It wasn’t that the car was in the ditch. It was that it was in the ditch with one door hanging open.
Ben gentled the Probe to a stop on the slick road. Then he set the brake and hit the emergency flasher button. He climbed out from behind the wheel. He had thick black hair and one of those faces women like — a little hard, though, around the eyes and mouth. He lit a cigarette and approached the car in the ditch. It was a blue Toyota four-door and it sat at a ludicrous angle with the right-hand headlight buried in the snowy bank.
They really put it in there, he thought. It’ll take a wrecker to get it out.
The door that hung open was on the passenger side. It had only gone partway and then jammed against the bank. There was just enough room for somebody to squeeze out, and he could see footprints there, half filled with new snow. A funny thing about those footprints. They didn’t circle back to the road. They tracked straight off into the woods.
Epauletes of white were forming on the shoulders of his black leather jacket. He took a drag off the cigarette. Filthy habit, but he was too much of a nicotine degenerate to quit.
He circled around the back of the car and slid through the open door. Right away he knew it was a renter, and a recent one at that. There was none of the usual clutter people leave behind when they use a car day in and day out. He opened the glove compartment and found nothing inside but the owner’s manual in its plastic sleeve. That made it certain it was a renter.
He’d been holding the cigarette outside the car. Good thing, too, because its absence from the interior allowed him to detect the faint odor of a woman’s scent. The tracks outside appeared to be those of a man. So there’d been two people in the car and they’d taken off in different directions.
Funny how when you were trained for it, when it was your profession, you could sense when things were wrong. Abandoned car in a ditch on a snowy night — you saw it all the time. And all it meant was that the driver hadn’t been able to handle the conditions. Incompetence or overconfidence — the two abiding traits of the human race. Yet the second his headlights had picked out the Toyota he had known that it was more than that. And now, as his eyes drifted to the upper edge of the windshield, his hunch was verified.
The snow layering the outside of the glass had partially obscured it. That was why he hadn’t spotted it the moment he’d slid inside the car. A dime-size hole with a spiderweb of cracks raying away from it.
So there’d been a third person in the car — probably in the backseat. And he’d had a pistol. And he’d used it at least once.
It was dark out now, coasting toward seven-thirty. She thought: Ben should’ve been here by now.
She went to the window. It was getting impossible out there, a constant slant of snow. She couldn’t even tell where the road was anymore. She tried to remember the last time she’d heard a car go by and couldn’t.
He’s stuck somewhere, she thought. Let it be that and nothing else. He’ll call me, tell me he can’t make it — like Ted should’ve called and hadn’t.
It got to be a quarter of eight and still there was no sign of Ben. She kept going to the window. She would’ve made herself a cup of tea, but she’d had so much already that her kidneys were floating.
She went out into the kitchen anyway. And that was when the back doorknob rattled and there was a soft, tentative knock.
A little thrill went through her — what the French call a frisson — and it wasn’t very pleasant. She had the feeling that whoever it was had been standing outside the door for some time, trying to figure out whether anyone was at home. Then he’d tried the knob and just at that moment the kitchen light had come on and he’d had to switch to a knock.
Ted had owned a hunting rifle and also a pistol. But after his death it had all been put in a trunk, and the trunk had gone up in the attic. So as far as weapons went, she was naked.
Kitchen knife, she thought. Then she realized how ludicrous it would be to open the door on a neighbor holding it in her hand.
Then she had a better idea. She flipped on the back-porch light. Then she pushed a chair against the counter and got up on it and opened the window over the sink.
He swung his face around and stared at her as she stuck her head out. He was a skinny guy with a short blond beard. His hair was blond, too, and thinning in front even though he couldn’t have been more than twenty-seven or twenty-eight. There was snow caked on his pants legs and snow in his beard and eyebrows and he looked utterly wretched.
He gave a shake of his head as if to unlimber his neck and began talking. “Hey, look, could I use your telephone? I put my car in a ditch and I need help.”
“Why’d you come to the back door?”
He waved a hand behind him. “I came out of the woods. I saw the lights down here and cut across a field and got all tangled up and now I don’t even know if I ended up the same place I headed for. So could I use your phone?”
There was an almost pleading look on his face. He was shivering and miserable and didn’t look dangerous at all. One of those people who make a mess of everything, even taking a shortcut on a blizzardy night.
“Wait a minute,” she said.
She climbed down off the chair. She thought about the knife again, then dismissed the idea as foolish.
He came into the kitchen, dripping snow and watching her worriedly with pale blue eyes — as if she might consign him once again to the mercies of the blizzard.
“How far did you walk?”
His eyes seemed to blank out on her. “How far? I don’t know.”
She handed him a kitchen towel. “You’d better dry your head.”
“What? Oh yeah. Sure.”
“Then we can go in the living room and you can use the phone.”
“Phone. Yeah.” As if it had just now occurred to him. “Is there, like, is there a taxi in this town?”
“Don’t you want a wrecker to pull your car out of the ditch?”
“That can wait — I got to get someplace.”
“We don’t have any taxis. The town’s too small. It’s mainly a summer place. People from the city have vacation homes along the lake. All we get in winter is the overflow from the ski resorts.”
He blinked at her. He seemed disoriented — not from the cold or his trudge through the snow, but from something else. Then she realized what it was. He’s afraid, she thought.
“How’m I — how’m I going to get out of here? I got to get up to Saranac Lake, someplace like that.” He didn’t add, “So I’ll be safe.” But he could’ve added it.
“There’s a motor court in town.”
“No — that’s out.”
He twisted his head around and stared at the wall, then twisted it back again.
“Look, you could drive me. You’re used to this crap — you live up here. And I’d give you — what would I give you? — I’d give you fifty. Hell, I’d give you a hundred if you wanted.”
“I’m expecting someone.”
He twisted his head around again. He seemed to do that when he wanted to think — as if he were shutting her out momentarily and going into a quiet room where the ideas would flow.
He twisted his head back again. “Leave them a note. Leave it right on the front door. That’d be all right.”
“Listen — I don’t know what kind of trouble you’re in, but you’re obviously in some sort of trouble.”
He blinked his eyes at her in horror. “No — what makes you think that?”
“Anyway, we have a sheriff’s deputy here and maybe, well, you might want to talk to him.”
“No — what’s going on here? I just put my car in a ditch, that’s all. What’s wrong with that? And now I want to get to Saranac Lake — yeah, Saranac. Or Placid if it’s closer.”