River Road (28 page)

Troy held up his hands. “Sure, man, it's right over there, under a floorboard.”

“You tried that on before. You'd better have the right floorboard this time.”

Troy attempted to shrug and keep his hands over his head at the same time. “I was just trying to keep it safe, man. And good thing I did. When Leia went on her rampage she only got the fake stuff. She didn't know where I'd hid the real stuff.”

“Big man,” Scully said, “foolin' a lil' girl. Why'd you go and kill her after, then?”

Troy's jaw tightened and his eyes flicked to me for a moment. We hadn't gotten to this part of the story yet, but I'd figured it out. “You felt betrayed by her, didn't you? She'd lied to you about the money—” I stopped, an awful thought rising in my head. Troy had thought Leia was blackmailing Ross for the money, but what if she'd come to me for the money, what if
that's
why she had wanted to talk to me? Of course I didn't have that kind of money but if she had told me I would have gotten help for her—gone to the police—only, Troy would have been angry about that. He would have lost his scholarship and without that he would have seen no future but ending up in his father's garage, turning into his father—

“You were afraid,” I said, looking into Troy's eyes. “Leia threatened to tell the police. You followed her in the car. It was snowing. You could have skidded into her. It could have been an accident . . .”

Troy stared at me. In the glare of the flashlight his eyes glittered as if full of tears but that might have been a trick of the light.

“Sure, Prof,” he said, his voice hard. “If that's what you think. I suppose you think it's an accident that Leia's body wound up under your car.”

Scully whistled under his breath. “That's cold, man. Getting it on with your teacher and then framing her for murder. I guess you won't mind what we do with her after I get my stash?”

As cold as I was I felt ice water sluice through my bowels at Scully's words. He had no intention of letting me go after he got his drugs and money. He could do what he wanted to me and then dump me in the river. He'd already disposed of one body that way. I clutched the flashlight, wondering if I could use it to defend myself. But what good was it against a gun?

“Keep that light steady, bitch,” Scully told me, all the laughter gone from his voice. “Help your boy here find that stuff or you'll both be in the river.”

I shone the flashlight on Troy as he walked to the back wall, beneath the loft, and knelt down. As the beam followed him it caught Leia's painted eyes on the wall above him. Where I'd seen sadness in those eyes before now I saw reproach.
If only you'd listened to me
, they seemed to say,
you wouldn't be about to die.

“Shine the light on Troy,” Scully growled. “That painting is fucking creepy.”

So I wasn't the only one reading reproach in those eyes.

I lowered the beam down to the floor where Troy was running his hands over the floorboards. “What's the matter?” Scully demanded. “Did you lose track of your hidey-hole?”

“Nah, it's just that the wood's swollen with the cold. I'm having trouble prying it up.”

“Lame-ass college boy,” Scully muttered, stepping toward Troy. “Lemme at—”

As soon as Scully was near, Troy rose, a length of wood studded with nails in his hands, and swung it at Scully's face. One of the nails went into his eye. A jet of blood gushed up like a geyser, rising with Scully's high, inhuman scream. Troy was yelling too.

“Run!”

For half a second I thought my feet had frozen to the floor, but then I turned and fled, out of the boathouse and into the storm, the shriek of the wind merging with the shouts and screams of the men I'd left behind. I still had the flashlight in my hand but all it showed me was a spinning galaxy of snow. I switched it off and stowed it in my pocket so it wouldn't give away my location and headed toward what I thought was the riverbank. If I could find the train tracks I could follow them back to campus but I couldn't see the tracks. I could just make out the tree line, though, so I ran for the trees, instinctively seeking their shelter.

I remembered the distance between boathouse and woods as short, but wading through thigh-high snow, battling gusts of snow-filled wind, it felt like a mile before I stumbled against a broad-trunked pine. I wrapped my arms around it and pressed my face against the rough bark, inhaling its resinous scent. I felt like I could stay here forever rather than brave the chaos of the storm, that it would be good to become a tree, like Daphne, who prayed to her father the river god to change her into a tree to evade her pursuer, Apollo.

