Up ahead she can see a snow-dusted triangle of ground, slightly raised, with the main road bending around it. In the center, bracketed by park benches, is a pedestal with a figure on top of it. Isaac Hamilton, who else could it be? And from here she can see clearly that the figure has no arms or legs, just a slender body with head, held up at the same proud tilt. At least the angle of the headused to look proud to her; now it looks defiant. As she lowers her foot on the brake, the Expedition's tires encounter an unexpected patch of black ice and the vehicle swerves a little. Sue instinctively steers in the direction of the skid, correcting it without thinking-ambulance driver reflexes coming into play again.
Then, halfway through Wickham, as she passes the statue, it starts snowing again, heavily. She sits forward, switches on her wipers, visibility compromised. The flakes are thick and seem to strike her windshield with real weight. It's becoming distinctly more difficult to see.
Up ahead, at the next intersection, the gray van is pulling out of a side street, emerging from a snowfall so thick that it actually seems to materialize out of the air. It turns right, and now it's driving in front of her, fifty feet up the road, heading out of town. The van is moving slower than she is and she taps the brake slightly to maintain her distance. At the same time the snow falls even harder, thicker. The wipers are at their fastest setting and they still can't keep up. Sue slows down even more, hovering between twenty-five and thirty. The van's taillights fade in the distance, and then they are gone. She feels pressure in her skull, building in her sinuses. It's her headache coming back. Her foot goes down on the gas. She's going thirty-five, forty.
Sue's still picking up speed when the snow suddenly stops coming down again, the road clear in front of her. With complete clarity she sees the van is right there, less than twenty feet away.
It's directly in her path.
And it's not moving.
'Shit!' She grabs the wheel with both hands and smashes down on the brake. The Expedition goes into a skid, the back end swerving, coming around faster than she can control it, and Sue realizes there's no choice-she's going to hit the van, and she's going to hit it hard. Everything slows down, the details of the moment laser-clear in her mind, and there's a loud, complicated crash as the rear of the Expedition smacks violently into the van. The impact hurls her hard against the seat belt, which catches her between her breasts, the Expedition's airbag deploying with a pop that she feels more than hears, the synthetic smell of fresh plastic whacking her in the face and driving her head back against the seat. Then it's deflating, letting her sag forward, as she looks out her windshield at nothing. The engine has stalled. It's dead quiet.
Sliding out of her seat, she jumps down and walks around the back of the Expedition. From here she can see that the rear door of the van has been knocked open and hangs crookedly from its hinges. There's a faint light on inside. Sue takes two steps, hearing her feet scrape the snow off the road as she advances toward the van, then cranes her neck for a closer look.
All the seats have been removed, creating a featureless cave. Sprawled on the floor, not moving, are two corpses that by now she recognizes immediately-her nanny, Marilyn, and Jeff Tatum. Marilyn is on her side, her legs flopped at an angle, one arm across her face. Jeff Tatum is facedown.
There's nothing else back here.
Keeping her distance, Sue walks sideways around the van. She sees a child's car seat on the front passenger side.
Veda's car seat.
It's empty.
The driver's seat is empty as well.
Sue slowly opens the passenger door, leaning in, placing one hand on the padded car seat, fingertips brushing over the stale cracker crumbs and dried raisins that have found their way into its creases over the months. The fabric upholstery is still warm. Pressing her nose against the seat's headrest, Sue smells Veda's hair, where the back of her skull probably lay just a few seconds earlier.
Veda, what did they do with you? Where are you now?
Behind her in the darkness, she hears the trill of the cell phone in the Expedition. She starts walking toward it and thinks she sees something moving in the back of the vehicle, the shape in the garbage bags sitting upright against the rear window.
Watching her.
6:01A.M.
Sue blinks, squinting. It's too dark to tell whether she's imagining him there or not. Up front the phone is still ringing. That's definitely real. She opens the driver's side door, takes the phone, and steps away. Her headache is gone again, drowned in adrenaline.
Sue hitsTALK.
'Where's my daughter?'
'Oh, that's right,' the voice on the other end says. 'You thought she was in the van, didn't you? Well, it's a good thing she wasn't, Susan. You could've really hurt her when you crashed into it.' He pauses. 'But if I were you, I wouldn't worry about where she is now, just where you're going to be in another ninety minutes, when her life is on the line.'
'White's Cove. I'll be there.'
'That's good,' the voice says. 'Meanwhile it looks like your passenger is showing some life of his own.'
She glances into the back of the Expedition. The shape against the glass is no longer there. He must've lain down again or lost his strength. Maybe he wasn't sitting up at all. Walking to the driver's side, the phone clasped to her ear, Sue looks in but doesn't see the thing in the garbage bags poking its head up. The Expedition is silent inside. She climbs behind the wheel, starts the engine. 'You want me to-'
'Get back on the road,' the voice on the other end says. 'Get moving.'
Sue puts the Expedition in gear. She drives the rest of the way out of town. The yellow lines leap through her headlights, behind the snow, a peculiar feeling of dislocation filtering through her mind. Something is happening here. She's going forward, but she's also traveling backward. Backward in time, more than twenty years, to the day that she and Phillip saw the man at the park. This is not a voluntary remembrance. It's like the memory is being leached from her pores.
Looking through the windshield of the Expedition, Sue can already make out the worn-out assortment of leftover playground equipment through eleven-year-old eyes, wilting in the muggy heat of that lost August afternoon. She and Phillip were sitting on the cracked plastic swings, idly kicking their legs at the small patches of muddy earth underneath them, the last remnants of a weak rain two days earlier. Twenty yards away, two younger children, scrubby-looking toddlers in dirty shirts and skinned knees, giggled and shrieked as they ran up and down through the low weeds while their mothers, mobile-home women in Spandex pants, watched anxiously, smoking cigarettes.
They were the only other kids here. Most people had stopped letting their children venture beyond the center of town that summer. Instead they went to the movies or the mall or played at Sheckard Park in the middle of town, or their parents packed them off to band camp or chauffeured them to the gated community pool two towns over. Sue's mother didn't know that she and Phillip had ridden their bikes out here today-she thought they were at the East Town Mall catching a matinee-and Phillip's parents…well, Phillip's parents never really seemed to question where Phillip was. When in doubt, they assumed that he was at the public library, studying. And more often than not, they were right.
But today, he and Sue had come out here to sit on the swings, kick their feet up and catch a too-infrequent breeze lifting from the empty field down the road, bringing the smell of industrial solvents from the mill in town. Phillip had bought them both Cokes from the 7-Eleven on the bike ride out, the wet plastic bottles covered with dirt and wood chips. Sue wasn't sure why they'd come here, except that they liked it-the conversations they had here seemed different from any conversation she ever had with anybody else, ever. Sure, she and Phillip would talk about school and TV, and how screwed up their parents were. But they also talked a lot about the future-Phillip had already decided he was going to be some kind of millionaire, Sue said she wanted to be an Alaskan bush pilot
