But she didn’t expect to be.
She had played her small part, put in hours on the ground, knocked on some doors, and now what she wanted, more than anything, was to go home. At the appointed place, the corner of Guinevere and Ledwicke, she waited for her ride, her blue cotton T-shirt a thin shell against the damp night air. It was well above seventy degrees when she’d left home this afternoon, and she’d never meant to be gone this long, but she was due a bonus, a little extra cash in her pocket, if she unloaded all the leaflets she’d been given to distribute. She was too smart, or proud, to toss the lot of them into a trash can at the neighborhood community center as others before her had tried, only to be fired the second the ploy was discovered by the campaign staff. This job meant more to her than to the others, she knew that. She was six months out of high school with no brighter prospect on her horizon than moving up to the cash register at the Wendy’s on OST where she worked part-time, so she’d pushed herself a little harder, made a show of her unmatched fortitude and productivity, pointedly staying past nightfall, a plan she hadn’t thought all the way through, as evidenced by her lack of a decent coat or even a cotton sweater, and the fact that she was flat broke after spending what little money she had at a pay phone at the truck stop on Market Street. Once more, she checked to make sure the last leaflet, the one she’d saved and carefully folded into a neat square, was still inside the front pocket of her leather purse. Rooting around inside, she checked the time on her pager, the one Kenny had bought her when he left for college, promising they’d make it work somehow. Had he called? She scrolled through the phone numbers stored in the tiny machine. How long would she have to wait out here? It was already coming on nine o’clock, and she knew her mother would worry. She could picture her right now, smoking a Newport out the kitchen window, still in her pink nurse’s scrubs, and listening to KTSU, All the Blues You Can Use, glancing every few minutes at the yellow sunflower clock above the stove, wondering why her daughter wasn’t home yet. The girl crossed her skinny arms across her chest, a defense against the night air, which seemed cooler here at the southernmost edge of the neighborhood, where the base of Ledwicke ended abruptly, running smack into the lip of a wide, untamed plot of scrub oak and weeds and tall, clawlike trees. This far to the south the streetlamps in Pleasantville gave out, and she was all too aware that she was standing alone on a dim street corner miles from home, with nothing but the low, insistent hum of an idling engine as unwelcome company.
He’d been watching her for a few minutes now, the nose of his vehicle pointed east on Guinevere, the body tucked under the low-hanging branches of a willow tree, so that she could make out no more than a man’s rough silhouette behind the windshield, sharp angles outlined by a faint yellow light coming from a window on the side of a house across Ledwicke from where she was standing. His headlights were dark, which is why she hadn’t seen him at first. But he was facing in her direction, his engine running, his features wearing an expression she couldn’t read in the dark. She couldn’t tell the make or model of the vehicle, but it was the height and width of a van, or a truck of some sort.
Run. Just run.
It was a whisper inside her own skull, her mother’s voice actually, calling her home. But she should wait for her ride, shouldn’t she? She felt a stab of uncertainty, a panic so sharp it made her eyes water. Everything hinged on this one choice. I should wait for my way out, she thought, still wanting to believe a way out was possible, but already knowing, with a creeping certainty, that this night had turned on her, that her disappearing had already begun. She knew she’d made a mistake, knew even before she heard the van’s door open. Just run.
Jay Porter stood on his own lonely street corner clear across town.