Fatality (8 page)

“Thank you,” she said. She tucked her hair inside and jammed the bill down on her forehead. The van pulled into the wide right-hand breakdown lane. Rose got out and stepped over the thigh-high metal guardrail and onto the grass, and the van drove away.

A wide, low hill had been sliced through the middle by the Interstate, two lanes in each direction lying in a shady valley between two long, grassy slopes. The north-and southbound lanes were divided by a football field of grass. Rose was on the northbound side.

A half mile of highway turned out to have a lot of garbage. There was a tire and tire shreds, two hubcaps, an alarm clock, and several hundred brightly colored advertising inserts that had lost their way. There were dirty napkins, half a paperback book, and a rotting T-shirt.

Rose filled a bag and rolled the tire over next to it, wondering how the tire had managed to get across the guardrail.

The sun was pleasantly warm and the road surprisingly interesting.

She glanced up now and then, checking out dragging mufflers or radios loud enough to be heard in the next county. She scrambled up the grassy hill to fetch Styrofoam or used Pampers, but mostly she stood in knee-high green grass, flecked here and there with early white daisies or poison ivy, reaching in for plastic water bottles and paper coffee cups.

This was the most unlikely after-school activity Rose Lymond ever expected to take up.

Every now and then, a vehicle strayed slightly out of its lane, its right tires running over the cut marks in the emergency lane designed to wake them up. The noise was shocking, like a sudden freight train, ending the instant the car corrected its wheels. Rose decided it was better not to look at the traffic. Sturdy as the protective metal fence was, Rose could not believe it would really hold back a truck going eighty miles an hour.

The wind rushed down the cupped valley, yanking the baseball cap from her head and lifting her blond hair. For a moment she felt beautiful, like a model in a shampoo commercial. She laughed out loud. Models hardly ever wore padded orange trash vests.

The laugh healed her a little. She straightened up, with such a crick in her spine she felt like Nannie.

So many cars coming so fast. Even now hundreds of them were probably rolling their windows down, preparing to chuck trash into her half mile. Way up ahead she could see a fellow worker on his hillside. The man south of her had not yet come over his hill but a dark SUV, like a square barrel on high tires, had paused in the emergency lane, blinkers on. Once she would have assumed the driver was checking his map. Now she knew he was getting rid of pizza crusts and old shoes.

Her grassy field came to an end, sloping down sharply to a narrow local road that passed beneath the Interstate. The road was so little used there wasn’t even a line painted down the middle. To reach the rest of her half mile, Rose would have to climb over the guardrail and walk on the overpass for a hundred feet. Oh, well, the emergency lane was designed so that fire engines and ambulances could pass on the right. There was plenty of room for one thin girl, even in a padded vest.

The lost baseball cap, tossed brutally in the wind tunnels of each passing car, came to rest in the center of the overpass. It huddled up against the cement curb along with lots of other trash.

The guardrail was nearly as high as her waist. Awkwardly she crossed over, lifting her spear so she didn’t put it through her foot. The cap was blowing around again. She hoped it wouldn’t be whisked out of reach. She heard the rumble of tires on the cut marks, but she was used to the racket now and turned without much interest.

A car was halfway out of its lane, hurtling forward on the diagonal across the emergency lane.

It was not braking.

It was going to hit the bridge.

It would hit Rose first.

Chrissie Klein had not had time for breakfast before she left for school, so she was having it after school. Chrissie was a big refined-sugar fan. She was having a Pop-Tart, a sight from which her mother had to be protected, as she did not approve of white sugar. As soon as she finished the Pop-Tart, Chrissie planned to have Froot Loops.

The Kleins had many phone lines: Chrissie’s, her mother’s office, her father’s office, the fax, and the dedicated Internet. When her own phone rang, Chrissie spoke into it with her mouth full, not worried because any friend of Chrissie’s would have equally low standards of phone etiquette. “Yeah, hello?” she said.

“Chrissie, it’s Anjelica Lofft.”

The Pop-Tart all but fell out of Chrissie’s mouth. “Anjelica?” she repeated stupidly. “Lofft?”

“Yes. How are you, Chrissie?”

