The water was thick with mud, black in the darkness. It rushed in through the vents and the cracks in the doors. Panicked, Nell tried the handle, though she knew it would be useless. Water pressure welded the doors shut.
This was going to be worse than torture, worse than being strung up naked on a telephone line for police to find. It was going to be a silent death, and it would render her invisible. Nobody would ever think to look for a missing car in a nondescript swamp on the side of the road. Sebastian and Lindsay would never know what had happened to her. Where was Sebastian now? He would be leaving for work in a couple of hours. He wouldn’t even realise she was gone until hours later, and then he would call Lindsay and they would both go frantic. There would be posters, public appeals. They would search and search, never knowing that she had been dead even before they knew she was missing at all.
The only evidence she had even gone to this road would sink with her, in the text messages on her phone in her purse.
Her purse. She found it floating as the water reached her chest. She fumbled through the sodden contents until she found the hammer Lindsay had forced into her hands days earlier.
It slipped from her wet grasp and she fumbled in the murky black. The water rose and she drew in a gasp an instant before it filled the car completely.
Immediately the world disappeared. Nell knew that, logically, she was still in a car, in a swamp, off of West Lazarus Road. But in the dark, she was in a parallel universe. The hammer was gone, just as the steering wheel and the seats were gone. Just as Lindsay and Sebastian were gone. Even her drunk, ambling father, who had never been kind but was proud of his daughters in his own way. Even Bonnie, with her raspy smoker’s voice and her hardened eyes.
Everything was gone.
Nell’s fingers snared something and she grasped at it. She thought it might be the latch of some secret door that she could open, and her entire life would go flooding out of this world and into the next along with the swamp water.
The shape of the object woke her from her trance. The hammer. She spun, weightless in the water. Everything moved slowly, and she couldn’t see the window in the darkness, but she felt it. She drew back the hammer and hit the glass. Again, again. The glass didn’t shatter as she had somehow expected. Rather, it cracked. She felt the jagged lines forming when she touched its surface.
She drew back and kicked at the prone glass with the heel of her boot.
Her body floated, light and useless. As the water rushed through her ears, she heard Lindsay screaming at the hospital doctors. They were in the delivery room, the baby tumbling in Nell’s womb, and the doctors had anesthetised her so they could cut her open and tear the baby out. Lindsay was saying words that Nell couldn’t hear, but what she did hear was how afraid Lindsay was. She didn’t trust Nell’s life in their gloved hands. She didn’t trust that this would all be over soon.
Nell felt something break, just like the skin of her engorged stomach. A piece of glass bit at her ankle.
She forced herself back awake. She forced herself to squeeze through the narrow window frame and then swim. She didn’t know what direction was up, but she moved anyway. Her delirium had shattered like the window, and now she felt the burning of her lungs. The desperation came back so that she was full with it. The thought of dying, which had moments ago seemed bearable, was now unthinkable. She would live. She would.
She broke the surface of the water with a painful gasp. Time returned, all its little pieces back above the surface where Nell had left them.
She’d been certain that hours had passed under water, but logic told her it had only been a few seconds. Still gasping, she swam for the road. Without the car headlights, only the stars lit the way, offering her the faint outline of gravel.
Even as she fought to steady her breathing, she tried to be quiet. She listened for the hum of an engine, footsteps, or any sign of whoever had been chasing her.
There was no one.
Slowly, she crawled onto the wet earth and ambled back up to the road. She looked down it in either direction. Her fists clenched, and she reminded herself to keep a clear head. Panic was useless. Panic made people do stupid things.
She looked down and saw that she was still clutching the hammer. She didn’t remember swimming with it. But there it was, slick and wet, still splattered with old paint.
Nell held it up and laughed. It was a desperate, hysterical laugh. No doubt the sort of laugh Bonnie had given before she fired the shot that would land her in prison forever.
Nell’s phone was in the swamp, along with her car and all the identification and money she’d been carrying. It was nearly dawn by the time she reached a gas station; she could hear birds awakening in the shifting darkness. Before that, she’d gone up and down West Lazarus Road, shivering in her wet clothes, looking for number 2, only to discover that the numbers began in the double digits. From there, she had tried all variations of 2. 12. 20. 21. But the address Lindsay gave her didn’t exist. She might have been drunk when she texted; whatever the reason, Nell planned to lay a massive guilt trip on her sister when she saw her next.
