by Riley Sager
He stops talking, letting his story—that long, sad tale—linger in the car like smoke.
“Do you still miss her?” Charlie says.
“Sometimes. Do you still miss your parents?”
Charlie nods. “And I miss Maddy.”
What she doesn’t say, because she’d never admit it to anyone, is that she misses Maddy more than her parents. It’s not something she’s proud of. She certainly doesn’t feel good about feeling this way, but it’s the truth. She is very much her parents’ daughter. Her father was quiet and prone to introspection, and so is she. Her mother, just like Charlie, was an enthusiastic movie lover, courtesy of Nana Norma. Charlie has her father’s hazel eyes and her mother’s pert nose, and she sees them every time she looks in the mirror. They are always with her, which goes a long way toward lessening the pain of losing them.
But Maddy was something different. As foreign and exotic to Charlie as a tropical flower growing in the desert. Bright and beautiful and rare. It’s why her loss stings more and why Charlie feels so guilty about it. She’ll never meet another Maddy.
“Why did you tell me that story?” she asks Josh.
“Because I wanted you to get to know me.”
“So I’d trust you?”
“Maybe,” Josh says. “Did it work?”
“Maybe,” Charlie replies.
Josh hits the wipers, swiping away the gathering snow, and shifts the car into a lower gear, helping it climb the slow but steady rise of the highway.
Charlie’s familiar with this stretch of road.
The Poconos.
The place where Maddy had been born and raised.
The place from which she hoped to escape.
They pass a faded billboard advertising one of those big honeymoon resorts that had been all the rage in the fifties and sixties. This one is decidedly rustic. With timber-studded walls and a roof of green slate, it resembles a massive log cabin. Mountain Oasis Lodge, it’s called. Or used to be. A conspicuous white banner with black print has been slapped over the image of the lodge.
ENJOY OUR LAST SEASON!
Judging by the state of the banner—frayed at the corners and faded, though not quite as much as the rest of the billboard—Charlie assumes the resort’s last season ended several summers ago.
Maddy’s grandmother had worked at a place like that until it went belly-up in the late eighties. Maddy had regaled her with stories of visiting her grandmother at work—running through empty ballrooms, sneaking into vacant rooms, sprawling across round beds with mirrored ceilings and scrambling inside bathtubs shaped like giant hearts.
Tawdry.
That’s how Maddy described the place. “It tried so hard to be sexy, but it was, like, the worst, cheapest kind of sexy. The hotel version of crotchless panties.”
It hadn’t always been like this, Charlie knew. Maddy had also told her about the Poconos that existed a couple of generations before they were born. Back then, movie stars often motored the short distance from New York for a few days of fishing, hiking, and boating, rubbing elbows with working-class couples from Philadelphia, Scranton, Levittown. Maddy had shown her a picture of her grandmother posing poolside with Bob Hope.
“She met Bing Crosby, too,” Maddy said. “Not together, though. Now that would have been the cat’s meow.”
Charlie sighs and looks out the window, at the trees skating by in gray blurs.
Like ghosts.
It makes her think of all the people who’ve died on this highway. People like her parents. Killed in explosions of glass. Torched in fiery wrecks. Crushed under tons of twisted metal. Now their spirits are stuck here, haunting the side of the road, forever forced to watch others drive by to destinations they failed to reach.
She sighs again, loud enough for Josh to say, “You getting carsick again?”
“No. I’m just—”
Charlie’s voice seizes up, the words clogged in her throat like a hard candy that’s been swallowed.
She never told Josh she felt carsick.
Not for real.
That was during a movie in her mind, one she only half-remembers now that she knows it didn’t really happen. The state trooper coming up on their right. Charlie’s covert breaths fogging the window. Her index finger slicing across the glass.
But if it didn’t really happen—if it was all in her head—how does Josh know about it?
Charlie’s mind starts whirling, clicking like an old movie projector. It spins out a thought. One that should have arrived much sooner.
“Come as You Are” had just started playing before she dropped into that long, vivid mental movie and was still playing when she woke from it.
That makes sense. Charlie had once read that dreams that feel like hours can pass in mere minutes, and she assumes the same is true for movies in her mind. The song started, the movie unspooled in her thoughts, and when it was over, “Come as You Are” was still playing.
But when Charlie snapped out of the alleged movie in her mind, it was still the beginning of the song that she had heard. That definitely doesn’t make sense, especially since Josh told her she’d been zoned out for more than five minutes.
Then there’s the distance they traveled during that time. On the map at the rest stop, it would have been about the width of her index finger, which meant it was miles when blown up to full scale. Far more ground than can be covered during the course of a single song, let alone a few seconds.
Which means the music hadn’t been continuous.
Josh had indeed turned off the stereo.
Charlie watched him do it. It hadn’t all been in her head, like he led her to believe. It was real. It happened.
And if that was real, then what immediately followed might also be real. Including Twenty Questions.
Let’s play, Josh had said.
Those questions might not have been just her thoughts. They might not have been only dialogue in her mind.
