The Ruinous Sweep

by Tim Wynne-Jones

  Kali was waiting. She had made her way out into the middle of the road, one hand clutching her stomach, the other held out in front of her. Bee sped up. The distance between them shrunk, fifty yards, twenty-five yards. The woman wouldn’t move. Bee swore at the top of her lungs, one ragged, filthy word dug up from the very bottom of her own despair and fury, a sound coming from her that loosened the teeth in her mouth and resounded in her skull as if there were nothing in it but bone and emptiness.

  Then she slammed on the brakes.

  She stopped right at Kali’s feet.

  The woman stared at her, her body heaving, her mouth gaping open, her eyes mad with fear. She leaned forward, one hand on the car’s chrome insignia. The other arm hung limp at her side, injured in her fall, perhaps. The car growled. Well, not quite — more like muttered excitedly, as if to say, I’m not the kind of vehicle you do this in but it is rather bracing! Slowly, hesitatingly, Kali began to move around the car toward the driver’s side. She was limping, but this time it was evidently for real. Her hands never let go of the car’s hood, as though she had to maintain contact with it to stand upright as well as to hold it there. The madness had gone from her eyes. There was pleading there now. If we could just talk, her eyes seemed to say. Bee waited, her hands grasping the wheel, her mouth open trying to take in enough air to soothe her racing heart. Her eyes never left Kali’s eyes. She was inching her way down the side of the car, as if there were a path there, not more than a foot wide, and a chasm to the other side. And, oh, her eyes were talking. I can explain, said her eyes. It wasn’t me, said her eyes. I’m a victim, too, said her eyes.

  And all the while Rory is on his way!

  Bee waited and watched, her own eyes tracking the woman as she came up to the driver’s door. Again, as before on the shoulder outside the school driveway, she bent down until her face was framed in the window. Up close her face was ravaged, tearstained, pathetic in its need. She took the handle in her right hand and placed her left hand on her knee.

  It was now or never. Bee tromped on the accelerator and the Figaro leaped in response, dirt flying from its back wheels. She almost heard the snap of Kali losing her grasp on the door handle, but she didn’t look back. Heard a shout of pain — a broken wrist? Don’t think. She concentrated on the road. Only when she made the fork did she slow down and look back. Kali was sitting on the ground, her head in her hands. And even from so far away Bee could see her shoulders heaving.

  Bee sped up the hill and past the school driveway, picking up speed on the straightaway, hoping that all the little elves were safely in school. She wanted out of this place. She wanted Inspector Callista Stills and Staff Sergeant Jim Bell and all the cops in Perth and Ottawa and . . .

  She glanced at the passenger seat. Her phone. She slowed down, stopped. Put the car in park. She lurched across the passenger seat and grabbed her bag from the floor. She searched through it. Not there. It had been on the seat. It was gone. She swore and threw the bag on the seat. Then she reached across the passenger seat and explored the space between it and the door.

  “Please, please, please!” she prayed to the god of lost things. But it was not there. She had it. Kali O’Connor.

  Bee leaned backward in the driver’s seat, suddenly overcome with fatigue. What now? Kali had asked her who she’d called. She had lied. She’d told her Jilly. But she’d inputted Stills’s number. So when Kali looked, the last number Bee had called would be Inspector Stills. And Kali had met Inspector Stills.

  Stills had interviewed her. The woman was going to freak out. Was that bad? Not really. In fact, it was great! Kali had been frightened back there. Now she would be truly, deeply frightened. If she had anything to do with the murder, it would serve her right. Maybe she’d make a run for it. That wasn’t Bee’s problem. She just wanted Donovan’s name cleared. No, who was she kidding! She wanted justice. She wanted his killer to be brought down!

  Bee sat there, her mind racing. Stills would phone. Bee tried to imagine Kali standing there holding the phone, it jangling in her hand with its ringtone of Groucho Marx singing “Lydia the Tattooed Lady.” And there would be that number on the screen, that name. What would she do?

