Page 29 of No Safe Place

The way south toward NYC was on the right-hand side up a long on-ramp, and just as they were about to get on it, Colleen looked up at the interstate overpass and watched as a car pulled off the highway to wait by the top of the on-ramp.

“Look! It’s a trooper car!” Jodi cried out. “You can’t go up that way! Travers used to be cop. He must be calling in favors from his cop friends. The local law enforcement around here are deeply connected to this. They helped cover it up. Whatever you do, do not go up there!”

Colleen looked back as she slowed.

The Nissan was coming up behind them fast.

She looked forward at the fork in the road. Even if she didn’t get on the southbound ramp, she would have to get on the interstate heading north. Other troopers could just as easily pull them over on that side as well, right?

Glancing to her left, Colleen suddenly invented a third option. She whipped the wheel hard left and the car jostled with a thump as she pulled up onto a grass median.

Jodi shrieked as they bumped over the uneven ground around the base of a traffic sign.

When you come to a fork in the road, take it, came a crazy thought in Colleen’s head as they continued to make the world’s most illegal U-turn.

Boy, was she being inflexible now, she thought as the RAV4’s passenger door suddenly scraped loudly against a concrete jersey barrier.

She didn’t give a shit. Not anymore. They needed to get out of here.

She squeezed them onto the interstate exit lane back into town. As they drove back the way they had come, Colleen could see that Travers was pulled over across the median in the shoulder now on his phone.

Before she could stop herself, Colleen honked and gave Travers the finger as they blew past in the opposite direction.

Jodi laughed nervously. “Where to now?” she said.

Colleen lifted her phone.

“Siri, directions. The Forge.”

26

It was a quarter to eight when I stepped out of my Airbnb onto the town’s flagstone sidewalk for The Forge and my date with Colleen.

Beckford really was one of those hidden gems of a little town, wasn’t it? I thought as I stood for a moment in the crisp cool air. It had a town green, a bunch of meticulously renovated Victorian houses, old-fashioned plate glass–fronted stores, a white steepled church. There was a big Halloween parade in the town every year and all the giant windows of the stores were already decorated for it.

It looked like something out of an old Twilight Zone episode where someone goes back in time, I thought as I came to the end of its main street and crossed into The Forge’s gravel parking lot.

I smiled.

Hell, it felt like a Twilight Zone episode, I thought smiling as I thought of spending time with Colleen.

Just inside the restaurant’s heavy wood door, there was a wait-to-be-seated area, but since I was early, I just crossed to the dark bar beyond it and slid into one of its booths where I could face the door.

The Forge was a casual place but nicely appointed. The walls above the wainscoting were painted English racing green, and there were equestrian oil portraits everywhere of show horses and fox hunts.

The little history about it on its menu said it had been renovated many times but that main part of the barnlike building had originally been built in 1790 as an inn. Then after the Beckford Tool Factory was built just behind it, it had been converted into the depot for the train line that had come through. But the train was discontinued when the factory closed in the 1960s and sometime in the late ’80s, it had been turned by one of the locals into a restaurant.

“Well, aren’t we looking spiffy tonight,” said a voice behind me as I was checking my watch.

The short, feisty and plump bespectacled sixtysomething waitress I found smiling at me as I turned was named Daisy.

Daisy had “a lot of moxie” as they said in old movies. And being a big fan of moxie, I’d gotten into a routine of bantering with her over the last two weeks I’d eaten there.

“Do you really think so?” I said as I rose in my seat, straining to look at myself in the mirror behind the bar.

Clean-shaven with my hair pasted to one side with a little styling gel, I was wearing a pair of khakis with a button-down blue-checked dress shirt. Trying to look my best, I’d even passed everything through the travel iron. My lace-curtain Irish grandmother would have been impressed with the razor sharpness of the creases I’d put in my pants.

“You’re pretty as a picture,” Daisy assured me with a wink. “Let me guess. Hot date?”

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