'It's already happening. Oh shit, I knew it, it's already too late.' Now the kid is opening the door to the backseat, climbing into the Expedition on the right side behind Marilyn's body, and crouching down with his head low as if anticipating a mortar attack. 'Come on, we've got to get out of here.' This doesn't come off as a demand so much as a plea, as if he's on a mission as urgent as hers. 'I'm serious, lady! Let's go!'
'Who are you?' she asks again.
'I'll tell you later, just hit it.'
'Hold on,' she says. 'You've been following me. You're telling me that you don't have anything to do with my daughter's kidnapping?'
'Not me.' The kid shakes his head and points. 'Him.'
Sue is about to turn around and ask the kid who he's talking about when she sees another car coming toward them from behind, rolling down the middle of the snowed-over road toward the pickup. She sees it clearly now. It's a van, the old-fashioned rectilinear model of no particular color.
'Who is that?' she asks.
'Look,' the kid says, 'I'm telling you for your own sake as well as mine, we've got to get out of here right now, okay? The dead travel fast. Just get us the fuck out of here.'
'First tell me why you're following me.'
'Toprotect you!' he explodes. 'Now come on, let's go.'
Sue puts the Expedition into drive and starts moving east down what's left of Townsend Street. At the same moment, on the other side of the street, the van is pulling up alongside the kid's pickup, where it creeps to a halt. She sees movement inside the van, dark and indiscriminate, and then they're too far away to see anything else.
'Who was in that van?' she asks, as Townsend Street trails away and becomes Route 117 in her rearview mirror. 'Was that the man who kidnapped Veda?'
The kid crouched behind her in the backseat doesn't say anything. She can hear him breathing, cornered- animal style, and it sounds like he's trying to keep every nerve in his body from bursting through his skin all at once. Sue keeps her eyes on the road. She flashes back through everything that just happened and sees it all clearly, though it doesn't make any more sense than when it first happened. There's no question that the old farm truck was the same truck she saw out on the road an hour or so earlier, when she was first trying to dial Phillip's number in Malibu. It's the same truck that flagged her down after the night at the pumpkin patch. Probably the same truck that chased her out of the Prudential Center. And those are just the times shenoticed it. So the kid has to be an integral part of it whether he admits it or not.
'Why did you run away the last time you saw me?' she asks.
No reply. Sue looks back. Then she sees the headlights coming up behind them fast. Right away she knows it has to be the van.
It's approaching fast, and she doesn't see any particular reason to try to outrun it, especially not with the roads the way they are. So she just lets it get up close behind her, until the kid cowering in her backseat realizes that it's there too and starts freaking out again.
'Wait a second, what are you doing?' he asks. 'He's getting too close. He's going to see me.'
'Then keep your head down,' Sue says, and pulls the wheel hard to the right, giving the van plenty of room to pass. Sure enough, the van swings into the oncoming lane, right alongside them, and the kid in her backseat shuts up, ducking his head. Sue is aware of the looming dark shape of the van holding at fifty miles an hour to her immediate left. Then a flashlight beam sweeps out of the driver's side of the van, trained directly on Sue's face, and it's so bright that when she looks over she can't see anything but white light that makes her eyes ache.
'Don't look at him!' the kid's voice pipes up from behind her. 'Don't let him see your face!'
For about half a second she considers hitting the brakes to get the light off her face and then disregards the idea-again, why bother? The van's driver apparently sees whatever he was looking for, a scared woman in her thirties with a dead body partially uncovered in the passenger seat, and the flashlight beam goes off, leaving spots flashing in Sue's eyes. The van's engine revs and it goes blasting up ahead of her, disappearing around the next curve.
'He's gone,' she tells the kid. 'You can come up now.'
'He's not gone.' He sits up, climbing and unfolding himself into the backseat right behind her head. 'He's just playing with you.'
'Who is he? Who areyou?'
'My name's Jeff Tatum.' He tosses it out there so offhandedly that it has to be the truth. 'You don't know me. I live in Gray Haven.'
'You've been following me for months.' This is just a guess but she's pretty sure that if she's wrong, he'll tell her. 'What do you want? How do you know me?'
Big surprise, the kid doesn't answer. Sue realizes that he's reached between the seats and grabbed the map with the route planned out on it. He stares at it. 'Where did you get this?'
'It was stuck to Marilyn's body.'
'Punished, what does that mean?'
'It means he was punishing me. Killing Marilyn and leaving her body here was my punishment. Why-'
'What did you do?'
She turns around, looks at him. 'I'm done answering questions here. So far you haven't told me anything.'
But Jeff Tatum is just staring at the map, reading the names of the towns aloud. 'Winslow, Stoneview, Ashford, Wickham…' He jerks his head up at the road in front of them. 'Whoa, wait a second. You're not actuallyfollowing this route, are you?'
'Yes.'
'Oh hell no. You can't. You can't do that.'
He starts to crumple the map up and Sue grabs it back from him, stuffing it down between her knees, then turns around far enough to look him straight in the eyes. 'Leave it alone. I don't know who you are or what you want but so far all I've seen you do is jump in my car and come unglued. It's been an insane night so far and unless you start telling me what you know about my daughter you're bouncing right out of here even faster than you came in, and I don't care who you're running from.'
'Listen to me, Sue, Ms. Young, seriously-' The earnestness that comes into his voice now is almost as alarming as the fact that he knows her name. 'I'm sorry about earlier, when I stopped you up the road. I figured that you were calling the police, or even worse, on the phone with him, and I knew if I tried to say anything to you, he'd hear me. I panicked and got back in the truck and drove away.'
'Who is he?'
But Jeff Tatum is looking out the windshield at the road ahead. 'I don't know what he told you about this route or these towns, or what you think you're doing, but this is really a huge mistake.'
'Let me tell you what I know,' she says. 'I know that somebody kidnapped my daughter tonight. Whoever it is killed her nanny and he's given me orders to drive through these roads and these towns by tomorrow morning if I want to get her back. I don't know why he wants me to do it, and I don't care. All I know is that I'm driving his route.'
Of course she's left out one small detail, the thing wrapped in garbage bags in the back of her car, the whole point of everything. And the kid seems to know it too. He doesn't say anything, but his eyes watch her in the rearview mirror, reminding her of how they gleamed from the truck's mirror earlier, only now they look softer, haunted by something deep inside.
'Why were you following me?' she asks.
'I already told you, to protect you.' He sounds like he means it. 'To protect you and your daughter and other people from getting killed.'
'You're protecting me by stopping me from doing what this guy is telling me to do?'
'Exactly.'
'That doesn't make any sense.'
'If you know your history it does.'
'History of what? People who do stupid things?'
'The history of murder in New England.'
