Beware That Girl (35 page)

“Yeah.” She nodded. “Yeah.”

Olivia hadn’t moved a muscle by the time I came back from changing into jeans and a sweatshirt. “Okay, so we have to figure out how to get him down to the car.”

She nodded but didn’t respond. It’s like we took turns being stupid.

“Hey, I got it! Does this place have those pushcart thingies to move small bits of furniture and suitcases?”

“We do.” She brightened. “They’re in that little room off the garage but before the elevators. There’s like three of them in there at all times.”

“Okay, you watch him, and I’ll go.”

I took the freight elevator down. My future—hell, my life—was shredded. But I didn’t cry. Instead, I saw myself walking through the Old Campus at Yale. I inhaled the crispness of October as I walked to one of my intro classes. Rustling leaves crunched underfoot. I waved at a couple of kids I knew from my dorm. We would meet later for study hall and then go for a coffee before my shift at the library.

I had pinned everything on Yale.

The sense of belonging and loss was unbearable.

I was in the storage room without knowing how I got there.

Sorry, Mom. I tried. I tried real hard. I swear to you and God, I tried.

I failed.

I brought up the trolley. Neither of us wanted to touch the body. Hysteria was edging back in around us. We eventually decided to wear gloves.

Redkin was way heavier than he looked. It was awkward and awful, but we did it. We got the body all tucked in and then threw our coats overtop.

Somewhere in all of this, Olivia had poured herself a glass of wine. I went to take a sip from her glass and she shook her head. “If anything goes sideways, you have to blow zero for alcohol.”

“Right,” I said. Or I think I said. Because throughout all this, it was like I was watching myself from somewhere else. I was thirsty, but I couldn’t have a drink. My cellphone rang once. We had to go, we had to go, we had to…

“Time to go,” I said.

“Time to go,” she whispered.

We wheeled Redkin into the elevator.

“We’re going to take the Palisades on the way to Bear Mountain.” Olivia said this with rather shaky authority. “I changed my mind about the Taconic. We need a river or at least an embankment to drive off.”

“What?”

“Well, plan A was, like, off a cliff. This will be better.” She was convincing herself, no doubt about it. “There’s a spot to go off near Route 6 right before the Bear Mountain Bridge, I’m sure of it.”

“What?!” I was yelling at this point.

“No, listen. The Dentons have a lodge at Bear Mountain. I know the route like the back of my hand. We went tons of times.”

“When?”

“When I was a kid.”

Oh, God.

The coast was clear when we arrived in the garage. We went to the appointed spot, and sure enough, there it was—a corpse of a car. It had to be at least thirty years old.

“It sure looks like something that would be untraceable,” Olivia said, making a face.

We checked for other residents returning from a late dinner or whatever. It was as quiet as a tomb. All I could hear was my own breathing.

“He’s got to go in the front with you, Kate.”

“What? No! No way!”

“Yes, I’ve got it worked out!” She slapped the trunk of the car. “When we get to the bit off Route 6, we’ll stop and you’ll switch places with him. We can just slide him over and you can sort of drive from the passenger seat and jump out just before we hit the water.”

“WHAT?!
Nooo!
” She was crazy, that was the only explanation. My life was in the hands of someone who was batshit crazy.

“It’s the only way. Look, I’ll be right in the car with you. We’ll jump out together. He has a tragic accident and we make our way back to the city on foot, or catch the Woodbury bus, or, or…we’ll figure it out.”

What was I going to say? We’d passed through the “this is nuts” portal several hours ago. My mind emptied. “Yeah, okay.”

She opened the squealing door with considerable difficulty. “A car accident just about always works. It’ll look like he was on the run. It’s foolproof!”

“Did you take too many pills?”

“Never been straighter or more scared in my life.”

“Me too.” But I couldn’t come up with anything half as good while we stood there. “Fine, let’s load him up.” This was way harder than we had anticipated. Had he started to stiffen? Again, we were both caught off guard by how heavy the body was.

The car was so old it only had lap belts.

“Lean him over toward the door. I don’t want him listing toward me,” I directed. “Where are the keys?” Maybe there weren’t any and we’d have to come up with plan C. I prayed hard for plan C.

“They’re in the ignition,” offered Olivia from the backseat, the natural seat for any born-and-bred New Yorker. “Plug ‘Bear Mountain Bridge’ into the GPS.”

I wanted to hit her. “Olivia, there’s no GPS on a car like this.”

“Never mind, I’ll Googlemap it.”

I turned the key, and miraculously, the stupid car started. When I tried to hit the lights, the windshield wipers went off at hurricane speed. We both screamed. Three knobs later, I found the lights. “Okay, okay.”

“So we’ll take the George Washington and then—”

“Shut up! It’ll be a miracle if we make it out of the garage. I’m pretty sure air bags weren’t invented when this car took its first breath.”

“That’s good, though! The missing air bags, the seat belts—it’ll all work great for us. You can do it, Kate. You can do anything. I knew that the moment we met. We’ll get out of this, you just watch.”

I slid the car into drive and held my breath. We lurched and braked and lurched and braked.

She leaned over the seat. “Maybe we should take a couple of laps around the garage before we hit the streets?”

We drove around in tight circles for almost twenty minutes. I would have kept driving for the rest of the night in the safety of the garage, but she wouldn’t let me.

“Time’s a-wastin’! You’re good. Let’s go!”

My heart was jack-hammering. I could barely hear her. My hands were sweating in my gloves. I gripped the steering wheel even tighter. At 12:57 a.m., we finally headed for the exit, and God knows where else, with our cargo.