Sugar and crumbs stuck to her tongue and throat. She felt choky and anxious.

“May we talk?” said Anjelica.

Chrissie loved to talk. Talking was the reason for life. The problem with school was that during those forty-five-minute stretches of class, only the teacher was supposed to talk. Chrissie had never been able to cope with that. She could think of a million things to ask Anjelica. “Well? Did he murder her? Were you there? Did you see? How’s boarding school? Do you like being a zillionaire? Want to share a million or two?”

But what came out of her mouth was, “You never invited me for a weekend.” Chrissie was humiliated and astonished to hear herself say that out loud. Four years later she was still so crushed that she actually admitted it? Yikes, thought Chrissie. Time for self-improvement.

“If we hadn’t moved away, I would have,” said Anjelica. “I was envious of the close friendship you had with Rose.”

Rose, thought Chrissie. This is about Rose. How strange.

“The nightmare is back,” said Anjelica. “Once again, the police are convinced that my father murdered his partner. They are equally convinced Rose saw it happen. Rose could not have seen it happen because it didn’t happen. Rose and I saw exactly the same thing because we were waiting in exactly the same car at exactly the same time.”

“So why aren’t you calling Rose?” asked Chrissie.

“I thought she might have discussed something with you.”

“Rose is a very closemouthed person.”

“I guess so. I heard about the police-car stunt.”

It wasn’t a stunt, thought Chrissie. It was an unavoidable act of courage. But that was most certainly not the business of snippy snobby Anjelica Lofft, so Chrissie said, “How could you possibly know what Rose Lymond is doing in her spare time in a town you haven’t visited in years?”

“We’re living at the lake estate again,” said Anjelica. “We’re only ninety miles north.”

But the car theft hadn’t been on the news or in the papers. Rose’s astonishing act had become common knowledge only when the police questioned the diary names, and Halsey and Jill and Erin had been up half the night on e-mail and phone, making sure everybody knew. But the “everybody” they notified were kids in school. How could Anjelica know? With whom was she still friends?

“The police were
here,”
said Anjelica, as if the very soil on her property would have to be cleaned now.

Chrissie frowned.

The police were hoping to arrest Mr. Lofft for murder. Why tell him about Rose? Shouldn’t they be a little more protective of somebody they wanted as their star witness? This did not sound protective of Rose. It sounded protective of Milton Lofft.

“What did Rose tell you about her weekend with me back when it happened?” asked Anjelica.

Chrissie reverted to seventh-grade behavior. “That you were barely polite, hadn’t arranged a single activity, and didn’t even sleep in the same room.”

“That’s true,” said Anjelica. “I think we had other things on our minds.”

“We?” repeated Chrissie Klein. “You and your father? Like, what could have been on your little mind, Anjelica? Murder?” she said cruelly, remembering the pleasure of finding out, as all seventh graders did, how easily you could hurt somebody. Power was when you slashed somebody down.

Anjelica hung up on her.

Chrissie expected to feel remorse but didn’t. She poured Froot Loops into a bowl and tried to decide what Rose would want her to do next. It didn’t make sense to Chrissie that Anjelica was pursuing this.

She was pouring milk on her Froot Loops when it came to her that there must be something else in the diary. Not just Rose Lymond’s secret.

A
second secret.

A secret that would matter to Anjelica Lofft.

Chrissie closed her eyes and tried to remember every word she had read in that diary. But if there was a second secret, Chrissie could not come up with it. I should talk to Rose, thought Chrissie. But then I’d have to admit I read the diary. I’d have to admit I know the truth.

Putting a hand on the overpass railing, Rose simply vaulted over. It was the kind of thing she would never have done if she’d had time to think about it. What if she fell thirty feet to her death on the pavement below? What if she wasn’t strong enough to vault over and got impaled against the railing? What if it would have been wiser to run forward or dash back?

But Rose didn’t think, just leaped.

She was lucky. She was close to the start of the bridge and her fell was only six or eight feet, cushioned by little bushes. Her roll downhill was punctuated by the stabs of sharp little cedars.

