Big Driver (2 page)

But the introduction was more of an
entr'acte
. Act One was the eleven o'clock reception, where the higher rollers got to meet Tess in person over cheese, crackers, and cups of lousy coffee (evening events featured plastic glasses of lousy wine). Some asked for autographs; many more requested pictures, which they usually took with their cell phones. She was asked where she got her ideas and made the usual polite and humorous noises in response. Half a dozen people asked her how you got an agent, the glint in their eyes suggesting they had paid the extra twenty dollars just to ask this question. Tess said you kept writing letters until one of the hungrier ones agreed to look
at your stuff. It wasn't the whole truth—when it came to agents, there
was
no whole truth—but it was close.

Act Two was the speech itself, which lasted about forty-five minutes. This consisted chiefly of anecdotes (none too personal) and a description of how she worked out her stories (back to front). It was important to insert at least three mentions of the current book's title, which that fall happened to be
The Willow Grove Knitting Society Goes Spelunking
(she explained what that was for those who didn't already know).

Act Three was Question Time, during which she was asked where she got her ideas (humorous, vague response), if she drew her characters from real life (“my aunts”), and how one got an agent to look at one's work. Today she was also asked where she got her scrunchie (JCPenney, an answer which brought inexplicable applause).

The last act was Autograph Time, during which she dutifully fulfilled requests to inscribe happy birthday wishes, happy anniversary wishes,
To Janet, a fan of all my books,
and
To Leah—Hope to see you at Lake Toxaway again this summer!
(a slightly odd request, since Tess had never been there, but presumably the autograph-seeker had).

When all the books had been signed and the last few lingerers had been satisfied with more cellphone pictures, Ramona Norville escorted Tess into her office for a cup of real coffee. Ms. Norville took hers black, which didn't surprise Tess at all. Her hostess was a black-coffee type of chick if one
had ever strode the surface of the earth (probably in Doc Martens on her day off). The only surprising thing in the office was the framed signed picture on the wall. The face was familiar, and after a moment, Tess was able to retrieve the name from the junkheap of memory that is every writer's most valuable asset.

“Richard Widmark?”

Ms. Norville laughed in an embarrassed but pleased sort of way. “My favorite actor. Had sort of a crush on him when I was a girl, if you want the whole truth. I got him to sign that for me ten years before he died. He was very old, even then, but it's a real signature, not a stamp. This is yours.” For one crazed moment, Tess thought Ms. Norville meant the signed photo. Then she saw the envelope in those blunt fingers. The kind of envelope with a window, so you could peek at the check inside.

“Thank you,” Tess said, taking it.

“No thanks necessary. You earned every penny.”

Tess did not demur.

“Now. About that shortcut.”

Tess leaned forward attentively. In one of the Knitting Society books, Doreen Marquis had said,
The two best things in life are warm croissants and a quick way home
. This was a case of the writer using her own dearly held beliefs to enliven her fiction.

“Can you program intersections in your GPS?”

“Yes, Tom's very canny.”

Ms. Norville smiled. “Input Stagg Road and US 47, then. Stagg Road is very little used in this
modern age—almost forgotten since that damn 84—but it's scenic. You'll ramble along it for, oh, sixteen miles or so. Patched asphalt, but not too bumpy, or wasn't the last time I took it, and that was in the spring, when the worst bumps show up. At least that's my experience.”

“Mine, too,” Tess said.

“When you get to 47, you'll see a sign pointing you to I-84, but you'll only need to take the turnpike for twelve miles or so, that's the beauty part. And you'll save tons of time and aggravation.”

“That's also the beauty part,” Tess said, and they laughed together, two women of the same mind watched over by a smiling Richard Widmark. The abandoned store with the ticking sign was then still ninety minutes away, tucked snugly into the future like a snake in its hole. And the culvert, of course.

- 5 -

Tess not only had a GPS; she had spent extra for a customized one. She liked toys. After she had input the intersection (Ramona Norville leaned in the window as she did it, watching with manly interest), the gadget thought for a moment or two, then said, “Tess, I am calculating your route.”

