Wicked Games (21 page)

They had the top down on the car and the wind whipped Jules’s hair out behind her. The short sleeve of Carter’s gray-and-red striped linen shirt flapped like a flag.

Good-bye, Dream Point.

Good-bye, Miami.

Orientation weekend would begin in five days, and since Carter’s dad and his wife were vacationing in Brazil, the plan was to stop off in Savannah, Georgia, and hang out in the house where Carter had grown up before he and his mother had moved down to Dream Point. Carter still had keys, after all, and Savannah was a magical, romantic city.

Good-bye, Fort Lauderdale.

Good-bye, Boca, Palm Beach, Port St. Lucie.

They sang along to the songs streaming from their iPod, or Jules did—Carter refrained from ruining the beauty of her sound with his own squawks and rasps.

They counted license plates.
There’s one from Mississippi. There’s one from Alabama. There’s one from Ohio, New York, Kentucky. A little green Mazda2 with Idaho plates. Hey, there’s Pennsylvania—hello, neighbor, here we come!

Good-bye, South Florida.

Good-bye, Daytona.

Even though they knew it was corny and a kind of old-person thing to do, they played I Spy to fill up the time. Carter spied something black—a vulture circling above them. Jules spied something yellow—the blocky sign for a Waffle House up the road. They were ironic about it, rolling their eyes and mockingly, emphatically congratulating each other on getting things right.

Carter spied something green—a little Mazda2 with
Idaho plates. “Didn’t we see that car, like, an hour ago?” he asked Jules. “It seems like it’s been following us forever.”

“You see it, too, huh?” said Jules. “So it’s not just my imagination.”

She turned in her seat to study the car. The sunlight beating off the windshield made it almost impossible to see the driver, but from what she could tell, whoever it was had longish brown hair. “I swear, it’s been behind us since at least Palm Bay. That’s weird, isn’t it?”

“It is weird,” Carter said. Each time he’d checked the rearview mirror, he’d seen it again, hovering fifty, a hundred yards behind them. “Do you think—” Jules couldn’t bring herself to say Lilah’s name out loud. It was like if she said the word, the girl would materialize.

“No,” said Carter. “Absolutely not.” Seeing the worry invade Jules’s face, Carter tried to explain the car away. “It’s got Idaho plates, for one thing.”

“Yeah, but it could be a rental. Rentals seem to
always
have Idaho plates.”

“Well, and it’s I-95. It’s, like, the only road you can take north from Miami. Every single person leaving town is following the same trail. We’ve seen that same Walmart semi the whole way as well, so . . .”

“You think?”

“Yeah, I mean, really. How would she even know we’re taking this trip?”

“How does she know anything? How did she know I’d be in the theater that afternoon? Or where I’d parked my car when she broke into it?”

“It’s not her. I promise. It can’t be her.”

Carter took Jules’s hand in his and held it tight.

To take her mind off the car behind them, he asked her, “Have you ever been to Savannah before?”

“First time,” she said. “I’m imagining thick, sultry southern heat and Spanish moss everywhere. And everyone a little love crazy, filled with a longing that nothing can diminish, just like Scarlett O’Hara in
Gone with the Wind
.”

“Ha,” said Carter. “It’s sort of like that. I can definitely promise you some Spanish moss. And there are some unbelievable restaurants. You haven’t had soul food until you’ve had Georgia soul food.”

“Collard greens!” she said.

“Chicken-fried steak! And we can check out the bar scene if you want. It’s like a classier, never-ending spring break. People dancing on the bar. More Southern Comfort body shots than you’ll ever want in your life.”

Jules laughed.

“What I’m really interested in is seeing your dad’s house. The place where little Carter watched cartoons and learned how to walk.”

“Yeah, well,” he said, “it’s totally changed since then. He did this huge renovation a couple years ago.”

He was careful not to mention the many times he’d visited his dad’s house before with Lilah, that she knew where it was located and how to get there, that she knew all the secret hiding places in the drafty old building.

A Kanye West song shuffled on and Carter turned it up. He thrust his head back and forth to the beat. So did Jules. They bobbed their heads in tandem and rolled on.

