panorama of the sea, Jeanette began to feel a little better. “Maybe you were right, after all,” she said, sighing, relaxing into the seat. “Maybe this is just what we both needed.”
Chet reached out and squeezed her hand reassuringly, pressing his foot a little harder on the accelerator and inclining his head toward the view of the Pacific. “On a morning like this, there’s nothing like it in the whole world, is there?” The needle on the speedometer crept up slowly, edging past fifty, and Chet eased his foot back on the accelerator, knowing that in another mile or so he’d have to begin slowing down again for the series of hairpin turns that curled along the convoluted coastline between Barrington and Stratford.
Instead of slowing down, the car continued to accelerate.
Chet felt a rush of adrenaline flow through him at the car’s strange behavior, but then figured out what must have happened.
The cruise control. He must have left it on and accidentally touched the Resume button.
But even as he pressed the brake to cut the speed controller out automatically and begin slowing the car, he realized that the cruise system didn’t work that way.
Whenever you came to a complete stop, the speed preset was automatically canceled. And if the engine was shut off, surely that would do it, too.
His right foot pressed down on the brake pedal, but instead of feeling the minute jerk as the cruise control disengaged and the engine, as well as the brakes, began to slow the car, he felt the engine fighting the brakes.
Jeanette glanced over at him worriedly. “Aren’t we going a little fast?”
Chet said nothing, pressing harder on the brakes. The car began slowing down, and the tension that had built up inside him began to ease. “Accelerator’s stuck, I think,” he muttered. “Probably something loose in the linkage. It won’t take more than a minute to fix if I’ve got a pair of pliers or a crescent wrench in the trunk.”
“Oh, Lord,” Jeanette groaned. “All we need right now is a big car repair bill.”
“There won’t be a bill,” Chet replied, his foot pressing yet harder as the engine continued to battle against the brakes. “If it’s the linkage, it’s hardly a problem at all.”
Suddenly he realized that the problem was more serious than he’d thought, for as the brakes heated up, they began to slip, and now the car was accelerating again.
Half a mile ahead of them was the first of the curves, as the road began snaking along a narrow cut carved out of the rock cliff that rose out of the sea.
“Honey, slow down!” Jeanette demanded. “You can’t—”
“I’m trying to!” Chet snapped. “But the brakes are heating, and I’ve got to let up on them for a second.” He eased off on the brakes, and the car surged ahead, the engine roaring as it was freed of the drag provided by the brakes.
As Chet stared at it in sudden fear, the speedometer rose past sixty, then seventy.
“Chet, slow down!” Jeanette cried, sitting up straight in the seat and staring out the windshield at the sharp curve to the left that was only a few hundred yards ahead now.
Chet slammed his foot on the brake pedal, and the car once more began slowing, but within a few seconds the brakes had overheated once more, and he felt them starting to fade away.
The speedometer needle dipped below seventy for a second, then once more began creeping upward.
Frantically, Chet jerked on the transmission lever, and when it failed to respond, tried to switch off the ignition.
The key refused to turn. The car seemed to be operating under its own volition.
They hit the first curve at seventy-five, Chet’s knuckles white as he clutched the steering wheel. The tires screamed in protest as they went into the turn, but the road was banked here, and the wheels held. Fifty yards farther on, the road twisted back to the right, and then, if Chet remembered right, went into the first of the hairpins, turning a full 180 degrees to head out on the northern wall of a deep cleft in the coastline.
The car survived the second curve, too, but both the Aldriches heard a violent grinding sound as they slued to the left, the rear fenders scraping against the low rock guard wall, the only thing protecting them from shooting off into the sea.
“Stop!” Jeanette screamed. “For God’s sake, do something!”
Chet got the car back into the right lane, but it was fully out of control now, still accelerating as it shot down a grade toward the hairpin turn and the narrow bridge that spanned the gap of the cleft at its tightest point.
“We’re not going to make it!” he shouted. “Get your head down!”
The car was doing nearly ninety when they hit the turn. Though Chet turned the wheel all the way to the lock, it wasn’t enough.
The front of the car nosed onto the bridge, but at almost the same instant, the rear wheels lost their traction and the big sedan spun out of control.
Jeanette’s side of the car slammed into the end of the concrete railing on the right side of the bridge, the door buckling in, the seat belt mounted in the doorpost giving way instantly.
Jeanette was hurled across the front seat almost into Chet’s lap as the car continued to spin, the rear end whipping off the road while the sedan pivoted on the edge of the bridge. A second later it tumbled over the edge, flipping in midair before slamming into the rock face of the cliff.
By the time it came to rest on the floor of the gorge and burst into flames, Chet and Jeanette Aldrich, mercifully, were already dead.
As the sun rose higher and the autumn morning brightened, a billow of smoke rose from the burning wreckage lying a hundred feet below the bridge.
No more than a minute later a large truck, creeping down the steep, narrow road in its lowest gear, rounded the curve from the north, and the driver saw the plume of smoke drifting up from far below.
“Jesus,” he breathed. As he switched on his flashers and ground the truck to a stop to check the wreckage for survivors, he reached for the microphone of his C.B. radio. “Got someone who missed the bridge above Barrington,” he reported. “Looks like it just happened. Car’s at the bottom, burnin’ like crazy.”
The telephone rang in Hildie Kramer’s apartment just as the morning news was beginning, and Hildie muted the television as she picked up the phone.
“Mrs. Kramer?” a male voice asked.
“Yes.” Hildie’s nerves tingled. The heaviness of the voice told her that whatever her caller had to say this early in the morning wasn’t going to be good news.
“This is Sergeant Dover, of the Barrington Police Department.”
Hildie’s heart skipped a beat. “Have you found Steven Conners?” she asked, already preparing herself for a carefully tempered expression of grief over the teacher’s death.
“I wish we had,” Dover told her. “It’s about the boy who found his car.”
Hildie’s mind worked quickly. Josh had been acting strangely last night. Had he slipped out of the house during the night? But why? He knew nothing of what was happening in the hidden laboratory. “Josh MacCallum?” she asked.
“The other one. Jeff Aldrich.”
“I see,” Hildie said guardedly, keeping her voice steady, although her sense of apprehension instantly rose. What had happened? Had Jeff told his parents the truth?
“I’m at the boy’s home right now,” Dover went on. “I’m afraid there’s been an accident, and the boy’s here by himself. He asked me to call you.”
“An accident?” Hildie echoed. “What sort of accident?”
“I’m afraid it’s his folks. Their car went off the bridge north of town. Happened about forty-five minutes ago.”
“Dear Lord,” Hildie breathed. “Chet and Jeanette? Are they all right?”
“No, ma’am,” Sergeant Dover replied. “I’m afraid they’re not. That’s why I’m calling you. Neither of them survived.”
Hildie steadied herself against a table as the words sank in, and when she spoke, her voice was trembling. “Ill be there right away,” she said. “Tell Jeff I’m coming.” Without waiting for a reply from the police officer, she hung up the phone, ran a comb through her hair, then left through the door that opened onto the parking lot.
