The Woman at the Edge of Town

by Georgette Kaplan

  Table of Contents

  Other Books by Georgette Kaplan

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Epilogue

  About Georgette Kaplan

  Other Books from Ylva Publishing

  Sign up for our newsletter to hear

  about new and upcoming releases.

  www.ylva-publishing.com

  Other Books by Georgette Kaplan

  Ex-Wives of Dracula

  The Scissor Link Series

  Scissor Link

  Face It

  The Cushing-Nevada Chronicles

  Easy Nevada and the Pyramid’s Curse

  For Zuzu. I promise we’ll stop calling you that as soon as you understand words mean things.

  Chapter 1

  Fingers of rain tapped at the world with the quiet insistence of an unwanted question. It had rained all morning the day of Sarah Kay’s twentieth birthday, and it would continue into the afternoon and evening and keep going into the night. Drizzling. Not the fun kind of puddling showers or the exciting, gothic-horror rainstorms, but an uneven, wavering rainfall that would let up just long enough to give a little hope that the sun would come out, then piddle out jerkily again from graying clouds.

  It went with the gray day Sarah was having. It had started with pancakes from Eileen, her mother, which were nice, but…just enough effort to make her feel ungracious for not being more impressed. Then she’d been to work, where no one had much noticed. A dull, six-hour shift of front-facing in a supermarket, the same as any other, the same as any job she’d worked over the summers or holidays since she’d started high school.

  The first box of Pop-Tarts in the stack had been taken out, leaving a little cavity, so she pulled the next one up, then the next box of cornflakes, the next box of microwave popcorn—all because it looked better when products were all lined up front and center like Tom Cruise’s teeth.

  Two thoughts circled each other with depressing regularity as Sarah worked. The first was that her job only existed because some consultant somewhere—who wore a suit that cost more than her internal organs—had done up a report saying that the company could increase its earnings by 0.000002% if the products were on the front edges of their shelves instead of recessed by a unit or two. Identical men in identical suits with identical millions had done similar reports for Walgreens, Target, Walmart, and all the other big-box stores Sarah had tried and failed to fit in at.

  The second thought was that she could go back to college, figure out her major, graduate top of her class, and this would still be the only field that would be hiring.

  After work was a birthday party at home that bored her sick. There was pizza, sure, and ice cream and…well, balloons. Perfectly fine for, like, Tuesday. But she’d rather have some real fun.

  Instead, her mom was threatening to watch Practical Magic with her as if it was some kind of ritual. None of her real friends were here, except for her boyfriend Tyrese; the rest were all her mom’s friends and people she was supposed to be friends with, and she was twenty seconds away from just bailing. It’d probably take hours for anyone to notice anyway.

  There was one real perk. She’d been paying on her car for three years now, a gently used 2013 Prius that she’d gotten two thousand dollars off of because the dealer was trying to move inventory and no one else wanted a car with a purple paint job like Willy Wonka was riding around in it. So her big birthday present was that her mom had finished paying it off for her. It was so damn practical that she would bite her tongue clean through before she let herself be ungrateful.

  Vanilla ice cream, though. She could be petty about that. Who got vanilla ice cream for a birthday party? It was like signing Have a great summer in someone’s yearbook.

  She soldiered through thanking everyone for their gifts—mainly gift certificates, gift cards, and some sort of amulet that was supposed to protect her from evil spirits. But if it worked and evil spirits were a real concern, who would sell something like that? Then she was finally able to bolt, with Tyrese in the passenger seat and her behind the wheel.

  She put the Prius through its paces, and it seemed to accelerate just a little faster, purr just a little louder, with the pink slip all hers. They orbited town like a satellite, tires throwing up gales of puddled water.

  “It’s a race thing,” Tyrese told her.

  “What? No.”

  “I’m ninety-nine percent sure it is. They make a Baby-Sitters Club show where Kristy’s a black girl. People hate it.”

  “That’s not what it is.”

