Following the map, Sue heads southeast through the night. The road has no name. The only reason she knows it's the right road is that periodically, when it flattens and straightens and the snow isn't falling too hard, she'll catch a glimpse of the van's taillights up in the distance. She likes seeing the taillights because she knows that Veda is in there. And she knows it's the van because once she got close enough to see its dented back door staring back at her like an ugly face.
Then the van speeds up and she can't see the taillights at all.
She hits the gas, taking it up to seventy, then eighty, waiting for them to appear. Visibility isn't an issue at the moment but she still sees nothing. Maybe the van turned off and now they're behind her. She checks the rearview. Nothing back there. Not only are there no other cars on this route, there aren't any signs-no billboards, speed limit signs, or mile markers, just the endless pipeline of the night.
She finds herself thinking about the route, what it's done, and the two bodies in the back of the Expedition. If it's true that driving through these back roads can resurrect the dead, then what about Marilyn? What about the other, the thing she dug up under the bridge?
She tilts the mirror down and turns on the dome light. She can't see beyond the backseat, nor can she hear anything over the sound of the engine and the tires on the road. But if a hand were to reach up over the seat, followed by the body itself slinking into the dark space behind her, she could see that. If she were looking, that is. If she weren't looking, or listening, she might not hear it until one of those cold hands slipped between the two front seats and clamped over her mouth. And then she'd hear the voice, right next to her ear. Would it ask her to take it farther down the road, she wonders. Or would it say something else, maybe some old poem about a man who traveled from White's Cove to Gray Haven, to paint the Commonwealth with blood?
She decides to keep the light on for now.
She drives another fifteen miles, watching for the next sign that will indicate her turn for Ashford. It's harder to see with the interior light on, but she leaves it on just the same. She remembers how Phillip always hated driving with the light on. Whenever they went anywhere, he would drive and she would navigate, and she always thought it was less about the light and more about her insistence on consulting a map as they went. If it were up to him, he would've found his way by sense of smell.
Why couldn't you be here now to help me get through this?
At some point she finds herself thinking about him in a deeper sense, and his sudden departure a year and a half earlier, the way he walked out of her life with almost no warning, leaving the details to his attorneys and accountants. In the brief and awkward telephone conversations that Sue's had with Phillip since then-the last one was several months ago-he always said that he wasn't ready for the obligations of parenthood, that he was afraid he'd be a bad father. For a long time Sue refused to accept that.
"That's yourexcuse?" she asked, during a particularly awful phone call last August, to which he replied, "It's my reason, Sue. And it's better this way. You'll just have to take my word for it." He refused to go into it any further than that. Ultimately it became easier just to believe him. Her husband, despite the fact that he always seemed like a stand-up guy, had run away from his life with her and Veda simply because he didn't think he was up to the challenge.
But what if he was running from something else? Something he couldn't possibly tell her about, for her own protection? And what if whatever it was caught up with him, within the last two months, and that was why the phone calls finally stopped?
She's still wondering about that when, behind her and approaching quickly, the blue-and-red police lights begin to flash.