Twilight

by Nancy Pickard

  I glanced down at the necklace. Yeah, right.

  “Cleo,” I said, as she took back her property, “you deliver the most amazing things. And speaking of which, did you check out the source of that spider paperweight we got yesterday?”

  “Yeah, and I still say it came from the Dime Store.”

  “Really? Nellie Kennedy says not.”

  “Shall we ask the pendulum?”

  I was joking, which Cleo must have been able to tell, because she didn’t hand it back to me, but just continued to reclasp it around her neck and then to stuff it back down into her blouse.

  “I guess there was a time,” I said, “when oracles wouldn’t have had to hide the tools of their trade.” It was funny, but in spite of myself, I felt happier, stronger, more peaceful, thanks to her silly little silver wand. I didn’t quite know how to thank her.

  “That’s okay,” she said, “really.”

  I stared. “Are you a mind reader?”

  “It doesn’t take a psychic to know what kind of pressure you must be feeling. But … I think you ought to remember they’re jerks.” She flushed, as if she were embarrassed at her own temerity in telling me what to do.

  But I was delighted with her advice and laughed out loud when I heard it.

  I released a pent-up breath.

  “So, Madam Cleo,” I said, “how’d you get so smart, so young?”

  Her eyes closed, her face drew in, as if she’d felt a spasm of pain.

  “Cleo?” I stood up. “What’s wrong?”

  But she turned away, hiding her face from me, waving away my concern with her hands. “Sinus headache. Comes on sudden like that. No big deal. Gotta go. See ya, Jenny.”

  She trotted away, out of my office, out our front door.

  I felt responsible for making her late on her rounds and sorry if I had contributed extra tension to her headache.

  When I stepped to the front window to watch her drive away, I saw an old battered black wasp of a motorcycle parked against the curb. I didn’t see its driver.

  His voice, however, coming from behind me, made me jump.

  “What kind of experiment, and why do you need me?”

  I turned, disguising how startled I felt by his sudden appearance.

  “David,” I said.

  So he had heard my request. And he’d come. Sounding belligerent, suspicious. Looking like a nerdy Hell’s Angel, skinny and tall and dressed all in black, and wearing a black baseball cap with a Star Trek logo. But at least he’d come. Another sign of progress?

  With the poltergeist, one never knew.

  “Jenny,” he echoed, mocking me.

  “David, has anybody given you a hard time about that editorial?”

  “No.” He looked as if I were nuts to ask. “Why should they? I mean, like, nobody knows it’s named after her, except you and me and Geof and your board members, right?”

  “Right.” My wry tone was certainly wasted. “I’ll just get my jacket.”

  The motorcycle ride out to the vicinity of Nellie’s house was good therapy for what ailed me. When I told David that, as we alighted from his bike, he said in a mellower voice than he’d used before, “So, what ails you, exactly?”

  It was already late afternoon, and getting toward that time of evening when the light is the most beautiful and eerie. As we rode, it had begun to weave a twilight shawl of yellow, pink, violet, and black threads of clouds above us. It was not a warm shawl, however, not on this late October afternoon, and I shivered inside my jacket as I considered David’s very good question. We had pulled to a stop at the mouth of the Kennedys’ gravel driveway, where I’d run over their discarded Christmas tree the winter before.

  A few feet behind us was the big red stop sign.

  It looked plainly visible from every direction.

  Beyond us, the hill dropped off fairly steeply, and I could just see the beginning of the curve that wound through the deadly intersection with God’s Highway. I couldn’t see that exact spot from where we stood, nor would any driver have known it was there, unless he was local and familiar with this route.

  It seemed to me that was a surmountable problem.

  Maybe we could solve it with cheap and simple signage.

  I sighed, thinking with half of my mind, We should be so lucky that it turns out to be so easy, and with the other half, still pondering David’s question.

