His first thought was that he needed to get the police.
And then: You are the police.
There’d been talk of him hiring a deputy or two, but it hadn’t happened yet.
Ethan sat down in the road.
The shock of the wreck had begun to fade, and he was growing cold.
After a while, he got up. Couldn’t just leave her here, not even for a couple of hours. He lifted the woman in his arms and carried her off the road into the woods. She wasn’t as cold as he would’ve thought. Still warm even. Bloodless and warm—an eerie combination. Twenty feet in, he found a grove of scrub oak. He ducked under the branches and set her down gently on a bed of dead leaves. There was nowhere to take her now, but it felt wrong just leaving her here. He folded her hands across her stomach. When he reached for the top button on his shirt, he discovered that his hands were still trembling. He tore it open, took it off, covered her with it.
Said, “I’ll be back for you, I promise.”
Ethan walked out to the road. For a moment, he considered putting the Bronco into neutral, rolling it off onto the shoulder. But it wasn’t like anyone would be driving out here in the next few hours. The dairy wouldn’t be making its milk deliveries until late tomorrow afternoon. He’d have time to clean this up before then.
Ethan started back toward town, the lights of the houses of Pines twinkling in the valley ahead.
So peaceful.
So perfectly deceptively peaceful.
Dawn was on the verge as Ethan walked into his house.
He drew the hottest bath he could stand in the clawfoot tub downstairs. Cleaned up his face. Scrubbed off the blood. The heat dimmed the body ache and the throbbing behind his eyes.
There was light in the sky when Ethan climbed into bed.
The sheets were cold and his wife was warm.
He should’ve called Pilcher already. Should’ve called him the moment he walked inside, but he was too tired to think. He needed sleep, if only for several hours.
“You’re back,” Theresa whispered.
He wrapped an arm around her, drew her in close.
His ribs on his left side ached when he breathed in deeply.
“Everything okay?” she asked. He thought of Peter, smoking and sizzling after the shock. The dead, naked woman lying in the middle of the road. Of almost dying, and not the first clue as to what any of it meant.
“Yeah, honey,” he said, snuggling closer. “I’m fine.”
3
Ethan opened his eyes and nearly leapt off the mattress.
Pilcher sat in a chair at the foot of his bed, watching Ethan over the top of a leather-bound book.
“Where’s Theresa?” Ethan asked. “Where’s my son?”
“Do you have any idea what time it is?”
“Where’s my family?”
“Your wife’s at work just like she’s supposed to be. Ben’s in school.”
“What the hell are you doing in my bedroom?” Ethan asked.
“It’s early afternoon. You never showed up for work.”
Ethan shut his eyes against a crushing pressure at the base of his skull.
“You had a big night, huh?” Pilcher said.
Ethan reached for the glass of water on the bedside table, his entire body stiff and brittle. Like he’d been broken into a thousand pieces and haphazardly patched back together.He drained the glass.
“You found my car?” Ethan asked.
Pilcher nodded. “As you can imagine, we were deeply concerned. There are no cameras near the billboard. We didn’t see what happened. Only the aftermath.”
The light coming through the window was sharp.
Ethan squinted against it.
He stared at Pilcher—couldn’t tell what book he held. The man was dressed in jeans, a white oxford, gray sweater-vest. The same gentle, unassuming style Pilcher always sported around town where people believed he was a resident psychologist. He and Pam were probably seeing patients today.
Ethan said, “I was driving back to Pines after Peter McCall. Assume you heard what happened there?”
“Pam briefed me. So tragic.”
“I glanced into the pasture for a split second, and when I looked back, there was something in the middle of the road. I hit it, swerved, overcorrected, flipped my Bronco.”
“The damage was severe. You’re lucky to be alive.”
“Yeah.”
“What was in the road, Ethan? My men didn’t find anything except debris from the Bronco.”
Ethan wondered if Pilcher really didn’t know. Was it possible that the woman in the road had been a Wanderer? There was rumored to be a group of residents who had discovered their microchips and cut them out. Who had knowledge of the camera placements and blind spots. People who kept their chips with them during the day, but on occasion, would extract them and leave them in bed to wander undetected in the night. Word was they always wore hooded jackets or sweatshirts to hide their faces from the cameras.
“It makes me nervous,” Pilcher said, rising to his feet, “when I see you wrestling with a simple question that should require no thought at all to answer. Or perhaps your head is still cloudy from the wreck. Does that explain the delay? Why, when I look in your eyes, I see the wheels turning?”
He knows. He’s testing me. Or maybe he only knows that she was there, but not where I put her.
“Ethan?”
“There was a woman lying in the road.”
Pilcher reached into his pocket, pulled out a wallet-sized photo.
Held it up to Ethan’s face.
It was her. A candid shot. Smiling or laughing at something off-camera. Vibrant. The backdrop was blurred, but from the color, Ethan guessed that the photo had been taken in the community gardens.
He said, “That’s her.”
Pilcher’s face went dark. He returned the photograph to his pocket.
“She’s dead?” He asked it like all the air had gone out of him.
“She’d been stabbed.”
“Where?”
“Everywhere.”
“She was tortured?”
“Looked that way.”
“Where is she?”
“I moved her out of the road,” Ethan said.
“Why?”
“Because it didn’t seem right to leave her naked out in the open for anyone to see.”
“Where is her body right now?”
“Across the road from the billboard in a grove of scrub oak.”