“Whoa-ho, how about that!” Norville said, and laughed the way that people do at some amiable peculiarity.

Tess smiled, although she privately thought
programming your GPS to call you by name was no more peculiar than keeping a fan foto of a dead actor on your office wall. “Thank you for everything, Ramona. It was all very professional.”

“We do our best at Three Bs. Now off you go. With my thanks.”

“Off I go,” Tess agreed. “And you're very welcome. I enjoyed it.” This was true; she usually did enjoy such occasions, in an all-right-let's-get-this-taken-care-of fashion. And her retirement fund would certainly enjoy the unexpected infusion of cash.

“Have a safe trip home,” Norville said, and Tess gave her a thumbs-up.

When she pulled away, the GPS said, “Hello, Tess. I see we're taking a trip.”

“Yes indeed,” she said. “And a good day for it, wouldn't you say?”

Unlike the computers in science fiction movies, Tom was poorly equipped for light conversation, although Tess sometimes helped him. He told her to make a right turn four hundred yards ahead, then take her first left. The map on the Tomtom's screen displayed green arrows and street names, sucking the information down from some whirling metal ball of technology high above.

She was soon on the outskirts of Chicopee, but Tom sent her past the turn for I-84 without comment and into countryside that was flaming with October color and smoky with the scent of burning leaves. After ten miles or so on something called Old County Road, and just as she was wondering
if her GPS had made a mistake (as if), Tom spoke up again.

“In one mile, right turn.”

Sure enough, she soon saw a green Stagg Road sign so pocked with shotgun pellets it was almost unreadable. But of course, Tom didn't need signs; in the words of the sociologists (Tess had been a major before discovering her talent for writing about old lady detectives), he was other-directed.

You'll ramble along for sixteen miles or so,
Ramona Norville had said, but Tess rambled for only a dozen. She came around a curve, spied an old dilapidated building ahead on her left (the faded sign over the pumpless service island still read ESSO), and then saw—too late—several large, splintered pieces of wood scattered across the road. There were rusty nails jutting from many of them. She jounced across the pothole that had probably dislodged them from some country bumpkin's carelessly packed load, then veered for the soft shoulder in an effort to get around the litter, knowing she probably wasn't going to make it; why else would she hear herself saying
Oh-oh
?

There was a
clack-thump-thud
beneath her as chunks of wood flew up against the undercarriage, and then her trusty Expedition began pogoing up and down and pulling to the left, like a horse that's gone lame. She wrestled it into the weedy yard of the deserted store, wanting to get it off the road so someone who happened to come tearing around that last curve wouldn't rear-end her. She hadn't
seen much traffic on Stagg Road, but there'd been some, including a couple of large trucks.

“Goddam you, Ramona,” she said. She knew it wasn't really the librarian's fault; the head (and probably only member) of The Richard Widmark Fan Appreciation Society, Chicopee Branch, had only been trying to be helpful, but Tess didn't know the name of the dummocks who had dropped his nail-studded shit on the road and then gone gaily on his way, so Ramona had to do.

“Would you like me to recalculate your route, Tess?” Tom asked, making her jump.

She turned the GPS off, then killed the engine, as well. She wasn't going anywhere for awhile. It was very quiet out here. She heard birdsong, a metallic ticking sound like an old wind-up clock, and nothing else. The good news was that the Expedition seemed to be leaning to the left front instead of just leaning. Perhaps it was only the one tire. She wouldn't need a tow, if that was the case; just a little help from Triple-A.

When she got out and looked at the left front tire, she saw a splintered piece of wood impaled on it by a large, rusty spike. Tess uttered a one-syllable expletive that had never crossed the lips of a Knitting Society member, and got her cell phone out of the little storage compartment between the bucket seats. She would now be lucky to get home before dark, and Fritzy would have to be content with his bowl of dry food in the pantry. So much for Ramona Norville's shortcut . . . although to be fair, Tess supposed the same thing could have happened
to her on the interstate; certainly she had avoided her share of potentially car-crippling crap on many thruways, not just I-84.

