Riptide

She dressed and ran downstairs. She had to find something to block up the window. But there wasn’t anything except half a dozen dish towels with lighthouses on them. She ended up stuffing all her pillows around the tree branch. It worked.

She closed the front door behind her and stepped into the howling wind. She was wet clear through before she’d taken three breaths. No hope for it. She ran through the heavy rain to the Toyota and fumbled with the lock even as her hair was plastered to her head. Finally she got the door open and climbed in behind the wheel. When she turned the key in the ignition, the car growled at her, then stopped. She didn’t want to flood it so she didn’t turn the ignition again. No, give it a rest for a moment. Again, finally, she turned the key, and Lord be praised, the engine turned over, started. Tyler’s house was just about a half-mile down the road, the first street to the right, Gum Shoe Lane.

At a loud crack of thunder, she looked back at Jacob Marley’s house. It looked like an old Gothic manor in the English countryside, hunkered down in the rain, filled with lost and ancient spirits. It looked menacing even without billowing fog to shadow it in more gloom. A sharp lightning flash streaked down like a silver knife. The house seemed to shudder, as if from a mortal wound. It looked like the gods wanted to rip it apart. She was very glad she was leaving. Maybe Jacob Marley Senior really had poisoned his wife and God was just now getting around to some punishment. “Thanks a lot for waiting until I was here,” she yelled heavenward. She waved her fist. “I come here and you decide, finally, to mete out divine justice. You’re a little bloody late!”

The huge hemlock that could have so easily smashed right into the side of the house lay on its side nearly parallel to the west wall. That one very full and long branch that had crashed through her bedroom window looked like a hand that had managed to reach into the house. She shuddered at the image. Everything suddenly seemed alive and malevolent, closing in on her, like the man who had called her and stalked her and murdered that old woman and shot the governor. He was near, she felt him.

Just stop it. She drove very slowly down the long narrow drive, no choice there. Debris filled the road, wind bent trees nearly to the ground. The boughs glanced off her windshield. Branches whipped toward her, rain hammered against the windshield, pounded against the car, making her wonder if she’d come to Maine only to be done in by a wretched storm. She had to get out of the car twice to pull fallen branches out of the way. The wind and rain slammed hard into her, making it impossible to stand straight and nearly impossible to walk. She knew there had to be dents in the car fenders. The insurance company was going to love this. Oh dear, she’d forgotten, she didn’t have any insurance. That required being a real person with real ID.

Suddenly headlights cut through the thick, swirling sheets of rain, not twenty feet from her. They were coming toward her, fast, too fast. Damnation, to get killed on Belladonna Way. There had to be some irony in that, but she couldn’t appreciate it right then. She’d come to hide herself and be safe, a tree branch came into her bedroom, and now she was going to die because she couldn’t bear to stay in that old house, knowing it would collapse on her, swallow her alive. She smashed down on the horn, jerked the steering wheel to the left, but these headlights kept coming inexorably, relentlessly toward her, so fast, so very fast. She threw the car into reverse but knew that was no good. There was so much debris behind her that it was bound to stall her out. She slammed on the brakes and turned off the engine. She jumped out of the car and ran to the side of the road, feeling those damned headlights crawl over her, so close she wondered if the stalker hadn’t found her and was now going to kill her. Why had she ever left the house? So there was a tree branch in her bedroom dripping on a rag rug. It was still safe, but not out here, in the middle of a wind that was whirling around her like a mad dervish, ready to hurl her into the air, and a car that was coming after her, a madman at the wheel.

Then, suddenly, miraculously, the headlights stopped about eight feet from her car. Rain and lightning battered down, blurring the headlights, turning them a sickly yellow. She stood there, the wind beating at her, breathing in hard, soaked to her bones, waiting. Who was going to get out of that car? Could he see her, huddled next to some trees that were nearly folding themselves around her from the force of the wind? Did he want to kill her with his own hands? Why? Why?

It was Tyler McBride and he was yelling, “Becca! For God’s sake, is that you?” He had a flashlight and he pinned her with it, the light diffused from all the rain, pale, blue-rimmed, and it was right in her eyes. She brought up her hand.