And thus lose sight of the fact that she was driving to her death, that she was alive only because a suitable site had not yet been reached.
It was one thing to have recognized the seal set upon her by Dickens in her bedroom doorway; it was another now that the abstract was becoming real. Again Amanda’s lungs did not seem to be getting enough air, and it was with difficulty that she managed what would have been the normal thing to say if she were still deceived: “Isn’t it about time to find a telephone booth?”
If she had had any smallest doubt about her reconstruction of events it would have been dissipated by Claude’s extreme glibness. “There’s one up ahead, about a mile.”
A spasm of actual nausea quivered through Amanda’s stomach. She did not travel this road often, but she remembered a picnic area with benches and trestle tables under trees but no toilet facilities, so that it might be weeks or even months before—
Slow the car enough to jump out and commence a blind and hopeless run in the snow? Try to engineer an accident which would involve only the passenger side of the car? A racing driver might have attempted it; Amanda knew that she could not. Even in this extremity her sense of survival was too strong for inexpert aiming at a tree or a telephone pole.
Far ahead, well past the picnic area in this crystal air —in fact at a main junction—were tiny, shifting Christmas lights. No, not Christmas lights, but pinpoints of red being blanked out occasionally as if by intervening figures. “You’d better open your window,” said Amanda with an air of defiance, staking everything on a diversionary tactic of her own, “because I’m going to smoke a cigarette. Incidentally, there’s somebody behind us.”
Claude twisted as she reached for the cigarettes and matches on the dashboard. Her foot went down on the accelerator, not in a sudden burst of speed which might cause a skid but in a steadily building pressure, and he turned back at once, saw the distant roadblock, and ripped a few savage words at her as he snatched the keys out of the ignition.
The car continued to travel, weaving and slewing as Claude lunged across Amanda and reached the headlight control, sending them into darkness. He kicked at her ankle and found the brake. For a matter of seconds he was engaged with the wheel, jerking the hood away from a fence of railroad ties black against the snow, and Amanda’s trembling hands found the folder of matches deposited in her lap, struck one and held it to the others, thrust it wildly at the face now as close to hers as it had been to Ellie Peale’s.
She got the door open in the middle of his shriek of rage and pain, and with the car still rolling wrenched herself free of his weight and the floor pedals and went pitching out and down to the road. Even with the snow as cushion the impact dizzied her. She staggered upright and began to run, hearing behind her the slam of the Rabbit’s door.
And here came Dickens, bearing down on her with the cruel white-gold flare of high beams. He was shouting at her. Her whole life experience shriveled to the scope of hours, the tears she had not allowed earlier pouring down her face, Amanda reached the guard rail on the bridge that crossed an irrigation ditch, swung herself terrifiedly over it, and dropped.
She had never looked consciously at the ditch when she drove over it—it was simply there, like the mountains and the far cottonwoods—and it was deeper than she would have guessed. Her ankle gave and she went plummeting down one steep side on her back, her head arrested by sudden agonizing contact with a rock or an iron tree root. Above her, as if in fury gone mad, a horn was blaring.
And she had been wrong, and ruined everything, because when the nightmarish noise had stopped, clods of snowy dirt were disturbed on the ditch bank and a triumphant voice reduced to a mutter by the rush of blood in her ears was laying, “I’ve got her. I’ve got Rosie. . . . Amanda. Are you all right?”
It was Justin she had fled from moments ago, Justin who was now sliding a cautious arm under her shoulders and attempting to lift her to a sitting position. Amanda lifted her bursting, throbbing head cooperatively, and, to the accompaniment of a chopped-off siren and what turned out later to have been a warning shot from the police, went for a short time completely to pieces.
Somewhere in this process there was a shattering collision of metal, followed by shouts. “There goes my car,” observed Justin.
He was correct. At the sight of Amanda’s running, stumbling figure with the Rabbit beyond, he had swung his car broadside, plucked Rosie from the back seat, leaned in to send that signaling echo of horn to the roadblock ahead while his bright lights beaconed into the night. Claude Eggen, slewing the Rabbit around and hearing a siren come to life, had rammed the obstructing car. He had been apprehended with his wig badly singed and melted.
Tow trucks were sent for. A deputy drove Justin and Amanda to the house which she had left with Dickens’ pronouncement upon her. En route, he phoned in the location of the church in which Ellie Peale’s body reposed, and then a description of the man whom Mrs. Balsam would identify, still by means of printing, as a shaven Harvey Sweet.
Before Amanda gave the statement which would have to be elaborated in detail, before she drank the coffee Justin made and laced heavily with rum—mystifyingly, he was at the same time supplying himself with Port du Saint which he tucked anyhow into rolls—she put Rosie
