The Warning Sign

by Mia Marlowe

  “Good.” He scooped up the little dog. “I have a feeling I’ll need an ally today.”

  Sara tucked her wallet and keys into her jeans pocket and trooped after him down to the tiny visitor’s parking space by her building. Traffic was almost non-existent at this hour on Saturdays. She actually heard a muffled bird call from the park that edged the river across from her building. The day would be another hot one, but now the air shimmered with freshness as it soughed off the Mystic River. To top it off, a shiny blue T-bird waited in the crisp quiet. Maybe Ryan was right about morning being the best part of the day.

  “Oh, she’s a beauty,” Sara almost purred. She’d loved vintage cars for as long as she could remember. Her creaking Taurus didn’t count. It was just old.

  “Handles great, too.” He pulled open the driver’s side door. “Wanna drive?”

  She could have kissed him.

  Later when Sara was flying low on I-95 with the T-bird’s engine rumbling and the wind whipping her hair, she decided that on second thought, it was a very good thing she hadn’t shaved her legs that morning.

  Chapter 5

  Ryan glanced over at Sara as they sped along. A little smile curved her mouth. She didn’t seem to care that her hair was flying out in all directions. He liked that she wasn’t fussy about it. Russet, copper, a few strawberry blonde streaks, it was hard to decide what color it was exactly. He settled on autumn. Looked soft as silk, too. Maybe she’d let him smooth it down for her later.

  As for the rest of her, Sara dressed her figure down, but she couldn’t completely disguise the fact that she was soft and curved in all the right places. With any luck at all, he’d get a chance to see how she looked in a bathing suit today.

  But as enticing as the outside of Sara Kelley was, he was even more drawn to the riddle of who she was inside. Though she was only 22, she seemed older, steadier than women his own age. Not that 25 was ancient, but he was over the wild recklessness of his undergrad years. Sara showed only the briefest of flickers of that. He saw glimpses of it now while she was behind the wheel of his T-bird, one of the reasons he loved watching her drive.

  Her youth had been lopped off to deal with her impairment. And her main coping mechanism seemed to be that prickly wall she raised around herself. He was determined to vault over and see what was behind it.

  Ryan wanted to understand what her world was like. Last night, he decided to take a bath instead of his usual shower. At one point, he let himself slip completely beneath the warm water and listened to the distorted voices on his TV in the next room.

  Was that anything like what Sara experienced all the time?

  How did a hot young woman adjust to a loss more often associated with a 90 year old? And how did she do it without losing who she was?

  She’d graduated from Boston College, so he knew she was smart. Stubborn, as well. She had mirrors in her apartment, so she must know she’s pretty. So why did she throw up so many road blocks when he tried to approach her?

  It’s worth my time to find out.

  They couldn’t talk as they drove. The wind noise made it too difficult for Sara to hear anything else. He didn’t want her looking while he signed to her or worse yet, taking her hands off the wheel to sign back. Besides, he was satisfied with just watching her as they zipped by Eastern seaboard waking to life.

  She was a good driver. Gutsy, but safe, and she shifted the T-bird through its gears with satin smoothness. Ryan had been in a serious car accident when he was sixteen, one that killed his best friend and put him in traction for three months. He’d always be thankful he hadn’t been the one driving that day. The guilt would have killed him. But it took him the best part of nine years before he felt at ease riding with anyone else again. Even now, heavy traffic made panic rise in the back of his throat.

  At the last toll in New Hampshire, he tapped Sara’s shoulder and signed that she should pull off at the next exit so he could drive.

  Once they made the switch, he moved over to Highway 1A so they could meander through the charming coastal towns. It gave Sara a chance to enjoy the beautifully restored 18th century homes. Between the houses they caught breathtaking views of the Atlantic while the sun peered over the edge of the earth.

  The sun was still hovering low on the eastern horizon when he pulled off the main highway and onto a curving gravel road. It ended at a point that jutted out into the ocean. Not exactly a cliff, but a steep enough decline that he set the emergency brake with care before he turned off the engine.

