I remembered her mentioning the tiny house thing when we first met. “Where?”
She shook her head. “It was outside the city. Like, somewhere rural, some random place. It was, like, a shipping container. This place had a huge window on one end and a yellow mural on one wall that you could see from the outside.” Then her face fell. “But that could be just a picture. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Didn’t Elise spend summers in Hocking Hills when she was growing up?” Brock said.
The three of us stared at each other.
“How many yellow-muraled shipping container rentals could there be?” I said, already pulling up Airbnb on my phone.
* * *
As it turned out, only one. “But it doesn’t give an address or anything,” Jordy said. “Just a green dot over the general area.”
She held up my phone and I glanced quickly at it as I backed out of the driveway. She was right; rather than a pinpoint location, it showed a mint-colored circle over an area to the south-southeast of Lake Logan in the Hocking Hills area.
“Is there a key? How big is the green area?”
She tapped and zoomed. “Okay, if this is five hundred meters,” she said, holding her thumb and index fingers about an inch apart, “then that means the green part is, what, a thousand meters? Er, a kilometer?”
“Okay, so about a half a mile,” I said. I gripped the steering wheel as I turned left out of the Hazletts’ subdivision, the snow crunching under my tires.
From the backseat, Brock groaned. “A half a mile? That’s—how many streets is that going to be? There could be hundreds of houses.”
I shook my head. “Not out there. But you’re right, a half-mile radius is less than ideal.” I sped up a little to make it through a yellow light. “But, it’s also a lot smaller than, well, however far Elise could get in two days.”
Jordy was fidgeting beside me, irritated. “I can’t believe you,” she muttered. “Two days without hearing from her and you didn’t even think it was weird.”
“She was fucking pissed at me! She does this all the time, okay? I know you think that I’m a big dummy and Elise is Miss Perfect but you don’t know the half of it.”
That made her go quiet. “You’re right.”
I called Tom from the road. “Hi, you’re on speakerphone.”
“Uh, hi, I got your message about Wyatt—”
“Tom, sorry for interrupting you. But I’m here with Addison’s friend Jordy, and another friend’s husband, Brock. We have a bit of a situation.”
I explained the situation as concisely as I could.
“We’re on 33 now, leaving Blacklick,” I said. “But a half-mile radius isn’t great. Especially not in the snow, plus those hills. Do you know anyone in Logan? Or the Hocking County sheriff’s department? Maybe someone would know exactly where this house is.”
Tom was quiet for a bit. “Can you take me off speaker for a sec?”
“Not really,” I said. “I don’t know how to do that in here yet.”
He sighed. “Well, you know what I’m going to say.”
“I know. That I’m impulsive and reckless and should leave a rescue operation to the police entirely.”
“Yes.”
“Logan probably has all of six patrol cops working at any given time, and the roads are bad. They’re going to be busy. And the sheriff’s department is probably spread even thinner, given the size of Hocking County. And we don’t know that she’s there.”
I gritted my teeth as I changed lanes and various lights in my dashboard flashed either outrage or encouragement, but the fishtail never came.
“You don’t know, but obviously you think she is.”
“She has their kids, Tom,” I said. “It’s not a wait-around-and-see type of thing. Would you rather her husband goes off half-cocked?” I met Brock’s eyes in the rearview and winked. “Because he’ll do it.”
“Definitely,” Brock added.
“Send me the link to this place,” Tom said.”I’ll see what I can find out.”
“Thank you, Tom.”
“Hey. Be careful.”
“I will.”
“I mean it.”
“I know.”
He sighed. “I’ll call you back when I have something.”
I punched the button on my steering wheel that I thought was supposed to end the call and said to Jordy, “Copy the link to the Airbnb and open my email.”
“Okay.”
“Start a new message and type T-H-E-I and it should come up.”
“Theitker at columbuspolice dot org?”
“That’s him. Send the link.”
Jordy said, “Who is that?”
“Someone who always comes through,” I said.
She curled up against the door frame and didn’t say anything else.
* * *
By four o’clock, we’d gone twenty-six miles in an hour. The snow was still falling fluffy and thick, and what was left of the light was going now too. The sky was asphalt wrapped in gauze. We were one vehicle in a long string of blinking red brake lights; it got worse the farther south and east we went, both because of the weather and because Route 33 constricted to only two lanes and began to curve over and around the Hocking Hills area’s namesake landscape. Brock kept calling Elise, over and over, the tinny sound of five rings then the start of her chipper voice mail intro drifting from the backseat to serve as the soundtrack for our trip. Jordy had her head tucked into her collarbone, her long ponytail partly covering her face. I might’ve thought she was asleep except for the anxious fidgeting of her hands in her lap.
When my phone rang—Tom’s name filling the screen in my dash—all three of us jumped. I fumbled with the buttons on the steering wheel until I successfully answered his call.
“Roxane, hang on, I’m getting someone else on the line.”
I waited through a series of beeps.
“Brian, Roxane, you both still there?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Yes,” a gruff male voice said.
“Great. Brian’s with the Hocking County sheriff, okay? He knows the place you’re talking about.”
