West Ridge is a small town set high on hills fifteen miles from the sea. Its college sits on the only road through town. The high elevation and the undivided highway make it vulnerable in winter, on the rare occasion of heavy snowfall, to being cut off. Seventeen years earlier, following a freak storm, the town had been cut off for twelve hours. On the Saturday evening in June when the Lofte cousins were at the mining school, two traffic accidents achieved the same result.
The first took place at a nasty bend in the road five miles south of West Ridge, a notorious accident spot. A white truck skidded while turning a corner, lost control, and overturned, spilling its load of drums of cooking oil. These split on contact with the road, leaving an oil slick that had spread across both lanes by the time the next car arrived on the scene.
Five minutes later, three miles north of West Ridge, a broken-down old tractor was rammed by a blue minibus. The tractor’s right rear wheel collapsed, leaving it leaning on the crumpled bus. Fuel leaking from both vehicles burst into flames, sending an explosion of light and smoke high into the evening sky. In the still summer air, the sound carried to every house in West Ridge. In both accidents, everyone walked away from the scene unhurt—there were no casualties.
When the ambulances came from the north to pick up the sick kids at the mining school, they found the road blocked by an impassable furnace. When the police arrived from the south, the road was blocked by twenty tons of truck wreckage, a hundred fifty gallons of cooking oil, and four cars that had skidded into each other.
The last two vehicles to reach West Ridge before the accidents were both black Audi A8s. In the one approaching from the south was a German—Volker Berghahn; the one from the north was driven by an American, Brad Collins, who turned to the smartly dressed woman in the passenger seat next to him.
“Boom. And boom again. Our turn, I think, Roshanna.”