The man turned on the garage light.
It was fluorescent and filled every corner.
She pictured big fingers grabbing her, and dragging her out from under the car and tearing her skin on the cement and—
—and what?
She had heard only one voice, only one set of steps. And yet, the man must be speaking to somebody. Could there be two people? Was one motionless by the door? Was one tucking himself into a closet, hiding himself, so he could spring out at her?
Alice tried to remember the voice. She would have to tell the police. But she was beyond memorizing anything; she was even beyond lying here, she was so scared. She wanted to leap up and run, but she was in a tomb: concrete and black pipe and gritty underside.
She started to cry.
I can’t make noise! she thought.
She forced herself to cry silently. Itchy, annoying tears ran down the sides of her face and into her hair and ears. Her nose filled but she let that run, too, because she dared not sniffle.
“I killed him good,” said the voice. It was thinned out like paint, distorted with tension.
Him.
Killed him.
What him did that mean?
Not Alice’s him. Not her father. Not that him.
The man turned off the garage light and the darkness was wonderful: safe and friendly. She listened. He was doing something in the house: something heavy and quick. She could not imagine what it was. She had no imagination right now—or maybe way, way too much. Her mind blotted with emptiness and then surged with the vision of a body—a him!—then hurled itself into a vision of her father, her very own beloved father—the him—killed—covered with blood, or mangled, or—
No, Alice said over and over, no.
Why had the intruder stated I killed him good—while standing next to Alice’s hiding place? What kind of announcement was that?
At the other end of the tiny condo, the computer keyboard tapped evenly for a minute or two. It was a placid, gentle sound. Then came the shutdown music of the computer, a single sweet note.
And then the front door closed and an engine started up right next to the garage, and the minivan drove away. Alice could hear the shifting of gears, and she was surprised; hardly anybody had a manual transmission.
It was much harder to get out from under the car than it had been to get under it.
She was filthy.
She felt sick.
She was terrified.
The house seemed perfectly normal, in spite of what she had been hearing. Nothing had been touched that Alice could see. The computer was off. Nothing was out of place.
She was the only thing out of place. Her hair and skirt and hands and face—she was disgusting.
She had to take a shower. She had to cleanse herself, not just from the filth of the car and the garage floor, but also the filth of that voice, that trespass, that terrible presence.
If she washed away the grit and the oil, she could wash away those awful words, the nightmare vision they had put in her eyes.
She bolted the front door to make sure they couldn’t come back in. She should have had it bolted before. Dad would be annoyed with her. The rule was, If you’re home, put on the deadbolt.
Of course, Dad might be annoyed already, because she hadn’t driven to the ice cream place. Well, she would. As soon as she was clean. Maybe she should call him right now. But what number should she call? His office, or the one on Caller ID, the one she hadn’t recognized?
Dad’s bathroom was behind his closet. Alice never used Dad’s bathroom. She used the main bathroom, which faced the tiny center hall. She ripped off the dress and threw it in a bundle between the toilet and the door. She turned the water on high and leaped in and scoured herself, shampooing her hair twice, and all the time feeling full of electricity, little charged particles of horror and fear. What if the intruder got back in somehow while she was in the shower? What if—what if he—
She choked this back and just got clean.
She turbaned her wet hair with one towel, and togaed herself with another and ran into the bedroom for more clothes.
She dressed with amazing speed, like a crazed movie scene, whipping from one thing to another, and in the mirror she could not even tell whether she was dressed, but she felt dressed, she was pretty sure of it, and she ran back to the garage and pressed the door opener and leaped into the Corvette. It was good Dad had automatic. She remembered how he had agonized over that. Real Vette drivers shifted gears. Dad got bored shifting.
Alice shoved the key in and started the engine and inside the closed space it roared like the opening of a race. Alice’s heart was doing the same. Her whole body was revving.
Alice put the Vette in reverse and took her foot off the brake and let it choose its own speed to back up. When she was out of the short driveway, and fully in the cul-de-sac, she swung the wheel much too hard—and the wrong way. She’d turned the car toward the dead end, not the exit. Alice lifted her foot in humiliation and was stranded in the tiny sunlit road.
She did not have enough breath to drive. Who would have thought driving took so much oxygen? Gasping, Alice reentered the little driveway, centered herself, and turned the wheel inside out. When she was sure she was pointed right, she gave the Vette way too much gas and hit the curb with her back tires as she shot backward.
She pressed the remote and the garage door closed slowly back down, and she found Drive, and started forward with a terrifying roar. She could hardly even see over the hood. She had to arch her back and shoulders and even then she had only a partial view of the road in front of her.
She saw somebody on the sidewalk and thought—it’s him!—
She was so terrified she gunned the engine again, exploding out of the condominium complex. Luckily there was no traffic because she just barreled out and turned left and was off, racing, the Corvette a low red monster going for the jugular.
Chapter 2
ALICE WAS TOO SMALL for the driver’s seat. Her father’s legs were much longer. Alice could barely reach the brakes and the accelerator. She had to extend her legs and ankles like a new, badly balanced ballerina.
