Page 39 of Murder Road

“Eddie?” I asked.

He stared straight ahead, motionless as the rain spattered on the roof of the car. There was no car behind us, no other car visible. There was only us, sitting in the intersection at a green light, the wipers moving back and forth in the silence. Eddie’s gaze was unfocused, suddenly strange. I felt a chill deep in my stomach.

Then, as the light changed again, Eddie pushed the gas and we drove through the empty intersection onto Atticus Line.

I watched him warily as he accelerated on the slickening pavement. I didn’t like the way his body was too still, the way he wouldn’t look at me. “Eddie,” I said again.

He frowned and looked at me. “Yeah?”

It was just him, my husband. There was nothing wrong with him at all.

I shook my head. “Nothing.” I turned away, not caring that the rain was blasting into my window. I needed the fresh air.

The sky got darker, and lightning flashed high up in the clouds, followed a few minutes later by thunder. Eddie turned the headlights on.

“Hold on,” he said. “We’re going through a storm.”

The road was a tunnel in the increasing darkness, the trees flecked with yellowy-gray shadows. The wet smell from the hot pavement was electric. I could nearly taste it. I parted my lips and took a deep breath of it as Atticus Line flew by beneath our tires. This road, I thought. Why are we on this road?

Eddie eased off the accelerator a little as the wipers worked hard. Wind gusted, blowing fat, warm drops of rain into the car, wetting my hair and the side of my face. I felt water running down my neck, soaking my shirt, and I couldn’t bring myself to care. I felt detached, like I was leaving not only Coldlake Falls behind, but a part of me as well.

I didn’t believe in happy endings—far from it. I didn’t believe that Eddie and I would drive off into the stormy sunset in our bloody car and never have a problem again. My guard was incapable of truly going down. I had wanted so badly to get out of Coldlake Falls, as if that meant Eddie and I could go back to normal, whatever that was. But something wasn’t right. I had the familiar feeling that whatever we were driving into, it was going to be bad.

If Eddie felt the same, he gave no indication. He stayed focused on the road, which was harder and harder to see. His jaw was set firmly, as if he was determined.

“Jesus, it’s dark,” he said.

I tilted my head toward the window and looked up. The sky was uncanny. The sickly lemon tinge was fading, blotted out as if with ink. With every second that passed, it felt more like night. Like the night we had driven into town, except for the rain.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” I said as rain ran down my forehead and my face. “It’s barely dinnertime. It shouldn’t be this dark.”

“The rain is getting worse.”

I licked water from my lip and made myself say the words. “Should we turn around?”

Eddie’s voice was hoarse. “No. We just need to get through this.”

So he felt something, too, then. Something very, very wrong. Suddenly, I agreed with him. We’d come to town on Atticus Line—we’d leave the same way. If the road wanted to issue us a challenge, we were up for it. All we had to do was drive. What could a road do to us, after all?

I wiped rain from my cheek. And then I saw the light in the trees.

A dim glow, as if from a lantern. It grew stronger, then waned again.

“Did you see that?” I asked Eddie.

“We’re not turning around.”

“No,” I said. “We’re not.”

Lightning flashed overhead again, illuminating the rain-slicked road. This horrible, dead, empty road where no one ever drove. How many people had died here, trying to hitchhike in or out of Hunter Beach? Rhonda Jean, Katharine before her, more. The thought slid into my mind like a whisper: Those are just the ones they found.

Were there bodies on this road still? There were no hikers here, no dog walkers or neighbors. How many hitchhikers had gone missing over the years, never to be seen again? How many of them were just past the weeds at the side of the road? They would be scattered bones by now, a jawbone, a scrap of jeans. Would anyone ever find them?

As if he was reading my thoughts, Eddie drove faster.

The hiss of the tires on the pavement was loud. I was starting to get chilled from the rain, goose bumps rising on the skin of my neck. I put my hand on my neck to warm it, and my hand was cold. But I didn’t roll the window up.

The wipers whirred loudly as they sloshed rain from the windshield. Ahead rose a glowing light, white like the light in the trees. But this glow was much bigger.

---