Fog shortened the flare of her headlights. She left the curb and a truck, parked two car-lengths behind, started up at the same moment. It followed close at her rear, its headlights turned on bright, glaring back from her mirror into her eyes.
At first Marian felt only a mild annoyance. She kicked her own lights to bright and back to dim, to remind the other driver that he was violating the traffic regulations. The truck lights did not respond.
She shrugged. Marian’s frequent claim that truck drivers were homely knights dedicated to the succor of frail — though adept — women motorists had not been entirely a joke. Often in minor emergencies they had stopped to help. Now, just when her nerves were jangled anyway, she had to encounter a slob of a driver who seemed intent on blinding her.
But then, you couldn’t expect everyone to conform to an occupational pattern. Look at butchers. Once she had known a nice, sensitive butcher who painted in oils, assiduously avoiding the use of the color red.
But damn it, why didn’t a policeman flag down this creep and make him dim his lights? She had not seen a policeman, a highway patrolman, or a prowl car since she left home.
Her annoyance fizzed as she crossed an intersection and the truck stayed with her. She pulled to the curb, slowed almost to a stop, and signalled firmly for the truck to continue on. The truck pulled over too, and remained behind her.
She pressed the accelerator as hard as she dared in the tunnel of fog. Laboring noisily, the truck speeded up. Marion’s annoyance changed to real anger. Probably it was some juvenile delinquent acting out his hostilities on wheels borrowed from his hard-working Papa.
She had paid no attention to the truck when it had been parked on the street, and since then the glare had made it indistinguishable. But she knew it was not a very large one, nor a van. She had not seen the driver at all.
She would turn off Oakland and go out Shore Drive. Perhaps he would tire of his silly sport. If not, there ought to be traffic patrolmen there.
She turned right, suddenly and without signalling. The truck braked and turned after her. On the cross street she stopped for a barely visible stop sign. The truck stopped and started with her, keeping the distance unchanged. She suppressed a crazy impulse to slam into reverse and ram him with her rear bumper.
She swerved left into Shore Drive. The truck swerved with her. She blinked, eyes smarting from the mirrored glare. A small stalagmite of fear was edging up inside her anger. Possibly this was not a prankster.
Choosing Shore Drive had been a mistake, Marian decided. There was not another car in sight. At the right was a ledge, a slope of trees, a stretch of beach and then the lake, all greyed out by the fog. At the left was open park land, then a steep wooded cliff. On top of it, but invisible now, were perched grey stone mansions whose slit-windowed turrets peered down to the lake. They were inaccessible from this side. There was a long stretch of drive with no possibility of turning off except into the deserted park.
Now that Marian had let herself recognize her fear, it spread along her nerves like ice. She felt wetness inside her gloves, and fear pricked up along her spine like the fur of a frightened cat.
She speeded up to fifty, hoping desperately to hear the siren of a lurking prowl car. But there were curves ahead and she dared not maintain the speed. She braked, belatedly seeing the first curve. The bag beside her toppled and fell to the floor of the car. There was the sound of glass cracking and the sharp smell of whiskey began to fill the car. The truck’s tires screeched behind her, barely slowing in time.
“So if a cop should materialize he’d probably book me for drunkenness or something,” she said aloud. “That would be lovely. But there aren’t any cops. They all took off for Mars an hour ago. Stop talking, Marian O’Meara. You’re scared to death. You’re a gibbering mess of fright. Put yourself together.”
She gripped the wheel unnecessarily hard, slowing for the next curve.
“I never believed much in things that go boomp in the night and things that say boo. I do now, though.”
She tried not to imagine the face of the insane murderer in the truck — at last she had let herself admit that it probably was the psycho — which she had not even glimpsed in reality. A huge man with loose lips and little, mad red eyes?
But no, judging from the hell-fire messages he had left with his victims. More likely he was tall and gaunt, with thin lips and cavernous eyes, a self-tormented ascetic except when his hatred of evil turned into a wilder hatred of attractive women, because to him they were instruments of evil.
But I’m not, Rod. I’m not, Teddy and Midge. I don’t deserve this for anything, do I?
Silly. People don’t get chased by homicidal nuts because they do or don’t deserve it. They get pursued because something — color of hair, a way of walking, or being gaily dressed, reminds some split-off part of the psycho’s mind of what he hates or fears.
Marian was in the suburbs now, nearing the end of Shore Drive. There would be houses with driveways, with lights over front doors and people in lighted rooms who could be called. True, the business part of Brookdale would be closed and dark, but—
The filling station. That big lovely service station, filling a corner lot with its batteries of gas pumps, its white garage and its cheerful attendants! Only last Saturday night she and Rod had stopped there close to midnight. It had been open. A pleasant young negro had filled their tank, and he and a brisk red-haired young man had wiped the car windows.
With longing, with rising hope, Marian held up the two faces before the eyes of her mind. “Check your oil and water, Ma’am?” Strong young men, wholesome-looking young men, please be there.
She turned right into the station, seeing a gleam of light inside the garage, refusing to believe the pumps were unlighted. The filling station was closed. There was only a night light inside.
She swung out again, still wearing the truck like an appendage to her car. Its lights blazed back from her mirror and she dabbed with her glove at a trickle of tears on her cheeks.
As she swung back into the road she glanced at the gas gauge and froze. The needle was perilously close to “E.”
“Dear God, forgive me my carelessness, my rattling brains that don’t remember such things as keeping a full gas tank. Forgive me this one more time and make the gas last until I find help.”
The business street of Brookdale was deserted as she had known it would be. Damn those village fathers who vote every year not to allow a tavern in the town. It would be open now, with a juke box playing corn and a lot of beautiful, sloppy, jolly people at the bar. Would that offend the stuffy suburbanites more than the notoriety of a messy murder on their streets? But perhaps it wouldn’t come to that. They’d simply move her body, leave it somewhere in the city, and keep embarrassment out of Brookdale.
And where was the village police station? Marian had never thought to find out. Off on a side street somewhere, but she did not dare to leave the highway and search the dark cross streets.
She recalled a glimpse of the station, a genteel white phony colonial house complete with elms and marked with an unobtrusive sign — POLICE. She wouldn’t see the small sign in this darkness, nor would she recognize the building.
She drove on, between large houses set far back on landscaped lawns. Where was everyone? Lights gleamed dimly from some of the windows, but you could not be sure which houses actually had people — living, moving, waking people — inside. If she guessed wrong, there probably would be no second chance.