And the traffic! Trucks towered on one side, vans crunched on the other. Each red light meant gauging when to slow down, and Alice failed, braking as violently as if small children were darting in front of her.
They were not kidding about zero to sixty in five seconds. Compared to her mother’s tinny little Sentra, Alice was in charge of a rocket launcher. Or it was in charge of her.
At last she was out of the city, beyond the developments, free of red lights, hurtling down the long country road toward Salmon River. No matter how slowly she drove, it felt fast. The curves tested her control. The Corvette possessed goals of its own, and if she accelerated a tiny bit, it accelerated a whole lot, and the tires screamed and left patches.
Alice was exhausted.
She was holding the steering wheel way too tightly, but it was all that balanced her, scootched up too far on the leather seat, legs extended, ankles flexed. The fake fingernails gouged her palms, as if somebody else were holding the wheel.
She could grip, steer, look, stare, tense, turn, and brake.
She could not think.
Power vibrated up through her thighs and pressed her spine back into the padded leather, but she did not take her father’s joy in this. She did not have his faint smile, the one that told her he was pretending to be on a racetrack, or have the FBI on his heels.
There was the turnoff, by a low-lying meadow with a narrow glimpse of the beautiful Salmon River. The turn came quicker than Alice expected, and she took her foot off the gas late, braked late, and knew immediately that the best decision was to quit making the turn. Skip the whole thing, keep going straight, turn around later and come back. Too late for that. Alice found herself in the turn with way too much velocity. The tires screamed as if she had run over squirrels and Alice screamed, too, imagining their flat, bloody bodies, but
she hung onto the wheel and missed the picket fence of somebody’s yard and even got back onto her side of the road.
Thinking of squirrels had distracted her from thinking of cars. A silver Crown Victoria coming in the opposite direction had to yank into somebody’s hedge to escape collision. Wonderful. The state police drove Crown Vics.
But it was no state trooper. The driver rolled his window down and leaned out to yell at her. Alice was scarlet with shame, and weak with escape. What if she had totaled Dad’s Corvette?
Her mouth tasted awful, as if she’d thrown up and forgotten it.
She waved at the Crown Vic to apologize, but her fingers didn’t let go of the steering wheel after all and there was no wave. She crept forward, unable to solve this, leaving the driver’s furious voice behind.
There was the ice cream shack, centered on a parking lot of broken asphalt and the kind of pebbles that lodge in shoes and tires. The place seemed to have no name, just a big brightly painted wooden cone and scoop nailed to the gable. She wondered how they had a telephone listing without a name.
She circled around the back of the shack, riding the brake. Edging up the far side meant she faced frontward and wouldn’t have to back the car again.
Alice stopped.
Branches from pine trees relaxed onto the long scarlet hood. The engine would be hot, and the sap from the trees would make sticky spots hard to get off. Dad would be crazed.
But Alice could not drive another inch.
She turned the engine off and sat trembling. Waves of panic at all those near misses washed over her like ocean tides, as if now, now when she had gotten here, now she was going to drown.
It was several minutes before she was breathing like a person. She could see the road down which she’d come, and there were no dead squirrels on the pavement. That was good.
When would Dad get here? What were they going to do with two cars? She absolutely could not drive this Corvette again. She would have to drive the Blazer. No, they would have to abandon the Blazer, and somebody would have to come back for it another day, because Alice was ready to be the passenger again. Or forever.
Alice tilted the steering column, adjusted the seat, and fixed the rearview mirror. Now that she was done driving, she could see. Good job, Alice! she complimented herself sarcastically.
Only then did Alice remember the voice in her house. Herself under the car, hiding. Now a chilly ripple of fear traveled across her skin.
Driving had consumed her so completely that she in turn completely forgot what was making her drive so frantically.
Why hadn’t she called the police? Why hadn’t she called Dad? Why hadn’t she behaved like a sensible person? So that’s what panic was. It was one part stupidity, one part deafness, one part blind flight.
Chills in her bones ran down her fingers, and she found herself clenching and unclenching her fists.
And yet, the more she sat in the sun, the less likely it seemed that she, Alice, had hidden beneath a car from a vicious intruder who talked of killing. The memory dulled and became remote, like last week’s television show.
Alice shoved the heavy door open and got out of the car and stood in the sun, the welcome, normal, almost-hot sun of early spring.
She slammed the door of the Corvette. The solid chunk of metal going where it belonged soothed her. Her legs held her up. They seemed to have recovered from the stretching act of the dozen miles she’d driven.
The keys were hanging from the ignition, but here in the yellow sun it seemed okay to leave them. This was a normal place for normal people. Soon Dad would be here, and he would have a normal explanation.
Alice wanted to wait for Dad before she ordered, but she was too thirsty. She walked over to the little screened window and asked for a vanilla shake and a Coke. The Coke was handed to her right away, in a tall thin paper cup, completely different from the cups anybody else used, and that was part of the appeal; everything here had an old-time look and texture. She drank the Coke greedily, quenching her thirst, chewing on ice shards.
Through the screen she watched the boy mix that wonderful, heavy vanilla ice cream from the farm store down the road with milk from the farm itself. The world’s best shake.
