“The girl just vanished. Word is she is a sexual prisoner of a man out there in the mountains, but I say we have ourselves a killer, either in these parts or passing through. But, no ma'am, I wouldn't want to be lost, unprotected so to speak. Ain't nothing worse.”
The falling angle of sunlight stippled the road with the outlines of leafy branches, and when the breeze blew, the shadows danced across the pavement. The policeman handed back the license and registration and then turned to Erica, holding his gaze upon her features and her hair feathering across her face. She pulled a flyaway length together and tucked it behind her ear, keeping the tresses in place with a crooked finger. His stare alarmed and fascinated her; she had not noticed before how his gray eyes strained toward blue, but perhaps that was a trick of the radiant hour. “Don't get so hankerin’ for lonesome that you find yourself lost.” To an attentive Wiley he gave directions to Roanoke, and as the Pinto eased away they left the trooper in the middle of the road. In the rearview mirror, or so it seemed to her, the young man reflected an unearthly glow that brightened as the figure diminished.
SHE THOUGHT OF it as their wedding night, or akin in spirit and symbol, the first night they would share a bed to sleep next to each other and wake up together in the morning. In the game she was playing, a great leap forward. Off the highway on the Tennessee side of Bristol, they found a Mom-and-Pop motel that backed onto neighborhood streets where children called and hollered to one another in the early hours of the evening, eking out the last bit of play and nonsense before going to bed. She shut the drapes, wrapped her arms around her man. “We made it,” she said. “Despite the freaks, we got away.”
“The police have seen us. We'll have to get rid of that car,” he told her. “And be more careful. Don't want to be caught.”
“Still,” she said. “You liked it. Out there in the woods, like a wildcat.”
He kissed her and began to paw at her clothing, but she pushed away gently and patted him on the chest. “Why don't you stretch out? I want to get a shower, get ready.”
In the cramped bathroom, she unwrapped a thin bar of soap, inhaling deeply to discern any aroma. There was none. She laid out her cosmetics on the counter, arranging her lipstick and deodorant and tweezers just as she had at home. A small plastic bottle held a few ounces of her mother's lavender shampoo, and Erica caught her scent. She unrolled the red camisole bought just for this evening and hung it on the towel rack, the silk crimson as a wound spilling over the white terrycloth. In the mirror, she pondered an oily patch across her forehead and gazed into her tired eyes, and then cocking her left shoulder to the reflection, she admired the backward tattoo of the intertwined AOD and angel's wings.
That policeman had liked her, she decided, and the old man at the front desk too. He had leered at her, tried to look down her shirt when she bent to pick up her bag. She was pleased to know that men outside of her hometown, men other than Wiley, found her desirable, and as she stepped into the shower, that knowledge heightened the pleasure of soap and hot water. The lavender would last a few days, and then she would be gone for good. Indulging herself, she stood in a cloud of steam long after she had made herself clean. Wrapped in a towel and brushing her hair in front of a wiped circle in the mirror, she turned the handle and pointed at her reflection. “Pow,” and then the wide smile spread like a bloodstain. She slipped into her camisole and stepped through the doorway. Sprawled across the bed, Wiley snored into his pillow, a slick of dirt where his sneakers scraped the coverlet, his hair twisted over his face and around his neck like a noose. She turned off the overhead light and in the soft glow of the table lamp, she watched him sleep, so much like a child in his dreams, a little boy lost, that she could not bear to wake him.
7