Strange Girl (31 page)

In either case, she said when she was in second or third grade, she remembered Bo coming into her room late at night, when her mom was asleep. He’d just sit on the edge of her bed and stroke her hair and talk to her and it was nice. At least she thought it was nice. He did this off and on for a year. But later, when she was in the fourth grade, he started to climb into the bed with her, wearing only his underwear, and she remembered him touching her and asking her to touch him.

“Touching me,”
and
“Touch him.”

That was as detailed as she got.

“Did you tell your mom?” I asked as we climbed into Aja’s car. I felt in no hurry to start the engine. Aja would wait.

“Not until I was in fifth grade.” Janet added hastily, “I was young. I didn’t know what was going on.”

“What did your mom say?”

“She told me she’d talk to my dad about it. And she told me not to talk about it to anybody else.”

“But she believed you?”

Janet hesitated. “I’m not sure.”

It might have been a coincidence, but Janet was in fifth grade when her mother suddenly filed for divorce and moved to New York. She took Janet with her but only because Janet asked to go. Not because Mom was anxious to have sole custody or was desperate to protect her daughter.

“That’s a pretty lame reaction,” I said. “I hate to say it but I don’t think she believed you.”

“That, or else she didn’t give a damn,” Janet said. “Don’t forget, I just spent a week with the woman. Mom never changes. She’s nice and friendly and attentive and yet—all the time you’re in the room with her—you feel like a robot’s been assigned to be your chaperone. She was like that when I was growing up.”

“Is that why—when you were a kid—you came back home after a year?”

Janet hesitated. “Yeah.”

“You said before you missed your friends.”

“I missed you.”

I didn’t believe her, I thought. She was telling me only part of the story and not the most important part. Something else had dragged her from New York City back to Elder.

I spoke carefully. “Did you miss Bo?”

Janet ignored me and looked toward the terminal. “Aja’s waiting with our bags. We should get her.”

“What did Aja do to drag this skeleton out of the closet?”

Janet stared straight ahead, her gaze thoughtful. “Nothing. I mean, nothing I can put my finger on. But just hanging out with her I started to remember what had gone on, you know.”

“Wait a second. Are you saying you’d blocked it all out?”

“No. I knew it’d happened. It’s just . . . whenever I did remember it, I pretended like it hadn’t really happened. Does that make sense?”

“Sort of. Has anything happened in the last seven years?”

“No. Not since I was ten years old. Bo’s been great.”

Great,
I thought.

Aja was waiting outside with our three sets of bags when we drove up to the loading-and-unloading zone, shivering in a thin leather jacket she’d bought in a shop in the hotel in LA. I yelled at her for not waiting inside the baggage area.

“That’s a great way to catch pneumonia,” I said as I loaded the bags into the trunk.

“I’m fine,” Aja said, starting to climb in the backseat.

“Sit in the front seat with Fred,” Janet said.

“I don’t care where I sit,” Aja said.

“You should be with your boyfriend,” Janet insisted. She may have been trying to put distance between us to stop all the Bo questions. That was my thought anyway. I hadn’t told her about Bo being at the airport or the fact I’d punched him in the gut. For the first time since I’d known her, Janet appeared delicate. I didn’t want to add to her burdens.

It was after three in the morning before we left the airport. We had a long drive ahead of us. But I felt awake enough to drive. I’d slept on our flight home, and it was good to be with my two favorite people in the whole world. Plus I was still riding the buzz from my impending record deal.

While Aja and I had been in the air, Marc Kroff and Jimmy Hurt had both called and left messages reminding me that I had to get an agent right away. Their hurry to finalize the deal added to my excitement.

It was important I stay alert. The recent snowfall had been light but it had left the road icy. I held our speed below fifty and kept my distance from other cars. The last thing I wanted to do was hit the brake; we’d spin out of control for sure.

We’d been driving for roughly an hour when I saw Janet stir in the rearview mirror and yawn, waking up from a nap. Aja sat silently on my right. I was surprised she hadn’t dozed off.

“I don’t want Mike, Dale, or Shelly to know what’s going on,” Janet said.

I nodded. “Understood.”

Janet sighed. “Of all the families in the world I could have been born into. I get a mother who’s so closed down inside she can’t show affection and a father who’s so desperate for love it’s turned him into a pervert.”

