Chapter 9

Chapter Nine: Ridge Road

On the morning of the retreat, it was raining.

It was not the dramatic kind of rain, not the thunderous, cinematic downpour that announces disaster in films. It was a thin, gray, persistent drizzle, the sort that settles on the world like a damp cloth and makes everything look slightly unfinished. Lena stood at the glass wall of the apartment at six-forty with her small suitcase beside her and watched it streak down twenty-two stories of window, and she thought, quite calmly, that she had never felt so awake.

She had slept. That was the odd part. After a week of broken nights on the sofa, she had gone under at ten the night before and woken without an alarm, clear-eyed and strange, as though something inside her had finally stopped bracing for impact and settled into waiting.

She had packed light. A sweater, jeans, a rain jacket. A toothbrush. The blue dress, because she had nothing else suitable for the Saturday dinner, and because it had become, quietly, a kind of talisman. And at the bottom of her bag, wrapped in a pair of socks, a small black object about the size of a matchbox.

Ruth had given it to her on Friday.

"Close the door," Ruth had said.

It had been past six, the floor mostly empty, the late sun slanting orange through the windows. Ruth had been standing beside Lena's desk with her coat already on, and she had looked, for the first time Lena could remember, uncertain.

Lena closed the door of the small supply room where they had ended up. "What is it?"

Ruth took something from her coat pocket and pressed it into Lena's palm. It was a digital recorder, old and scuffed, its gray plastic worn pale at the edges, with a tiny red button on the side.

"It was Harold's," she said. "My husband's. He used it for dictating letters, in the years before his hands went. It still works. I changed the batteries yesterday." She wrapped Lena's fingers around it. "It will record for nearly eighteen hours. It's very small. It picks up a room."

Lena stared down at it. "Ruth, I can't..."

"I'm not telling you to do anything. I'm not telling you anything at all." Ruth's voice was low and steady. "I'm only saying that you've been told three times in the last month that nobody believes you. And I thought, if I were in your shoes, I'd want something that doesn't need to be believed. Something that simply is."

"It might be illegal."

"It might." Ruth lifted one shoulder. "It might also be the most sensible thing a person could do. I'm an accountant, dear. I trust documents. A thing in black and white has a way of persuading people who've decided not to listen."

Lena closed her hand around the cool plastic. Her eyes were hot.

"Thank you," she said.

"Don't thank me. And don't tell me when you use it." Ruth buttoned her coat to the collar. "I'll be on the second coach. If anything happens, if you need anything, I will be forty minutes ahead of you and entirely at your disposal." A pause. "Be careful on that mountain road."

"You've seen the route?"

"Everyone's seen the route." Ruth's eyes were very grave. "Half the office is already complaining. Nobody wants to take it. They say it's a death trap in the wet. But it's the executive party's car, and Celeste put in a request, and..." She sighed. "Well. You know what happens to requests from Celeste."

The black car was waiting at the main entrance of the building at nine.

It was a long, polished sedan with tinted windows, its hood beaded with rain. A thickset man in a gray uniform stood beside it with an umbrella, and when Lena stepped out of the lobby with her suitcase, he came forward with a slow, courteous nod.

"Miss Hartwell? Tomas Reyes. I'll be your driver today."

He was perhaps fifty, with a weathered, kindly face and a gray-flecked mustache, and he took her suitcase with the gentle efficiency of a man who had loaded ten thousand bags. She liked him at once.

"It's a pleasure, Mr. Reyes."

"Tomas, please." He opened the rear door. "Mr. Cross and Miss Marlowe are already inside. They asked me to say they didn't want to keep you waiting in the wet."

Already inside. She heard it the way one hears a small stone drop.

She ducked into the car. It was warm, and smelled of leather and a faint, expensive perfume she knew by now with unsettling precision. Damian sat on the right of the back seat, laptop open on his knees. Beside him, in the center, one leg crossed over the other, sat Celeste, in a pale cream coat that made her look as though she'd been carved from candle wax.

"Lena!" Celeste turned with a radiant smile. "Come, sit. There's room."

There was not, exactly. The rear bench had been designed for two, and a third person would have to sit with her knees against the center console, but the passenger seat in front was empty, and Lena understood perfectly well that she was meant to take the seat in the back, on the left, pressed against the cold window, a foot away from either of them.

She took it.

"Good morning," she said.

"Morning." Damian did not look up from the screen.

The door closed. The car pulled away from the curb, and the building slid backward into the rain, and Lena felt her pulse beat once, hard, in her throat. In her jacket pocket, her hand closed around the small cool shape of the recorder.

She had pressed the red button in the elevator.

The first hour passed with remarkable smoothness.

They left the city. The skyscrapers fell away, then the suburbs, then the long gray ribbon of the highway opened out into farmland, flat and sodden and dotted with distant barns. Celeste kept up a gentle, tireless stream of conversation. She asked Damian about the Singapore figures. She asked Tomas about his daughters, and listened with real attention when he told her one of them was studying to be a nurse. She admired the weather, in a way that made the rain sound like a personal gift. She offered Lena a thermos of tea, and Lena, after a pause, took it, and sipped, and found it perfectly ordinary.

Damian worked. His laptop clicked quietly. Once or twice he muttered something to Celeste, and she answered in a low voice, and their heads bent together over the screen. Lena looked out at the rain and tried to feel nothing.

"You're quiet," Celeste said, at one point, turning with a little tilt of the head. "Are you feeling all right?"

"I'm fine."

"You do look pale. Would you like the heat up? Tomas, could we..."

"I'm fine," Lena said. "Thank you."