  “Excessive concern about the opinions of other people,” was my eventual self-diagnosis, only partially facetious. “I guess.” I tore my gaze away from the setting sun and took a chance and smiled at him. There was something about his ancient BMW 1000 motorcycle that softened us toward each other, the way nothing else ever seemed to do. After one of our infrequent joy rides, the kid became almost human. Nearly adult. Kind of intelligent and likable. Our rides melted me, too, and so I was probably nicer to him than I was at other times.

  “Get yourself a motorcycle, that’ll cure that problem,” he advised. “The only people who approve of cycles are other cycle riders. Everybody else hates us. They think we’re stupid or we’re foolhardy or we’re dangerous and we ought to be illegal. When you’re on a motorcycle, you just can’t give a fuck about other people’s opinions.”

  My own motorcycle …

  What an idea …

  An idiotic idea. I shook it off and got down to business, describing the general problem to David. Then I said, “So I want to test the actual safety … or relative danger … of the trail crossing. I’m going to walk down to the crossing. What I’d like you to do is get back on your bike, far enough up the highway that you can get up to the speed limit. Run the stop sign. Drive on down the hill. Don’t exceed the speed limit, just keep going fifty-five. And see how far back you have to start braking in order to come to a full stop at the place where I’m standing.”

  “Okay, but why my bike? Why not a car? It was cars that killed those people, wasn’t it?”

  “I will probably repeat this, with cars.”

  I could see that he was getting interested, even a little eager about this test drive of ours. He waved one of his long arms in the direction of the crossing. “You ought to step out in front of me all of a sudden, Jenny, see if I can stop in a hurry.”

  “Uh, no, thank you.”

  “Hell, why not?”

  “Because what if you can’t, David?”

  His answering grin was devilish.

  Down at the bottom of the curve, I positioned myself right in front of the trees closest to the road, exactly at the place where the trail came out onto the highway. In the mere fifteen minutes or so that David and I had puttered around by the stop sign and the little bit of time it had taken me to stroll down, the sun had declined considerably farther in the west. It was so low on the horizon now that if you were driving west—which the kid would be—it could blind you. I wondered if that was what had happened, if the drivers had been blinded, either to the stop sign or to their victims.

  “I’ll have to find out what time of day they died,” I told myself.

  It smelled good down here, fresh and countrified, although there were houses other than the Kennedys’ all around, even if they weren’t visible precisely from where I stood. Most of them were stuck back away from the highway, behind fences and hedges or rows of long-established trees. This was the far outskirts of Port Frederick, so it wasn’t quite city, but it wasn’t quite country, either. And yet it didn’t feel exactly suburban, either—if you equate the suburbs with newer homes—because most of these places looked as if they’d been around for fifty, seventy, even a hundred years or more. No authentic historical landmarks, maybe, but comfy old farmhouse-type places, all the same. Homes that their owners loved, and homes that had seen more than one generation of a family inhabit them. These were the very property owners whom I felt had been cheated when they lost their private access, their property boundaries, on Crowley Creek when the trail was established.

  A roar of a motorcycle engine placed me on red alert.


  I heard David approach the stop sign at the top of the hill, and it was obvious from the ensuing noise that he didn’t stop there, or slow down at all, but kept on coming at a steady roar. Since I knew he was planning to stop in plenty of time, and since there wasn’t any traffic coming from the other direction, I decided to step out into the road, as Ben Barney might have done. Not far, though. Didn’t want to place too much temptation in the kid’s path, I thought, smiling to myself.

  The roar increased.

  The car that hit Mr. Barney wouldn’t have made that much racket, I reminded myself, might even have been very quiet, so it was possible, I supposed, that he wouldn’t have heard it coming. Maybe there was other noise—like a lawn mower, or a tractor in the distance. Or, maybe Melissa’s husband was bird-watching, or … (I thought, sadly) … thinking romantic thoughts about her …

  I was looking at the curve in the road.

  Even so, it startled me to see David zoom around it.