“All human beings are desperate for love,” Aja said.

Janet chuckled. “You know, Aja, I appreciate you give good advice and all that, but do you ever stop and look at your own problems? I mean, I doubt everything in your life has been bright and rosy since the instant you popped out of your mother’s womb.”

“You’re right,” Aja said. “My family life was far from perfect.”

I glanced over at her. She was staring out the side window.

“How so?” I asked.

Aja shrugged. “My father was a criminal and my mother was a saint. It made for a difficult combination.”

“What did your father do?” I asked.

“He worked for a drug cartel.”

“Shit,” Janet muttered.

“Was your mother like you?” I asked. “Was she aware of the Big Person? Is that why you call her a saint?”

“A saint is someone who does no harm. That was my mother.”

I spoke carefully. “How did they die?”

Aja hesitated. “My father was greedy. He could never have enough money. He stole from his bosses. They didn’t like that. When I was five years old, they sent three men and a woman from another country to kill him.”

“God. I’m so sorry,” Janet said. “What happened?”

A car close behind us suddenly honked. I’d seen the car approaching in my rearview mirror, or at least its lights. Now it was practically on top of us. It kept honking, edging closer. Janet peered out the back window.

“That’s Bo’s car!” she cried.

“Damnit!” I swore. “I didn’t tell you, I ran into him at the airport. He came to pick you up. He was drunk. We ended up trading blows.”

“He hit you?” Janet gasped.

“It was more like I hit him.” Our car lurched as he struck our rear bumper. “Christ! He’s trying to run us off the road!”

I wasn’t exaggerating. Bo struck us twice more before he accelerated into the left lane and came up on our side. I could just glimpse him through the glare of our headlights and the fury of the flying snow. Hunched over his steering wheel, craning his head in our direction, he looked insane. I suspected he’d drowned the pain and humiliation of my blow with another bottle of booze. He had to be totally smashed to be risking his daughter’s life.

Aja’s Mercedes was powered by one of the finest engines the company had ever built—the 4.0L AMG biturbo V-8. The car could do over a hundred and fifty miles an hour without straining. Outrunning Bo wasn’t a problem. It was the damn ice on the road. The frozen sheets could spin us into the steep grassy slopes on either side of the interstate just as easily as his ramming routine.

Bo swung partway into our lane and gave us a light tap.

A light tap that almost sent us careening out of control.

I felt I had no choice but to accelerate. I pushed our speed up to ninety. But doing ninety on icy asphalt in the dead of night felt like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute. Still, Bo stayed with us, the lunatic. I increased our speed to a hundred. No good. The bastard was an expert mechanic and he’d supercharged his Mustang. He caught us easily.

“Roll down your windows!” Janet cried.

“Why?” I yelled.

“He’s rolled his down! Do it!”

I hit the buttons that rolled down my window alone, while locking the others in place. Freezing wind flooded our car. Janet pounded the back of my seat in frustration. I ignored her. I couldn’t handle another distraction. Bo’s Mustang was a foot away and the road up ahead looked like a frozen lake. We had at most ten seconds before the combination of gravity, speed, and an extreme lack of friction would become every bit as dangerous as a cliff.

Bo screamed at me across the gulf. “I’m taking my girl home!”

“She’s not your girl, you prick!” I yelled back.

“I’ll go with him! I’ll go!” Janet cried.

“Fred,” Aja said.

The ten seconds were cut in half and all I could see was a thick, white sheet in front of us that appeared to glisten—I had the high beams on—with a million hidden diamonds. On the upcoming stretch it was clear the wind had funneled the two inches of snowfall into a two-foot blanket of powder. If we hit it doing a hundred there was a chance we’d flip over and become airborne.

I had no choice, I hit the brakes. On our left, Bo’s Mustang vanished. For all I could tell he’d smashed into a tree.

Our wheels gripped the asphalt for perhaps three seconds. We were lucky to get that; it cut our speed to sixty. Then we hit a sheet of invisible ice that lay camouflaged beneath the blanket of snow and we went into a spin. My life didn’t flash before my eyes but the dark landscape did. We were a clock running backward, subtracting potential years instead of hours from what was left of our lives. We were totally out of control.

