It could still be him. Maybe he switched to a car. He could have driven back to his house, his lair, and switched to a car. Thinking, she’ll see it’s a car and come out of wherever she’s hiding. She’ll wave me down and then I’ll have her.
Yes, yes. That was what would happen in a horror movie, wasn’t it? Screaming Victims 4 or Stagg Road Horror 2, or She was trying to go away again, so she slapped her cheeks some more. Once she was home, once Fritzy was fed and she was in her own bed (with all the doors locked and all the lights on), she could go away all she wanted. But not now. No no no. Now she had to keep walking, and hiding when cars came. If she could do those two things, she’d eventually reach US 47, and there might be a store. A real store, one with a pay phone, if she was lucky… and she deserved some good luck. She didn’t have her purse, her purse was still in her Expedition (wherever that was), but she knew her AT&T calling-card number by heart; it was her home phone number plus 9712. Easy-as-can-beezy.
Here was a sign at the side of the road. Tess read it easily enough in the moonlight:
YOU ARE NOW ENTERING COLEWICH TOWNSHIP
WELCOME, FRIEND!
“You like Colewich, it likes you,” she whispered.
She knew the town, which the locals pronounced “Collitch.” It was actually a small city, one of many in New England that had been prosperous back in the textile-mill days and continued to struggle along somehow in the new free-trade era, when America’s pants and jackets were made in Asia or Central America, probably by children who couldn’t read or write. She was on the outskirts, but surely she could walk to a phone.
Then what?
Then she would… would…
“Call a limousine,” she said. The idea burst on her like a sunrise. Yes, that was exactly what she’d do. If this was Colewich, then her own Connecticut town was thirty miles away, maybe less. The limo service she used when she wanted to go to Bradley International or into Hartford or New York (Tess did not do city driving if she could help it) was based in the neighboring town of Woodfield. Royal Limousine boasted round-the-clock service. Even better, they would have her credit card on file.
Tess felt better and began to walk a little faster. Then headlights brightened the road and she once more hurried into the bushes and crouched down, as terrified as any hunted thing: doe fox rabbit. This vehicle was a truck, and she began to tremble. She went on trembling even when she saw it was a little white Toyota, nothing at all like the giant’s old Ford. When it was gone, she tried to force herself to walk back to the road, but at first she couldn’t. She was crying again, the tears warm on her chilly face. She felt herself getting ready to step out of the spotlight of awareness once more. She couldn’t let that happen. If she allowed herself to go into that waking blackness too many times, she might eventually lose her way back.
She made herself think of thanking the limo driver and adding a tip to the credit card form before making her way slowly up the flower-lined walk to her front door. Tilting up her mailbox and taking the extra key from the hook behind it. Listening to Fritzy meow anxiously.
The thought of Fritzy turned the trick. She worked her way out of the bushes and resumed walking, ready to dart back into cover the second she saw more headlights. The very second. Because he was out there somewhere. She realized that from now on he would always be out there. Unless the police caught him, that was, and put him in jail. But for that to occur she would have to report what had happened, and the moment this idea came into her mind, she saw a glaring black New York Post-style headline:
“WILLOW GROVE” SCRIBE RAPED AFTER LECTURE
Tabloids like the Post would undoubtedly run a picture of her from ten years ago, when her first Knitting Society book had been published. Back then she’d been in her late twenties, with long dark blond hair cascading down her back and good legs she liked to showcase in short skirts. Plus—in the evening—the kind of high-heeled sling-backs some men (the giant for one, almost certainly) referred to as fuck-me shoes. They wouldn’t mention that she was now ten years older, twenty pounds heavier, and had been dressed in sensible—almost dowdy—business attire when she was assaulted; those details didn’t fit the kind of story the tabloids liked to tell. The copy would be respectful enough (if panting a trifle between the lines), but the picture of her old self would tell the real story, one that probably pre-dated the invention of the wheel: She asked for it… and she got it.
Was that realistic, or only her shame and badly battered sense of self-worth imagining the worst-case scenario? The part of her that might want to go on hiding in the bushes even if she managed to get off this awful road and out of this awful state of Massachusetts and back to her safe little house in Stoke Village? She didn’t know, and guessed that the true answer lay somewhere in between. One thing she did know was that she would get the sort of nationwide coverage every writer would like when she publishes a book and no writer wants when she has been raped and robbed and left for dead. She could visualize someone raising a hand during Question Time and asking, “Did you in any way encourage him?”
That was ridiculous, and even in her current state Tess knew it… but she also knew that if this came out, someone would raise his or her hand to ask, “Are you going to write about this?”
And what would she say? What could she say?
Nothing, Tess thought. I would run off the stage with my hands over my ears.
But no.
No no no.
The truth was she wouldn’t be there in the first place. How could she ever do another reading, lecture, or autographing, knowing that he might turn up, smiling at her from the back row? Smiling from beneath that weird brown cap with the bleach spots on it? Maybe with her earrings in his pocket. Fondling them.
The thought of telling the police made her skin burn, and she could feel her face literally wincing in shame, even out here, alone in the dark. Maybe she wasn’t Sue Grafton or Janet Evanovich, but neither was she, strictly speaking, a private person. She would even be on CNN for a day or two. The world would know a crazy, grinning giant had shot his load inside of the Willow Grove Scribe. Even the fact that he had taken her underwear as a souvenir might come out. CNN wouldn’t report that part, but The National Enquirer or Inside View would have no such compunctions.
Sources inside the investigation say they found a pair of the Scribe’s panties in the accused rapist’s drawer: blue Victoria’s Secret hip-huggers, trimmed with lace.
“I can’t tell,” she said. “I won’t tell.”
But there were others before you, there could be others after y—
She pushed this thought away. She was too tired to consider what might or might not be her moral responsibility. She’d work on that part later, if God meant to grant her a later… and it seemed He might. But not on this deserted road where any set of approaching lights might have her rapist behind it.
Hers. He was hers now.
– 13 –
A mile or so after passing the Colewich sign, Tess began to hear a low, rhythmic thudding that seemed to come up from the road through her feet. Her first thought was of H. G. Wells’s mutant Morlocks, tending their machinery deep in the bowels of the earth, but another five minutes clarified the sound. It was coming through the air, not from the ground, and it was one she knew: the heartbeat of a bass guitar. The rest of the band coalesced around it as she walked. She began to see light on the horizon, not headlights but the white of arc sodiums and the red gleam of neon. The band was playing “Mustang Sally,” and she could hear laughter. It was drunken and beautiful, punctuated by happy party-down whoops. The sound made her feel like crying some more.
The roadhouse, a big old honkytonk barn with a huge dirt parking lot that looked full to capacity, was called The Stagger Inn. She stood at the edge of the glare cast by the parking lot lights, frowning. Why so many cars? Then she remembered it was Friday night. Apparently The Stagger Inn was the place to go on Friday nights if you were from Colewich or any of the surrounding towns. They would have a phone, but there were too many people. They would see her bruised face and leaning nose. They would want to know what had happened to her, and she was in no shape to make up a story. At least not yet. Even a pay phone outside was no good, because she could see people out there, too. Lots of them. Of course. These days you had to go outside if you wanted to smoke a cigarette. Also…