There’s a chance that she truly spoke them. Which means there’s also a chance Josh answered them until she winnowed it down to a single object that on the surface is so innocent but turns out to be terrifying with the proper context.
A tooth.
“You’re just what?” Josh says, reminding Charlie that she never finished her sentence.
“Tired,” she says. “So tired.”
The word clouds the window. Just a tad. In that wisp of fog on the glass, Charlie can make out the edge of what appears to be a letter.
Her eyes go wide.
In shock.
In fear.
Her heart does the opposite. It contracts, shrinking into her chest the way a turtle retreats into its shell, trying to avoid the threat it senses is coming. But Charlie knows it’s too late. The threat is already here.
She confirms it by saying three more words heavy on the sibilant syllables.
“Just so exhausted.”
The fog on the window grows. An expanding gray circle.
Inside it, clearly scrawled by her unsteady finger, is a single word. Written backward. Readable to someone on the outside looking in.
HELP
INT. GRAND AM—NIGHT
Charlie stares at the word, her right eye twitching, as if it no longer wants to look at it. It’s the twitch that tells her this isn’t a movie in her mind.
That doesn’t keep her from wishing, hoping, praying, begging that she’s wrong. If there’s one single right time to have what she’s experiencing not be real, now is that moment. But the snow is still smacking the windshield and the wipers are still moving and Josh is still behind the wheel and the fog on the window is still receding and the word is still clinging to the glass and Charlie knows that all of it is real.
It’s always been real.
Josh lied to her. About everything.
> And she let him. Hell, she helped him do it. By doubting her own mind. By appearing so obviously fragile. By making him think he could do and say anything and she’d believe it. It’s literally the plot of a movie.
Gaslight.
Even though she’s seen it several times, it still didn’t stop her from completely falling for it in real life. She’d be furious if she wasn’t so scared. But anger takes a back seat to fear. Because there’s only one reason Charlie can think of for why Josh would do such a thing.
He’s the Campus Killer.
Not could be. Not may be.
He simply is. Charlie has no doubt about that now. Her gut, which so far tonight has been a better guide than her brain, tells her he has to be. He knows about the tooth, which right there is enough to convict him in her mind. Then there’s the fact that he told her he’s lived near Olyphant for the past four years, which is how long the Campus Killer’s been at large.
Angela Dunleavy. Four years ago.
Taylor Morrison. Two and a half years ago.
Madeline Forrester. Two months ago.
Stabbed. Killed. A pulled tooth their killer’s trophy.
Charlie has no illusion that he won’t try to do the same to her. He will. It’s the reason she’s here. This is no gob-smacking coincidence. It was intentional on Josh’s part. He sought her out.
He might try to come for you next.
And so he has.
Even worse is how Charlie made it so easy for him. All he needed to do was show up at the ride board, flash that movie-star smile, and offer to drive her away from her pain and guilt. Charlie did the rest.
She considers the possibility that it would have happened anyway. That eventually she would have ended up in this precise situation no matter what she did. Earlier she thought that she deserved such a scenario. Maybe fate agreed and had this all planned out. Payback for failing to save Maddy.
What’s important now isn’t how it happened, or why. It’s that Charlie needs to find a way out of the situation. If there is a way out. She suspects this is what a mouse must feel as the trap starts to snap shut. Too late to run. Too late to change your actions. Far too late to undo your own undoing. Just a grim acceptance right before the crunch.
“You’re quiet again,” Josh says, acting all innocent. As if nothing is wrong. As if he’s not a complete monster. “You sure you’re not getting carsick?”
Charlie feels sick, although it’s not from the car. But she doesn’t mind letting Josh think that. It’s better than him thinking she knows all the horrible things he’s done. That she’s terrified by that knowledge. That it has her so scared she’s shocked she hasn’t puked.
Yet a wild, dangerous part of her wants to tell him she knows who he is and what he’s done. Clearly, Josh is toying with her. The lies. The music. The flirting. It’s all because he enjoys playing with her emotions. Why not come clean now and deny him that satisfaction?
Because then there’ll be nothing left to do but kill her.
Charlie fears—with a quivering depth she didn’t know was possible—that the reason Josh lured her into his car and onto the highway is because it makes it easier for him. All he needs to do is swerve onto the side of the road, slit her throat, and shove her out of the car. He wouldn’t even have to turn off the engine. And by the time someone noticed Charlie bleeding to death on the rumble strip, Josh would be miles away.
The scared, sensible part of her knows it’s best not to reveal anything.
The smartest, bravest, most careful course of action is to pretend she doesn’t know a thing. Maybe he won’t try to harm her until he’s certain she knows who he really is. Maybe he’s patient and vowed to wait as long as it takes. Maybe Charlie can pretend long enough to get away.
But where?
That’s the problem.
There’s no place to get away to. They’re in the middle of the Poconos, with no other cars in sight. The Grand Am speeds down the center lane of the highway, going seventy in spite of the snow. Charlie knows she can’t leap from the car, no matter that her hand is back on the door handle and her legs are now twitching as much as her eye and that even her shrunken, terrified heart seems to beg her to do it with every frantic beat.