  Her thoughts were interrupted. Up ahead a car was coming her way. The first one she’d seen since she’d turned onto Sugar Valley Road. Not a car. A truck. And as it neared, she saw that it was a red truck moving fast, sending up a dust storm behind it. A truck with an urgent destination.

  For one moment, Bee froze. Then she threw her car into gear and stepped on the pedal. The car complained and she remembered the hand brake. She released it and the car shot forward, clinging to the right verge of the road. The truck loomed large. It sat high on its springs. A lift job. A red lift job. The front fender way off the ground, the license plate speckled with mud, but readable. She read it. Sounded out the letters and numbers. Remember that.

  She couldn’t see inside the pickup, the windows were tinted. Gleaming black in the noonday sun. She prayed that Kali hadn’t given Rory a description of her car.

  Then she had to stop praying or trying to pierce the blackness of those windows with her eyes and concentrate on the road, because the vehicle would be upon her any second. She pulled over as far as she could, over to the edge of where the narrow road fell away to rock and bramble. She daren’t move any farther over. Daren’t go any faster. Then — whoosh! — the truck passed her, pebbles pinging off her car’s sides and windshield.

  “Thank you, God,” she shouted, “I owe you big time!”

  She pulled out into the middle of the road, raced though the next turn and the one after that, until at last she saw the highway straight ahead.

  “Yes! Yes! Yes!” she cried. And didn’t slow down until she was perilously close to the intersection, where she slammed on the brakes.

  She sat, held up by a long line of speeding traffic passing by on the highway. Biding her time, catching her runaway breath, her finger hammering on the steering wheel, her eyes flitting to the rearview mirror, seeing only dust.

  He doesn’t know my car. Kali recognized it, but she wouldn’t have had time to tell Rory about it when she’d called him. The only thing she’d have had time to tell him was that she — Bee — was there in Sugar Valley and something needed to be done with her. He can’t turn around, thought Bee. There’s no way. Not until he gets to the school, at least. But he won’t stop there; he’ll race on to Kali’s.

  Rory owned a big red pickup. It all fit horrifyingly together. She glanced again in the rearview mirror, still waiting to turn onto the highway. She imagined a towering dust storm pulling up behind her as she waited to zip into the traffic. Her eyes focused on the dust storm in her head until the dust settled and she could see the vehicle again in her mind’s eye and read the license number she had memorized.

  RUCO 467.

  “Oh!” she gasped, throwing her hand over her mouth. She felt like she was going to be sick.

  Are you, he had said.

  And she had asked him, Am I what?

  See, he had said.

  And she had looked around the intensive care unit as if there were something she was supposed to get for him.

  Oh!

  She closed her eyes and moaned. Her neck felt too weak to hold up her head. It fell forward on her hands gripping the steering wheel fiercely. Her hair, loosened almost entirely from its ponytail in her fight with Kali, now fell around her face like a curtain. And she was back in the hospital, back in the space capsule with Donovan, her notebook on her lap, her hand waiting to write, grasping at every syllable. She could hear his voice in her head, insistent, pleading.

  The car dealership looked like the Holy Land must have looked to Joshua. Milk and honey and Chryslers. She made her way through the parking lot of shiny new cars and pulled up at the front doors. She climbed out and there was already someone waiting, a man with a crew cut, a striped tie, and a grin on his face. “I sure hope you’re looking for a trade-in,” he said. She looked back at To
ddy the Turtle, who had never looked so down at the mouth, her mossy sides covered with dust and grime.

  “I need to use your phone,” she said.

  The salesman set her up at his desk and showed her how to dial out, then wandered away to gaze out at the lot — or longingly at the Figaro, she figured. Bee punched in the number and it was picked up after only one ring.

  “It’s me, Beatrice Northway.”

  “Where the hell are you?”

  “Perth.” She looked on the desktop and saw a neat little stack of business cards for sales coordinator Maury Beamer. She read off the dealership’s name.

  “So you’re buying a new car?”

  “No.”

  “I’ve been trying to reach you for fifteen minutes.”

  “And no one picked up?”

  There was a pause. “You and your cell phone have become separated?” said Stills, with a slightly ominous tone.