She somersaulted, feet hitting the hot pavement of the little country road. She staggered, got her balance, and ran under the bridge. It was damp in there, and dark. Water seeped through cracked concrete. She wasn’t bleeding, thanks to the padded vest and her jeans, but she was good and bruised.

Had it been the SUV loitering at the top of the hill south of her? Rose knew her cars, because she was fifteen and thought constantly about what she would own if she could own one. And yet the vast number of cars had made her lose interest; they blurred until they were just traffic.

She berated herself for not identifying the vehicle. In memory she fought for detail, but she had caught none. She’d been busy saving her skin.

Above Rose, the car braked rather carefully, probably not even leaving a patch. It came to a stop in the emergency lane. Its bulky frame cast a shadow on the country road below.

Rose backed up into the depths of the tunnel, her heart pounding like tires on a warning strip. The shadow of the driver leaned over to see what had become of her. The sun was bright and the two shadows had the clarity of black paper cutouts.

Walk out and wave, she told herself. Let the poor soul know you weren’t hit.

But she didn’t move. Had the car wandered out of its lane? Or left the lane deliberately? Had the driver felt like scaring any old orange-vested worker by the side of the road? Fair game, the way substitute teachers in school were usually considered fair game? Or, when her cap blew off, had the driver known Rose by her hair?

How deserted the little country road was. Above her, traffic raced by. Down here, it was quiet and empty. She yearned for a school bus or a delivery truck.

The driver shadow disappeared. In a moment, the car shadow also disappeared.

When her pulse eased off, she scrabbled back up her hill. No other car had stopped. Nobody had noticed anything. There was no one in the emergency lane and no dark SUV in sight.

Rose leaned on the top of her stick, staring at all the bad drivers of the world.

She didn’t want to get on the bridge again. But if she didn’t cross it, she wasn’t going to reach the trash on that end of her half mile.

They’re not grading me, she reminded herself. I’m not going to get C minus because I skip some of it.

She caught sight of the boy’s baseball cap. It had been swept up the grassy slope she had just cleaned. Rose caught it and wept suddenly over the kindness of strangers.

When rehabilitation was over and Rose finally got home, her parents were sitting together, watching TV news. Rose hated television news. It made her queasy and uncertain, as if life, like tides, could come out from under her.

She stood silently, not wanting to let Mom and Dad know she was home. What would they say? So, darling, how was rehab? Do you have a future in trash? Are you going to be a good, talkative girl from now on?

The Loffts had had TVs in every single room, including Rose’s own bath. In that huge, elegant house …so much furniture, so many windows, paintings, sculpture, tapestries, collections …commentators called back and forth like dinner guests, from room to room, from channel to channel.

Late that Friday night, alone in the guest room, sick of rereading her diary, Rose got out of bed to see who was there, but the conversation she’d been dimly hearing all night long came from televisions.

She went from room to room, bare feet noiseless on the thick carpets or shining hardwood, Oriental rugs or Mexican tiles. The house was not full of people. It was full of television images, quivering reflections of humanity.

Rose had crept back to her solitary room. Crawled between the sheets. Slept for hours, as if things might change while she was unconscious. But in the morning, things had not changed.

Nothing would change here, either, so Rose went into the TV room and squished herself between her parents. “I’m a trash expert now,” she said.

Her mother sighed, stroking the thin blond hair and taking Rose’s fingers in her own and examining them, as if she might find answers in the shape of Rose’s nails.

Dad put his arm around her and gave her a fierce one-armed hug. He was a forgiving man. Except for one thing.

Nobody could forgive that.

I
N THE MORNING, ROSE
found that she lacked the energy for school. She lay in bed staring at the ceiling. Unlike Tabor, who could sleep and sleep, body molded into the mattress, sleep so deep he could hardly be shaken awake, Rose just woke up and got out of bed. She never lingered.

Not today.

I can’t get up, she thought. School is too much. Ming and Chrissie and Alan and the police and Mom and Dad. They’re all too much.

She decided to stay home with a sick headache. She had never suffered from such a malady, but Chrissie’s mother quite routinely had migraines so bad she threw up. Rose had helped Mrs. Klein one horrible afternoon, bringing a hot-water bottle, lowering the shades, and mopping up the bathroom.