Chapter 16
I had another sleepless night, and as much as I want to go back to bed, I realize I can’t. Not until I tell you how it happened.
The accident didn’t happen the way you probably imagine, or the way that Miles imagined. I hadn’t, as he suspected, been drinking that night. Nor was I under the influence of any drugs. I was completely sober.
What happened with Missy that night was, quite simply, an accident.
I’ve gone over it a thousand times in my mind. In the fifteen years since it happened, I’ve felt a sense of déjà vu at odd times—when carrying boxes to a moving van a couple of years ago, for instance—and the feeling still makes me stop whatever it is I’m doing, if only for a moment, and I find myself drawn back in time, to the day that Missy Ryan died.
I’d been working since early that morning, unloading boxes onto pallets for storage in a local warehouse, and I was supposed to be off at six. But a late shipment of plastic pipes came in right before closing time—my employer that day was the supplier for most of the shops in the Carolinas—and the owner asked if I wouldn’t mind staying for an extra hour or so. I didn’t mind; it meant overtime, time and a half, a great way to pick up some much needed extra cash. What I hadn’t counted on was how full the trailer was, or that I’d pretty much end up doing most of the job alone.
There were supposed to be four guys working, but one had called in sick that day, another couldn’t stay since his son was playing a baseball game and he didn’t want to miss it. That left two of us to do the job, which still would have been okay. But a few minutes after the trailer pulled in, the other guy turned his ankle, and the next thing I knew, I was all by myself.
It was hot, too. The temperature outside was in the nineties, and inside the warehouse it was even hotter, over a hundred degrees and humid. I’d already put in eight hours, with another three hours to go. Trucks had been pulling up all day, and because I didn’t work there regularly, most of my work was the backbreaking type. The other three guys rotated turns using the forklift, so they might get a break now and then. Not me. My job was to sort the boxes and then haul them from the back of the trailer to where the door slid up, loading everything on pallets so the forklift could move them into the warehouse. But by the end of the day, since I was the only one there, I had to do it all. By the time I finished up, I was bone-tired. I could barely move my arms, I had spasms in my back, and since I’d missed dinner, I was starving, too.
That’s why I decided to go to Rhett’s Barbecue instead of heading straight home. After a long, hard day, there’s nothing better in the world than barbecue, and when I finally crawled into my car, I was thinking to myself that in just a few minutes, I’d finally be able to relax.
My car back then was a real beater, dented and banged up all over, a Pontiac Bonneville that had a dozen years on the road already. I’d got it used the summer before and paid only three hundred dollars for it. But even though it looked like hell, it ran good and I’d never had a problem with it. The engine started up whenever I turned the key, and I’d fixed the brakes myself when I first bought it, which was all it really needed at the time.
So I got in my car just as the sun was finally going down. At that time of night, the sun does funny things as it arcs downward in the west. The sky is changing color almost by the minute, shadows are spreading across the roads like long, ghostly fingers, and since there wasn’t so much as a cloud in the sky, there were moments when the glare would slant sharply through the window and I’d have to squint so I could see where I was going.
Just ahead of me, another driver seemed to be having even more problems seeing than I was. Whoever it was was speeding up and slowing down, hitting the brakes every time the sunlight shifted, and more than once veering across the white line onto the other side of the road. I kept reacting, hitting my own brakes, but finally I got fed up and decided to put some distance between me and him. The road was too narrow for passing, so instead I slowed my car, hoping the person would pull farther away.
But whoever it was did just the opposite. He slowed down, too, and when the distance had closed between us again, I saw the brake lights blinking on and off like Christmas lights, then suddenly staying red. I hit my own brakes hard, my tires squealing as my car jerked to a stop. I doubt if I missed the car in front of me by more than a foot.
That’s the moment, I think, when fate intervened. Sometimes, I wish I’d hit the car, since I would have had to stop and Missy Ryan would have made it home. But because I missed—and because I’d had enough of the driver in front of me—I took the next right, onto Camellia Road, even though it added a little extra time, time I now wish I could have back. The road swung through an older part of town, where oaks were full and lush, and the sun was dipping low enough that the glare was finally gone. A few minutes later, the sky started darkening more quickly and I turned on my headlights.
The road veered left and right, and soon the houses began to spread out. The yards were bigger, and fewer people seemed to be about. After a couple of minutes, I made another turn, this time onto Madame Moore’s Lane. I knew this road well and comforted myself with the knowledge that in a couple of miles, I’d find myself at Rhett’s.
I remember turning the radio on and fiddling with the dial, but I didn’t really take my eyes off the road. Then I turned it off. My mind, I promise you, was on the drive.
The road was narrow and winding, but like I said, I knew this road like the back of my hand. I automatically applied the car’s brakes as I entered a bend in the road. That was when I saw her, and I’m pretty sure I slowed even more. I don’t know for sure, though, since everything that happened next went so fast that I couldn’t swear to anything.
I was coming up behind her, the gap between us closing. She was off to the side, on the grass shoulder. I remember she was wearing a white shirt and blue shorts and not going real fast, kind of gliding along in a relaxed sort of way.
In this neighborhood, the houses sat on half an acre, and no one was outside. She knew I was coming up behind her—I saw her glance quickly to the side, maybe enough to catch sight of me from the corner of her eye, and she moved another half step farther from the road. Both my hands were on the wheel. I was paying attention to everything I should have and thought I was being careful. And so was she.
Neither of us, however, saw the dog.
Almost as if lying in wait for her, it charged out from a gap in a hedge when she was no more than twenty feet from my car. A big black dog, and even though I was in my car, I could hear its vicious snarl as it charged right at her. It must have caught her off-guard because she suddenly reared back, away from the dog, and took one step too many into the road.
My car, all three thousand pounds of it, smashed into her in that instant.