“Of course I thought it was Deanna. Tony did, too. We got back to school and told a few people, and you know how that goes. Everybody wanted to see this woman. They’d all heard about her, back when it happened, back when their parents were in school. But it was like another chapter was opening now, and we had started it. We thought we were going to hit it big, solve this old crime and get famous, but it never turned out like that. Polly, or Deanna, or whoever the hell she was, left Bell City. It made the papers. Polly’s aunt and uncle even made a statement, said that it was ridiculous to suggest she and Deanna were the same person. They’d raised her from when she was a little girl. Her uncle even wrote a book about Deanna, I heard. Or at least that’s what Mrs. Sumner says at school. I never read it.”
“I don’t recommend it,” Brian said bitterly. “It’s boring.”
“So anyway, it blew over. We never did go back there to that house in Bell City. We were too scared to. My mom and dad got a letter from someone, a real heated thing, saying we had opened up old wounds that should have never been opened. It wasn’t too long after that that someone started that rumor about Deanna’s remains being found out in California, but I never believed it. I think she’s still out there somewhere, and I think if you can find Polly you’ll find Deanna.”
Mary looked at this scrawny boy, trying to register what he had said. Some girls played tennis up on the park courts, laughing at every missed hit. The playground was empty, the swings blowing back and forth, their rusted chains squeaking. She could not get her mind off something Paul had said, some bit of information that was almost buried in there.
The car. A red Honda.
Mary knew that they would have to return to Bell City to find the house Polly had stayed in when she returned to Bell City with her red car. The car would not be there, of course-not now. But this is where they needed to go, Mary knew that much. Once again, they were being led. The kid lit a wrinkled cigarette, and the smoke caught in the wind and trailed away across the field off to their right.
A car pulled up then, an old Bondo’d Mustang that was packed with kids who looked just like Paul except for the white hair. He said good-bye and piled in the car, and the kids disappeared down a little dirt road into the heart of the park.
“Where now?” asked Dennis. But of course he already knew.
38
The house on Rattlesnake Ridge was easy to see. It was just up the hill from the Wobble Inn on a little switchback-heavy road named St. Louis Street. Through the trees you could see the top of the inn where they had questioned the bartender just twelve hours ago.
The house was dilapidated and probably empty, but Dennis knocked on the door anyway. “Nobody’s home,” he said. They all stood around the car, waiting for some divine inspiration. It was after 11:00 a.m. They had missed all of their classes now, and still they hadn’t made any progress since last night.
“Let’s go down the hill to the bar,” Brian said. Mary shrugged. They didn’t have anything better to do.
There were no cars parked at the Wobble Inn today. The place had a desolate air, empty and ominous. Brian tried the front door, but it was locked. “Closed?” he asked. They looked in the streaky front windows, and saw that there were no tables inside as there had been last night. The booth where the men had played poker was gone. The bar itself had been torn out. Wires swung from the ceiling where the beer lights had hung.
“What the hell?” Dennis asked.
Mary felt that constriction in her heart again, just as she had at the Collinses’ yesterday. Things were beginning to move, the pattern was revealing itself. They had to figure out the pattern before this afternoon, before Williams’s deadline expired.
“Let’s go to the back,” Brian said. They went around the building. The back doors were locked, too. When they looked inside, it was the same thing. Emptiness. No tables, no bar stools. Nothing except the floorboards and the bare walls.
“What should we do?” Mary asked. She was feeling an anxiety like she had never felt. It poured down on her, opened her up from the inside out. She felt every notion of the world, every lick of the wind and every beam of heat from the sun. The spin of the planet, too, under her feet. She felt it, all of it, and in a strange way it was exhilarating.
“Hey!” someone shouted from up on the hill.
They all turned. He was standing in the trees, halfway down, holding himself in position by a sapling. Coming toward them.
The bartender.
“What’s going on?” Dennis called. “We came back to talk to you!”
The man didn’t say anything. He turned and began to claw up the hill. Fast, faster-grabbing trees as he went, turning up the fallen leaves with his boot heels as he tried to find his footing on the loose dirt.
“There’s a car up there,” Brian said.
There was. They could see the top of it from where they stood, parked in front of the empty house they’d just been to on St. Louis Street.
My God, Mary thought. He’s coming for us.
Before she could say anything, Brian was pulling her and they were running toward Dennis’s car. They got in and Dennis fought with the keys. “Hurry!” Brian shouted. He kept looking behind them, out the back window, for the car they had seen. Dennis finally found the right key and shoved it into the ignition. He started the car and put it in gear, and they spun out of the Wobble Inn’s parking lot, throwing a cloud of gravel behind them.
“There he is!” Brian shouted. Mary turned to see it: the car was pulling off St. Louis and speeding toward them. There were two men in the front seat.
“Oh Christ, oh Christ,” Dennis was saying.
The ridge dropped away on either side of the car, and at some points along the road there was no guardrail. Mary looked to her right and saw the tops of the trees. It was the same thing on the other side. Behind the Lexus, the car was gaining on them quickly but Dennis didn’t seem to be driving very fast.
“Faster, Dennis!” Brian shouted.
“I’m going as fast as I can!” Dennis came back at him. His voice was high pitched, girlish almost. “Do you want to end up down at the bottom of the ravine?” Things were breaking down fast now, churning toward a boiling point. Mary cursed herself for getting into this, for coming out to Cale and Bell City in the first place. She should be at Winchester, or at home, even, back in Kentucky where everything was safe.
The car was a silver, rusted Mazda RX7. It was right on their bumper now. Mary could see the two men’s faces. The bartender was driving, and the man in the passenger’s seat was the man from the trailer. Marco. Their stares were placid. Businesslike. As she stared at them, Marco raised a video camera to his eye. She could see its pulsing red light. My God, she thought, they’re filming us. The camera struck an awful fear in Mary, and she turned around and put her face in her hands.
“The interstate,” Dennis said.
She looked up in time to see it whizzing by her on the right-hand side: the sign for I-64. Straight ahead.
Dennis drove toward it. The ridge opened up into a straight stretch, and he put on the gas. But the car behind them stayed on their tail, and Brian slunk down in the seat. He was praying under his breath.
“There!” Dennis shouted.
Mary looked ahead of them. She could only see the distant clover of the freeway ramps rising out of the woods in the middle distance. “What?” she asked him.
“There! Right there!” he shouted again.