Reminded of
my
pursuer, I inched my way around the back of the tree so I was concealed from anyone coming from the river. There was a depression in the snow here because the wind was blowing off the river. I crouched in it, looked toward the boathouse, and listened. The screams that I'd heard as I ran were gone now. Did that mean Troy had overpowered Scully? He'd had the advantage of surprise—a wave of nausea overtook me recalling the sound of the nail-studded board whacking into Scully's flesh and the sight of his blood gushing into the air—but Troy had said that Scully was stronger than he looked, and he was angry. Even with one eye he might have killed Troy. And then he'd be looking for me. I had to stay hidden.

The snow was mounting on either side of me, blown by the wind around the tree. It made a natural hiding place. I even felt warmer here, the snow acting as insulation. Maybe I could stay here until morning, gone to ground like a small animal in its burrow.

Then again, I might freeze to death by morning.

I had to keep moving. I could follow the line of trees that flanked the tracks, keeping behind them as much as possible so Scully wouldn't see me.

Or Troy. He'd helped me escape but did I really know he meant to let me go? He'd as good as confessed to killing Leia. He had to know I'd tell Joe what I'd heard—if I survived.

I looked again toward the boathouse. It crouched like a large black toad on the edge of the water. No sound or light came from it. Maybe Scully and Troy had killed each other. I felt a twinge of guilt at the relief the thought brought me. No matter what Troy had done he was still a young man I had cared about. I just couldn't trust him anymore. And I couldn't just stay here waiting for one of them to come get me or to freeze to death.

I crept out of the shelter of my tree and flung myself toward the shelter of the next one. I stayed low to the ground, in the lee of the high drifts mounding up at the tree line. I felt like a small animal tunneling through the snow, fleeing the hunting owl, scuttling away from its deadly talons—

The fingers that suddenly closed around my neck felt like talons. They plucked me out of the snow as if I weighed no more than a mouse and shook me. I was staring up into the bloodied pit where Scully's right eye had been.

“Bitch!” Flecks of spit hit my face. “You're gonna join your boy in the river.”

He wrapped his hand around my hair and dragged me to the river's edge. He flung me onto the ice like I was a piece of trash. I heard a crack as the ice broke beneath me. I dug my nails into the ice. If he left me here maybe I could cling on to this piece of ice and float away like a polar bear on an ice floe, like—

He kicked me in my side. I heard another crack and from the excruciating pain in my side I was pretty sure it was one of my ribs. The ice was cracking too. If only I could hold on—

Scully's boot came down on my hand, breaking my hold and at least two of my fingers. I screamed and tried to scuttle away from the next kick—into ice water. My ice floe was tilting down into the water. I could drown or face another blow—a real Scylla and Charybdis choice, I thought inanely.

But maybe there was another choice.

When the boot came down again I grabbed it with both hands—the hand with the broken fingers lighting up with pain—and yanked. Unbalanced on the slippery ice, Scully crashed down to one knee. When he tried to get up his other leg went through the ice. He screamed at the shock of the ice water. I crawled across my ice floe, toward another one that had broken loose and was floating on the current. Before I could get to it something yanked me back by my foot. I reached into my pocket and closed my hand around the flashlight. I thumbed on the light as I drew it from my pocket and aimed it in his eyes. I almost wished I hadn't. The view of one-eyed Scully holding a jagged shard of ice over his head and about to bring it down on my skull was not my choice for the last thing I'd ever see. Emmy's face is what I'd have chosen. But then another face reared over Scully's shoulder, one almost as welcome as Emmy's.

“Put it down, asshole, and we might all get out of here alive. Move one inch and I'll put a bullet in your thick skull.”

If I couldn't see his face I wouldn't have recognized Joe's voice. Scully heard the same deadly intent in it. He started to lower the ice shard but then he slammed it into Joe's face and lunged to the left into the river. Joe grabbed for him, then Scully vanished under the ice, sucked into a whirlpool as deadly as any Charybdis.

I
almost followed him. Without Scully's counterweight my ice floe tipped. I began to slide into the water. Joe grabbed me around the waist and pulled me out. We fell to the riverbank, both soaked in icy river water.