  Sara unfastened her seatbelt and rose up. She folded her legs under her, knelt in her bucket seat and hooked her hands over the windshield. The fresh breeze brought a salty tang with it. The tide rolled in, crashing against the dark granite bones of the coastline in both directions. There was a red flash in the distance, a lighthouse perched on a small hunk of rock.

  “This is probably my favorite place in the world,” Ryan said. He loved everything about it—the sound of the breakers, watching the humpbacks in season, the sun flashing on the water. If not for the neighbors, he’d buy this point of land, build a little bungalow there and never leave.

  Lulu yipped from her carrier in the tiny back seat. Ryan reached back and released her, figuring he needed to cultivate the dog’s friendship. She scrambled up to snug herself as tight to Sara as she could. Ryan scratched behind the dog’s ears and she wobbled closer to him. If Lulu trusted him, maybe her mistress would, too.

  “Oh, this is beautiful,” Sara said. “What a view! I can see why you come here.”

  Well, the view was certainly one reason. There was only one residence in sight, or more precisely a glimpse of a roofline. Woods crowded the coastline and the house was tucked back into the trees well enough to disguise its monstrous size. Ryan pulled a pair of binoculars from his glove compartment and trained them on the boathouse and dock. A SeaRay with a sedan bridge bobbed alongside.

  Good. The WaveDancer was still there. Now if there was just some way he could get to the slip without anyone in the house—

  “So tell me about you,” Sara said, interrupting his thoughts. “What does a speech pathologist do for fun besides pick up deaf girls?”

  “That pretty much occupies all my spare time.”

  She swatted his chest playfully.

  Hitting is a good thing, one of his buddies had told him once. If a girl takes a swipe at you, your chances of scoring shoot up to about 75%.

  But then his friend was still single, too.

  “Did you always want to be a speech pathologist?” she asked.

  “No, I wanted to be Superman.”

  That made her laugh, but it was truer than he wanted to admit. He’d always been driven to excel and he wanted more than anything to be one of the good guys.

  To make up for other things.

  “They don’t hand out capes anymore, so I settled for becoming a civilian contractor working with the Seals.”

  “The Navy Seals?” She snorted. “Ok, you’ve impressed me. Talk about being an over-achiever. So, did you overthrow third world governments and conduct secret wars?”

  “Wow, you watch too much TV.” He shook his head. “No, I was part of an anti-cyber terrorism unit. My goal was to overthrow the bad guys using little ones and ‘oh’s.’”

  Of course, that sometimes meant sneaking into some pretty secure places in dangerous parts of the world to extract information from uber -firewalled systems or to administer a nasty computer virus personally where it would do the most good to the most bad.

  “The tech stuff is easy. It makes sense to my mind, but it gets a little numbing after a while,” he said. That and once the government learned about his family connections, he was cordially invited to resign. “So I decided I’d try to help people another way. Speech pathology seemed like a good fit. My grandmother is deaf,” he told her. “I learned to sign as a boy.”

  “That explains why you’re so natural at it.”

  “Well, I spent a lot of time with her,” he
said. “She and my granddad still live out on Cape Cod.”

  “Any brothers or sisters?”

  “No, it’s just me,” he said, shifting uncomfortably. The less said about his family, the better. “My parents divorced when I was small and Mom never remarried. How about you?”

  “I’m the eighth of seven children.”

  He chuckled. “Bit of a surprise, I take it.”

  “You could say that. My nearest brother is ten years older than me,” she said. “When the immediate family comes home for Christmas with all the spouses and kids, it’s like a small country looking for refugee status.”

  “Certainly not lonely,” he said with a trace of wistfulness. “Sounds nice, actually.”

  “Not always,” she admitted. “You were probably lucky your parents divorced. My mom and dad pick each other to shreds every day, but they’d never consider it. Divorce is like the crowning glory of deadly sins in my clan.” She grimaced. “Which kind of puts me in the perpetual dog house. I wasn’t going to bring this up, but you may as well know it now. I’m divorced.”

  He sensed a chink in her armor giving slightly.