  Despite myself, I got scared and jumped back off the highway, losing my balance in the process. While David did just what he said he’d do, sliding to a smooth and steady stop right where he was supposed to, I tripped, flailed about with my arms, and fell backward into the trees, landing on my back in the leaves among their trunks.

  From that position, I heard the sound of whistling and applause.

  When I caught my breath, I looked up to see David still astride his motorcycle, clapping wildly for my performance. It took him only a couple of moments to pull toward me, switch off his bike, prop it up, and then run over to give me a hand up. He was grinning, damn him, as he pulled me to my feet.

  “Didn’t trust me, didya?” he accused, but he was laughing.

  “You just startled me, that’s all.”

  “Right.” Still laughing, he started brushing leaves off me, but I brushed his hands away. “You win the award for Best Imitation of a Tree in a Tornado.”

  That made me giggle, which made him laugh harder.

  “God, you looked funny,” he said, grinning at me. “There was this surprised look on your face, like your eyes got real big and your mouth opened like a fish, and then you kind of made this weird rabbit hop, only backwards, and then you did your windmill impersonation, and then you fell down. It was a riot”

  “I’m sure,” I said sarcastically. “Oh, damn!”

  “What?”

  “Look, I’m bleeding! I scraped my hand on one of the trees. I’m going to get blood all over my clothes, if I don’t do something about it.” Besides which, it hurt. It was the back of my left hand, the same arm the Hallowèen protestor had wounded the day before. “I’m not usually this clumsy!”

  “I didn’t say you were,” David retorted, sounding defensive.

  “I know, I know, I was talking to myself. This is the third time I’ve done something like this in the last couple of days …”

  I was beginning to feel cursed.

  “Come on, Jenny. Just hop on the bike, and I’ll ride you back to your office. You can bleed all over me, I don’t care.”

  “No, no, ride me back up to the top, will you? I’ll run up to the Kennedys’ and see if they’re home. Maybe they can doctor me with some soap and water and a couple of Band-Aids.” While we walked back over to his bike, I asked him, “What would you do, David, to make this place safer?”

  “That’s easy,” he said confidently. “Put gates up on both sides of the trail—like toll gates, you know?—where you have to stop if you’re walking along. And you pay a quarter, maybe, which automatically opens the gates, and it also helps to underwrite the cost of the gates, to defray expenses. If you make people do that, see, then they can’t just run out on the road without looking.”

  Underwrite, I thought? Defray expenses? Maybe some of the talks that Geof had been having with David about handling his inheritance were beginning to pay off. They were enlarging his vocabulary, at least As for David’s plan to fix the crossing … “That’s inventive,” I said, tactfully, I hoped.

  “But you gotta consider the qualifiers,” he advised me.

  I got on the bike behind him again, careful to keep the back of my left hand from touching anything. On our ride out, sitting astraddle hadn’t been as easy and comfortable as it usually was, because of the bump on my right knee, from my literal run-in with Pete Falwell the day before.

  I said into his right ear, “The what, David?”

  He turned his face so I could hear him. “Stuff like time of day, angle of the sun in their eyes, road conditions—like, is it slick because it just rained, or—

  “Snowy,” I contributed, remembering.

  “Yeah. The amount of traffic. Stuff like that.”

  There had seemed to be a lot of traffic the night Geof and I had gotten stalled the previous January, but maybe that was only because of the backup. In normal conditions—like now—there wasn’t much, surprisingly little, in fact. I recalled two or three vehicles passing us when we stood at the top of the hill in Nellie’s driveway. Two cars coming from the direction of town, a van going the other way. Nothing since then. From the standpoint of changing the trail crossing, that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. It was tough to persuade governments to install safety equipment, or alter roadways, if you couldn’t give them impressive traffic counts.