“Troy,” I said when I had breath. “Scully said Troy went in the river. We have to find him.”

“We can't help him now and if we don't get someplace warm we'll both freeze to death—damn—” He was patting his clothes, as if trying to pound feeling into his flesh. “I had my radio clipped to my belt but it's gone. Come on, we've got to get moving. Up the hill . . . your house . . . my car . . .” His teeth were chattering so much I could barely understand him. When I tried to stand I couldn't feel my legs.

“Don't think I can,” I said. “Go on . . . go get help.”

He shook his head and pushed me ahead of him, into the woods. “Use the trees.” He grasped a branch and pulled himself forward, pushing me ahead of him. When I tried to grab a branch with my broken fingers the pain nearly made me pass out. Joe caught me and kept his arm around me the rest of the way. I could feel his breath on the back of my neck and smell the sharp tang of his sweat despite the frigid air. All I wanted to do was lie down in the soft, pillowy snow.

“Not far now,” he rasped, his breath warming my frozen ear. “Just a little farther.”

He was lying, of course. The hill had grown twice as steep and twice as long since the last time I'd climbed it. We had both died and been sentenced to the infernal punishment of eternally climbing this frozen hill. When we read Dante's
Inferno
in the Great Books class, I taught my students that Dante gave his sinners a
contrapasso
punishment that fit their sin so that we could see their suffering as the fulfillment of their destiny. I knew what I was being punished for—my indifference to Leia that day that had led not just to her death but now to Troy's—but what had Joe ever done to deserve an eternity of climbing up a frozen wasteland? Maybe Joe was here to make me feel worse for inflicting this punishment on him. I must have been a selfish sinner, then, because I was still glad to have him by my side. When we finally reached my house, after what seemed like an hour, I would have gladly welcomed the fires of hell with his company.

He sat me down by the woodstove and coaxed a fire from the embers. He disappeared for a few minutes, long enough for me to wonder if he wasn't a mirage I'd summoned to keep me going on the long trek up the hill. But then he was back with a pile of clothing. “You have to get out of these wet things,” he said, tugging at my soaked shirt.

“I can do it,” I said, his obvious embarrassment rousing me out of my dreamy state.

“Good. Keep yourself dry and warm. I'll be back in just a few minutes.”

“Where are you going?” I asked, alarmed.

“Down to my car to radio the station. I have to let them know about Scully and Troy.”

“You said there was nothing we could do,” I said, hating the whine in my voice. A minute ago I'd thought he was a mirage; now I couldn't bear the thought of him going.

“For Scully, probably not, but we don't know for a fact that Troy
went into the river; we only have Scully's word for that. If he didn't he could be out in the storm, freezing or . . .” He didn't finish the sentence.

“Or he could come back here to make sure I don't tell anyone what he did to Leia.”

“Yes,” he admitted. “I don't like leaving you alone but I have to radio the station. I'll be back in five minutes—ten minutes tops.” He looked toward the door. The lock was broken off where Scully had forced his way in. He got up and pulled the couch in front of the door, then angled it so he could get out.

“Push this back when I go,” he said, “and hold this.” He gave me the iron fire poker. “If Troy does come, hold him off. I'll be back soon.” He held me by the shoulders and looked into my eyes.

“How will I know it's you when you come back?”

“I'll knock three times.” He smiled. “Try not to fall asleep. If you don't let me back in I may well freeze to death.” He squeezed my shoulders and bolted out of the door as if he was afraid of what he might do if he didn't leave quickly enough. I stood at the door a moment watching him go, but he vanished so quickly into the snow I once again thought I'd imagined him. Like one of those pioneer ghost stories in which a dead loved one visits a snowbound cabin.

I shook the thought off, closed the door, and pushed the couch in front of it. I wished I had some heavier piece of furniture, but I could barely move the couch with the pain in my ribs and hand. I had started shivering so I went back to the fire, stripped off my wet clothes, and put on the clothes Joe had brought for me—a strange combination of old, worn-out jeans, a silk shirt, and a Christmas sweater Dottie had knitted for me three years ago—