Chapter Seventeen

Dead Man's Curve

The inside of Davis's truck smells like an oil pan mixed with vanilla air freshener. The ashtray is overflowing with orange soda bottle caps. The floorboard is cluttered with changes of clothes for one job or the other. It's a vintage 1954 Ford truck, something he and his father rescued from the Dillards' old barn and rebuilt.

"So you found Lorelei's car?" I ask, after he tells me he called around to every tow truck company in the neighboring counties.

"Nope." He cracks his window to spit out the gum he'd been chewing. "No one had a record of picking up a gold Firebird on or around the day Adaire died. So then I got to thinking...that shit is traceable. If I was covering up a hit-and-run, I'd pay them to not make note of the car's make and model. So I called back around, asked if they picked up any cars off Highway 19 around those dates."

"And then you found her car?" I'm needing him to get to the point.

"No. But I find it awfully curious that Gunther's American Motorsports got pissed I called back a second time. Before the man slammed down the phone and hung up on me, he told me not to worry about cars he may or may not have towed from an accident. Thing is, I never told him the car had been in an accident."

"Oh, damn," I say, and I lean back against the seat. Cars get towed for all kinds of reasons, so if he said accident... "He knows something, doesn't he?"

Davis slowly nods.

It takes us about an hour to get over to Mercer to Gunther's American Motorsports. During our ride, Davis informs me that, once he passes his final EMT exams, he's going to start looking for jobs down in Galveston where his grandmother lives.

"Big Mama isn't getting any younger and Mom wants to sell the junkyard and move down there to take care of her. Makes sense to sell. I'll be too busy working at the ambulance authority to run it. She never liked the business, anyway, just held on to it after Daddy died." He says all this, talking to the road ahead of him and as if none of it's any big deal. Like stepping out of my life is an easy thing to do and several hundred miles between us doesn't matter to him. "I figured, since most of Mom's family is down there, I should set up roots there myself."

I want to ask him, What about Charleston? Adaire and him had had plans to move there so she could attend that fancy design institute while he worked as an EMT for a big hospital. I guess their dreams were only her dreams.

Of course, I feel shameful the second I think it. Davis loved Adaire. Still loves her. I'm happy for him, I really am. He's following his dreams in the medical field. And Galveston has a big hospital he can work for. I imagine it would be too painful for him to live their dream without her. But the idea of leaving her behind is even worse.

"Mom got a really good offer from a junkyard company over in Alabama." Davis's voice brings me back to the truck cab with him. "I think she'll make enough to retire. But you know Mom." He turns to me, flashing a big smile. I try my best to mimic it. "She doesn't know how to sit still for five minutes. She'll have a part-time job somewhere, I'm sure."

I nod, happily agreeing, doing a good enough job faking my enthusiasm because Davis doesn't give me one of his pitying looks. Instead, he veers off the highway into Mercer and through the city streets until we finally find Gunther's.

The paint on the building looks faded, now more a muted mauve, probably from years spent in the overbearing sun. Seems fitting that a giant cartoon rat with a long beard and sunglasses drives a souped-up hot rod across the building—we ask the first employee we see, who points out the owner, Billy Gunther, who bears the same rodent-like front teeth and red scraggly beard. Except he looks like he's on the south end of retirement, hunched over and hobbling around.

"That's not who I talked to," Davis says. "The guy I spoke with had a young voice."

We decide to go inside and talk to the woman at the front desk, with spiky long nails, teased high hairdo, and skintight T-shirt, boobs spilling out of the V-neck.

Candy, or rather Candy Kane, as her name badge reads—damn, if her parents didn't do her wrong—manages the phones, cash register, and impatiently waits on customers all by her lonesome.

"What can I do for you, sugar?" She eyes up Davis like he's her next dessert. He does look handsome, even if it's just his Harvey's Boneyard mechanic uniform—the tough growling bulldog logo oversells it, though.

Davis leans heavily on the high counter, melting her with his gorgeous brown eyes. I bite my lips to keep from laughing.

"My boss called yesterday afternoon. He's looking for..." Davis fishes a scrap of paper from his pocket and squints to read it. "A 595-A front clamp, full wrap manufacture color code 194/200." He politely stuffs the paper back in his pocket and throws her a smoldering look.

Well, that gets her purring. It's Greek to me what he said, but apparently she speaks mechanic.

"That's pretty darn specific, but I'll see if we can order you one." She bobs a seductive eyebrow, then pecks away on a computer a few seconds. "Turbo? Or a sedan?"

"Turbo."

"Diamond black bezel or halogen headlight?"

"Diamond."

Peckety-peck a bit more.

Davis lets loose a long whistle when she quotes him a price. "That is way out of my client's budget." Davis stretches his neck as if he's trying to get a look-see at the parts cars parked out back. He leans in closer to her. "Come on, you don't have a little something in the back I can get for cheaper?"

She bites her lip and dashes a look over to the garage, then leans in conspiratorially.

