you break an axle or something, we’ll never get to Reno in time for the train. Slow down.” Seat-belted in, holding on to the overhead grab handle, she would still bounce so high that her stupid hat was almost constantly striking the Suburban’s headliner. Jack had never done a great deal of off-road driving and had several times admitted that dirt roads creeped him out at any sort of speed. “How fast are you going, Jack?”
“Forty or so, unless I hit a bad stretch. Sometimes a little closer to fifty when the road looks okay.”
“Your brights are on?”
“Brights are on.”
“I almost wish we had airbags in this.”
“I can’t even remember if they were an option on the ‘89 models. Relax, anyway. I’m taking it nice and easy. If that rain hits, it’ll slow us down a lot.”
The storm clouds made it seem well past twilight, and the interior of the Suburban was in deep shadow, save for the glow from the dashboard lights. “I’m glad it’s dark for once.”
“Why?”
“Then I can’t see the whiteness of your knuckles on the steering wheel.”
Jack laughed, but his laughter sounded a little less than sincere.
While Jack had still been holding her in his arms and the smell of the shotgun’s twin discharges was still heavy in the air of the barn, Lizzie—rifle in hand—had run in, Alan and Peggy just behind her.
Jack—Ellen knew that he must have been talking overly loudly because he couldn’t hear properly yet—had given a quickie version of what happened, leaving off his own daring, emphasizing how she had distracted Fowler. She’d brushed herself off, Lizzie helping her, then found her dumb hat and her purse, the purse like one of those little blue sacks small bottles of Crown Royal came in. Only, it was the wrong color.
Peggy and Alan cleaned up the blood on the barn floor. Lizzie taking one leg, Ellen taking the other, Jack took Fowler’s wrists and they carted the body out of the barn and toward the stream. They pitched it off the embankment and as far out into the current as they could, well past where any water for the house would be sourced. “After a while, he’ll bloat up and float off—probably. If he doesn’t,” Jack advised Lizzie, “you send for my deputy—not the damn crook county sheriff—and tell him you discovered the body and don’t know how it got there. Get him to get it out of the water and haul it into town. Hopefully, like I said, Lizzie, the corpse will just float away.”
Returning to the barn, Lizzie gave them both last-minute hugs and kisses. Peggy wished them well and Alan promised, “I’ll look after things as best I can, guys.”
“You’re a fine great-great-grandson,” Jack had told him, laughing at the biological absurdity of a man of fifty having a great-great-grandson who was thirty-two years old.
Ellen envied persons who could sleep in a moving car. She could not. Instead, she peered into the deepening darkness beyond the headlights’ field of illumination, the reset dashboard clock showing only five minutes after five. But the darkness was from a cloud cover more dense than she could remember ever having seen before. A storm would make their marathon drive on rutted stage roads more than doubly dangerous.
As if the storm front were some sort of malevolent spirit capable of reading her very thoughts, a barrage of raindrops larger than she ever remembered seeing cascaded through the beams of the Suburban’s headlights and slammed against the windshield. In the next instant, their vehicle was engulfed.
The rain was cold, almost like ice where it pelted the bare skin of her hands and face. The goofy hat was gone, her hair covered with a heavy shawl that shielded her shoulders as well. Jack had let her out of the Suburban just past the outskirts of Reno, the equivalent, more or less, of a three city block walk from the train platform and the tiny station it fronted.
Women’s clothing of the period weighed an inordinate amount under the best of circumstances, but now that Ellen was soaked nearly to the skin, the skirt of her dress and the petticoats beneath it dragged at her, weighing her down.
Ellen Naile carried only her purse and a small carpetbag, both in her right hand. In her skirt pocket was the Seecamp .32 Jack had insisted that she carry. Her left hand alternated between clutching the rechargeable Maglite flashlight—which she would have to hide as soon as she was able to rely