  One of the nice things about talking with someone with a hearing impairment was that it wasn’t considered rude to maintain eye contact for long periods of time. It was necessary. He liked looking at Sara’s moss green ones very much.

  “Sad for him, happy for me,” he said.

  “Oh, believe me, he wasn’t sad.” She glanced away, but not before he read deep pain in her. Then she turned back to him with a falsely bright smile. “What about you? Ever married?”

  “Engaged once. Didn’t take.” Lisa Rasmussen was home-coming queen pretty and smart as a whip. Just standing beside her made Ryan feel like a minor deity. But she couldn’t handle the complications that came with him. As soon as Lisa learned a few gritty truths, she had run like hell. He couldn’t blame her.

  Sara’s false smile bloomed into the real thing. “Sad for her, happy for me.”

  A guy is never really sure when the moment is right to try to kiss a girl. Ryan expected to wait till he dropped her off at her place this evening, and then if she was giving off the right signals, he’d make his play. But now Sara’s lips were softly parted. Moist and pink. And the early morning light was setting her disheveled hair aglow like a crooked halo.

  He leaned toward her and stopped halfway to his goal, searching her face. Her eyelids fluttered shut. It was all the invitation he needed. He closed the distance gently slanted his lips over hers.

  The world went wet and soft and almost unbearably sweet. He resisted the urge to plunge his tongue into her mouth. She was skittish enough. No need to scare her off first thing. With supreme effort, he pulled back and cupped her cheek, running a thumb over her lips.

  She breathed deeply and smiled at him. “That was nice.”

  “Just nice?” he said. “I can do better than nice. Want to give me another chance?”

  “Sure, but be warned.” One of her brows raised in a wicked arch. “I grade on the curve.”

  Ryan had never been able to resist a challenge. He pulled her close and claimed her mouth.

  The T-Bird jerked forward. People talk about ‘the earth moving,’ but this was the first time he’d actually felt it. The car lurched again.

  “What the hell—”

  He swiveled in his seat.A black SUV, its windshield dark enough to hide its occupant, shoved its grill into his car’s rear bumper. The only thing that kept the T-Bird from tumbling down the steep decline was his emergency brake. He tried to start his car to throw the T-bird’s muscle into reverse, but he tromped the gas pedal too hard and she flooded. The SUV’s gears ground in a metallic whine and it hitch backward. The motor roared and the vehicle slammed them again.

  The T-Bird’s nose dropped over the edge and it slid forward on its undercarriage. Sara screamed. The car teetered. Then with sickening clarity, Ryan felt the exact moment when the balance shifted. The T-Bird’s hood tipped downward.

  “Hold on!” he bellowed.

  The sea rushed toward them.

  Chapter 6

  Neville Rede rolled his window down so he could enjoy Sara Kelley’s scream. Punctuated by the screech of twisted metal and the crash of surf, it was a veritable symphony of suffering.

  Perhaps he’d discovered a new artistic medium. Wasn’t that the height of originality? Take that, dean of the Boston Art Institute.

  Then a new sound pricked his ears. Another convertible of lovebirds was puttering down the narrow gravel road behind him.

  This must be a popular hook up spot.

  Neville swore under his breath. There wouldn’t be enough time to make sure of things. He gunned the SUV, executed a jerking three-point turn, and roared past the new convertible back down the lane toward the highway.

  He glanced in the rear view mirror. Fortunately, the newcomers weren’t looking at him. No way they’d be able to report more than a fleeting description of this vehicle, which wasn’t his anyway. The couple had already parked and climbed out of their car, pointing downward to the surf.

  Rage blurred his vision. He forced himself to take a deep breath, but it didn’t help. He’d been rushed. He’d been cheated.

  Like banging a whore and at the last second she tells you to pull out.

  For a moment, he was tempted to turn around and send the second vehicle over the edge as well.

  “Don’t get careless,” he ordered himself.

  If he was honest, even the first hit wasn’t up to his usual standards. It was just a moment of opportunity he couldn’t resist.