The conventions of horror tales and mysteries—even mysteries of the bloodless, one-corpse variety enjoyed by her fans—were surprisingly similar, and as she flipped open her phone she thought,
In a story, it wouldn't work
. This was a case of life imitating art, because when she powered up her Nokia, the words NO SERVICE appeared in the window. Of course. Being able to use her phone would be too simple.

She heard an indifferently muffled engine approaching, turned, and saw an old white van come around the curve that had done her in. On the side was a cartoon skeleton pounding a drum kit that appeared to be made out of cupcakes. Written in drippy horror-movie script above this apparition (
much
more peculiar than a fan foto of Richard Widmark on a librarian's office wall) were the words ZOMBIE BAKERS. For a moment Tess was too bemused to wave, and when she did, the driver of the Zombie Bakers truck was busy trying to avoid the mess on the road and didn't notice her.

He was quicker to the shoulder than Tess had been, but the van had a higher center of gravity than the Expedition, and for a moment she was sure it was going to roll and land on its side in the ditch. It stayed up—barely—and regained the road beyond the spilled chunks of wood. The van disappeared around the next curve, leaving behind
a blue cloud of exhaust and a smell of hot oil.

“Damn you, Zombie Bakers!”
Tess yelled, then began to laugh. Sometimes it was all you could do.

She clipped her phone to the waistband of her dress slacks, went out to the road, and began picking up the mess herself. She did it slowly and carefully, because up close it became obvious that all the pieces of wood (which were painted white and looked as if they had been stripped away by someone in the throes of a home renovation project) had nails in them. Big ugly ones. She worked slowly because she didn't want to cut herself, but she also hoped to be out here, observably doing A Good Work of Christian Charity, when the next car came along. But by the time she'd finished picking up everything but a few harmless splinters and casting the big pieces into the ditch below the shoulder of the road, no other cars had come along. Perhaps, she thought, the Zombie Bakers had eaten everyone in this immediate vicinity and were now hurrying back to their kitchen to put the leftovers into the always-popular People Pies.

She walked back to the defunct store's weedy parking lot and looked moodily at her leaning car. Thirty thousand dollars' worth of rolling iron, four-wheel drive, independent disc brakes, Tom the Talking Tomtom . . . and all it took to leave you stranded was a piece of wood with a nail in it.

But of course they all had nails,
she thought.
In a mystery—or a horror movie—that wouldn't constitute carelessness; that would constitute a plan. A trap, in fact
.

“Too much imagination, Tessa Jean,” she said, quoting her mother . . . and that was ironic, of course, since it was her imagination that had ended up providing her with her daily bread. Not to mention the Daytona Beach home where her mother had spent the last six years of her life.

In the big silence she again became aware of that tinny ticking sound. The abandoned store was of a kind you didn't see much in the twenty-first century: it had a porch. The lefthand corner had collapsed and the railing was broken in a couple of places, but yes, it was an actual porch, charming even in its dilapidation. Maybe
because
of its dilapidation. Tess supposed general store porches had become obsolete because they encouraged you to sit a spell and chat about baseball or the weather instead of just paying up and hustling your credit cards on down the road to some other place where you could swipe them at the checkout. A tin sign hung askew from the porch roof. It was more faded than the Esso sign. She took a few steps closer, raising a hand to her forehead to shade her eyes. YOU LIKE IT IT LIKES YOU. Which was a slogan for what, exactly?

She had almost plucked the answer from her mental junkheap when her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of an engine. As she turned toward it, sure that the Zombie Bakers had come back after all, the sound of the motor was joined by the scream of ancient brakes. It wasn't the white van but an old Ford F-150 pickup with a bad blue paintjob and Bondo around the headlights. A man
in bib overalls and a gimme cap sat behind the wheel. He was looking at the litter of wood scraps in the ditch.

“Hello?” Tess called. “Pardon me, sir?”

He turned his head, saw her standing in the overgrown parking lot, flicked a hand in salute, pulled in beside her Expedition, and turned off his engine. Given the sound of it, Tess thought that an act tantamount to mercy killing.