One deep breath in and out and she put her foot on the brake and shifted the car into gear. As the car began to slowly crawl forward, she still questioned her sanity for doing this. This wasn’t her fight. She knew this. Yet if she could stop Karl from crushing someone else’s spirit, as a survivor of his particular brand of mayhem, she had to do this.
Resolute in her decision, no matter how messy it seemed, she continued on her journey, using the soothing sounds of old-schoolR&B to calm her nerves and empty her mind. She was four miles from the Delaware Water Gap Toll Bridge when the evening sky with its scant remnants of light turned to a murky gray-black. She’d only made it a few hundred feet more before the heavens poured.
“Dammit.” She turned the music down and focused more on the dark road while visibility eluded her. “I don’t know who thought it was a good idea to build curvy, mountainous roads with damn near no lights and guardrails. Who decided safety was a luxury feature?”
The rain poured down so hard, motorists turned on their hazard lights to help prevent collision. The more the rain fell, the slower traffic crawled until she was sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic in the middle of the bridge during what looked like a monsoon.
She pressed the speaker button on her steering wheel and directed Siri to dial Michael Park. While she waited for the call to connect, she thought back to all her pre-trip prep. She’d looked at the forecast before she left, and it called for light rain close to midnight. Since she’d planned to arrive somewhere between eight and nine, she should’ve been fine. The joke was obviously on her because this definitely was not fine.
A glance at the dashboard monitor revealed an ominous spinning wheel that made the hair on the back of her neck stand and her heart pound with anticipation. She grabbed her phone from the cupholder and looked to see not a single bar on her cellphone.
“You’ve got to be kidding me. Have I been out of cell range since I got on I-80? This is like a horror film setup.”
No cell service, stuck in the middle of a highway that looked to be slowly leaning toward flooding conditions, she was either the unluckiest person in the world or Fate was having a big laugh at her expense.
“Maybe this is a sign I’m not supposed to go to Mayberry. I know I’m only two exits away, but perhaps the universe is telling me to take my ass home and wash my hands of this whole matter.”
She’d nearly resolved to do just that when she saw the cars infront of her inch ahead. She took her foot off the brake and waited for her car to roll forward, but her engine made coughing sounds and the car refused to move.
“No, no, no! As much as I paid for you, you’d better not stall on me on this damn bridge.” Her reprimand earned her a loud wheezing sound that panicked more than angered her. “Okay baby, mama’s sorry she yelled at you.” She stroked the dashboard nicely. “Please, we’re almost there, just two short exits and we’ll be at the inn. Please, be a good girl and do it for me.” She put the car in park and prayed as she turned the ignition off and tried to start it again. When she pushed the start/stop button again, the car gasped and wheezed, but thankfully the engine turned over and the car crawled forward.
Between the weather and the drag on her accelerator, what should’ve been a five-minute drive took twenty. By the time she pulled into a parking spot in the back of the inn, her nerves were shot, and she was desperately worried about what the rain was gonna do to her fresh silk press.
She opened her glove compartment to find a small handheld umbrella and a rain bonnet. “Thank goodness, at least one thing has gone right tonight.”
She adjusted her rearview mirror to make sure the rain bonnet protected every strand of her freshly straightened hair. Satisfied that Mother Nature wouldn’t be able to ruin her look, she grabbed the umbrella.
With her hair tied up and her thumb on the automatic release button of the umbrella, she stepped out of the car and made a mad dash for her trunk. With her weekender secured to her shoulder and her Jaguar’s security system engaged, she walked as quickly as her cute stiletto boots would allow and made her way into the reception area of the Main Street Inn.
Vanessa stood in the open foyer shaking off the excess water sliding down her face, arms, and hands. Even though she’d had an umbrella, with the lack of tall buildings to block some of the water,the rain came hard and heavy from all directions, including up from the ground.
Satisfied that she’d gotten as dry as she could get without an absorbent towel, she took a moment to look around. Being an inn in the Pocono mountains, she’d expected something rustic. And to some degree, it was. The carpeting was a mosaic of dark reds, beige, and different shades of brown. An enormous fireplace off to the right was made of bloodred exposed brick and the lounge chairs arranged around it were upholstered with deep red and brown fabric.
That area is definitely made for relaxing in the mountains.
With a slight shift of her vision to the right, she saw a large reception counter painted in a soft eggshell with a beautiful dark wood trim at the top of the counter. And even though the two areas were so starkly different, they seemed to form a happy balance of the old and the new in one space.
She gave the room one last glance, looking for signs of life anywhere her eyes could reach. When she didn’t see anyone else after a few more seconds passed, she headed toward the front desk.
“Well, this definitely isn’t the Ritz-Carlton,” she mumbled. “No way I’d make it an inch inside this place without waitstaff falling over themselves to accommodate me.”
She waited a second more until her impatient nature rose and she looked around until she noticed a bell on the counter.
“How quaint,” she huffed, before tapping the bell a few times in rapid succession. She raised her hand to tap it again, but fought the impulse to follow the action through. Vanessa was never that type of rich woman who thought the world should cater to her. Part of her rehabilitation after ending her marriage was simply to be more assertive. Lately, however, she was finding it hard to see the clear line between asserting control over her life and not being a jackass.
As she took a breath, an older woman with silver hair and deep ebony skin ambled to the counter and greeted her with a wide smile.“Oh, look at you, dear.” The woman’s warm voice broke through the perma-chill attempting to settle into her bones. “You’re soaked.”
“Yes,” Vanessa answered, her voice softer than she’d intended. “The weather is terrible out there. I just want to get upstairs into my room and get out of these wet clothes.”
The woman nodded slowly with compassion and what looked like sympathy shading her brown eyes.
“I’m Hannah,” the kind woman stated. “And I wish I could help, but we’re full up. And since the storm hit out of nowhere, I’m sure every available room will be packed with travelers needing a place to rest for the night. When storms come like this, driving in these mountains is impossible.”
“No worries.” Vanessa smiled. “I made a reservation earlier in the week. I registered under the name V. Jared.”
The innkeeper pulled out a long ledger book that gave Vanessa flashbacks to her grandmother’s bookkeeping days for the family business. Vanessa was no spring chicken, but even in her accounting classes way back in the day, these types of books were obsolete.
The older woman turned a few pages until she’d finally found the one she was looking for and scanned each line with her pointer finger.
