She realized she was close when she saw flares guttering along the shoulder of the highway. Ann slowed the car down to a crawl. After each long bend in the road, she expected to come upon the jackknifed truck splashed in flecks of blue and red light. But no truck materialized, nor did the patrol car with Mitch and Sheriff Dawkins. Ann found it hard to believe they’d finished up so fast. Cops were usually the last to leave an accident scene, having to take measurements and write up notes for their reports. Something must have happened to pull them away. Maybe there were extra victims that needed to be transported to the hospital in Buoy City, or another emergency call? If they’d returned to Traitor Bay they would have had to pass her on the road. There was no other route except for a treacherous thirty-mile detour up through the mountains and she couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to try and drive up there now with its potential for flash floods and landslides. Hunters were known to get lost up there during unexpected storms-she’d known a boy in school who’d never been found.
Her headlights began to pick out a sheen of oil and ground glass, the epicenter of the crash. Road flares had burned down to cylinders of ash, reminding her of her grandfather’s cigars when he’d leave them to smolder on the porch. Since a logging truck had been supposedly involved, she was surprised by the lack of bark chips and clumps of moss scattered along the edges of the road. The only sign an accident had happened recently was a burnt rubber smell, and as far as she could tell it might have been coming from the chronic overheating problems of her own car.
As Ann crept up the road she noticed the rain had stopped, and when she looked up she could see that the sky had cleared. A white moon stuck to the ridge above like a downed hot air balloon, dragging shreds of light between the trees as if it had been torn open from below. This has to be the center of the storm, she thought. I’ve got to go back and take a closer look at that accident site. There won’t be a lot of time. Once the eye moves off, the wind and rain will be back in full force. And it might be a whole lot worse than when the storm first hit.
She turned onto an overgrown logging road and parked her car behind a stand of trees. As she walked back to the highway, she was surprised by how rank the smell of brine was coming off the ocean-a dark roiling cove far below, sparsely littered by the amber lamps of crabbing boats. Her upper chest had stung at first, as if it were sewn up tight with stitches. But soon the warm moist air worked its way down, melted away the stitches so she could breathe. Stress, she told herself. That and my stupid allergies. But you can try and push it out with your lungs. She turned on her flashlight and walked back to the place she’d determined was the accident scene, safety glass crunching beneath each step. She hadn’t seen another car since she’d decided to go to Buoy City. Other than the steady rustle of branches in the wind and the gurgle of water finding its way down, the highway up here was quiet.
Walking along the edge of the road, she aimed her flashlight at a silver stream of rainwater cutting into the ditch, watched as a convoy of plastic bottles and beer cans floated past. Beyond the ditch were fallen pines covered with moss. Some of the badly weathered trees tilted up at her with manes of fern, like startled creatures with gaping sockets eaten away by rot. Tracing the woods with her light, Ann noticed something in the shadows beyond the decaying logs that took her breath away. Sword ferns, glistening wet with something dark. Holding her breath she ushered the beam back, following the flattened salal and bracken on the slopes of the ditch to were she stood and let the light pool around her feet, saw the mirror of blood and the drop of oil in the shape of an eye.
Something’s dragged itself into the woods, she thought. Or was dragged.