She tells herself Josh can’t hurt her when they’re going this fast.
She tells herself that she’s safe as long as the car’s in motion.
She tells herself that when the Grand Am starts to slow—and it will at some point; it has to—she’ll hop out and run like she should have done back at the toll plaza.
“Did you hear me?” Josh says, insistent. “I asked if you’re sure you’re not getting carsick.”
Charlie sits completely still. She should say something. No, she needs to say something. But her tongue sits dead inside her mouth, useless. After a few more seconds of struggle, she’s able to croak out a word.
“Yes.”
“I don’t believe you.”
She almost snorts out a bitter laugh. The feeling is mutual. But then Josh says, “Let’s get off the highway,” and the laugh withers in the back of Charlie’s throat.
“Why?” she says.
“To look for a place to eat.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“I am,” Josh says. “And I think some food will do you good.”
Charlie knows it’s all a ruse and that it’s time for the inevitable. The moment they’ve been leading up to since she first got into the car.
An exit ramp appears, and Josh slides the car into the right lane. Charlie tells herself to stay calm.
Don’t let him know she knows.
If she can do that, then maybe she’ll be okay.
But Charlie’s not sure she can do that. Not with the Grand Am sliding off the exit ramp and onto a road far different from the interstate. Once they get past the competing gas stations and a shuttered Burger King clustered near the off-ramp, it becomes just two lanes of blacktop slicing through mountain woods, dark as far as the eye can see. The road is devoid of other cars. It’s just them and the woods and the dark night and the snowfall trickling to a halt.
Charlie tenses when she sees a street sign bearing the name of the road for which they traded the highway.
Dead River Road.
Not the name of a place anyone would willingly go. It sounds to Charlie like the name of a place people try to avoid. A place frequented only by the lost or unsuspecting.
But Josh doesn’t seem lost. He seems to know exactly where they’re going, steering the car confidently through the forest, the sweep of the headlights brightening the trees that hug the side of the road. Charlie assumes this is because he has a spot already picked out. He’s done his research.
She knows now is the time to act and she should finally make a leap from the car. But fear, that heavy, unwieldy thing, keeps her pinned in place.
Charlie wonders if Maddy was in this same situation two months ago. She hopes not. She hopes Maddy had no idea what was about to happen to her. That the last moments of her life were as grand and vivacious as she was.
“We should turn around,” Charlie says, her voice robotic because she’s trying to keep her fear from peeking through. “There’s nothing here.”
“There is,” Josh says. “I saw a sign for a place back on the highway.”
The only sign Charlie remembers seeing is the billboard for that now-defunct lodge.
“It’s late,” she says. “The place is probably closed.”
Josh remains focused on the road, driving with his fingers tight around the wheel and his forearms rigid. “It might still be open.”
Charlie keeps disagreeing, because it’s all she can do at the moment, even though it’s clear Josh isn’t going to listen to her.
“It’s so late and we’ve wasted so much time and I just want to go home.”
He
r voice breaks on the last word. A bit of sadness slicing through it.
Home.
Nana Norma is there right now, probably waiting up for her. Charlie pictures her on the couch in a robe and nightgown, nursing a bourbon, her eyeglasses reflecting a Busby Berkeley musical playing on the TV. The thought makes her heart crack just like her voice.
Arriving on the heels of that desperate ache is an urge to fight. A surprise to Charlie, who’d spent so much of this drive thinking only of flight.
But fighting might be her only choice.
Hurt Josh before he can hurt her.
Charlie looks down at the backpack at her feet. Inside are things that would normally be found in a purse. Her wallet, spare change, tissues, and chewing gum. Gone is the pepper spray Nana Norma had given her when she left for Olyphant. Charlie lost that more than a year ago and never thought to replace it. All that leaves for self-defense is her keys, which jingle at the bottom of the backpack as Charlie picks it up.
She unzips the bag and reaches inside, feeling for the keys. They aren’t much. Certainly not as good as pepper spray. But if she holds them with the keys poking out from between her fingers, Freddy Krueger–style, she might be able to fight off an attack from Josh.
Not that Josh looks remotely close to attacking. Calm behind the wheel, he points to the horizon, where the sky is lightened by a soft electric glow. Within seconds, a diner comes into view. One so traditional Charlie thinks it could be mistaken for part of a film set.
Chrome siding runs below the diner’s wide front windows, beyond which are red booths and blue tables. A sign hangs on the front door—red-on-black letters telling them that, yes, they’re open. There’s another sign on the roof. Neon. It spells out the name of the place. The Skyline Grille. The “e” on the end flickers slightly, like even it knows it’s unnecessary.
“Told you there was a place open,” Josh says as he steers the Grand Am into the parking lot. “You need to trust people more, Charlie.”
Charlie gives a wary nod, knowing the opposite is true. Trust is what got her into this situation. A heaping dose of suspicion would have helped her avoid it entirely.