  Most accidents happen in the home. In the pre-dawn that morning, Neville had been stealthily checking to see if the low windows into the basement of Sara Kelley’s building would be hard to jimmy. A slip in the tub some night had the added benefit of her being naked when he did her.

  Not that he’d act on any impulse he might have. Condoms weren’t foolproof and DNA was too precious to leave lying around in a dead girl’s vagina. But the vision of her body, perfect and broken, in the red-tinged bathwater would sustain him for months of jerking off.

  Neville had just found an unlocked window in the supposedly secure building when he saw Sara Kelley’s new boyfriend drive up in that pretentious little T-bird.

  Good thing Neville had a few microdots on him. He managed to stick one on the vehicle. From then on, monitoring their trip was easy.

  It had been a simple enough matter to liberate an appropriate SUV from a nearby lot and Neville was off, following a trail of electronic breadcrumbs. Crossing not one but two state lines seemed like a gift from the gods. The authorities almost never cooperated well enough to connect the dots between accidents from one state to the next.

  Now Neville slowed to a couple of miles under the limit. He certainly couldn’t afford to be pulled over by an eager beaver local traffic cop. Using the SUV’s GPS, he drove to the nearest Amtrak stop. He parked as far from the station as he could, careful to wipe the vehicle for prints, and bought a ticket back to Boston.

  Paying cash, of course.

  By the time the police in Maine located this stolen car from Massachusetts, the Kelley accident would be old news. Even if there was a little paint from the T-bird on the SUV’s indestructible bumper, the chance that anyone would put the two incidents together was laughably remote.

  CSI was just a TV show, after all.

  He wondered if the accident would even make news back in Beantown. No matter what the authorities said about it, the subtext would be that the late Ms. Kelley and her date were just careless enough not to set their brake. While they were getting ready to hump each other’s brains out in the T-bird, they tragically rolled to their death. Not a terribly dignified way to go.

  Neville may not have been able to properly enjoy his work, but at least he had the memory of Sara Kelley’s scream. It wasn’t as much as he’d hoped, but it would have to do.

  Chapter 7

  The T-bird plummeted down the s
teep incline, leaping over boulders in jarring bounces. Just before the water of the Atlantic crashed up to meet them, the nose of the vehicle caught against one of the jutting rocks and the car did what felt like a slow-motion flip. With her seatbelt unfastened, Sara was thrown free, airborne outside the vehicle for a few terrifying seconds.

  Salt water closing over her head cut off her scream. It was so cold, what little air she had left in her lungs shot out in a stream of bubbles. Disoriented, she hung suspended in watery stasis for the space of three heartbeats. Then she flipper-kicked toward the sun.

  Her lungs burned, the need to inhale pressing against her ribs. Her ears ached. Sara clawed the water, arms and legs churning. She didn’t seem to be making any headway. The world of light and air kept retreating from her.

  Finally, her head broke the surface. She snatched a quick breath before a wave pummeled her and sent her down again. When she came up a second time, she was able to stay up, but only by kicking and flailing. She was much further from shore than she expected to be. A man and woman were climbing down the steep embankment to the water’s edge, pointing toward her excitedly.

  There was no sign of Ryan or the T-bird anywhere.

  Her hearing aids were dead. In stunned silence, she fought her way back to the land. When one of her knees grazed an underwater rock, she stood.

  “Ryan!” she called, knowing she wouldn’t hear if he answered. At least he’d hear her. If he could. “Lulu!”

  She shielded her eyes with her hand and scanned the waves. They’d seemed picturesque a few moments ago. Now they foamed like a rabid wolf. The T-bird was completely gone. Sara saw no evidence a car had even gone into the water. Where was Ryan? How long had it been? Her sense of time warped beyond knowing. It expanded and contracted around her as she dragged in another lungful of air.

  “Ryan!”

  A little black dot was flailing in the surf a good twenty yards from shore. Lulu was still moving, but she wouldn’t make it on her own steam. Sara shook, amazed at her own survival, paralyzed in indecision about whether or not she dared go back in after Lulu. Without conscious volition, she found herself splashing toward deeper water.