Майкл Корита - If She Wakes

Abby had executed maybe two thousand fishhook runs. She didn’t need an engineering degree to see the problem with the scenario on the bridge across from Hammel College. The slope was too steep and the fishhook turn was too narrow.

He’d have rolled first. He might have hit Beckley’s car, but he’d have had his van on its side by the time he did. The cargo van was too tall, its center of mass too high, to handle such abrupt cornering and remain upright.

Unless he’d never tried to turn. Unless he’d been coming straight at them, targeting them.

Abby didn’t hesitate to look at the photos this time. Her curiosity had overridden her apprehension, and she was able to see past the blood on the pavement and focus on the vehicle positions.

The cargo van was upright, the CRV was upright, the damage was catastrophic, and all of that made sense until you stood down here and looked up the hill and thought about the angles.

Her phone rang, a shrill shattering of the quiet, and she closed the accident report and looked at the phone. Hank Bauer, her boss and friend and onetime sponsor, a man who’d paid the fees to get a teenage Abby Kaplan into stock-car races in Wiscasset, Scarborough, and Oxford.

“Hey, Hank.”

“How’s it going, Abs?”

“Fine. Actually... well, it’s a little messed up.”

“Whaddya mean?”

“Something’s wrong in that report. What Ramirez said happened is impossible. It might be what he thinks happened, but it isn’t right.”

Hank’s voice dropped an octave. “He smashed directly into a parked car. How wrong can he be about that ?”

“He would have tipped that van,” Abby said. “Hank, I’m telling you, there’s no way he could have hit the passenger side of her car that hard if he’d swerved the way he said he did. He’d have rolled it into the river first.”

“Let the police worry about Ramirez,” Hank said. “I just want our girl Tara to be clean as a whistle. Okay?”

“Right,” Abby said, but she didn’t like it because she wanted someone who could talk on her level about this problem. She changed tack instead. “I might have good news there. I think I’ve got her phone.”

“How’d you do that?”

Abby told him about the trip to the salvage yard, and Hank began to laugh before she was done.

“Only thing surprising about that is Sam hadn’t sold it yet.”

“Well, I’ve got a box of phones now and I don’t know which is hers. I’ll charge them up tonight and test them.”

“Save yourself the trouble — you can ask her sister tomorrow.”

“What?”

“She wants to know what you’re doing, I guess. Wants to meet you. Wants to meet anyone and everyone who’s involved.”

“She’s coming up here?”

“No, you’re going down there, to the hospital in Massachusetts. Bring your treasure chest from Savage Sam along.”

“The hospital? Why?” Abby felt a cold fist tighten in her gut. She did not want to go to the hospital. She most sincerely did not want to see that girl in the coma. “I’ll call the sister. I don’t need to go to Boston to see her in the hospital.”

“You think I don’t know that? I already called her. The sister is a law-school student but apparently believes she’s already passed the bar and been appointed district attorney. I’m glad it’s you and not me who gets the treat of meeting her in person.”

“I’m not wasting a day in Boston just to explain what I’m doing.”

“Like hell you’re not. Billable hours! Abby, do you have any idea how much I can soak that college for? If the family wants to see you at the hospital, you go to the friggin’ hospital. You can show her the phones. That won’t be a waste of time. And you can take the Challenger!”

His enthusiasm made Abby close her eyes. “I’m good with the Chrysler, thanks.”

“Aw, c’mon, Abs.” Sorrowful now. “I bought the damned thing.”

“Nobody told you to.”

“Just drive it, would you? Get a taste again. See what it does for you.”

“I’ll think about it,” Abby said, and then she hung up.

What Hank wanted her driving was a Dodge Challenger Hellcat with 707 horsepower growling under a black-on-red hood. He’d bought it for well under value after it was repossessed by a friend of his who sold cars in New Hampshire. Because Hank still believed Abby craved speed, he’d purchased the Challenger and offered it to her as a temporary “company car.”

It could do zero to sixty in under four seconds, was outfitted with Pirelli racing tires, and was generally everything one could want in a modern American muscle car.

Abby hadn’t had it over sixty miles an hour yet.

On a couple of occasions, Abby pretended that she’d put the car through its paces on the back roads and been duly impressed. One part of that wasn’t a lie — she did keep it on the back roads. That was because she could avoid the anxiety of driving in traffic and at higher speeds, though, not so she could test those beautiful Pirellis on a double-S curve.

Hank wasn’t wrong. Abby should have been driving it. Exposure therapy. Stare the fear down, in small doses.

Soon, she told herself.

Any day now.

She pocketed the phone and walked toward her Chrysler 300, a pleasant if somewhat staid sedan. Nothing threatening about it. Not like the Challenger Hellcat.

As she crossed the road, her right ankle throbbed, a souvenir from an early crack-up at the Oxford Plains Speedway in western Maine. She looked down and watched the way her hiking shoes flexed across the top as she walked sideways across the steep slope. The leather uppers pulled right, toward the river, while the rubber soles fought them and tugged left, biting into the pavement.

It would have rolled, she thought. That van would have rolled.

When she was a child, Tara was terrified of a house at the end of the road: 1804 London Street. It was a once-grand Victorian built by a family who’d made a small fortune in the days when Cleveland had been a manufacturing boomtown, money later tied up in a bitter feud among the siblings who’d inherited it upon their mother’s death. When Tara first saw the house, it had been vacant for at least ten years, the beautiful wood trim rotting beneath peeling paint, the stonework around the gardens and the patio lost to weeds and untamed hedges. For the older kids in the neighborhood, it inspired ghost stories and fevered claims of a woman in white who appeared in the attic window. They would run onto the porch and knock on the door, just like the children in Tara’s favorite book, To Kill a Mockingbird, and it was probably this association that gave her the bravery to finally join in the fun.

Boo Radley’s home had held no terrors. Boo was simply misunderstood, and because all Tara wanted to do in life was be Scout Finch and because she liked to imagine her late father had been like Atticus Finch, she carried out a summer of replication, leaving notes and small treasures tucked in trees and under eaves on the property. However, because this was not a fictional southern town in the 1930s but a Cleveland suburb in the early 2000s, her notes were not replaced with intricate handmade delights. Instead, someone who saw her leaving the notes responded by filling her favorite hidey-hole with condom wrappers.

She stopped trying to re-create her Scout-and-Boo fantasy after that.

But still, she didn’t fear the house as she once had. That was the power of imagination, the power of the mind — she’d taken ownership of the place, trading scary stories for warm ones, and with her fantasy vision, she erased the fear. The kids who mocked her might be able to replace her charm bracelets with condom wrappers, but they couldn’t replace her new vision of the once-frightening abandoned house.