Brock grabbed the back of my seat.
“Yeah, it’s on a property out Starr Route Road, right about halfway between 664 and 180,” the deputy said. “Six or seven small cabins on the parcel, which is probably close to two hundred acres.”
“Fuck,” Jordy said.
“Pardon?” the deputy said through the line.
“Um, never mind,” I said. “Okay, so can you give me the address?”
“There’s nobody up there, ma’am, I promise you that.”
I saw Brock’s shoulders dip in the mirror.
“How do you know?”
“Road’s damn near impassable in weather like this, and I actually just drove through there and I can tell you there aren’t even tracks up the driveway.”
That didn’t exactly seem definitive. “Is there more than one way to get there? Another driveway?”
“Roxane,” Tom said. “You said it was just a hunch.”
I shook my head—at him, at the traffic, at everything. Beside me, Jordy had her own phone out and was comparing it to something on mine. Then she looked up, her eyes bright with something like excitement.
“Um, thanks anyway,” I said, and hung up.
“Two hundred acres,” Jordy said. “Sounds like a lot, but it’s less than this stupid green circle. About half the size, okay?”
“How do you know that?”
“My job,” she said. “Corporate real estate.”
“Hey, look at you.”
“So anyway, Starr Route Road, midway between 180 and 664—those are here and here,” she said, pointing. “So midway between them is here, which is at the lower middle of this circle. So now I’m looking at the Hocking County property lines—Brock. Phone. Give it.” Jordy held a hand into the backseat. “I need another screen.”
He obliged.
Jordy
leaned forward, all three of our phones spread out over the glove box. She tapped and pinched and typed for a few minutes and Brock and I stayed quiet.
Finally, she clapped her hands together.
“I found it,” she said. “Right here. This is the only property that meets all the criteria. And besides the driveway off of Starr Route Road, there are at least two other ways in.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
By the time we got to Starr Route Road, it was night. The road itself was barely visible under the white blanket that had fallen over the past few hours, so I had to rely on the curve of the trees to really see where it went. The ride had been white-knuckle to say the least. I was growing fonder of the Range Rover, though; its stupid-expensive tires held their own.
“Okay, we’re almost there,” Jordy said as we crept past a log cabin encircled by a sagging split-rail fence. “This is going to be the driveway that guy was talking about.” She wiped the fog off her window with the sleeve of her coat. “It goes up through the middle, and there are cabins on each side. We could go up this way. But the place we’re going is almost all the way up the hill. So we’d be visible the entire way.”
“What are the other options?”
“There’s another road up here. It’s probably gravel, or dirt. Do you think we can make it up a hill on that?”
“To be honest, I don’t know if that matters,” I said, “because it’s under at least eight inches of snow.”
Jordy glanced into the backseat. “Brock?”
I looked at him in my mirror, but his face was shrouded in shadow.
“Go the back way.”
Half a mile later, a small gap in the trees opened up to the right. “This it?” I said.
My navigator nodded. “It’s going to cut sharply to the right, then start up the hill.”
I eased into the turn. The road was claustrophobically narrow, barely wider than my vehicle. “I guess let’s hope no one is coming down.”
“I suspect that won’t be an issue.”
I killed the high-beams in favor of the running lights once I discovered just how steep the incline was. I’d long forgotten everything I learned in geometry but the angle was extreme enough for gravity to tug on the back end of the car—if I let off the gas, we began a downward slide—and the headlights pointed up at the blinding snow rather than at the road.
My palms were sweaty as we crested the hill. The top of it was ridged with trees so heavy with snow and ice that some of them drooped like willows. With the engine no longer straining, things were eerily quiet.
Jordy tapped her window. “I see it. The shipping container.”
It was up ahead to the right, angled off the gravel road to face away from us. But the large window Jordy had mentioned cast a yellowish glow onto the snow out in front of it; the lights were on.
There was no sign that a vehicle had been up here today. The snow on the driveway was undisturbed.
Brock smacked the back of my seat. I jumped but didn’t say anything; I figured he was entitled to be angry.
I closed my eyes and listened to a faint whining sound. We were idling in place, but the sound was getting louder. “Do you hear that?” I said.
Jordy wiped off her window again and peered out. “Are those headlights?”
I looked. Down through the trees, something was moving.
Behind me, Brock scooted over to the other side of the car and looked out.
Whatever the movement had been, it seemed to stop. Either that, or the headlights had dipped below our sightline. The whining sound got louder still.
None of us even took a breath for what felt like an eternity.
Then the movement started again as what was clearly a small SUV struggled up the driveway.
“That’s her. That’s Elise.”
Before I could stop him, Brock dove out of the vehicle and stumbled through the deep snow. In his bright green and black coat, he stood out from the snow as if a spotlight were on him.
The SUV stopped.
Brock was still moving toward it, hobbling through the snow with exaggerated steps.
“She’s going to turn back,” I muttered.
Jordy opened her door and started out too.
“No,” I said. “She can’t see us back here.”
I opened my door and stood halfway up, sticking my head outside. The air was wet and cold. “Brock,” I whisper-shouted, “come back here.”
