“What?” Suzie turns cold, her skin rippling with goose bumps. Suddenly she is right back in the dream, the smell of smoke rich and thick in the air, Abigail with her dread, accusatory gaze. “What did you just say to me?”
Cathy blinks. “I said I won’t ever forget this. Are you okay? Suzie? You’ve gone white.”
But Suzie is already backing away with her heart hammering in her throat.I’m imagining things, she tells herself as she approachesthe counter,either that or I’m losing my mind, but aren’t they both the same thing, really?
She returns Mrs. Scott’s smile, but it takes her a moment to fix it into place. “How are you doing, Mrs. Scott?”
“Been looking at my weather app.” Mrs. Scott shuffles forward on slippered feet. “Did you know you can see storms anywhere in the world on this thing? My grandson downloaded it for me. Now I can watch real-time lightning strikes from Istanbul to Ecuador. It’s telling me there’s blizzards heading toward us over the Atlantic. Been threatening for a while.”
“My mother used to say she could feel snow coming in her joints.”
“Reckon I’ll stick to my app.”
Suzie widens her smile, but she still feels jumpy. She thinks that if a car backfired out on the street, she’d leap right out of her skin.
Mrs. Scott doesn’t seem to notice, because she just keeps right on talking. “You know I saw that Maddon girl last week? The one you used to pal around with.”
“Hazel?”
“That’s right. Is she home for good, then?”
Suzie swallows. There is a dry clicking sound in her throat. “No, she’s just house-sitting for her parents. You want me to put all this in your bag?”
Mrs. Scott nods as she hands a cotton tote to Suzie, her smile revealing a mouthful of long teeth. “It’s funny. I saw the other Maddon girl yesterday too. The older one. Must be the first time those two have been in the same town in over six years. I’d give anything to have my girls come visit.”
Suzie nods. Mrs. Scott had lost both adult daughters within thespace of a year. Their graves are side by side up on the Hill, the old cemetery on the other side of town.
“I heard that Hazel got divorced. It’s a shame. I never met Joe, but her mother showed me the wedding pictures. He was a fine-looking man.”
Mrs. Scott has a face deeply netted with wrinkles and a shrewd expression which often reminds Suzie of a rodent. Something in it is ferrety and inquisitive.
She leans forward over her walker. “But that wasn’t Joe she jumped into that truck with the other day. So who was he?”
“Wait. When was this?” Suzie’s head lifts. She can feel her interest—no, excitement—snapping inside her like a series of electric shocks. “What man?”
“Well, let’s see now. It was the truck I noticed first. You don’t see many of them, do you? Pickups, they’re called. He had a tarp pulled over the back, and the whole thing reminded me of the trucks we’d see in the war when they brought the soldiers home, all sat in the back, shell-shocked and hollow. He was hunkered down in the driver’s seat like he didn’t want to be seen. That’s what made me notice him, funnily enough. He didn’t have a beard or a mustache, but just a lot of”—Mrs. Scott waves her hand over her jawline to indicate stubble—“mess here, like he didn’t know what a razor was.”
“When was this?”
“Last week. Hazel was walking toward the packhorse bridge and went right past my window while I was watching for the rainstorm. Then I saw the truck pull up and she jumped right on in.”
Suzie pulls the bag away even as Mrs. Scott is reaching for it. Her blood is moving through her, hot and fast and urgent.
“Would you know him if you saw him again?”
“I suppose I might.”
For the second time that morning and in as many days, Suzie does something against company protocol. She lifts the hatch and beckons Mrs. Scott through to the back room.
Suzie thinks that Cathy must have been listening to that whole conversation, because she immediately steps away from the monitor as the two women enter the small office, Mrs. Scott in front, stooped low over her walker. She doesn’t register much surprise at seeing Cathy there, only giving her another of those toothy smiles, pale eyes glinting in the small, dim room.
“Mrs. Scott is going to review the footage,” Suzie tells her, fighting to keep her voice steady. “She saw Hazel get into a truck with a man the other day.”
The three women crowd round the desk, prompting a strange, rogue thought to pop in Suzie’s overwrought brain.Look at us, we’re Macbeth’s three witches.
“By the pricking of my thumbs, / Something wicked this way comes,” Suzie whispers as she presses Play. Cathy casts her a puzzled glance, which she ignores. Her stomach is churning.
“That’s him,” Mrs. Scott says almost immediately.Too quick, Suzie thinks. The cameras are old and the footage grainy, making it difficult to decipher more than the shadowed face of a man trying not to be seen. But Mrs. Scott is nodding with absolute certainty, looking first to Cathy, then back at Suzie. “That’s the truck that Hazel climbed into. It’s even got that tarp on the back, look!”