She opened her mouth to object but seemed to think better of it. She just nodded.
Hank walked back to the plow, climbed up into the cab, and pulled away. In his side mirror he could see her standing there, small against the snowbank, her phone still glowing in her hand. He rounded the gentle bend to his driveway, pulled in, and parked. When he got out of the truck he looked back down the road. He could just make out the shape of the Equinox and what he thought was the woman still beside it, though at this distance and in this light it was hard to be certain.
He went inside.
Trisha was in the kitchen, not on the couch, which meant she'd heard the plow pull in and was already heating something up for him. She turned when the door opened and he stamped the snow off his boots on the mat.
"There's a girl down the road," he said. "Car's in the snowbank near the curve. She won't come up to the house.Call the sheriff's office, would you? Tell them there's been an accident."
Trisha reached for the landline on the counter. "Is she hurt?"
"Says she isn't. But she shouldn't be out there."
He peeled off his coat and hung it on the hook by the door while Trisha made the call. He could hear her giving the details, the location, the description of the car. He opened the fridge and pulled out a beer and stood at the kitchen window, looking out toward the road. He couldn't see much from this angle. Just the trees and the snow and the distant flicker of the plow's amber lights, which he'd left running.
It was less than ten minutes later when headlights swept across the kitchen window and tires crunched on the gravel drive. Hank set down his beer and went to the front door. A county sheriff's cruiser was pulling in behind the plow. The door opened and Ray Sutherland stepped out, adjusting his hat against the cold. Hank had known Ray for years. Everybody in this part of the county knew Ray.
"Ray. What are you doing here?"
"I was closest so I responded. We do that from time to time."
Hank nodded.
“Did you say, the driver was by the curve?" Ray asked, already looking past Hank toward the road.
"Red Equinox. She's right beside it. Young girl, early twenties."
Ray looked down the road. Then he looked back at Hank.
"She's not there," he said.
Hank stepped off the porch and looked for himself. The plow's amber lights were still cycling, throwing a slow pulse of orange across the snow, and in that light he could see the Equinox still sitting at its awkward angle against the bank. But the space beside it where the young woman had been standing was empty.
"That's not possible," Hank said. "I was in the house ten minutes. Maybe less."
Ray was already walking back to his cruiser. "Stay here."
Hank watched him drive down to the Equinox and get out. Ray walked around the car, checked inside, looked up and down the road. He crouched near the snowbank and studied something on the ground. Then he got back in the cruiser and sat there for a long time with the dome light on, talking into his radio.
Hank stood on his porch in the cold, his beer going warm on the kitchen counter behind him, and waited for someone to tell him what had happened to the girl on the road.
No one ever did.
2
Present day
"So I'm sitting there, right, and she orders a second bottle of wine. A second bottle. For herself. I haven't even finished my first glass." McKenzie pushed open the driver's side door and stepped out into the rain, pulling up the collar of his jacket. "And then she starts telling me about her ex-husband's boat. In detail. The horsepower, the hull type, where he docks it in the summer. I'm thinking, am I on a date or am I getting a marine survey?"
Callie climbed out of the passenger side and reached back in for her coffee. The rain was light but steady, soaking through everything slowly, never letting up. The trailhead parking lot for Heaven Hill Trails was already crowded with three High Peaks police cruisers, an unmarked sedan, and a park ranger's truck. Radios crackled from the open windows of the nearest cruiser, dispatchers and patrol units talking over each other in clipped bursts.
"Did you see her again?" Callie asked, more out of politeness than interest. She sipped her coffee. It was lukewarm and bitter.
“Aye, I drove her home," McKenzie said. He locked the car and adjusted his tie under his jacket, a habit he had even when no one was watching. "Walked her to the door like a gentleman. She asked if I wanted to come in and see her cat."
"And?"
"Thorne, I have my limits."