She paid, stuck a straw into the thick white bubbles, and sucked hard to get it to rise to her mouth. Vanilla was such a friendly flavor. A family kind of taste.
There was a strange blankness in her head, as if she had had thoughts once, and would have them again, but wasn’t having them now. She could taste, and see, and be warm. But she could not think.
She went back to sit in the car and wait for her father.
He didn’t come.
She had finished her shake and finished her Coke and taken both cups to the trash and still Dad had not come.
The sun made the interior of the Vette hot in a cozy, afternoon nap kind of way. By now, Alice felt proud of her drive, proud of having pulled it off, eager to boast to Dad. Maybe he drove the Vette in part because everybody else on the road was envious.
She gave the key a quarter turn for power only and the radio came on. Dad listened to the station with the best traffic reports, which did not mean the best music. Alice had always wanted to be a traffic person, leaning out the window of the helicopter, spotting wrecks, and making snide remarks about people who could not drive, and rubberneckers who made it all worse, and recognizing cars by their roofs. From a copter, Dad’s Corvette would be the easiest car on the road to spot.
Alice leaned forward to tune the radio to a better station and saw her unfinished nails. She got out the polish. Its acrid, distinct smell filled the car.
The radio left off advertising and sports and moved to local news. Alice was surprised at how much time had passed. How long had it taken her to drive here? How long had she sat, mindless in the sun?
“Tragedy and mystery struck the Stratford Condominium complex earlier today,” said the announcer. His voice was completely happy.
Stratford? thought Alice. That’s where Dad lives.
“Thirty-nine-year-old Marc Robie was found murdered in his bedroom. Neighbors are shocked. This is the kind of place where you never dream such a thing could happen, they say.”
Dad?
That Marc Robie?
Murdered in his condo?
That was impossible.
Dad had not been home.
She had been home.
Daddy! thought Alice.
“Police are looking for Mr. Robie’s teenage daughter, Alice Robie, for questioning. Alice Robie was seen driving away from the condo in her father’s car before police arrived at the murder scene.”
Alice watched her fingers carefully screw the cap back onto the polish. She watched those same fingers open the bag, drop the polish back in and seal the plastic zipper. Her breath was not keeping her alive; she was turning blue. The plastic bag slid out of her fingers.
Murdered meant dead.
Her father.
No. She would not go along with that. It was impossible. She needed Daddy. She loved Daddy.
The reporter loved being in on the action and his voice rose several notches. “Incredibly,” cried the reporter, “police were called by the murder victim’s ex-wife, who received an E-mail message from their daughter Alice, confessing that she had killed her father. Alice Robie is described as five feet five inches, 115 pounds, long brown hair, brown eyes. She is driving a ʼ94 red Corvette, license 386 JEF.”
Alice wet her lips with a dry tongue. She got out of the Corvette and stumbled across the entire parking lot, suddenly a vast hideous stretch of pockmarked black and gray. Her feet and legs had not recovered from being stretched after all, because they could hardly lift themselves to travel forward. The public phone on the other side, under other pine trees, seemed as remote as another state.
Alice stared at the phone for a minute, trying to figure out its technology and what was required of her to use it. She tapped in eleven digits to get the long-distance carrier they use
d. Her fingernails got in the way. Then she tapped zero plus ten digits of her mother’s phone number. She tapped the same number a second time, and then the four-digit PIN number so it would charge.
Tears got in her way. She could not see. She made a mistake and had to start over.
It seemed incredibly cruel, to require rows and rows of pointless mean numbers, just so she could talk to her mother.
At last it rang.
Her heart was pounding so hard she could hear it in all her pulses. Her tears were drenching her face, she was raining on herself.
“Hello?” said her mother. The voice was half scream. It had a terrible texture.
Alice loved her mother. She believed that Dad had gone on loving Mom, even though Dad had announced a million times that this was not so. But Mom had certainly not gone on loving Dad. Mom spent time in divorce support groups, which occasionally met at the house so Alice was forced to listen: ten women saying vicious things about their former husbands.
And yet Alice had gone on loving her mother just as much, and this was something Alice had not figured out: How you could love a person you thought was so wrong, wrong, wrong.
“Mommy,” said Alice, and her voice broke. She clung to the heavy old-fashioned receiver of the pay phone. She wanted to cry: Mommy, come get me; Mommy, say this isn’t true; Mommy, say Daddy is fine.
Her mother said, “Alice! Alice, the police are here! Alice, I can’t believe this!” Her mother was crying. Huge wrenching sobs broke up her words. “Ally, darling, I love you. No matter what you have done, I still love you.”
Alice stared at the phone. “Mom, you can’t—you can’t—” She could not find the end of her sentence. What had the radio said? What was Mom saying? What could it mean?
“Ally, your father!” Her mother’s voice was a stranger’s voice. “You must have been so angry! It’s my fault. I should never have let you stay with him.”
Alice’s brain felt sticky, like the hood of the Corvette from pine sap. “Angry?” she said.
Her mother was gasping with sobs, and her voice was thready from too little air. “Oh, Alice, how are we going to get through this? Ally, I can’t believe this!”