buckled into the passenger seat.
She blinked a couple of times, thinking there must be something wrong with her vision because she couldn’t make anything out beyond the windshield. There was nothing out there. No road. No buildings. No street lights.
Then it dawned on her that it wasn’t a problem with her eyes.
There really was nothing out there. Only stars.
She could see them twinkling in the sky. It was a beautiful evening, if she overlooked the part about how all the blood was draining from her body.
It was difficult to hold her head up, but with what strength she still had, she looked around. As she took in the starkness, the strangeness of her surroundings, she wondered if she might actually be dead already. Maybe this was heaven. There was a peacefulness about it. Everything was so white. There was a sliver of moon in the cloudless sky that illuminated the landscape, which was dead flat and went forever. It was, it occurred to her, more like a moonscape than a landscape.
Was the car parked on a snowy field? Off in the distance, she thought she could make out something. A dark, uneven border running straight across the top of the whiteness. Trees, maybe? The thick black line, it almost had the look of a… of a shoreline.
“What?” she whispered quietly to herself.
Slowly, she began to understand where she was. No-not understand. She was starting to figure out where she was, but she couldn’t understand it.
She was on ice.
The car was sitting on a frozen pond. Or maybe a lake. And quite a ways out, as far as she could tell.
“No no no no no,” she said to herself as she struggled to think. It was the first week of January. Winter had been slow to get going, and temperatures had only started to plunge a week or two ago, right after Christmas. While it might have been cold enough for the lake to start freezing, it certainly hadn’t been cold long enough to make the ice thick enough to support a Crack.
She felt the front end of the car dip ever so slightly. Probably no more than an inch. That would make sense. The car was heaviest at the front, where the engine was.
She had to get out. If the ice had managed to support something as heavy as a car, at least for this long, surely it would keep her up if she could get herself out. She could start walking, in whichever direction would get her to the closest shore.
If she could even walk.
She touched her hand to her belly. Everything was warm, and wet. How many times had she been stabbed? That was what had happened, right? She remembered seeing the knife, the light catching the blade, and then She’d been stabbed twice. Of that, she was pretty sure. She remembered looking down, watching in disbelief as the knife went into her the first time, then seeing it come back out, the blade crimson. But it was only out of her for a moment before it broke her skin and was driven in a second time.
After that, everything went black.
Dead.
Except she wasn’t.
There must have been just a hint of a pulse that went unnoticed as she was put into the car and buckled in, then driven out here to the middle of this lake. Where, someone must have figured, the car would soon go through the ice and sink to the bottom.
A car with a body inside it, dumped in a lake close to shore, someone might discover that.
But a car with a body inside it that sank to the bottom out in the middle of a lake, what were the odds anyone would ever find that?
She had to find the strength within her. She had to get out of this car now, before it dropped through. Did she have her cell phone? If she could call for help, they could be looking for her out on the ice, she wouldn’t have to walk all the way back to Crack.
The car lurched forward. The way it was leaning, her view through the windshield was snow-dusted ice instead of the shoreline. The moon was casting enough light for her to see the interior of the car. Where was her purse? She had to find her purse. She kept her cell phone in her purse.
There was no purse.
No way to call for help. No way to get someone to come and rescue her. Which made it even more critical that she get out of this car.
Now.
She reached around to her side, looking for the button to release the seat belt. She found it, pressed hard with her thumb. The combined lap and shoulder strap began to retract, catching briefly on her arm. She wriggled it out of the way and the belt receded into the pillar between the front and rear doors.
Crack.
She reached down for the door handle and pulled. The door opened only slightly. Enough for freezing-cold water to rush in around her feet.
“No no,” she whispered.
So cold. So very very cold.
As water began swirling in, the car tilted more, its trajectory becoming alarmingly apparent. With her hands placed on the dash, she braced herself as her world began angling down. She took her right hand off the dash and used it to push against the door, but she couldn’t get it to open any further. The front part of the door, at the bottom, was jamming up against the ice.
“Please no.”
The last crack she heard was the loudest, echoing across the lake like a clap of thunder.
The front end of the car plunged. More water rushed in. It was over her knees. Then up to her waist. The windshield went black.
In seconds, the water was to her neck.
The intense pain, where the knife had pierced her twice, receded. Numbness spread throughout her body.
Everything became very black, and very cold, and then, in a strange way, very calm.
Her last thoughts were of her daughter, and of the grandchild she would never see.
“Melissa,” she whispered.
And then the car was gone.
Three
The thing was, Keisha usually worked alone.
Okay, sometimes she’d have her boyfriend Kirk on standby to take a phone call if necessary, to provide a testimonial to a skeptical prospective client. But other than that, she liked to run her own show. The way you maintained control was to handle all the details yourself.
Bringing someone else into the mix, particularly someone without much experience, was risky. But there hadn’t been much money coming in lately, what with Kirk not back to work, Keisha’s car needing all new tires-she’d been running on three bald ones for months-and Matthew having to have those couple of teeth pulled. Keisha didn’t have the luxury of being picky these days, and besides, she figured Justin Wilcox had as much to lose as she did- maybe even more-by screwing up this con on his mother and stepfather.
She had to admit, the kid was good. He not only conceived the whole thing, but pulled off his part without a hitch. He’d heard about Keisha from one of his old high school English teachers, Terry Archer, who had been persuaded to tell the class some of the details of what had happened to his wife, Cynthia, whose family had disappeared when she was only fourteen, and whose fate had been unknown for twenty-five years.
It was big news at the time, when they found out what had actually happened. The story even made CNN. Archer had told his students that an incident like that, it brought all sorts of people out of the woodwork, which led him to tell them about the Milford psychic who’d claimed to know what had happened to Cynthia’s family. How she
