Clouded Vision by Linwood Barclay
For readers
Setting the Scene
Ellie
She’d been dreaming that she was already dead. Then, just before her dream came true, she opened her eyes.
With the little energy she had, she tried to move, but she was pinned down, tied in somehow. Tired, she lifted a bloody hand from her lap and her fingers felt the strap that ran across her chest. She knew its texture, its smoothness. A seat belt.
She was in a car, sitting in the front.
She looked around and it came to her that it was her own car. Yet she wasn’t behind the steering wheel. She was strapped into the passenger seat.
She blinked a couple of times, thinking there must be something wrong with her eyes because she couldn’t really make anything out. Then it became clear that it wasn’t a problem with her sight.
It was night.
She gazed out through the windscreen, to see stars shining in the sky. It was a lovely evening, if she forgot about how all the blood was draining from her body.
It was hard for her to hold her head up, but with what strength she still had, she looked around. As she took in the starkness, the strangeness of where she was, she wondered if she might actually be dead already.
Maybe this was heaven? There was a certain peace about it. Everything was so white. There was a sliver of moon in the cloudless sky. It lit up the landscape, which was totally flat and seemed to go on forever.
Was her car parked on a snowy field? Far, far away, she thought she could make out something. There was a dark, uneven border running straight across the top of the whiteness. Trees, maybe? The thick, black line almost had the look of a – of a shoreline.
‘What?’ she said quietly to herself.
Slowly, she began to understand where she was. No – not understand. She was starting to work out where she was, but she couldn’t understand it.
She was on ice.
The car was sitting on a frozen lake somewhere in the northern New England area of the US. And it was quite some way out, as far as she could tell.
‘No, no, no, no, no,’ she said to herself as she tried hard to think. It was only the middle of December. The temperatures had plunged a week ago. While it might have been cold enough for the lake to start freezing over, it certainly hadn’t been cold long enough to make the ice thick enough to support a—
Crack.
She felt the front end of the car dip ever so slightly, probably no more than an inch. That would make sense. The car was heaviest at the front, where the engine was.
She knew she had to get out of this car. If the ice was able to support something as heavy as a car, at least for this long, surely it would keep her up if she could get herself out. She could start walking, whichever way would get her to the closest shore.
Could she even walk? She touched her hand to her belly. Everything she felt was warm, and wet. How many times had she been stabbed? That was what had happened, right? She could see the knife, the light catching the blade, and then—
The knife had gone into her twice, she thought. Then everything had faded to black.
Dead.
But she wasn’t.
She must have had just a hint of a pulse. It must not have been noticed as she was put into the car and buckled in. Then she had been driven out here to the middle of this lake, where, someone must have figured, the car would soon go through the ice and sink to the bottom.
A car with a body inside it, dumped in a lake near the shore – someone might discover that too easily.
But a car with a body inside it that sank to the bottom out in the middle of a lake, what were the odds anyone would ever find that?
She knew she had to find the strength. She had to get out of this car now, before it went through the ice. Did she have her mobile? If she could call for help, they could come looking for her out on the ice. She wouldn’t have to walk all the way back to—
Crack.
The car lurched forward. The way it was leaning, her view ahead now was snow-dusted ice instead of the far shore. The moon was casting enough light for her to see the inside of the car. There was no sign of her handbag, which was where she kept her mobile. Whether she had a phone or not, it didn’t change the fact that she had to get out of this car.
She had to get out right now.
She reached around to her side, looking for the button to release the seat belt. She found it and pressed with her thumb. The combined lap and shoulder strap began to move, catching briefly on her arm. She pulled it out of the way and the belt receded into the pillar between the back and front door.
Crack.
She reached down for the door handle and pulled. The door opened only slightly. It was enough for freezing-cold water to start rushing in around her feet.