"You didn't hear this from me..."

Hope flares inside me.

Davis zippers his lips dramatically.

"But Billy Jr. got called to pick up a brand-new Pontiac Firebird some spoiled silver spoon wrecked, hit a deer last month. Busted fender, heavy damage to the undercarriage."

I lightly gasp. Davis gives my hand a squeeze below the counter. His eyes stay focused on Candy. Intently listening. Holding on to that charming smile like he didn't miss a beat.

"We wasn't supposed to say nothing because she paid us to keep quiet so her daddy didn't find out." Candy exaggerates her eye roll. "But everything gets hauled to DeRoy's place," she whispers, then scribbles an address and a phone number down on the back of their business card. "Go see DeRoy, he'll take care of you."

"You're a lifesaver." Davis grips the top of her hand in thanks, and I'm sure she's about to pop.

My knee joints feel like Jell-O as we walk away.

"Well," Davis says from the side of his mouth, as we walk out and a younger rat version of Billy Gunther Sr. walks in. "Guess we're going to DeRoy's place."

"Shit, man." DeRoy's teeth are a brilliant white. Charm and swagger ooze off his handsome face. "We've got junkers that pick up and drop off cars anywhere from Ohio down to Gulf Shores." He rolls a lone truck tire over to an existing pile of equally exhausted tires. "Everybody wants this part or the other. But if we're talking about a vehicle as new as you're saying..." He picks up a fresh tire to haul back over. "Then some individual might have bought it. Owners sign the titles over, not us. Find the title to that car, you'll have the VIN number. Then you might be able to track it down."

I brandish a big grin over to Davis with this bit of great news.

"That is, if it was done all legal-like," DeRoy adds, deflating our hope. Chances of that are definitely slim.

It's a quiet ride back, as neither of us want to talk about hunting down the car that killed something so precious.

We're almost home when Davis speaks up. "We're gonna get that VIN number," he says like a promise.

I tilt my palm back and forth in the sunlight and watch as the rays play on the blue glass.

"Wanda up at the courthouse owes me a favor for changing her car battery. I'll see if she knows anyone over at the motor vehicles office."

I simply nod.

"Hey." There's something about the gravity in his tone that implores me to look at him. "I want to show you something before I take you home."

"Yeah?" I say to him, pulling down the car's visor as the late-day sun tries to blind me. "Show me what?"

"Something that's been bugging me." He flicks on his blinker to turn left at the end of the road, and I tense up.

I've done pretty good these last few weeks avoiding Highway 19. Hell, I take the two-mile loop on Shaw's Chapel Road just to avoid it. I haven't driven on it since Wyatt and Aunt Violet dragged me out there to stick one of those white memorial crosses on the side of the road where Adaire died. Raelean said it's really pretty, like Easter in the middle of summer, with all those fake spring flowers you can buy from Walmart.

For me, it feels like they decorated a crime scene. I've got plenty of ways to honor Adaire, and I sure as hell don't want to memorialize where she was slain.

Aunt Violet also said it's a place she can go to feel close to Adaire. Like her ghost is stuck out there on the side of the road, cars whizzing by, all alone, just waiting for someone to remember she once existed. I want to tell Aunt Violet that Adaire is right here next to me, next to her, next to all of us. But that doesn't make her feel as good as a cemetery of plastic bouquets.

My body clenches up as we get closer. It's a quiet stretch of highway through the back woods of a small town, but this road is so much more. Dead Man's Curve it was named back in the '50s, when a teenager took the tight turn too fast and flipped his car and killed himself. Since then, lots of young kids over the decades have dared each other to drive fast around the curve for kicks. Sure, there have been a few car accidents here and there, but only two deaths. First that teenager and now Adaire.

"Why you doing this?" There's no hiding the tension in my voice.

"'Cause I need you to see something?"

"I don't need to see anything out here." My foot presses the imaginary brake on my side of the floorboard.

"It's fine, Weatherly. Trust me."

"Davis," I say, my tone tight as the straight part of the highway disappears into a sharp right farther ahead.

"Davis," I say a little more urgent as the front of his truck gobbles up the highway.

"We don't have to stay long, I swear. I just want you to see—"

"Davis! Stop!" The terror in my voice has him slamming on the brakes. We fishtail lightly as the road peeks around the corner. That artificial patch of vibrant color that marks her death sticks out like a sore thumb stuck in the middle of nature.

Crawling from the ditches and up the embankment are tufts and tufts of black ferns. A cancer suffocating the landscape. Their thick presence here only adds to the fear this stretch of road holds.

Davis eases the truck over to the side of the road in case someone comes along. He waits for me to calm myself; I didn't realize how heavy I was breathing until the silence of the truck highlighted it.

"I need you to come with me," he says, regarding me like a newborn fawn. "It's important," he adds when I hesitate to follow.

