I went down the back stairs, the canvas tote bumping against my hip with every step, the gown gathered in one fist so I wouldn’t trip on the hem.The carpet on the upper landing gave way to industrial vinyl halfway down.My shoes squeaked a little every few steps.
At the bottom of the stairs I pushed through the swinging door and the noise of the kitchen hit me -- the hiss of a flat-top, two voices in Spanish arguing pleasantly about the placement of a tray, a third voice calling for hands on hot.A girl in a white catering jacket pushed past me carrying a sheet pan of tartlets and didn’t look up.None of them did.A bride in a wedding dress moving through a service kitchen wasn’t the strangest thing they had seen that week, and even if it had been, they had two hundred people to feed.
I kept my head down and my pace steady.The kitchen was long.The exit at the end of it was a steel door with a red bar across it and an EMERGENCY EXIT sign above.I’d stood beneath that sign three weeks ago and timed my walk back.Forty-two seconds.
I made it in thirty-six.
I hit the bar with my hip -- both hands occupied, one with the tote and one with the gown -- and the door swung outward into the dark.
The air hit me first.
It was November in Tennessee, and the day had been warm, but the night was not.The cold came up off the asphalt of the loading dock and slid under the gown, along my lace-covered arms, and across the back of my neck where the veil still lay.The veil.I’d forgotten the veil.It was still on, the cathedral length of it draped down my back and trailing two feet behind me on the concrete of the dock, and for one absurd second, I considered going back.With a mental shrug, I kept going.Went down the three concrete steps off the side of the dock.The gravel crunched with each step, and I picked up my pace.
The access road ran east.To my right was a row of valet town cars parked along the front of the building -- I could see the chrome and the gleam of them through the gap between the building and the catering tent -- and a knot of drivers in black suits standing near the valet stand, smoking, their faces lit blue by their phones.None of them looked up.The catering tent ran a long fluorescent line of light along its seam, and I could hear voices inside it, the rattle of glassware, the wet sound of ice being shoveled.
I kept the building between me and the valet stand and I moved.
The gown didn’t want me to move.The silk skirt spread wider than I was used to.The beading dragged at my shoulders.The train caught against my calves and scraped over gravel, picking up grit and dirt and whatever else.I gathered more of it in my fist and lifted the hem to my knees.I walked, then jogged, and then -- when the row of town cars was behind me and the building had narrowed to a single lit window high up on the second floor -- I ran.
I ran east along the gravel road, and the music from the reception came after me through the back wall of the ballroom -- muffled, distorted, the band swinging into something bright and brassy that I recognized from the playlist Grant’s mother had insisted on.I’d sat at her kitchen island in Connecticut six months ago and listened to her play it through her phone and nodded when she asked if it was perfect.I’d agreed to all of it, piece by piece.
The music thinned behind me.The gravel changed under my feet -- looser here, then a stretch of grass that was almost soft, then gravel again, then the harder pack of the shoulder where the access road met the two-lane.
I stopped at the edge of it.
I looked left.I looked right.
The road disappeared into black pine country.TheWestinsat back from the road behind a long line of poplars, and from where I stood you couldn’t see the building, only the diffuse glow of it above the trees, like a stadium lit up at a distance.
I didn’t look back.
I stepped onto the asphalt and turned north.North led to the highway, and highways had buses, and buses went to places that weren’there.I started running again.
The bag knocked against my hip.The burner pressed against my ribs through the beading.The gown dragged at my legs and the cold found every gap the neckline left.Far behind me, barely audible, a woman who might have been my mother might have been calling my name.
I ran.
Chapter One
Rogue
The lot atHadley’ssat empty -- one rusted Buick, a flickering sodium light, dead still except for the canopy buzz.I rolled the Harley under the canopy and killed the engine.The noise dropped away.The night pressed close.
I’d been on the road since nine, a pointless run Hawk sent me on to check a stretch of road south of Nashville.Two of our guys thought they’d picked up a tail last week.I’d seen nothing but dark asphalt.Now, twenty minutes from turning north for home, I was hungry, bone-tired, and needed gas.Hadley’shad it all.
I swung off the bike and stretched the road out of my shoulders.The canopy lights hummed.Inside the store, a kid in a Titans cap sat behind the counter with his face in his phone, and a country station played thin from a blown speaker mounted by the cigarette racks.I paid him cash for two gallons of regular, picked up a black coffee and a Slim Jim I wouldn’t eat, and walked back out under the buzzing light and its collected moths.
I was about to unlock the gas tank when I clocked the white.
It was a flicker, no more -- a piece of something pale catching the edge of the security light around the corner of the building, where the dumpsters sat behind a low cinder block wall the owner had built so the highway couldn’t see the trash.The Buick at the far pump still had no driver.The road was empty in both directions.The tree line beyond the lot was black.Tennessee woods in November swallowed light whole.I stayed at the pump.
I leaned against the pump, uncapped the coffee, and took a long, slow sip I didn’t want.Then I looked.The lot.The road.The tree line.I gave it two minutes.Nothing moved.The flicker of white stayed put.
I set the coffee on top of the pump and walked around the corner of the building.
She was crouched in the gravel between the cinder block wall and the back end of the second dumpster, knees up, the skirt of a dress that had cost somebody a year’s salary bunched around her thighs and stained dark at the hem with whateverHadley’sback lot had to offer.There was a veil in her hair.An actual veil.Pinned high and torn loose at the bottom edge where she’d caught it on something.Brown hair had freed itself from the pins on one side.
She was pressing her left wrist against her ribs.