When they had gone only three miles, they came upon a white, two-door Plymouth Valiant — a car that Joey had admired as a kid but hadn't seen in ages. It was stopped at the side of the road, broken down. Three sputtering red flares had been set out along the shoulder of the highway, and in their intense light, as if by a dark miracle of transubstantiation, the falling rain appeared to be a downpour of blood.
The vehicle that he was following slowed, almost halted beside the Valiant, then accelerated again.
Someone in a black, hooded raincoat stood beside the disabled Plymouth, holding a flashlight. The stranded motorist waved at him, imploring him to stop.
Joey glanced at the dwindling taillights of the car that he had been pursuing. It would soon pass around a bend, over a rise, out of sight.
Coasting past the Plymouth, he saw that the person in the raincoat was a woman. A girl, really. Arrestingly pretty. She appeared to be no older than sixteen or seventeen'
Under the hood of the coat, her flare-tinted face reminded him, curiously, of the haunting countenance on the statue of the Virgin Mother at Our Lady of Sorrows, back in Asherville. Sometimes the Virgin's serene ceramic face had just such a forlorn and spectral aspect in the crimson glow of the flickering votive candles arrayed in red glasses beneath it.
As Joey rolled slowly past this girl, she stared entreatingly, and in her porcelain features he saw something that alarmed him: a disturbing premonition, a vision of her lovely face without eyes, battered and bloody. Somehow he knew that if he didn't stop to help her, she would not live to see the dawn but would die violently in some black moment of the storm.
He parked on the shoulder ahead of the Valiant and got out of the rental car. He was still soaked from having stood in the cleansing downpour outside Henry Kadinska's office little more than twenty minutes ago, so the pounding rain didn't bother him, and the cold night air wasn't half as chilling as the fear that had filled him since he had learned of his inheritance.
He hurried along the pavement, and the girl came forward to meet him at the front of her disabled Valiant.
"Thank God, you stopped," she said. Rain streamed off her hood, a glistening veil in front of her face.
He said, "What happened?"
"It just failed."
"While you were rolling?"
"Yeah. Not the battery."
"How do you know?"
"I've still got power."
Her eyes were dark and huge. Her face glowed in the flare light, and on her cheeks, raindrops glistened like tears.
"Maybe the generator," he said.
"You know cars?"
"Yeah."
"I don't," she said. "I feel so helpless."
"We all do," Joey said.
She gave him a peculiar look.
She was just a girl, and at her age she was surely naive and not yet fully aware of the world's cruelty. Yet Joey Shannon saw more in her eyes than he could comprehend.
"I feel lost," she said, evidently still referring to her lack of knowledge about cars.
He unlatched and raised the hood. "Let me have your light."
At first she seemed not to know what he meant, but then she handed the flashlight to him. "I think it's hopeless."
While rain pounded against his back, he checked the distributor cap to be sure that it was seated securely, examined the spark-plug leads, scrutinized the battery cables.
"If you could just give me a ride home," she said, "my dad and I can come back here tomorrow."
"Let me try it first," he said, closing the hood.
"You don't even have a raincoat," she worried.
"Doesn't matter."
"You'll catch your death."
"It's only water — they baptize babies in it."
Overhead, the branches of the mountain laurels clattered in a bitter gust of wind, shaking loose a flock of dead leaves that whirled briefly but then settled to the ground as spiritlessly as lost hopes sifting down through the darkness of a troubled heart.
He opened the driver's door, got behind the steering wheel, and put the flashlight on the seat beside him. The keys were in the ignition. When he attempted to start the engine, there was no response whatsoever. He tried the headlights, and they came on at full power.
In front of the car, the girl was caught in the bright beams. She was no longer tinted red. Her black raincoat hung like a cowled robe, and in its folds, her face and hands were white and gloriously radiant.
He stared at her for a moment, wondering why he had been brought to her and where they would find themselves by the time this strange night had ended. Then he switched off the headlights.
The girl stood once more in the lambent light of the flares, lashed by crimson rain.
After leaning across the seat to lock the passenger door, Joey got out of the Valiant, taking the flashlight and the keys with him. "Whatever's wrong, I don't have what's needed to fix it." He slammed the driver's door and locked it as well. "You're right — the best I can do is give you a lift. Where do you live?"
"Coal Valley. I was on my way home when the trouble started."
"Hardly anyone lives there any more."
"Yeah. We're one of the last three families. It's almost like a ghost town."
Thoroughly soaked and cold to the bone, he was eager to get back to the rental car and switch the heater to its highest setting. But when he met her dark eyes again, he felt more strongly than ever that she was the reason that he had been given another chance to take the road to Coal Valley, as he should have done twenty years ago. Rather than run with her to the shelter of the Chevy, he hesitated, afraid that whatever he did — even taking her home — might be the wrong thing to do, and that in choosing a course of action, he would be throwing away this last, miraculous chance at redemption.
"What's wrong?" she asked.
Joey had been staring at her, half mesmerized, contemplating the possible consequences of his actions. His empty gaze must have disconcerted her every bit as much as the concept of consequences disconcerted him.
Speaking without thinking, surprised to hear these particular words issuing from himself, he said, "Show me your hands."
"My hands?"
"Show me your hands."
The wind sang epithalamion in the trees above, and the night was a chapel in which they stood alone.
With a look of puzzlement, she held out her delicate hands for his inspection.
"Palms up," he said.
She did as he asked, and her posture made her resemble more than ever the Mother of Heaven entreating all to come unto her, into the bosom of everlasting peace.
The girl's hands cupped the darkness, and he couldn't read her palms.
Trembling, he raised the flashlight.
At first her hands were unblemished. Then a faint bruise slowly appeared in the center of each rain-pooled palm.
He closed his eyes and held his breath. When he looked again, the bruises had darkened.
"You're scaring me," she said.
"We should be scared."
"You never seemed strange."
"Look at your hands," he said.
She lowered her eyes.
"What do you see?" he asked.
"See? Just my hands."
The storm wind crying in the trees was the voice of a million victims, and the night was filled with their pathetic pleas for mercy.
He would have been shaking uncontrollably if he had not been paralyzed by fear. "You don't see the bruises?"
"What bruises?"
Her gaze rose from her hands, and her eyes met his again.