  “So you like Kristy being black?”

  “I’m…confused why Kristy needs to be black when Jessi’s black…”

  “Oh, so being black is Jessi’s thing?”

  “Kinda. It was the nineties.”

  They’d been friends since elementary school, when he’d been the only boy willing to keep pulling her ponytail after she’d clobbered Billy Finch. In middle school they’d been bros, Tyrese sneaking her his dad’s beer and Sarah bringing him her mom’s lingerie catalogs. In high school, they’d made it official, going out to Sandra Bullock movies together and everything. There’d been some make-out sessions, she’d let him feel her up when those Sandra Bullock movies got steamy, and then at prom—

  He was her first, he was her boyfriend, and she loved him. They’d even done the long-distance thing for a bit while she’d been away at college. Eventually, they’d get married, maybe start a family…

  “So you think Kristy should be white?”

  “You’re not listening.”

  “Of course I’m listening. I’m spellbound by you. I’m entranced.”

  He plucked her right hand from the steering wheel and gave it a kiss. She snatched it back, gripping the wheel tighter. “C’mon, ten-and-two. I’m trying to drive.”

  “You’re trying to explain why you don’t like a TV show without sounding racist.”

  Sarah made an exasperated sound of disbelief. “They’re not even babysitters anymore! They grew up, moved to the city, started a law firm, and now they call themselves the Baby-Sitters Club because they ‘babysit’”—Here Sarah thought to do air quotes, but since she was determined to keep her hands on the wheel, she did a similar motion with her shoulders instead—“their clients. They’re in their thirties now! Which, by the way, is a ridiculous age to be partners in a law firm.”

  “It’s a reinvention. This is what they do when they grow up.”

  They passed a herd of cows grazing in their fenced-in enclosure, drooling cud from their chomping jaws.

  “They all become attorneys? It’s using a bunch of familiar names to get people to watch another generic doctor-cop-lawyer show. Not even familiar names, since now they’re calling Stacey ‘Simone,’ so I guess thank God they finally did something about a girl being named Stacey. That was really a glaring plot hole…”

  “So you just want a show about teenage girls babysitting?”

  “Kinda. I mean, if it’s called the Baby-Sitters Club… I just don’t get how it’s the Baby-Sitters Club if they’re in a different city, with different backgrounds, different names, different jobs—when you read a story, it has a kind of a soul, and you shouldn’t mess with something’s soul.”

  “So you want the same thing over and over again?”

  “I just like things the way I like them.”

  “Yeah…” Tyrese d
rawled, grabbing her hand again. “That’s the way I like you too.”

  He began sloppily kissing her hand, bathing her knuckles in spit. She tugged, but he had a good grip and bigger biceps than her.

  “Tyrese, c’mon, quit it.”

  “You gotta learn how to drive with one hand sometime, babe, or how are you ever gonna use your cell phone?”

  “Tyrese, I’m serious.” She gave him her best death glare. “It’s a ten-minute drive. You can’t go ten minutes without molesting—”

  She happened to glance forward then and saw it so abruptly that it was like her previous view of clear, empty road had been shattered by this new sight: a car, its front end hugging the trunk of a tree, its back half protruding back onto the street and into her lane.

  Sarah jerked the wheel—one-handed—and stomped on the brakes. The Prius obeyed, swerving to one side as the brakes locked, but there was no reassuring stop, just a liquid feeling of suspension—drifting, drifting, drifting on the wet pavement. Then she was thrown to the side, the car spinning out as it was ripped to a stop. She couldn’t keep it on the road, heard the squealing tires give way to a meaty, pulping sound as her wheels dug into the dirt and grass of the ditch. Then, mercifully, they stopped.

  For a moment, Sarah was frozen. Just breathing. No videogame reflexes, no adrenaline rush, just a prolonged wondering: What the hell happened, what the hell happened, what the hell happened? Her mind ticked away like a clock; she actually shook the cobwebs out. This was an emergency. She was in an emergency. She always pictured herself being cool, calm, collected—not an action hero, no, but if someone robbed the store she was working in, she’d keep a level head and open the cash register and send them on their way. Now she was one of those people who just went into hysterics.

