Highway 24 (6 page)

Amanda rushed to the passenger door. She pulled on the handle and slapped the window with fevered frustration. “Open up!” she screamed. “Open up.”

Drive away, warned his first impulse. She’s not real, he argued to himself, but the hand looked real and her palm slapping the window sounded real. His conscience insisted he help her.

She rattled the door handle. “Open up, damn you. He’s coming.”

“He,” she had said. That pronoun conjured up a crazed killer, some axe-wielding guy with a ski mask covering his face, stalking teenagers in the dark. Paul unlocked the doors. Amanda hurled herself into the car. Perspiration dotted her forehead and lipstick smeared her chin.

“Go,” she cried. “Drive, damn you. What are you doing?”

“What happened?”

“He tried to rape me. Faster.”

No wonder she jumped onto the road. Dad was her last desperate hope and he ran her down.
Her death had all the earmarks of a senseless tragedy, and somewhere out there in the dark, her attacker lurked free and unpunished. Paul pressed the accelerator. “Who’s after you?”

Amanda gave no answer. She muttered an incoherent torrent of profanity. Paul asked again.

“There he is,” she shrieked.

A young man in a dark tuxedo stood on the shoulder. He held his right hand in front of his face to shield his eyes from the headlights.

“What?” said Paul. That was not the villain he expected.

“Get him!” She wrenched the steering wheel with both hands, launching the car at the youth on the shoulder. Paul struggled to wrest control, but Amanda held the steering wheel with the strength of a hundred men. Paul punched the brake to the floor. Like before, when Amanda stared down those headlights, there wasn’t enough distance. The young man had no time to flee. His face twisted with terror in an unearthly white. The instant the car crushed the boy into the ditch, Paul recognized him.

* * * *

A harbinger of good things—the bright sunshine of a clear, fall morning—washed over Paul's hospital bed, but his mood remained brooding. He watched through the window a school teacher struggle to organize a game of touch football. Paul smiled but nothing lifted the pall from his spirits. Another round in his ordeal seemed imminent. For three days he had expected a visitor, not a ghostly one, but a real one.

Earlier that morning, he had talked to his attending physician. “You can leave tomorrow,” the doctor had said. The cracked ribs would heal, and the concussion had left no lasting effects. “The airbag probably saved your life.”

Paul had nodded. No one questioned his story about falling asleep. He wished the preacher would come. He had more questions.

A sharp knock on the open door roused him. In the doorway stood the sheriff, a tower of beige and black against the clean white of the hospital. He held his hat in his hands and fidgeted with the brim. The badge and uniform costumed a nervous schoolboy outside the principal’s office. Paul recalled the face of the boy in the ditch. The one before him was older and worn with years, but he was not mistaken in seeing the same features.

“Got a few minutes?”

“They’re letting me out tomorrow. So until then, I’m all yours.” Paul smiled.

The sheriff bit his lip. “Just got a few questions. Routine really. Just to flesh out your statement.” He pushed the door closed. “You don’t mind if I close this do you?”

Paul shook his head.

“Give us some privacy.” The sheriff approached the bed, refusing a chair, and stared down at Paul. “Did you see her again?”

What did it take for him to ask that question? “Is this going in your report?”

“That’s been filed and archived. You saw her didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Damnation. All these years. I’ve never seen her.”

If she terrified Paul with the shoe and her vanishing act, what would she do to the sheriff? “I don't think you want to.” But maybe not appearing to the sheriff, not offering that chance for closure, keeping the wound raw and open was the ultimate torture.

“What happened?”

“She said someone tried to rape her.”

“You talked to her?”

“She got in my car. Why do you think I had a wreck?”

The sheriff paced back and forth in front of the bed, slapping his hat against his thigh. “What else did she say?”

“I couldn’t tell. She mostly screamed and cursed.”

The sheriff laughed. “That Amanda, when she got mad she cursed like a sailor. If she wasn’t so damned excitable, so damned high strung. You know what I mean? All I wanted to do was kiss her. Rape her. What a crock of shit. I couldn’t get close enough to do that.”

Paul wanted to ask the sheriff why he had driven his date out on a lonely highway in the middle of the night. He didn’t believe the sheriff’s story, the accretion of year after year of rationalizations, building like a mound of guano in a bat cave. Amanda didn’t live out in the country. Could anyone act with that much caprice? His brief encounter didn’t argue for her stability. Paul didn’t fancy himself an interrogator. He wanted to go home and never see that road again. “She was hysterical.”

“I’d like to catch the bastard that ran her down. I saw the car. Too stupid to get the plate.”

Paul’s stomach twitched, imagining the agony his father must have endured, wondering when a police cruiser would pull in the driveway to arrest him. Did his father break out in a sweat whenever a police car drove slowly past the house? Paul knew what some of that agony meant, now. “He might have saved your life.”

“What?” The sheriff scrunched his face and for a moment Paul glimpsed the bitterness that lived inside, ugly and all consuming.

“She ran someone down with my car. That’s what the accident was about, killing some kid in a suit.”

The sheriff’s face fell ashen. He looked past Paul out the window. Paul noticed that hollowness about the eyes again.

“Her damned parents. They pushed her too hard.” He shook his head and moved toward the door. When he grasped the handle, he stopped and turned back. “She really wanted to kill the guy?”

Paul nodded.

“Will you be coming back here again?”

“No. I won’t.” Were there more chapters in his story with Amanda? He didn’t want to live them. He had found the closure that had eluded his father, but Amanda’s war continued. He decided he would drive a hundred miles out of his way to avoid this place, maybe find a new job.

“That’s probably for the best.”

* * * *

Paul stood in a graveyard, windswept and cold, staring at the yellowed grass covering his father’s grave. He had required a map to find it.

“Well, Dad. I got that promotion you always wanted. I’m the new district manager. No more road trips for me. And I found I’m not much different than you, but I took the shoe back.”

The wind blew his hair across his forehead and the slate sky threatened a cold rain.

Paul shrieked when someone touched his shoulder.

“Don't fear, brother. It’s only me.”

“How the hell? Are you following me, or...”

“Yes.” The preacher nodded. “I expected you here.”

Paul stared at the preacher. After the events in Cawker, he didn’t feel surprised to see him, but he wished the guy or whatever he was would stop sneaking up on him in cemeteries. “You travel.”

“I go everywhere.” The preacher pointed at the grave. “Made your peace?”

“I think so. I assume since you’re here it was the right thing to do.”

The preacher nodded.

Paul rubbed his hands together to warm them. “I have a question, actually a lot of questions. I expect only you can answer them.”

“I can, but will I?”

Paul grimaced. He thought he deserved a straight answer, not another question. “I’ve been wondering why I saw the sheriff’s ghost, as a young man, when he’s still alive?”

“That’s a horrible mystery. Most souls depart when the body dies, as intended. A few linger, reluctant to leave. But for some, and they are to be most pitied, the soul leaves before the body dies.” The preacher grabbed Paul’s shoulder and squeezed it. “Guard your soul and feed it. It’s a terrible thing to lose.”

Jeff Chapman writes software by day and speculative fiction when he should be sleeping. His works range from fantasy to ghost stories and have appeared in various anthologies and online publications. He lives with his wife, children, and cats in a house with more books than bookshelf space. You can find him musing about words and fiction at jeffchapmanwriter.blogspot.com.

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