Headlights(61)

I can’t move. I need to think.

“I…” I look around Whileago Manor.

“Hey—hey, look at me,” Hannah Lawrence says. I do, even as I only half know who she is and who I am. “Are they coming here?”

I try to make my brain work. I nod, somehow.

“Look,” she says after a second. “I don’t trust you. You could be doing all of this to mess with me, or … I don’t know. But I do know if they get here, I’m fucked, and I think you might be too. We need to go somewhere, get out of here.”

Whileago Manor and all the ghosts. My DNA. My hair.

How?

“Hey, help me,” she says. “We … I might have somewhere. For us to go. We’ll figure it out. Okay? Maybe … maybe we can figure it out together.”

That feeling of inevitability, of a great sweeping avalanche.

Hannah Lawrence, and me. The prime suspects.

Hannah Lawrence. And me.

Bad Feeling.

“Please,” she says.

Bad—

Her eyes lock on mine.

I’m so fucking screwed.





III

HIGHWAYMAN





1



In the John Denver Take Me Home movie, once Annie and John have called it quits, Annie becomes a therapist in Aspen. She meets with a patient, and during the session, the young woman tells Annie that she was preparing to kill herself when a song came on the radio. “Poems, Prayers and Promises.” It made her stop. Made her want to live. Made her realize that life is worth living. Just the one song, hearing it at the right moment.

Pete Noland killed himself. Josie told Jack about my past. The DNA on every single killer matches my own, and Daphne was the one who tested it, who told everyone. Hannah Lawrence, whose film roll makes her a suspect, is sitting beside me, and she brought the murder weapon to my house. The murder weapon that is now in the trunk of my car, the two of us speeding west on the highway. Hannah leans away, out the open window, her hand over her nose and the nose plug. Hannah Lawrence, who is the prime suspect—besides me.

“Leaving on a Jet Plane” plays on the car radio.

I-70 heading west is long and winding, twisting its way through the mountains, our headlights pushing into the dark ahead of us. Hannah leans as far from me as possible, her head out the window, gulping the frigid night air. It’s freezing in the car, but I don’t ask her to close it. She’s shaking, and I’m sure it’s not just from the cold.

I don’t look at her, don’t let myself look at her.

I glance over and look at her every fifteen minutes.

The orange glow of the dash, the occasional lampposts of the winding mountain road, against her nose, her cheek, her eyes, her throat. Shining through her hair.

And somehow … she smells like ponderosa pine. Just like she did in my dream. I don’t know how that’s possible. I don’t know how any of this is.

We drive in silence, save for when she tells me to stay on this road, that she’ll show me the exit. My heart pounding in my chest. Two heartbeats in my car. Hannah beside me.

And even though I’ve never been here, have never driven out this way, I realize where we’re going. Realize I should have known it all along. Again, I wonder if I’ve made the biggest mistake of my life getting in this car with her. If she did organize all of this, of course this was the only place left.

John Denver’s town. The city I thought my mom was taking me that night we were going to leave the Happy Inn. Where she might have been planning to.

Aspen.

And I don’t know what it is, but as we drive, a sense of strong déjà vu comes over me. I watch the mountains and the small towns roll by, and I think … I know this. But I can’t possibly. I’ve never been this way before.

And yet … it all looks so familiar.

We pull into Aspen just before sunrise.

We can’t see much yet, bruisy dark mountains against a blue-black sky, a small town down at the base of them, with its overnight lights on. The air feels cleaner up here, the elevation gain from Denver apparent. The cold air keeps me alert, and this new thinness to it wakes me up even more. Not that I need it.

Hannah tells me to take the turn for Red Mountain, and I catch sight of an old-timey drugstore on the corner, a red half-cursive CARL’S PHARMACY sign on the outside, a shadow lingering in front of it, following us as we drive past the entrance.

A smell, in my nose. That strange bitter chemical smell. The drugstore …

Something’s not right. Something …

Why does this all look so familiar?

Maybe the John Denver movie. I don’t know if they actually shot it here, but I watched it so many times, that could maybe explain it. Still, something doesn’t feel right. Correction: Nothing feels right. Everything is fucked. But something about this place.

I glance over at Hannah again. I swallow and turn my eyes back to the road.

We take a winding road up the mountain past enormous homes on wide lots, and pull up in the driveway of one of them near the top. A modern home that only looks like one story from the driveway that swings by the front doors, but a peek through the glass front doors reveals an enormous multistoried glass-and-wood modern house extending down the mountain.

Hannah jumps out of the car and inputs a code that opens the garage door, gestures for me to pull in. I do. Park. Step out into a garage full of vintage ski posters and high-end sporting equipment. My car now sits next to three vintage collectors’ cars—red Wagoneer, powder blue Bronco, yellow Aston Martin. It smells like Marianne and Noel’s garage, a particular combination of new-car leather, high-end wooden cabinet, garage-floor epoxy. I realize Hannah hasn’t come in.