Full Dark, No Stars(78)
“What if he’s married, Tess?” Tom asked. “What if he’s got a wife waiting for him?”
The idea startled her for a moment. Then she smiled, and not just because the only ring he’d been wearing was the one too big to be a ruby. “Guys like him don’t have wives,” she said. “Not ones that stick around, anyway. There was only one woman in Al’s life, and she’s dead.”
- 37 -
Unlike Lacemaker Lane, there was nothing suburban about Township Road; it was as country as Travis Tritt. The houses were glimmering islands of electric light beneath the glow of the rising moon.
“Tess, you are approaching your destination,” Tom said in his non-imaginary voice.
She breasted a rise, and there on her left was a mailbox marked
STREHLKE and 23. The driveway was long, rising on a curve, paved with asphalt, smooth as black ice. Tess turned in without hesitation, but apprehension dropped over her as soon as Township Road was behind her. She had to fight to keep from jamming on the brakes and backing out again. Because if she kept going, she had no choice. She’d be like a bug in a bottle. And even if he wasn’t married, what if someone else was up there at the house? Brother Les, for instance? What if Big Driver had been at Tommy’s buying beer and snacks not for one but for two?
Tess killed her headlights and drove on by moonlight.
In her keyed-up state, the driveway seemed to go on forever, but it could have been no more than an eighth of a mile before she saw the lights of Strehlke’s house. It was at the top of the hill, a tidy-looking place that was bigger than a cottage but smaller than a farmhouse. Not a house of bricks, but not a humble house of straw, either. In the story of the three little pigs and the big bad wolf, Tess reckoned this would have been the house of sticks.
Parked on the left side of the house was a long trailer-box with RED HAWK TRUCKING on the side. Parked at the end of the driveway, in front of the garage, was the cab-over Pete from the website. It looked haunted in the moonlight. Tess slowed as she approached it, and then she was flooded with a white glare that dazzled her eyes and lit the lawn and the driveway. It was a motion-activated pole light, and if Strehlke came back while it was on, he would be able to see its glow at the foot of his driveway. Maybe even while he was still approaching on Township Road.
She jammed on the brakes, feeling as she had when, as a teenager, she’d dreamed of finding herself in school with no clothes on. She heard a woman groaning. She supposed it was her, but it didn’t sound or feel like her.
“This isn’t good, Tess.”
“Shut up, Tom.”
“He could come back any minute, and you don’t know how long the timer on that thing is. You had trouble with the mother. He’s much bigger than her.”
“I said shut up!”
She tried to think, but that blaring light made it hard. Shadows from the parked cab-over and the long-box to her left seemed to reach for her with sharp black fingers—boogeyman fingers. Goddam pole light! Of course a man like him would have a pole light! She ought to go right now, just turn around on his lawn and drive back down to the road as fast as she could, but she would meet him if she did. She knew it. And with the element of surprise gone, she would die.
Think, Tessa Jean, think!
And oh God, just to make things a little worse, a dog started barking. There was a dog in the house. She imagined a pit bull with a headful of jutting teeth.
“If you’re going to stay, you need to get out of sight,” Tom said… and no, that didn’t sound like her voice. Or not exactly like her voice. Perhaps it was the one that belonged to her deepest self, the survivor. And the killer—her, too. How many unsuspected selves could a person have, hiding deep inside? She was beginning to think the number might be infinite.
She glanced into her rearview mirror, chewing at her still-swollen lower lip. No approaching headlights yet. But would she even be able to tell, given the combined brilliance of the moon and that Christing pole light?
“It’s on a timer,” Tom said, “but I’d do something before it goes out, Tess. If you move the car after it does, you’ll only trip it again.”
She threw the Expedition into four-wheel, started to swing around the cab-over, then stopped. There was high grass on that side. In the pitiless glare of the pole light, he couldn’t help but see the tracks she would leave. Even if the Christing light went out, it would come back on again when he drove up and then he would see them.
Inside, the dog continued to weigh in: Yark! Yark! YarkYarkYark!
“Drive across the lawn and put it behind the long-box,” Tom said.
“The tracks, though! The tracks!”
“You have to hide it somewhere,” Tom returned. He spoke apologetically but firmly. “At least the grass is mown on that side. Most people are pretty unobservant, you know. Doreen Marquis says that all the time.”
“Strehlke’s not a Knitting Society lady, he’s a f**king lunatic.”
But because there was really no choice—not now that she was up here—Tess drove onto the lawn and toward the parked silver long-box through a glare that seemed as bright as a summer noonday. She did it with her bottom slightly raised off the seat, as if by doing that she could somehow magically render the tracks of the Expedition’s passage less visible.
“Even if the motion light is still on when he comes back, he may not be suspicious,” Tom said. “I’ll bet deer trip it all the time. He might even have a light like that to scare them out of his vegetable garden.”