And once more the phone begins to ring.
Sue doesn't know how many times it rings before she answers it.
"I told you you'd be punished."
"You didn't have to." Sue's voice is drab, lifeless. It hangs in her throat like a tattered flag on a windless day. "You don't have to do this."
"Don't beg. It's pathetic. And you're wasting t-"
"Who are you, you son of a bitch?"The words fly out of her mouth before she can stop them, borne along on a torrent of fury she never would've guessed she had."If you've got something you want from me why the fuck don't you come out and take it?"
"Come out and take it?" The voice lets out a chuckle, actually sounding appreciative. "Oh, I like that, Susan. I like it a lot. I see you've grown some balls since we talked last."
"Who is this?"
"You'll figure it out eventually. That's part of it too." The voice gets nasty again. "Now get back in the car. We've got some traveling to do tonight. Quite a bit, actually."
Sue looks in at the corpse in the passenger seat staring back out at her. The lifeless thing that used to take care of her daughter, the friendly, slightly chubby girl who once nursed equal passions for Heath Ledger and Heath Bar Crunch and had been Veda's guardian and daytime companion for the last year and a half. The grief that she anticipates is still too deeply submersed in shock to make itself known.
"There's a blanket in the backseat," the voice says. "If you don't want to look at her like that. I wouldn't blame you. Death is pretty darn ugly, isn't it?"
"Fuck you."
"Fuckme? You're getting downright feisty, Susan. Maybe it's time for me to wake up your daughter so you can hear her scream again. What do you think?"
"No," Sue says, "no, no. I'm sorry. I won't-I shouldn't have said that." And despite what has just happened to Marilyn, right now all she feels is relief at the notion of Veda sound asleep through all of this. It is an irresistibly alluring thought.
"Get in the car."
Sue climbs in with the phone still pressed to her ear, takes the blanket from the backseat, and with her right hand spreads it clumsily over Marilyn's lap. Now she does cry a little bit, but silently, sparingly, like a few droplets of condensation leaking out from a high-pressure valve.
"Look at the note that I left you."
"I saw it."
"Look again."
Sue makes herself look at the bloody message stuck to Marilyn's chest. The sheet of paper that it's written on is actually a map, and when she looks more closely she realizes that it's a map of eastern Massachusetts. It starts just west of Worcester and covers the state line right to the coast. The ragged edge of the map would seem to indicate that it had been torn out of a spiral-bound road atlas.
"What is this?"
"This is your route for the rest of the night," the voice says. "Are you ready to ride, Susan?"