front seat and landed hard, found a man’s body there, lying faceup, eyes open. A black man. A young man. Dead. Harry’s knee was poking right through him. There was a bullet hole through his forehead. Small. Neat. Behind his head the car seat was dark with pooling blood.
The images began to fade, became outlines.
Harry slapped the front seat with his hand—
—he jerked his head toward the driver’s window, saw that the car was on flat ground, Humper’s Hill, surrounded by trees and moonlight, and his quick glimpse had given him a view of the tail end of a muzzle flash.
As the image faded, Harry slapped the seat again twice, very hard.
—sailed backward through time, and the black man was rising up and the muzzle flash was going back into the gun, and then the image hung, went forward again, instant replay off a rewind, the black man falling backward onto the seat.
In the flash Harry caught a glimpse of the executioner’s face. It was a big man with even features. He looked familiar, but Harry couldn’t quite place him. Behind the shooter, not far away, another man-sized shape could be seen in the flash of the muzzle fire. He seemed adrift, apart from it all. Observing.
Fading—
—looking over the seat this time, trying to ignore the gun poking through the window, directly at his face. Harry turned his head, looked through the rear passenger window, could see a woman being shoved against the car, slapped. The back door opening—
My God. I’m moving backward and forward on this, wobbling through time…. This is earlier…maybe.
—woman being shoved into the car, the man coming in on top of her. And out there in the dark, the shooter, and the other man in the darkness, the shadow guy with his back turned, his shoulders heaving. He seemed to be crying, or about to throw up. And then his face turned slightly, as if he might be looking over his shoulder to see what was gaining on him. A piece of light from the moon fell on his features and lit them up.
Kayla’s dad.
Fading.
Images swarmed him, overlapping and horrible, and he felt the woman’s terror, the quick spurt of fear the man felt when the gun poked through the open window—
—and then it all faded and Harry went limp.
There was a buzzing noise, and Harry couldn’t place it.
It went on for a long time, and finally Harry realized it was coming from his pocket.
He opened his eyes. He was no longer on top of Humper’s Hill. He was now back to being in the banged-up wreck of the car, angled on a brush-covered slope. He was lying up against the steering wheel, uncertain of how he’d come to be there. The sky was lightening. His head was full of confusing images.
Since there was nothing in his visions about the car going down the side of the slope, that meant to Harry that both the man and woman were dead when the car was pushed over.
Yeah. That was it…. Goddamn buzzing.
The buzzing continued.
Harry positioned himself so that he was stretched out on the seat, his head against the open driver’s-side window, his side against the steering wheel.
The buzzing was his phone.
Harry removed it from his pocket and answered.
“Hey, goddamn it, I was about to come down for you,” Tad said.
“Sorry. I sort of fainted.”
“You okay, kid?”
“Not really.”
“You saw something?”
“I saw a lot.”
Slowly the Mercedes moved forward, and Harry went up the hill, the rope tied around him, using his legs to bounce along as he was pulled up. He tried to use the phone, but that wasn’t working out so good. He could hardly hang onto it, let alone talk into it. He finally put it in his coat pocket and hoped for the best.
At the top, daylight was spilling through the trees, and the Mercedes stopped. With shaking hands, Harry removed the rope.
Tad got out of the car and walked back.
“You found Vincent?”
“Found something else.”
“And?”
“I think I have more questions than answers.”
50
Harry spent the rest of the morning at Tad’s place, sleeping fitfully.
All he could think about was how Kayla would feel when he told her what he had seen. Her father standing on the sidelines.
Should he tell her? Did it matter anymore? It had happened so long ago.
The car. It had to be the one he had heard about, the one he thought was most likely a legend. The car with the lovers in it. Or that was the story. The bodies had long ago been removed, or they had been removed after lying undiscovered for years. Their killers were never caught.
And the old car just left there, too much trouble to free. That’s the way it would have been done in the past, a little town like this. Forensics would have been thought to be some kind of disease. And the story of the murders would go around, and in time, unless you were really willing to research, it would be thought to be no more than a legend.
It all twisted inside of Harry’s head until he could take no more. He had tried hiding in sleep for a while, but the horror of it would uncoil again and noodle about at the edges of his dreams, and he would awaken.
He not only remembered what he had seen, he felt it all. It was as if he was the one who had been raped. And he had felt the man’s fear just as the gun went off, a sudden sickness and a sad realization that there was no more to his life.
Harry sat up in bed, wadded a pillow behind his head, and watched the sunlight trace along the edges of the window, then flood it.
He got up to make coffee, but Tad was already there. Coffee made. Cooking eggs.
They drank coffee and ate toast and eggs, and when they were finished Tad said, “You’re sure what you saw?”
Harry nodded.
“It was all kind of confusing. The whole event was jumbled.”
“Gonna tell Kayla?”
“Don’t know. Maybe we should just forget the whole thing.”
“Maybe.”
“Would you?”
“Probably not.”
“Come on. Would you?”