  “Yeah. Kali has it. Kali O’Connor.”

  “What the —”

  “Let me explain!” cried Bee, loud enough to draw the attention of the salesman. She waved at him. He held up his hands as if she had a gun and it were a stickup. Then he walked away. Bee turned her attention to the disgruntled voice at the other end of the line, explaining what had happened.

  “Didn’t I warn you not to do this?”

  “Do what?”

  “Play Nancy fricking Drew!”

  “It wasn’t like that, and it doesn’t matter anyway. Here’s a license number — have you got a pencil?” Stills grunted. “Ontario plates: RUCO 467.”

  “And this is?”

  “Rory Tulk. Kali’s new boyfriend since she left Al.”

  There was a pause. “Go on.”

  “It’s a red pickup. A red GMC Sierra.” She paused for effect. “With a lift job.”

  Then Bee decided now might be a good time to take a breath since she wasn’t sure she had done so since Stills picked up.

  “So what are your plans now, Ms. Northway? Thinking of making a citizen’s arrest?” The voice was testy, but maybe there was some grudging respect.

  “I was thinking of eating,” said Bee.

  “Better idea, stay put. Are you safe there, do you think?”

  Bee looked around. There were five people in the showroom, three of them salespeople as far as she could tell: Beamer, one other guy, and a woman. There was an elderly couple looking at one of the four cars on display. None of them looked like Justice League of America candidates. “I guess,” she said, the doubt evident in her voice.

  But Stills wasn’t listening for shades of feeling. “Good. Stay safe,” she said. “You hear me? We’re on this.”

  “Okay.”

  “Give me your number there?”

  Bee read the number off Maury Beamer’s business card. But even as she did, she knew she couldn’t stay here.

  “I’ve got to eat,” she said. “I’m starving.”

  Stills made an exasperated sound. “What’s the address?” Bee told her. “Listen. I’ve pulled the place up on Google Earth. There’s an OPP station about five clicks west of you on the right. The Ontario Provincial Police.”

  “I know what the OPP is.”

  “Hooray for you. Go there. I’ll phone ahead.”

  “Okay,” Bee said, and hated how meek she sounded.

  “I’m serious, Bee.”

  “I know you are.”

  “Stay out of trouble. You got that?”

  The elation of having reached the detective and passed on her report seeped away like air out of a punctured tire. Bee felt weak and powerless. It was physiological, she knew that: adrenaline payback time. “Got it,” she said. Then Stills signed off and the phone went to a dial tone. She hung up.

  “Cavalry on the way?” said Maury Beamer cheerfully.

  “I guess.”

  She would get lunch on the way. She had seen fast-food places when she’d entered town that morning. The cop shop must be in there among them somewhere. Then she thought of Perth’s pretty little downtown. There would probably be a bakery or something there where she could get a bowl of soup and a sandwich on freshly baked bread. Down-home cooking. Which is why it came as a surprise to her that her hands, with a will of their own, turned the car left onto Seven. Eastward and home. She wanted to make herself a grilled cheese sandwich in her mother’s sunny kitchen and then curl up in bed for a year. With all the doors locked.

  She felt bereft, as if Stills had deprived her of victory. Instead, the inspector had chastised her, cautioned her. She felt no sense of accomplishment, only a gnawing sense of emptiness. She had been in the middle of something half an hour ago and now had been cast aside. She turned on the radio, CBC-2, and some achingly beautiful classical piece poured into the car. She switched to CBC-1. It was the noon phone-in. They were talking about mold. She switched back to CBC-2. If you were going to be depressed, you might as well soak in it. And this piece was as good a backdrop to sorrow as she could imagine. She sobbed. She swore at Inspector Stills as if she were in elementary school again and the nasty teacher had taken away her guinea-pig feeding privileges.

  She didn’t want justice. Not really. What she wanted was Donovan. She wanted him back, right now, beside her, banging out the beat to a song on the radio — though not this one. She felt utterly alone.