"I just worry." A soft, sweet smile. "I know this is hard for you."

Hard. The word arrived, as always, with its small invisible hook. Lena tilted her face toward the window and said nothing, and in her pocket, a tiny red light glowed in the dark.

At eleven, they stopped for gas, and Celeste went into the little roadside shop to buy coffee. Damian climbed out to stretch his legs. For a moment, Lena was alone in the car with Tomas, who sat with his hands resting on the steering wheel, gazing out at the rain.

"Tomas," she said quietly. "How well do you know Ridge Road?"

His eyes met hers in the mirror. They were steady and thoughtful.

"Fairly well, miss. I've driven it a dozen times. In summer."

"And in the rain?"

A silence. Then, carefully: "I'd avoid it in the rain. The road's old. The guardrail was never rebuilt after the flood. And there are places where the shoulder simply isn't there." He shifted in his seat. "I did mention it to Miss Marlowe, when she gave me the route. I said I'd prefer the highway. She told me Mr. Cross had asked for the scenic way."

"Did he?"

"I assumed so." His brow furrowed slightly. "I didn't like to question."

"Would you question it now?"

"I'd be glad to." He rubbed his mustache. "But Mr. Cross is the client."

The door opened. Damian ducked back inside, rain on his shoulders, and Tomas turned to face the windshield with practiced smoothness, and the moment closed over like water.

"Damian," Lena said, before she could think better of it.

"Mm."

"I was wondering whether we might take the highway the whole way. The weather's turned, and I've heard Ridge Road gets—"

"Lena."

"I'm only saying—"

"We discussed this." He did not look at her. "The route was approved. Celeste planned it carefully. It saves forty minutes, and we're meeting the Vance delegation at two tomorrow. I'm not rearranging the entire weekend because you've read a sign about wet roads."

"It isn't about the sign. Tomas says—"

"Mr. Reyes is a driver." He said it mildly, but it was a door closing. "I appreciate his caution. I'm sure he'll be careful."

"Of course, sir," said Tomas, without turning.

Lena sat back. She stared at the back of the headrest in front of her, and she felt, in her chest, a small cold fist of something she could not name. Not quite fear. A more reasonable thing. The awareness, simple and quiet, that she had done everything she could and it had not been enough.

The passenger door opened. Celeste slid in, shaking rain from her hair, carrying two cardboard cups.

"Mocha for Damian," she said. "And, Lena, I got you a latte. I hope that's all right. I remembered you take oat milk."

Lena looked at the cup in her outstretched hand.

She had never told Celeste that.

"Thank you," she said.

The turnoff appeared at twelve-forty.

It was nothing to look at. A narrow gap in the tree line, a green sign half eaten by moss, and then the highway fell away behind them, and the world narrowed to a single wet gray lane between walls of dripping pine. Tomas slowed the car. The tires hissed on the asphalt, and the trees closed in overhead, and the light, which had been thin and pearly on the open road, dimmed to a kind of underwater green.

"Here we go," Celeste said brightly. "It's beautiful, isn't it?"

Nobody answered.

The road began to climb. It climbed in long, lazy switchbacks, up the flank of a hill so steep that the pines on the right grew from a slope barely twenty feet below the road's edge and then, farther up, dropped away entirely. Lena glanced out of her window. She could see, between the trees, a long, bright gulf of air, and far below it, a silver thread that was the river.

There was no guardrail. There was a low line of mossy stones where one used to be, and in two or three places, nothing at all.

"Tomas," Damian said, looking up for the first time. "Perhaps a little slower."

"Yes, sir. I'm at twenty."

"Make it fifteen."

The rain thickened. The wipers swept faster. Tomas's hands, Lena noticed, had gone white on the wheel, and he leaned forward slightly, peering through the glass, with the stooped, careful posture of a man crossing ice.

She found that she was holding her breath.

In the front of her mind, a clear, small voice kept repeating the same words. This is a death trap. Half the office said so. Everyone knew it. And behind it, a second voice, colder, lower, speaking in a tone she was not sure she had ever heard before in her own head.

She chose this road.

She turned her head. Celeste was looking out of her own window with one hand pressed lightly against the glass, her expression soft and unbothered. She might have been looking at a garden. As if she felt Lena's gaze, she turned, and their eyes met, and she smiled, a small, intimate smile of pure, warm reassurance.

"Don't worry," she murmured. "We're almost through the worst of it."

Her voice was gentle. It was a voice meant to comfort a child.

And something in the quality of it, some tiny, imperceptible wrongness, made the fine hairs on Lena's arms rise. It was the voice of someone who already knew how the story ended.

"The worst of what?" Lena said.

Celeste's smile did not waver. "The curves."

The car rounded a bend. The trees fell back. Ahead of them, the road ran along a rock face on the left and a long, open drop on the right, and in the gray distance, a single pair of headlights appeared, wavering in the rain, swinging toward them around the far corner.

"Truck," Tomas said, in a low, even voice. "Big one. Coming down."

"Slow down," Damian said.

"I am, sir."

"There's room," said Celeste. "Isn't there? He'll pull over."

The headlights grew. They were very bright, and very high, and too close together to belong to any ordinary car. They filled the windshield with a hard white glare. Lena saw the dark, square shape behind them and the sheet of spray thrown up by its wheels, and she saw that it was not slowing.

"Tomas," she said.

"I see him, miss."

"He isn't stopping."

The truck's horn sounded, one long, ragged blast that rolled off the rock face and seemed to go on forever.

Tomas swore, softly, in another language, and pulled the wheel hard to the right.

End of Chapter Nine