By the time they crossed the Georgia state line, they’d forgotten all about the green Mazda, but if they’d looked, they would have seen that it was still behind them.

Finally, seven hours
later, the mileage signs counting down to Savannah entered the double digits. They were thirty-six miles out. The beaches and flat expanses of reclaimed Florida marshland had been replaced by rolling fields of grass, grand plantation houses, Spanish moss on the trees.

“So, we’ve got a choice to make,” said Carter. “We can drop our bags and get settled in the house, which might be nice because then we won’t have to worry about it later, or we can head straight for the Riverwalk, where all the restaurants are. What do you think? We could go to Paula Deen’s and have one of those donut burgers.
It’s, like, diabetes on a stick, but hey, we’re young, we can handle—”

Out of nowhere, an engine to their left roared out of control, and before they could process what they were seeing, a blur of metallic green—the Mazda, the same one that had been following them earlier—swerved into their lane, cutting so close that Carter had to slam the brakes and twist the wheel with all his strength in order to avoid clipping its fender.

He yanked hard to the right, then the left, trying to stop the car from spinning out.

The tires squealed. The wheels locked up and they were suddenly moving sideways, halfway onto the gravel of the breakdown lane.

A chain reaction: Suddenly, every car on the road was swerving. There was honking, screeching brakes. Cars were winding around them like snakes. And then they weren’t. Carter had gotten the car under control somehow, straightened out, slowing down to thirty, his fingers turning white as they clenched the steering wheel. Traffic returned to normal, like nothing had happened.

“Fuck,” he said. “That was close. I can’t believe
nobody
got in an accident! Jules?”

When she didn’t respond, he dared to glance in her direction.

He saw the blood on the windshield first, barely a
fleck, just a thin smear of red, but it was enough for his heart to stop beating for a second. Then he heard her groan and he saw that she was slumped forward against her seat belt, holding her head in her hands.

“Jules—oh, shit. Jules, are you—what happened?”

She tried to put a good face on it. Slowly, so slowly, she sat up straight. She turned her head tentatively back and forth, checking to see what had been broken and where. “I think I’m okay.”

Blood trickled down her face from a spot over her right eye.

“You don’t look okay.”

“I hit my head.”

Carter drove on. He had no other choice, really.

A few miles up the road, he turned off and pulled into the parking lot of an Exxon Tiger Mart. As he walked Jules around the parking lot, he gauged her behavior. She was wobbly on her feet, a little. She kept touching her temple where she’d hit her head.

“Talk to me. Tell me how you’re feeling.”

“I’m a little dizzy.” She pressed her eyes shut and tried to blink away the pain.

Carter sat her down on the yellow ridge of cement at the end of the empty parking space next to their own. He studied her wound. It was swollen and bruised. He didn’t know enough about what to look for to really learn anything from what he saw.

“You know what? I’m going to take you to the hospital. We’ll be in Savannah in, like, twenty minutes. Okay?”

“I’ll be fine. I just need to shake it off.” She buried her head in her hands again. Though she was trying to play it down, she definitely seemed disoriented.

As he drove off toward Memorial University Medical Center with Jules still rubbing her head in the seat next to him, Carter’s mind raced even faster than his heart. He struggled to ward off the worst-case scenarios. Internal hemorrhaging. A sudden stroke.

The possibility that Lilah had been driving that Mazda.

Carter hung around
the waiting room, reading the closed-captioning on the television set mounted near the ceiling. He wished he could be back there in the examination room, but he couldn’t. He wasn’t a family member and the admitting nurse had refused to allow him to join Jules in the deeper recesses of Memorial University’s emergency room.

Alone with just the TV and a bunch of pamphlets about pregnancy and HIV to distract him, he fretted about Jules, wishing the doctors would tell him something, anything.

It was taking them forever to let Jules go. Was that a good or a bad thing? Carter didn’t know.

To ease his anxiety, he bummed a cigarette from a weedy guy in a bright red hoodie who was fidgeting a few seats down from him in the waiting room. He stepped out into the swampy heat of Savannah and smoked, something he almost never did—just one here or there, usually at parties.