  No. Emergency. She had to make sure everything was okay. She looked at Tyrese. He was gulping air, his eyes wide, a slight tremble in his frozen face. As much in shock or whatever as she was. Maybe more so. Sarah patted his arm. “You okay?”

  “What the fuck?”

  “You’re okay…”

  The other car. Belatedly, Sarah realized she was still holding down the brake pedal. The Prius was still in drive. She groped for the gear shift, found it, jammed it into park. Then, just on instinct, she pressed the stop button and killed the engine. Her headlights continued to blare out, drawing a mournful beep from the car’s systems. She barely heard it. Where was she? The other car. She undid her seatbelt, pulled herself out of the Prius. She didn’t feel as if she was hurt. No broken bones or blood—probably should’ve checked for that before she started moving.

  Her legs seemed to have developed all sorts of interesting kinks, though, threading needles through the flesh of her thighs as she staggered the few feet up to the road. The Prius looked fine; just one side had been gone over by Freddy Krueger, and— Holy shit, the driver’s side mirror had been clipped off entirely. Her mom was going to kill her. Her gaze moved past the gouges of muddy soil where the tires had clawed over the fresh skid marks on the road.

  She could see the other car’s taillights, their glow rising like smoke to the branches of the slanted tree above, which had shifted aside for the darkly wheezing car bundled up against its trunk. From here, it didn’t even look like a wreck, but rather some kind of bizarre taxidermy. A jackalope or something.

  Sarah took a step forward, getting her feet under her, then stopped immediately, recognizing the car. Anyone in Bathory would’ve recognized the 2002 Vertigo Streiff, one of those cars that was halfway to being a Batmobile. In a town full of Ford trucks and electric-shaver Japanese imports, it was the only automobile that made her understand how guys could think of cars as sexy.

  And it was driven by Nina fucking Rose.

  She looked back at her Prius. Her modest, piddling little Prius. Tyrese was groaning, coming out of his daze with a stupefied slowness. “Call 911!” she called out to him.

  “Wha?” he asked. “What happened? Everyone okay?”

  “Call 911!” she insisted, but he was even more out of it than she was, sluggishly patting his pockets for his phone. Sarah hurried back to the car and reached inside for hers, in the sunglasses case in the roof. It wasn’t really designed to be reached for by someone who wasn’t in the driver’s seat, and she slipped on the wet grass, driving her knees into the mud. Growling at herself, she wrenched herself up, grabbed the cell phone, and sloughed her way across the road to the wreck.

  It didn’t look bad. Well, what had been a gleaming model of engineering perfection was now a Christmas ornament, but it looked more like a fender bender than anything with the phrase wrapped around in it. Exhaust drooled out into the red atmosphere of the taillights, while something hissed out from the engine into the grass underneath the car. The headlights captured the leaves still falling from the struck tree. Sarah pulled her jacket shut around herself, suddenly registering the cold attacking her leggings and blouse.

  The windows were rolled up, tinted, and Sarah could see her own glossy shadow in the driver’s side one as she approached. “Hello in there? Are you okay? Ms. Rose?” She rapped her knuckles on the glass, and the sound was weirdly echo-y. In a cartoon moment of imagination, she wondered if that was because she’d broken something, picturing the whole car collapsing into dust from her tapping on it. Something tasted bitter in her mouth. Maybe she’d bitten her tongue.

  There was a dull, flat roar from the car, and Sarah stumbled back, nearly tripping over her own feet before realizing it was the window. It only came down a few inches, and through it the cabin was completely dark; she couldn’t even see through to the other window. What she could see were a pair of eyes.

