AT TIM’S PLACE SHE’D learned that, yes, Jeff had been there earlier. Hours earlier. Driving the Cape Cleaners truck, someone had said. Still making deliveries, because he’d gone to Boston earlier, and his car had broken down. Not the van, but Jeff’s Camaro, almost ten years old. But now the Camaro was parked beside the dry-cleaning store, and the van was gone.
At random, she turned on a blacktop road, driving away from the lights of Carter’s Landing. Had she been on this road before—maybe only minutes before? In the darkness, she couldn’t be sure. On the highways, the interstates, there were the lights, the billboards, the signs. Hold the steering wheel, press down on the accelerator, and the interstate did the rest. The interstate, and the motion of the car and the beat of the music. And then, once she’d gotten to Carter’s Landing, one Xanax, the topper, after the two Valiums.
But all of it together, the combination, still wasn’t enough to shut out the contempt in her mother’s voice telling her so plainly to leave them alone with their millions. And millions. And millions.
Her mother’s words, followed by his words:
“You were there.”
The three words had seeped into her consciousness. The three words, the sound of Daniels’s voice when he said it, the look in his eye—all of it had begun to fester, as if—
Ahead, she saw red and blue and white strobes flashing. Police lights. Ambulance lights. And now the policeman with a flashlight was waving her around the official cars and vans strung out along the road, blocking the right-hand lane.
As she braked, downshifted, turned out, she saw Constable Farnsworth eyeing her closely. Now he was waving to her. Did he want her to stop, was that why he was waving? Uncertain, she pressed the brake pedal harder, downshifted to first gear, crawling now.
And then she saw it: the Cape Cleaners van. It was parked between two rows of trees that bordered a narrow lane leading to a scattering of weekend cottages.
The van’s door was standing open, as if Jeff had carelessly abandoned it.