He couldn’t stop thinking about that green Mazda, about the way it had flashed periodically into view behind them all the way up I-95. That wouldn’t have been so unusual in and of itself, but if the car that almost clipped them had been the same one, and even though he couldn’t prove it, his gut told him it was . . . that
that
was too weird to be a coincidence.

It occurred to him that he could call Lilah’s home phone and get some verification of where she was and what she was up to. Yes. That’s what he’d do. He’d made a promise to Jules. He intended to keep it.

He pulled Lilah’s home number up on his phone. If she picked up, he’d have his answer and he could just hang up. If one of her parents answered, well, he’d see how it went.

When he heard her mother’s voice on the other end of the line, a surge of annoyance tumbled through his chest, but he pushed through it and said a respectful hello.

“I don’t think you should be calling like this, Carter,” she said.

“I’m going to be leaving for UPenn soon,” he lied, hoping this tactic would help him get the information he need. “And I figured I should at least say good-bye. Can I talk to her?”

“Well, that’s nice,” said Lilah’s mother in that way she had of saying things were nice when she actually meant they weren’t. “You’re too late, though. She’s in Mississippi. For freshman orientation.”

“Are you sure?”

“Why wouldn’t I be sure? We drove her out to Oxford on Saturday.”

Mississippi. That had been her safety school.

“You drove her out yourself?”

“She can’t really get there on her own, now, can she? It’s not like she’s got a rich daddy to buy her a car like you, Carter.” After that low blow, she didn’t even ask if he wanted to leave a message. Instead, she simply said, “Is there anything else I can help you with?”

“No, I guess not. Thank you, Mrs. Bell.”

Without another word, she hung up. Relieved, he went back inside and waited for Jules.

Eventually, she was buzzed out through the locked doors separating the waiting room from the examination rooms. She had a small bandage on her temple, but other than that, she looked like she was maybe okay.

When she saw him, she flashed him a weak smile. “So, I guess I know what it’s like to be a football player
now,” she said. “It’s a concussion. I’m going to be a little dizzy, so . . . no cartwheels and no . . . see? Because of my concussion, I can’t think of the witty thing that goes there.”

Carter kneaded her shoulders. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’ll pick up the wit until you’re feeling better.”

She smiled at this. “I should be back to my old charming self in, like, three or four days.”

“I’ve got good news, too,” said Carter. “Lilah’s in Mississippi.”

Jules looked confused for a second; then her expression hardened into skepticism. “You called her?”

“No. I did some recon. I talked to her mother.”

Jules nodded. He could tell that she was having trouble processing what he was saying, and he chose not to burden her with any more details.

“Anyway,” he said, “there’s no way it could have been her. So we’re free.”

He sat her down in one of the blue molded chairs.

“Jules, we’re free,” he said again. “Really. Whoever it was in that car back there, it wasn’t her. It couldn’t have been. We can relax. We don’t have to worry about Lilah anymore.”

He could see the strain on Jules’s face as she struggled with what he was saying. Finally, she grinned. “I guess, maybe we should go look for that Spanish moss,” she said, winking at him.

Carter’s dad’s house
was like something out of a movie, a huge antebellum row house right on Oglethorpe Square—one of the many shady parks scattered in a grid across downtown Savannah. It was four stories high, made of dark wood and stone, and on each floor there was an ornate iron balcony from which Jules could imagine southern belles in petticoats waving their handkerchiefs at passing gentlemen. Inside, the place was sleek and modern and sparsely furnished but it was decked out with all the latest electronics—surround-sound speakers built into the walls, a 3D TV the size of a truck, Bluetooth everything. An awesome and slightly intimidating place to camp out for three days. The muchness of it all
was enough to overwhelm any lingering fears she had about the green Mazda and the accident and the possibility that maybe Lilah had followed them north.

She’d always known that Carter hung out with the rich kids, but she’d had no idea that he was this rich himself. He sauntered around the place like it was just normal, like it was a place for living, not staring in awe.

They made their way up the weathered wooden stairs—they had actual banisters with actual scrollwork—to the second floor, then farther, up and up and up.