and fumbled with the lock even as her hair was plastered to her
head. Finally she got the door open and climbed in behind the
wheel. When she turned the key in the ignition, the car growled at
her, then stopped. She didn’t want to flood it so she didn’t turn the
ignition again. No, give it a rest for a moment. Again, finally, she
turned the key, and Lord be praised, the engine turned over, started.
Tyler’s house was just about a half-mile down the road, the first street
to the right, Gum Shoe Lane.
At a loud crack of thunder, she looked back at Jacob Marley’s
house. It looked like an old Gothic manor in the English countryside,
hunkered down in the rain filled with lost and ancient spirits.
It looked menacing even without billowing fog to shadow it in
more gloom. A sharp lightning flash streaked down like a silver
knife. The house seemed to shudder, as if from a mortal wound. It
looked like the gods wanted to rip it apart. She was very glad she
was leaving. Maybe Jacob Marley Senior really had poisoned his
wife and God was just now getting around to some punishment.
“Thanks a lot for waiting until I was here,” she yelled heavenward.
She waved her fist. “I come here and you decide, finally, to mete
out divine justice. You’re a little bloody late!”
The huge hemlock that could have so easily smashed right into
the side of the house lay on its side nearly parallel to the west wall.
That one very full and long branch that had crashed through her
bedroom window looked like a hand that had managed to reach
into the house. She shuddered at the image. Everything suddenly
seemed alive and malevolent, closing in on her, like the man who
had called her and stalked her and murdered that old woman and
shot the governor. He was near, she felt him.
Just stop it. She drove very slowly down the long narrow drive,
no choice there. Debris filled the road, wind bent trees nearly to
the ground. The boughs glanced off her windshield. Branches
whipped toward her, rain hammered against the windshield,
pounded against the car, making her wonder if she’d come to
Maine only to be done in by a wretched storm. She had to get out
of the car twice to pull fallen branches out of the way. The wind
and rain slammed hard into her, making it impossible to stand
straight and nearly impossible to walk. She knew there had to be
dents in the car fenders. The insurance company was going to love
this. Oh dear, she’d forgotten, she didn’t have any insurance. That
required being a real person with real ID.
Suddenly headlights cut through the thick, swirling sheets of
rain, not twenty feet from her. They were coming toward her, fast,
too fast. Damnation, to get killed on Belladonna Way. There had to
be some irony in that, but she couldn’t appreciate it right then.
She’d come to hide herself and be safe, a tree branch came into her
bedroom, and now she was going to die because she couldn’t bear
to stay in that old house, knowing it would collapse on her, swallow
her alive. She smashed down on the horn, jerked the steering
wheel to the left, but these headlights kept coming inexorably, relentlessly
toward her, so fast, so very fast. She threw the car into reverse
but knew that was no good. There was so much debris
behind her that it was bound to stall her out. She slammed on the
brakes and turned off the engine. She jumped out of the car and
ran to the side of the road, feeling those damned headlights crawl
over her, so close she wondered if the stalker hadn’t found her and
was now going to kill her. Why had she ever left the house? So
there was a tree branch in her bedroom dripping on a rag rug. It
was still safe, but not out here, in the middle of a wind that was
whirling around her like a mad dervish, ready to hurl her into the
air, and a car that was coming after her, a madman at the wheel.