The gas station was closed. A sign on the window announced that it would be open at 8 AM. Nell cursed the rural outskirts; had this happened within Rockhollow’s city limits, there would have been a dozen twenty-four-hour gas stations to choose from.
But of course, something like this would only happen in a place that slept between the hours of 8 PM and 8 AM. And now that she had reached a destination, Nell realised that she was not only shivering from the cold. She was trembling. Blood had crusted on her arms and cheek where the shattered window had sliced her.
She rooted around in her jeans pockets for change. The only good thing about an antiquated gas station in a nowhere town was that they always had a payphone.
The call to Lindsay went straight to voicemail.
‘Jesus, Lindsay, where the hell are you?’ Of all the nights for her sister to pull this shit. She dialled Bas’s number but it also went to voicemail. Nell slammed the phone back into the cradle without leaving a message. Of course, Bas always turned his phone off at bedtime, rarely turning it back on until he was halfway through his commute.
She picked up the phone again to dial 911, but hesitated. Burying her head under the damp hood of her sweatshirt, shivering in the middle of nowhere and operating on almost no sleep, her thoughts turned paranoid. She thought of the mannequin smouldering on the street beside Lindsay’s car, and the other hanging from a noose in a tree.
Nell had forced herself to be reassured by Lindsay’s insistence that the mannequins had been a prank, but now she sensed there was a pattern to this. Or rather there was a puzzle, and the pieces were scattered everywhere.
She dropped a quarter into the payphone and dialled a number she had come to know by heart. It was the number written on a Post-it note stuck to the wall by her desk, along with all the other notes she kept nearby for reference in the Hamblin case. Oleg’s cell phone.
He answered on the first ring. She imagined him in bed, his pristine hair tousled, his congenial smile replaced by raw exhaustion. She imagined him without pretence, the way he must be when he was alone.
‘Oleg? It’s Nell Way. I-I know it’s late – or early—’ Too late, she realised she hadn’t rehearsed this call, and after the night she’d endured, she couldn’t think straight.
He interrupted her. ‘What’s the matter? Has something happened?’
All Nell could think in that moment was that she had never heard worry in his voice before. She knew he’d been through hell thanks to Easter. But she had never pictured it until now. How had he sounded when he took the call that Autumn was dead? When he first picked up the phone and stared down his sister through the prison glass?
‘I’m sorry to call you like this but it is important,’ Nell said. ‘Can you meet me?’
He was there in twenty minutes, which Nell presumed to be some sort of record. It had taken her at least twice as long to make it this far when she was speeding her way to Lindsay. She recognised his gold Buick Century, which was the first car she’d seen since she’d been run off of the road. They stopped making this model fifteen years ago, but he kept it in remarkably pristine shape. He applied this sort of care to everything. Even during their interviews, he had laid his straw wrapper on the table, pressing it at the crease and then folding it into perfect squares as he spoke. He didn’t even seem aware that he was doing it.
He leaned across the passenger seat to open the door for her, and she leapt gratefully inside. The heat was blasting, and it thawed the frozen chunks of hair in her ponytail.
She closed her eyes. For the first time all morning, she allowed herself to believe that she was safe.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘What are you doing out here in the freezing cold?’ Oleg asked. ‘Why are you soaked?’
He hadn’t started driving yet, and Nell realised that she hadn’t told him where to take her. She didn’t know where she was heading. She hadn’t thought beyond getting him here, so that she could ask him her next question.
She leaned forward and cupped her hands over one of the vents, and then she turned to him. His hair was neatly combed, although his eyes were weary.
‘Oleg,’ Nell said. ‘I want you to know that I’ve always been honest in our conversations. That’s important, because when people entrust their stories to me, I want to give full transparency about how I’m going to use them.’
‘Yes,’ Oleg replied slowly. ‘I know that.’
‘So I need to ask you something about your sisters. Take your time before you answer.’
He raised an eyebrow. ‘Nell, what is this about?’
‘Is there any possible way,’ Nell said, ‘that Autumn is still alive?’