clearing in the hills overlooking the coast, and never leave.
“Rotten creep,” she muttered, and felt a tightness in her throat.
We shouldn’t have to leave, she thought. It isn’t fair.
They’d already been forced out of Agnes’s house because of the damn movie people. She and Eric had been living there in secret, which had been a tricky business in the first place. But they couldn’t possibly remain hidden once the filming began, so Agnes had made arrangements for them to move into the trailer.
She’d had mixed feelings about leaving Agnes’s home.
She loved Agnes like a mother and sister and best friend all rolled into one, and had known she would miss her terribly. Not only that, but she’d been nervous about the idea of living alone.
While she’d sort of dreaded it, however, she’d also found herself thrilled by the prospect of having her own private place to live—even if it was nothing but a crummy old trailer.
She’d soon found that she
As things turned out, she could’ve stayed at Agnes’s house for another full month. The film had run into some kind of problem that had delayed the start of shooting.
But she was glad she’d had the month.
The way things looked now, it might be the
Maybe she would find another place just as good...
No. Impossible. Malcasa was her home. It was where she’d met Agnes and the others, where she’d fallen in love with the father of her child, where she’d given birth.
Sandy began to weep as she walked down the trail.
She knew that she had to leave. There was no choice. She had to leave even though she’d killed Marlon Slade in self defense and no jury would find her guilty of murder.
Because if she stayed, she would be found out. Eric would be found out. It would be the end of their lives together.
The towel came in handy. As she strode down the trail crying, she lifted it now and again to wipe the tears from her eyes and cheeks.
It just isn’t fair, she thought. We never did anything wrong.
Sandy tried to stop crying. It was noisy and messy and childish.
We’ll be fine, she told herself. We’ll just take the trailer someplace else and dump that dirty rotten son-of- bitch’s body along the way and we’ll live by ourselves in the hills and everything’ll be fine.
Soon, she reached the bottom of the slope. Using a tree for cover, she glanced up and down the two-lane, paved road. No cars were coming.
Only one car was in sight.
Parked on the gravel by the side of the road, not far away, was a tiny MG convertible.
Sandy groaned.
No, she thought. Please. Don’t let it be his.
She couldn’t possibly tow the trailer behind
Taking the key case out of her pocket, she hurried over to the sports car. She jerked open its door, dropped
