“I’m sorry,” he said. “Took some guts to steal his car. How far’d you get?”
“Not far.” She laughed, surprising Kittredge. “I wrapped that car around a telephone pole about five miles down the road. Wasn’t far, but it was far enough—I knew I couldn’t go back. Not after what I did to his precious Mustang. That damn car was the only thing he loved in this world, far as I could see.” Kittredge nodded. “I crawled out through the busted windshield—neither door would open—and looked at what I’d done. The radiator was spewing steam; the gas tank was dripping gas. I had a pack of matches in my pocket, and I struck a match and threw it under the car—whoomph—and walked away. Just kept going. I burnt my bridges but good that day.”
“I guess you showed him,” Kittredge said, and she laughed again.
“I guess so; don’t know, though. I hitchhiked to Miami, and never saw the bastard again.”
“Why Miami?”
“Why not? Warm all year. Pretty beaches. Men with money.”
“Why’d you come back, then?”
“My mom.” She looked out the window before turning back to him. “She got sick while I was in Miami. Ovarian cancer, fast and mean. By the time they tracked me down, she was just about dead. My asshole stepfather was long gone, of course—he split soon as she got sick. ”
They passed beneath I-40, where a pair of long concrete bridges spanned the Holston River and the road they were on. Just after they emerged from the underpass, they turned left. The small green street sign—CAHABA LANE—was dwarfed by a big white sign that announced SUNNYVIEW BAPTIST CHURCH and pointed down the road. “This look right?” She nodded grimly. “And you think you can find the spot in the woods where he took you?”
“Be hard to miss, won’t it? The spot with a pile of my clothes laying there. Can y’all get fingerprints off of fabric?”
“We’ll ask the crime-lab guys. If your stuff’s still there. Don’t you think he might’ve taken it, though?”
“What, a souvenir? To remind him of our special first date?”
“Some guys do. The really creepy ones. But I was just thinking he might’ve taken it to cover his tracks.”
She shook her head. “Not unless he came back for it later. That dude was haulin’ ass out of the woods, same as me. Chasin’ me, at first. Gaining fast. But then those truckers stopped to help, and he jumped in his car and got the hell out of Dodge.”
He eased the car to a stop at the end of the lane, the tires crunching shards of broken bottles. Overhead loomed a faded COMFORT INN billboard, supported by rusting I beams, their bases like trash magnets, fringed with coffee cups, beer cans, and other debris. Kittredge narrowly missed stepping on a used condom that lay crumpled on the ground. Nice, he thought. Her door swung open before he got there to open it for her. She stepped out, glancing down at the condom, an expression of weary disgust on her face.
As they started up the narrow path that led through the posts and up the wooded slope, Kittredge felt a chill. He touched the holster on his belt, making sure his weapon was still there.
CHAPTER 25
Janelle
WALKING UP THE WOODED slope, Janelle felt almost like two people; two Janelles. A TV ad from her childhood started playing in her mind—“It’s two, two, two mints in one!”—and it wouldn’t stop. Two Janelles in one!
Janelle Number One was scared shitless, remembering the feel of the path under her feet, remembering the pain of the bent wrist and the twisted arm; remembering the humiliation of what he’d made her do after that.
Janelle Number Two, though, was mad as hell. Was something else, too. Brave? Strong? Those weren’t words she felt entitled to use—not about herself, anyhow. But whatever the feeling was, she recognized and welcomed it; it was the same feeling she’d had the afternoon she’d run off in her stepfather’s Mustang, the same feeling she’d had when she’d tossed the match beneath the car, when she’d decided to keep going instead of slinking back home, tail between her legs, to shut up and lie down and just take it, the way her life and her sack-of-shit stepdaddy had tried to teach her to do.