He didn’t seem to hear me, just continued galumphing through the snow.
All at once, the headlights of Elise’s vehicle arced away from him as she spun awkwardly in reverse and started back down the driveway.
“Brock, get in,” I shouted. He froze in place, his hands outstretched.
I sat back down in the driver’s seat and closed the door and stomped on the gas.
* * *
Once Brock was back inside the Range Rover, I got us turned around and said, “Buckle up, guys. I don’t think this is going to be fun.”
“We could go down the main driveway this time,” Jordy said.
I shook my head. “It’s less steep, but it’s longer. We can get down faster going back the way we came. Plus she won’t know that we’re behind her. For all she knows, Brock Ubered here.”
He was brushing snow off his jeans in the backseat with his bare hands instead of buckling his seat belt.
“Brock.”
“I’m fine.”
Jordy turned around and punched him in the arm. “Buckle your damn belt.”
“Was she by herself in the car?”
“It looked like the passenger seat was down,” he said. “It just looked like an empty space. I don’t know.”
The gravel road seemed steeper and narrower and rockier on the way down. The ground disappeared into a murky black tunnel a few yards in front of us. Jaw clenched, I eased off the brake and down we went, bouncing off of ruts and branches on the ground as the Range Rover locked into the tracks we’d made in the snow on the way up. It had felt like we spent hours getting up to the top of the hill, but the reverse trip was over in a flash.
Jordy said, “Roxane, remember the hairpin—”
I saw it just as she said it, the sharp bend in the path that we’d made shortly after turning onto the gravel from Starr Route Road. I racked the wheel to the left—too far—and clipped some low-hanging tree branches with my side mirror, turned the other way, skidding back across the road and almost into the trees on the other side before I finally got a grip and eased us to a stop.
“—turn,” Jordy finished.
I tried to laugh, blood pounding in my ears.
We sat quietly for a second, looking for signs of Elise’s SUV coming down the main driveway. I rolled my window down and heard the whine of tires spinning against the ice. Brock reached for his door handle again and I employed the child locks. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but you’re not getting out of the car again.”
“She’s stuck. She isn’t going anywhere.”
But as he said it, the unseen SUV lurched its way out of the snow and continued down the hill, headlights dancing through the trees like the aurora borealis.
I crept the Range Rover forward until the nose was sticking out onto Starr Route Road. In the time since we’d turned up the gravel driveway, the snow had filled in the tracks we’d made.
It was almost peaceful out here. Almost.
Brock said, “What are we going to do?”
“Jordy, what happens if you go that way?” I pointed to the right from our position in the mouth of the gravel road.
“Nothing,” she said as she thumbed the map on her phone. “Nothing for about twenty miles. So if I had to guess which way she was going to go, I’d pick left. Back to 33.”
I thought about it. I had to agree. I didn’t want either of our vehicles to careen through the snow anymore, which meant preventing Elise from turning. I drove back toward the main driveway, my window still down. The jerky whine of her vehicle told me it was still pretty far up
the incline. As I pulled around the corner, I realized the dancing lights weren’t just from Elise’s vehicle, but from two Hocking County sheriff’s patrol cars.
I braked gently and pulled to a stop alongside one.
“I hope you’re Roxane and not the other one,” the guy said. “Brian Mahaney. Heitker’s buddy.”
“Hi.”
“I thought I told you the road was impassable.”
“You also told me nobody’s been up there,” I said, “so I think we’re even. She’s coming down.”
“I gathered. You keep moving, and we’ll block the end of the driveway so she can’t get out.”
“She probably has kids with her,” I said, gesturing to my backseat. “His kids, and possibly another woman. So just, I don’t know, don’t do anything permanent.”
The deputy nodded and motioned me to move past the sheriff’s cars.
Meanwhile, Elise’s lights were getting closer.
The two deputies coasted forward. Mahaney stopped at a forty-five-degree angle on my side of the driveway, and the other went past, spun around, and parked opposite the first car so that they made a V pointing at the driveway.
A disembodied bullhorn intoned, “Begin braking now. Your speed is unsafe.”
The bouncing headlights got closer and closer and it became pretty clear that she wasn’t going to stop.
“Oh god,” I said.
Elise was speeding up.
I laid on my horn and stuck my head out the window. “Get out of the way, guys, she’s not stopping.”
The passenger door of Mahaney’s car opened and he dropped into the ditch just as Elise crashed into the noses of both cruisers, knocking them apart almost gently. Mahaney popped up but the deputy in the other car let out a wail in the dark. Elise shot across the road, through a rusting, snow-covered guardrail, and down a slight embankment. One of the headlights went dark but the car was still moving.
“Goddammit.” I pulled a jerky turn and rolled down the passenger window. Mahaney was crouched over the other deputy, who was splayed in the snow, a misty red around his legs. Mahaney spoke urgently into the mic clipped to his lapel. “How can I help?” I called.
He stabbed the air in the direction of the crunched-up guardrail. “Someone needs to stop her.”
The Stories You Tell Page 27