  The music was by Arvo Pärt. It was a requiem for someone or other. There was a bell in it that just kept chiming throughout the whole piece, and that bell carved a little chapel in her brain where she could huddle in her solitude, wondering how if she was this lost she would ever be found again.

  Then she looked in her rearview mirror and the narrow, cold little world into which she was in the process of crawling exploded. There was a red pickup on her tail.

  Stay put, Stills had told her. Stay safe. Stay out of trouble. Why had the detective’s message not registered? Well, it had, actually. There was no better place to stay safe and out of trouble than home.

  Even if home means passing through Mordor?

  Oh, she had thought of that. She knew she would have to pass the exit to Sugar Valley Road, but it had been half an hour or more since Tulk had raced past her on his way to Kali. If he’d wanted to give chase, he would have turned right around and been back on the highway in less than ten minutes. That’s what he would have done, she had thought. He’d seen the vehicle she was in. Not exactly a race car and completely recognizable.

  Why don’t I have a blue Toyota?

  So he’d have raced up to Seven and turned east at warp speed and kept going knowing he could overtake her before she got anywhere near Ottawa. By the time he gave up and doubled back, she’d be closer to civilization — or at least halfway, Carleton Place — where she could pull into a big box store parking lot and disappear. Okay, she hadn’t really thought it through, but this . . . Where had he come from?

  She heard the engine behind her roar and when she checked her rearview mirror, he was gaining on her, shortening the distance between them so much that she couldn’t even see the cab of the pickup.

  He’s going to ram me. He’s just waiting for a break in the traffic so no one will witness it.

  He honked his horn. He honked it again and again and again and then pressed his hand down on it and held it there until Bee cried out.

  “Stop it!” she shouted. Then she hurled a garbage-bag-load of curses at the air. If only curses were nails.

  She shoulder checked and he started to swerve left and right, left and right, honking the horn again, throwing on his emergency flashers, inching closer and closer. He was clearly insane.

  She clutched the wheel tightly, holding on to her sanity as much as the road. He’s not going to waste his time ramming you. He’s going to make you fly off the road all by yourself. Shatter you. Break your own damn neck.

  She glanced to her right: flooded woodland as far as she could see. No houses, no places of business, just swamp. There was a decent shoulder, but pulling over would only make his job all th
e easier, putting her right up against the drop-off into the mire. They rounded a long, slow curve, and as they came to the straightaway she saw traffic approaching in the westbound lane. He’d have to stop acting crazy. It wasn’t going to serve his purpose for her to die with witnesses to say she was pushed. Sure enough, he turned off the flashing lights and stopped his weaving. He even dropped back a car length or two.

  One, two, three vehicles flashed past and then the road was clear again as far as the eye could see. She heard his engine roar and he pulled out to pass. For a tiny moment she dared to believe that that’s what he was doing. She was driving so slowly, the poor guy just wanted to get by.

  If only!

  He stayed even with her in the wrong lane and then began to edge closer and closer to her flank. She held her own, refusing to budge. If he wants me off the road, he’s going to have to hit me. Then a better idea occurred to her. She checked the rearview mirror: empty. Good.

  One, two, three. Brake.

  The Figaro’s tires squealed and its little sage-green rump swayed perilously, but the Sierra flew on by and had to pull back into the eastbound lane because of oncoming traffic.

  “Who’s trailing who, fucker!” she cried.

  He slowed down. She held her distance. There was a car coming up behind her now. Tulk couldn’t just stop, could he? There would be a pileup — a turtle sandwich. But as long as she kept her wits about her, maybe she could dart onto the shoulder at the last minute. They came to a passing lane and the car behind her raced by. The passenger in the car waved, a big smile on his face. “Love it!” he mouthed. Another stretch of nothing but road. A peninsula through a sunken place of motionless, naked trees. Then Tulk pulled over onto the shoulder to let her pass, and what else could she do? She sure wasn’t going to stop! She flew by him, Toddy’s engine churning out enough power to almost get the needle up to the speed limit. Tulk fell in behind her again and in a moment was back on her tail, honking and flashing his lights and threatening at any moment to put her over the edge, if not literally then at least mentally.