Full Dark, No Stars(61)

From somewhere to her left, Tess could hear cars rushing by on I-84—the road she would have taken if she hadn’t been so pleased to be offered a shorter way home. Over there on the turnpike, people who had never been raped or stuffed in pipes were going places. Tess thought the sound of their blithe travel was the loneliest she’d ever heard.

- 16 -

The limo came. It was a Lincoln Town Car. The man behind the wheel got out and looked around. Tess observed him closely from the corner of the store. He was wearing a dark suit. He was a small, bespectacled fellow who didn’t look like a ra**st… but of course not all giants were ra**sts and not all ra**sts were giants. She had to trust him, though. If she were to get home and feed Fritzy, there was no other option. So she dropped her filthy makeshift stole beside the pay phone that actually worked and walked slowly and steadily toward the car. The light shining through the store windows seemed blindingly bright after the shadows at the side of the building, and she knew what her face looked like.

He’ll ask what happened to me and then he’ll ask if I want to go to the hospital.

But Manuel (who might have seen worse, it wasn’t impossible) only held the door for her and said, “Welcome to Royal Limousine, ma’am.” He had a soft Hispanic accent to go with his olive skin and dark eyes.

“Where I’m treated like royalty,” Tess said. She tried to smile. It hurt her swollen lips.

“Yes, ma’am.” Nothing else. God bless Manuel, who might have seen worse—perhaps back where he’d come from, perhaps in the back of this very car. Who knew what secrets limo drivers kept? It was a question that might have a good book hidden in it. Not the kind she wrote, of course… only who knew what kind of books she might write after this? Or if she would write any more at all? Tonight’s adventure might have turned that solitary joy out of her for awhile. Maybe even forever. It was impossible to tell.

She got into the back of the car, moving like an old woman with advanced osteoporosis. When she was seated and he had closed the door, she wrapped her fingers around the handle and watched closely, wanting to make sure it was Manuel who got in behind the wheel and not the giant in the bib overalls. In Stagg Road Horror 2 it would have been the giant: one more turn of the screw before the credits. Have some irony, it’s good for your blood.

But it was Manuel who got in. Of course it was. She relaxed.

“The address I have is 19 Primrose Lane, in Stoke Village. Is that correct?”

For a moment she couldn’t remember; she had punched her calling-card number into the pay phone without a pause, but she was blanking on her own address.

Relax, she told herself. It’s over. This isn’t a horror movie, it’s your life. You’ve had a terrible experience, but it’s over. So relax.

“Yes, Manuel, that’s right.”

“Will you want to be making any stops, or are we going right to your home?” It was the closest he came to mentioning what the lights of the Gas & Dash must have shown him when she walked to the Town Car.

It was only luck that she was still taking her oral contraceptive pills—luck and perhaps optimism, she hadn’t had so much as a one-night stand for three years, unless you counted tonight—but luck had been in short supply today, and she was grateful for this short stroke of it. She was sure Manuel could find an all-night pharmacy somewhere along the way, limo drivers seem to know all that stuff, but she didn’t think she would have been able to walk into a drugstore and ask for the morning-after pill. Her face would have made it all too obvious why she needed one. And of course there was the money problem.

“No other stops, just take me home, please.”

Soon they were on I-84, which was busy with Friday-night traffic. Stagg Road and the deserted store were behind her. What was ahead of her was her own house, with a security system and a lock for every door. And that was good.

- 17 -

It all went exactly as she had visualized: the arrival, the tip added to the credit card slip, the walk up the flower-lined path (she asked Manuel to stay, illuminating her with his headlights, until she was inside), the sound of Fritzy meowing as she tilted the mailbox and fished the emergency key off its hook. Then she was inside and Fritzy was twining anxiously around her feet, wanting to be picked up and stroked, wanting to be fed. Tess did those things, but first she locked the front door behind her, then set the burglar alarm for the first time in months. When she saw ARMED flash in the little green window above the keypad, she at last began to feel something like her true self. She looked at the kitchen clock and was astounded to see it was only quarter past eleven.

While Fritzy was eating his Fancy Feast, she checked the doors to the backyard and the side patio, making sure they were both locked. Then the windows. The alarm’s command-box was supposed to tell you if something was open, but she didn’t trust it. When she was positive everything was secure, she went to the front-hall closet and took down a box that had been on the top shelf so long there was a scrim of dust on the top.

Five years ago there had been a rash of burglaries and home invasions in northern Connecticut and southern Massachusetts. The bad boys were mostly drug addicts hooked on eighties, which was what its many New England fans called OxyContin. Residents were warned to be particularly careful and “take reasonable precautions.” Tess had no strong feelings about handguns pro or con, nor had she felt especially worried about strange men breaking in at night (not then), but a gun seemed to come under the heading of reasonable precautions, and she had been meaning to educate herself about pistols for the next Willow Grove book, anyway. The burglary scare had seemed like the perfect opportunity.