  They were dark, narrow like a cat’s, and rimmed with kohl, with hazel irises flecked with deeper black trapped in them like they were amber. The pupils were totally black, so black they actually caught the light like a glossy stone and reflected little pinpricks of white. The eyebrows were manicured, each eyelash a deft brushstroke, and the look in the eyes was clear and intent, so intent it seemed to push through to something behind Sarah, staring through her with such power that she felt an urge to turn around and see what it was.

  And there was blood. A scarlet strand of it, weaving from higher on the forehead down between the eyes, marking the profile of Nina Rose’s straight, distinguished nose. On her pale skin, it seemed to pick up the little light seeping past the cracked window, glaring like fire, triggering a wave of guilt inside Sarah.

  There was a pregnant pause; Sarah couldn’t think of what to say.

  “You’re about the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen,” Nina Rose said, her voice a dreamy whisper—centered, prepossessed, and totally out of tune with the wet, dreary evening, the shuddering car wreck, the blood still halving her face.

  Absurdly, Sarah felt herself blushing before she realized it was probably just the head trauma talking. “I’m going to get you out of there.”

  Sarah reached for the door but heard the echoing click of the car’s locks being engaged. She pulled on the handle and, no, Nina Rose wasn’t unlocking it. Sarah was locked out.

  “There’s no need for that.” The voice had risen to a slight, breathy timbre that seemed more fitting to the smoky eyes and their cool gaze. More focused now, the eyes scoured Sarah’s face. “I’m fine.”

  “I should still take a look at you. I’ve taken a first-aid course—I could do something about that cut.”

  “There is no need.” The voice was firm, definite—the woman behind the glass had the air of someone who decided things that stayed decided.

  Frustration swarmed inside Sarah. She looked down, spotted a decent-sized rock at her feet, and picked it up. There were worms underneath. Eww. “You might have a concussion, a spine injury, so either I can break the window, or you can let me in.”

  The eyes narrowed. Then, quite counterintuitively, there came a rich, deep laugh. It seemed totally incongruous to the first impression she’d just gotten, an unlearned sound like that a broken to
y would make, and Sarah almost thought the woman was going into hysterics before it abruptly ended.

  Sarah supposed she cut quite a figure, standing there in a Katy Perry concert T-shirt, leggings as pants, with her hair mussed up by the crash, and holding a muddy rock as if it was a lethal weapon. It wasn’t as if she would’ve actually done it. She just needed to be sure no one was bleeding out or going into shock or—anything. But then she heard the sirens, turned and spotted the red lights coming like watercolors mixing in with the mist, and dropped the stone.

  Tyrese must have managed to call 911 after all. And they’d had someone in the area. The benefits of living somewhere where nothing ever happened.

  >~~~<

  Eileen showed up right on the heels of the ambulance and proceeded to have a full-blown freak-out. All Sarah wanted to do was get a look at Ms. Rose, right across the road, hidden in a swirl of EMTs, but no, she had to get a lecture. Really, a double lecture, because Tyrese’s grandfather showed up too and had it out with him. More of a teeth-gritted scolding than Eileen’s audio offensive, but equally effective. Both of them kept their defenses half-hearted, hoping they could play dead and convince the ’rents to pass up an easy kill.

  Then, to Sarah’s horror, Eileen went to talk to Nina.

  Sarah tried to follow her, talk her out of it, but Eileen gave her a loaded finger point and generally insinuated that the Warsaw Pact would be kaput if she didn’t stay right where she was. So Sarah was left watching and listening to Tyrese’s continued dressing-down, as Eileen went to apologize on her behalf.

  When Eileen came back a few minutes later, Sarah winced inwardly. This must’ve been what criminals felt when they saw the Bat-Signal. “Well, she appreciates your help—”

  “Oh, she does, does she?”

  “Yes, well, she isn’t your mother, and she isn’t wondering why you were going so fast that you nearly ran into a car wreck instead of being able to stop in time,” Eileen enunciated. “Although I suppose I should just be grateful you’re still alive.”