We hit the two feet of powder; it could have been a ten-foot wall of granite. I heard a loud, grinding noise. It sounded as if the Mercedes’s driveshaft was cracking. But maybe it was my back that was breaking. I felt my body jerked in every direction at once.

The air bags exploded in our faces but rather than softening the blow I felt as if I’d been slugged by a prizefighter. I heard a loud snap followed by a warm wet gush. I felt pain inside my nose, terrible pain, and knew it was broken. Agony swelled through my head as a black wave washed over my brain. I passed out; it could have been for five seconds or five minutes.

The next thing I heard was silence, nothingness. I was freezing cold. The window on my left was still open and I had the makings of Frosty and his pals sitting on my lap. In other words, I was buried in snow. I couldn’t help noticing the white powder was soaked red. A sticky red as in blood.

Our wild momentum had caused a six-foot-tall mountain of powder to build up on the driver’s side. It had us half-buried. There was no way I’d be able to open my door. I’d have to crawl over to the passenger door. As long as Aja was . . .

I thought of her then. Looked at her.

She smiled. “Your nose looks like a snow cone.”

“Which flavor?” I said in a nasally voice.

“Strawberry.”

“How are you feeling?”

“I’m fine.” Aja twisted around. “You okay, Janet?”

I could still see Janet in the rearview mirror. She’d smashed into her own air bag and seemed to be holding up her left arm to keep it from hurting. The arm didn’t look a hundred percent straight. I assumed it was broken.

“I’ve been better,” Janet groaned. “Where’s Bo?”

Aja gestured to our cracked windshield. Her side was relatively clear, at least she could see past the powder. “His car’s a quarter mile up the road. It’s lying on its side. His lights are still on.”

“We have to help him,” Janet said. “Fred!”

I raised a hand. “I’ll check on him. But we need to light a few flares and spread them over the road. We need to do that immediately. The next car or truck that comes along could crush us. Aja, can you open your door?”

“It’s stuck,” Aja said, struggling with it, before suddenly spinning on her butt and raising both her legs and kicking it open. I hit the button that should have popped the trunk but didn’t hear anything. Snapping free of my seat belt, I held out the keys to Aja. She leaned back in the car and grabbed them.

“Get the flares,” I said. “Light them far away from the car, up the road, back the way we came. Hurry.”

“Gotcha,” she said before she turned and vanished.

Crawling over the armrest and across Aja’s seat let me know just how banged up I was. Everything ached; my progress was pitifully slow. I felt as if I’d been kicked by a gang of thugs. I imagined how nice it would be to soak in a hot tub. I was so cold!

I spoke to Janet. “Can you get out? Can you stand?”

“My door’s jammed. And my left arm . . . it’s numb.”

“I’ll work on your door once I’m out. I’m worried about a gasoline leak. There’s a chance the tank cracked. I don’t want us staying in here any longer than we have to.”

“You have to check on Bo,” she said.

“I promise, I’ll check on him as soon as we’re clear.”

I stumbled and fell the instant I got outside. There was something wrong with my left knee; it wasn’t working. Aja returned to my side and helped me to my feet. She had four flares in hand and already had two burning behind our car—at distances of forty yards and fifty yards. I took two and stuffed them in my back pocket. Aja had also retrieved a flashlight from the trunk.

“Good work,” I said. “Let’s get Janet out and get jackets on. I’ve got my cell. I’ll call 911 and tell them our situation. Then I’ll check on Bo.”

“Can you walk?” Aja asked.

“I’ll walk.”

It was actually Aja who popped Janet’s door loose. My knee was in worse shape than I thought. It didn’t hurt, not like my dripping nose, but it made a disturbing clicking noise when I put weight on it and it felt
mushy
. Great, I thought. My first advance from Paradise Records would go to an orthopedic surgeon.

I called 911 and explained where we were and what had happened. The dispatcher was blunt. She explained we were in the middle of nowhere and it would take forty minutes for an ambulance to reach us. I told them to please hurry.

Minutes later the three of us huddled together outside the slightly crumpled Mercedes. The car was heavily reinforced with steel bars; it scored high on crash tests. In that respect we were lucky. The vehicle had kept us alive and free from serious injury.