The black ferns, despite their ominous color and spiky fronds, are soft as the brush against my ankles. A thick carpet beneath my feet as we work our way closer to the memorial.

Davis squats down low to the ground and points to the road ahead, just before the plastic garden. "What do you see?"

It almost feels like a trick question. I shrug. "Fake flowers. The road."

He nods. "Okay. What do you not see?"

I regard the pavement again, still not getting his meaning. "I don't know."

"This is the scene of a car accident, what do you notsee?"

I remember the time Papaw and I were in a car accident, sort of. He had to slam on the brakes to keep from running over Mrs. Cole's young cocker spaniel, who had streaked across the road right in front of us. The sound of the squealing tires against the pavement were as loud as the dog's frightened yelp.

"Skid marks." I realize. Suddenly interested, I slowly move forward; all that anxiety about being here tries to rise up, but I push it down, as far as it will let me, because I need to understand what Davis is talking about.

He stands. "I know the ambulance picked her up here. But where are the skid marks?"

As I walk, I swing my foot back and forth, gazing over the weeds and ferns for glimpses of the ground underneath.

"You know what else I don't see?" I say, after making a few laps over the area. "I don't see pieces of her bicycle. Not a wheel spoke. Or a chip of a broken reflector." We spend a little time combing over the area, picking through the grass, looking for any evidence. We don't find anything more than broken beer bottles and fast-food trash.

Davis slowly nods, seeing the new conclusions I'm drawing. Things he hadn't considered.

"She wasn't hit here," I say. The realization sinking in. I walk farther down the road to where there aren't any trees and the landscape opens up to cotton fields. I stand in the center of the road and turn in a circle.

"We're at Three Way," I say, even though Davis already knows this section of the road leads three different directions. "Town of Black Fern is that way." I point down the curved road toward home. "Gas station where it forks toward Mercer City that way." I cast my arm a third of the way between north and south. "And what's that way?" I point toward the center of east and west, at the white peak of a home's roof hidden within the oak trees.

Davis speaks a whispered "Oh."

Sugar Hill Plantation. It hits me like a ton of bricks.

"But now the question is," Davis asks, "where does that side road lead?" He points to the field road the farmers use to maneuver their combines so they don't drive over the cotton. A smile slides on Davis's face. "Let's go see."

His truck bounces and shakes as he attempts to avoid the shallow mudholes and dodge the downed branches.

He and I are both surprised when, after not too long, the weedy dirt road turns into gravel, which soon after becomes pavement. The roof and shoulders of Sugar Hill Plantation are slowly revealed as we get closer.

Over the horizon, the tall pickets of a rusted green iron gate rise with a massive capital R in its center, lording over the dead. The historical Rutledge family cemetery. Gravestones here date back to the early 1800s. The land is filled with decaying jagged teeth in a carpet of green grass.

From the dilapidated condition of the fence, this entrance isn't maintained anymore, probably from lack of use. It opens with a gritted hiss and a howling yawn. I swipe the crumbly green flakes of paint off my hands.

I take off suddenly, needing to find something—anything—that will confirm the picture that's now forming in my mind.

Davis hurriedly tries to catch up as I rush down the road, looking for skid marks.

"Why was Adaire riding her bike that day? What was so important she couldn't wait until I returned her car?" I ask Davis, who's scanning the side of the road for any signs of evidence.

"Because she couldn't see Saturday clearly, it was too foggy," he says.

"Bingo." Now Davis is finally starting to see meaning in everything I've been telling him. "She discovered something. Something important. Something so urgent she had to address it right then and there. Enough to ride her bike for miles to get to it. Whatever it was, I think it was here." I halt so quickly Davis slams into me. Then he sees it, too.

Parallel lines of slanted S tire marks. Scattered within the dried crabgrass, chips of broken bike reflector. I hold up an orange piece to show Davis.

"Damn, Weatherly." That's all he can manage under the weight of what we've just discovered.

"Yeah," I say. This is big, and we both know it. But I still don't understand.

What where you doing out here?I silently ask Adaire, scanning the cemetery as if a giant lighted arrow will appear and point the way.

"We better go," Davis says quietly and tips his head toward the gardener pruning the roses out back.

We're a good piece down the road when Davis says he will try to talk to Wanda up at the courthouse and see if she can't find a car title or a vehicle registration for Lorelei and get a VIN number to track her car and find out where it ended up.

I pull the blue bottle stopper out of my pocket and turn it over in my palm a few times. A glimmer of light from the fading sunlight flickers through it.

A recipe to see.

For the life of me, I can't figure out what Gabby was referring to that could help me see what Adaire saw.

"Ha!" I say, realizing the recipe, or many recipes, are right in front of my face every day when I do the dishes at our kitchen sink. Right there in that narrow window is our family's magical recipe box.

"Drop me off at Raelean's instead."

"Are you sure? Because mom wouldn't mind you staying with us a few days until things cool off."

"Tell your mama I appreciate her. But I need to see about something first."