1:03 a.m.

I can’t begin to describe the mind-warping terror of turning left into actual traffic and onto Fifth. I swallowed hard, then harder. “Where am I going? Have you got it yet?”

Olivia leaned her elbows over the front seat, holding her phone with both hands. “So…okay, take a right onto Fifty-Seventh.”

I hadn’t exhaled since we left the garage. The nightmare of the streets momentarily displaced the nightmare of having a dead body beside me. There were so many lights—blinking, beckoning, strobing, changing—it was too much. We crawled across Fifty-Seventh. The car took it upon itself to shudder every so often. I took it upon myself to shudder right along with it. “Olivia, I’m seizing!”

“Okay, okay, here it is. Stay on Fifty-Seventh and then…hmm, it says take RT-9A north?”

“What the hell is RT-9A?”

“Don’t know, but it says it’s just past Twelfth, so I’m sure we’ll see it.”

“Jesus God.”

“Then we take exit 14 onto the George Washington Bridge.”

“What? No! We have to do the expressway
and
the bridge?

“We’ll be fine,” she said, paying no attention to my panic. “
Then
we merge onto the I-95 S via the exit on the left toward the upper-level crossing into New Jersey.”

“New Jersey! What the hell? New Jersey?!”

“Calm down. It’s not like we’re trying to sneak into Canada.” She kept scrolling. “Then we take exit 74 and merge onto the Palisades Parkway North crossing into New York.”

Cabbies were honking at us and passing me on both sides. The car groaned in a sulky protest every time I even thought about accelerating.

“Wait, wait. Where was that RT thing? We just passed Twelfth.”

“Two blocks up.”

The cabbies aside, I thought I was driving a bit better with less stop-and-go lurching.

“And near the end, we enter a roundabout and take the first exit, and then we’ll find a likely embankment and—”

“Whoa! Did you say roundabout? What the
hell
is a roundabout?”

“I don’t know, but how tough can it be? People must drive through them every day.”

I hate the GW. It looks like one of those Transformer monsters lying in wait for you. I wanted to jump off it as soon as I saw it. We made it over only because I had my eyes closed most of the way.

People honked at us less in New Jersey. Then people stopped honking altogether because it was very late and we were pretty much alone on the Palisades.

That was worse. It was easier to think about dark things in the dark. My hands hurt from gripping the steering wheel so tight.

What were we doing?

I kept glancing at Redkin. Neither of us had had the guts to close his eyes. He was freaking me out. It was like he was looking out into the middle distance. Like he was waiting. Like he was biding his time.

3:10 a.m.

It took us almost two hours to get to the roundabout. We circled it six times with Olivia yelling, “Take the first exit toward Bear Mountain Inn. The
first
exit!”

I was so fried that I didn’t get it. It was a circle. The first from what?

“The first exit. The first—”

“Shut up! Shut up!” I hit the curve at too hard an angle and the body fell into me. “Jesus! Get him off, get him off, get him off!”

“Stop the car!”

I braked so hard that we lurched violently. Redkin’s head hit the dashboard. The lap belts were next to useless. Olivia and I were fine except for the screaming. My foot was glued to the brake in the middle of the roundabout, in the middle of the dark and in the middle of God-knows-where.

“You okay?” she whispered.

“Yeah, sorry. I think I’m losing it.”

“No, you’re great. It’s me. I’m wired. I’ll shut up.”

Olivia grabbed ahold of the body from behind and straightened him while I talked my heart into starting up again.

I finally got off at the first exit.

“We’re almost there.” She was still whispering. “Slow down. We’ve got to go over at the perfect spot to get him into the river.”

Go over?
It was three a.m. I could have sworn that Redkin was getting ready to stir. I felt his eyes on me. We crawled passed a traffic light and then an inn.

“Slow down more.” Olivia rolled down her window and stuck her head out.

There was no moon and it had started to rain.

“Do you hear it?” she asked.

“What, the rain?”

“The river—the Hudson. It’s churning. Must be all the spring runoff and the rain we’ve been having. It sounds like it’s really moving. Slow down, slow down! That’s it! Pull over just up there.” She pointed to a small clearing within the trees, and somehow I steered the car to it. I turned off the engine and then silence.

“We made it,” I said. No one was more surprised than me. “We made it.”

Olivia reached over the seat to throw her arms around my neck. “You did great!”

“Yeah, well.” I exhaled. “Let’s get to it. We have to move the body to the driver’s side.”

“Right.” The chirpy bravado in her voice was long gone. “Right. Then after that, you’ve, uh, got to drive from the passenger side down over the embankment toward the water. And when I yell, ‘Jump,’ we jump out of the car.” She patted Mark’s shoulder. “He continues crashing down into the water.”

It was almost too stupid
not
to work.

We had trouble opening the doors. The rain must have made the hinges seize even more. It was pelting down hard. Olivia eventually gave up on the back passenger door and went out the left. We slid and shoved Mark over to the driver’s side and belted him in as best we could. Then we rearranged ourselves into our new positions. Somewhere in all that commotion, it dawned on me that we were going to “walk back.” Surely there were no buses out here. Walk back? To the city? In a downpour? On the highway?

I decided to table that piece of panic.
One clusterbomb at a time, Katie.

It was disgusting having to lean closer to the rigid body to start the car. Chemical things were happening within the corpse—pooling, rigor. I swear he stank, but I needed to get real close. Once I got the car started, I stretched over with my left foot and placed it firmly on the brake. I would have to reach over the body to grab hold of the steering wheel. Who was I kidding? I was still afraid of him. I didn’t think I could do it without puking.