  “I’ll keep all that in mind,” I assured David, and was glad he couldn’t see the smile on my face. He switched on the ignition, and off we roared to the top of the hill, after scattering gravel in a sharp turn at the bottom. For a minute, I thought he was going to leave me there, since I was only holding on with one hand, and when he accelerated up the hill I tilted backward precariously. But I managed to regain my balance and pressed against him until he deposited me on flat ground.

  But when I walked up to the Kennedys’ house, leaving David back at the mouth of the driveway, it was plain to see that Nellie and Bill weren’t home yet. Not that I should have expected them to be, at this relatively early hour. They’d still be doing big business at the Dime Store until nine or ten o’clock, no doubt. I couldn’t imagine how they managed to live with such long, hard hours, until I remembered how many hours I’d been devoting to my own favorite cause. And who is still at work this afternoon? I teased myself. At one side of their house, I found a spigot, which released enough cold water for me to rinse my hand until the bleeding stopped. The water had another benefit; it was so cold, it anesthetized the scrape, as well. When I was done, holding my hand carefully at my side I walked back to the end of the driveway where I’d left the kid with his engine idling.

  No David. No motorcycle.

  “Where’d you go?” I asked aloud, and then raised my voice to shout for him. “David? David!”

  Intuition tugged me toward the crest of the hill, and then on down into the deeping shadows at the bottom of it. The woods still looked lovely, but a good deal darker and deeper than they had just a short time earlier.

  “David?” I called out.

  I kept carefully to the side of the road, not wishing to become road kill, but nobody passed going either way. I wondered why. Now that I thought about it, we hadn’t seen any traffic on that road since shortly after we arrived at Nellie’s driveway. How could that be? Particularly at this time of day, when people should have been coming home from work, if they had jobs in town.

  It was all oddly quiet, except for the shuffling of my feet through the dead leaves and grass on the shoulder of the highway.

  I reached the head of the curve. Walked on, rounding it, until I came out on the other side, facing the way to the river …

  “David!” I screamed, at the sight awaiting me.

  He was down, he and his motorcycle, stretched across the pavement, vulnerable to any passing vehicle. The bike lay on top of him. And the kid … David … wasn’t moving, wasn’t making any noise. His battered old helmet was still on his head, but the goggles he wore had broken and been thrown into the street. I stepped over them and ran toward him, shouting his name over a
nd over. When I reached him, I quickly bent to see his face. White against the black pavement. But there was breath flowing in and out of his open mouth. I had to get help for him. He could be horribly injured. But I couldn’t leave him lying in the highway while I ran for assistance.

  I found out, quickly, just how heavy a 1000cc bike really is.

  And how strong I could be when I needed to.

  Somehow, straining, intent, desperate to do it, constantly worried about oncoming traffic, I pushed that motorcycle off him without allowing any part of it to fall back down on him. I pushed it into the trees and unceremoniously dumped it, though I knew he wouldn’t thank me for being so careless with it It may have been beaten up with age, but he loved it….

  Although I hated to take the chance of moving him, although I was horrified at the possibility of head, or neck, or back injuries, I grabbed hold of the shoulders of his black ski jacket, which was zipped up to his throat, and pulled him off into the trees. I removed my own jacket and covered him with it, fearing shock for him.

  Then I left him there and ran toward my memory of one of the nearby houses that had its inside lights on.

  It took longer for the ambulance to reach David than it should have, but there was a good—or, at least, an understandable reason for their frightening delay ….

  Somebody had blockaded the state highway above the stop sign and near the bridge.

  They’d used actual state highway barricade signs to do it, the ones which were normally used only to block the road when the creek flooded. Drivers, assuming the bridge was out, had taken back roads, like good citizens.

  Only the paramedics—inspired by the urgency of my message when I called 911, and then by police lieutenant Geof Bushfield after I reached him—had observed the creek was dry, and so had set aside the barricades.

  11

  WE TOOK HIM TO PORT FREDERICK MEMORIAL, BECAUSE THAT’S where Geof had him enrolled in a hospital insurance plan. His beloved BMW we had to leave by the side of the road.