The blue eyes in the reflection were red-rimmed, but not because of remorse. If she had the chance to do it all over again, to right that wrong . . . she bit her lip and pushed the thought out of her mind as her car struggled against the incline. She wasn’t a bad person. Not really. And James . . . Oh, dear God, James . . .
A lump filled her throat as the Corolla nosed upward, snow now covering the pavement and piling along the sides of the road where the plow had come through earlier. She fiddled with the defrost knob, as the windshield was beginning to fog, and cranked the temperature to the highest level.
Nothing.
The fan was broken. Had been for weeks.
“Shit.” She grabbed a used napkin from the coffee shop, which had been wedged into a cup holder. Lump in her throat, she swiped away the film as best she could, then she squinted through the windshield.
What little traffic there had been had thinned, and finally, as the car climbed, engine whining, she found herself alone on this stretch of road winding through the night-dark peaks of the Cascades. She pressed harder on the gas. “Come on. Come on.” Visibility was hampered by the ever-increasing snowfall and, of course, the useless defroster. Once more, she wiped a spot clear above her steering wheel to see that now, in the mountains, the snowstorm was nearly a whiteout.
“Great.”
She thought of James, and her heart crumbled. A wash of memories slipped through her mind, and tears threatened again. She hit the gas at the next sharp turn.
Her wheels shifted.
Spun.
She eased off. “Get a grip,” she told herself as the car straightened out, the beams of her headlights reflecting in a million swirling flakes, the engine lugging down with the steep incline.
Their last fight had been their worst. Never before had anger and nasty words turned physical, but tonight her rage had been mercurial.
More tears.
Blinding her, just as rage had blinded her earlier.
Shaking her head against the memory, she floored the accelerator, snagged the wet, wadded napkin, and took another swipe at the fogged windshield as the road dipped suddenly.
“Crap!”
Her heart froze.
Another corner loomed, this one hairpin sharp.
Automatically, she hit the brakes.
The back tires spun as she turned the steering wheel with her free hand.
The Corolla hit ice and began a slow, steady swirl.
“No . . . no, no, no!” She was high in the mountains, the tops of eighty-foot fir trees level with the road, their icy branches laden with snow, the canyon below invisible. “Oh, God.” She took her foot off both the brake and the gas . . . that was what she was supposed to do. Right? Drive into the spin or some such thing? Her heart pounded in her ears.
In slow motion, she saw the edge of the road, the piles of snow hiding the guard rail, if there was one, and beyond, the darkness.
Fear crystallized her blood.
Don’t panic, Megan! Do NOT panic!
But a scream started to form in her throat.
Suddenly all four wheels found traction, and she had control again.
Oh . . . hallelujah . . .
Heart thudding, nerves jangled, she licked her lips. That was close. So damn close. She let out her breath slowly, concentrated on what she had to do, pushed the fight with James far from her mind and drove ever upward, meeting no cars, which seemed weird even with the blizzard-like conditions here, near the summit. A few more miles and she’d be heading downward.
To Seattle.
To Rebecca.
To sanity.
Over the summit, the car sped up.
She eased on the brakes, hands holding the steering wheel in a death grip. Around one corner. Faster and faster.
Slow it down!
But the car raced forward, gravity pulling her downward, the foggy windshield nearly opaque.
She tapped the brakes a little harder, the back end of the car sliding around a corner, her breath tight in her lungs. She swallowed as she guided the car down the narrowing road, snow piled high on either side.
Just a few miles and—Oh, shit, what’s that? Something in the middle of the road? At the next turn? No!
Her heart a jackhammer, she squinted through a thin patch of clear glass.
On the road ahead something moved.
Something tall and dark against the white.
A deer? Elk? Some other creature?
The steady snow masked its shape as it darted to the side.
Two legs?
“Fuck!”
A man? Woman? Goddamned Sasquatch?
The shadowy image stepped into the middle of the damned road.
A person. Definitely a person.
What the hell?
“Hey!” she yelled, slamming on the brakes. “You idiot!”
The car shuddered.
No!
It began to rotate.
Faster and faster.
She rammed the gearshift into LOW.
But it was too late. The Toyota slipped sideways, spinning out of control. Through the windshield, she caught glimpses of the sheer cliff face on one side of the road and the steep canyon on the other. In the middle of it all, a person. A brainless, idiotic freak. “Shit, shit, shit!” She tried to steer, failed, the Toyota careening wildly to the mountainous side of the road, her bumper shearing ice off the cliff, only to send the little car back across the lanes, rushing toward the ravine, the scenery a snowy blur.
It was all over.
She knew it.
Through the foggy glass, she caught a glimpse of the snowy treetops in the thin beams of the headlights and, beyond the treeline, the vast darkness of the canyon.
This was how she would die, her car hurtling over the edge, crashing through the trees in the yawning darkness, plummeting hundreds of feet to the nearly frozen, snaking river far below.
God, no!
She stood on the brakes.
The crevasse beyond the treetops loomed.
One wheel found pavement.
Caught.
The back end of the Toyota shimmied.
Heart hammering, adrenaline firing her blood, she ignored everything she’d ever heard and cranked hard on the steering wheel, away from the ravine.
The car twisted. The Corolla’s hood pointed directly at the massive wall of stone.
No person on the road between.
What had happened to that shadowy
