The crows followed her wherever she went, hopping from pew to pew, to chancel railing. Although their kind was usually raucous, these two neither cawed nor shrieked. Their persistent interest in her, combined with their silence, soon convinced her that there was something strange about them.
17
The moon beyond the window was low and golden, soon to pale as it strained higher. The sink faucet emitted a drop every minute or so, striking the faintest hollow note from the stainless-steel basin, as if counting down toward some mortal event.
If Joanna was lonely, as Auntie Kat insisted, the loneliness at the moment arose not from the lack of a man in her life, but it was the effect of the many photographs that had occupied her even as she had been eating dinner at the kitchen table. Her memory of Rustling Willows as an enchanted place had faded over the years. Indeed, the photos brought back to her such a strong sense of the magic of the property that it seemed she hadn’t merely forgotten this aspect of the ranch, but for whatever reason had consciously repressed it.
As she finished the last bite of the lasagna she’d made for dinner, she heard a car engine turn over and race as if a driver’s foot pumped the accelerator. Her dropped fork clattered onto her plate as she rose to her feet. The muffled but nevertheless loud roar vibrated through the walls. She faced the direction from which the sound emanated, but she hesitated to take a step toward whatever discovery awaited her.
All of the recent strangeness had begun more than three weeks earlier, when the Lincoln Continental had started of its own accord, in the locked garage. To the best of her knowledge, the vehicle had not malfunctioned again, until now.
The wall phone rang. Startled, Joanna glanced at it, sure that the woman who called her before dawn of this long day was on the line again. Let it go. After four rings, it would go to voice mail.
But it didn’t. The phone continued ringing, ringing, and the engine snarled rhythmically in the garage, as though a power beyond Joanna’s comprehension was intent on bullying her into a response.
She went to the phone. The readout provided no caller ID.
As Joanna stared at the handset and the strident ringing insisted on her attention, the roar of the car escalated until a crazy but compelling supernatural scenario fired her imagination: the parking brake failing, the transmission slipping from park to drive, the house shuddering as the demonically possessed vehicle crashed through the garage and into the kitchen, crushing her to death against the refrigerator.
When she snatched the handset from its cradle and put an end to the ringing, the Lincoln in the garage stopped racing, and idled. The vaguely familiar but unidentifiable woman’s voice spoke, as before, without emotion, in an eerily calm fashion that didn’t match her words. “Jojo, I am spiraling into Bedlam. The big dark sky. The terrible big dark sky. Only you can help me.”
“Who is this?” Joanna demanded.
“Come now. Come quickly. Will you please?”
Joanna hung up and turned away from the phone, which at once resumed ringing. When she ventured into the adjacent laundry room, the engine began to race again, and she realized it was the Aviator this time, rather than the Continental.
She took the electronic key from the pegboard and opened the door. Exhaust fumes billowed in from the garage. The headlights of the big SUV blazed. The vehicle rocked slightly on its tires, like a restrained bull eager to rampage.
Although this eruption of weirdness unsettled her, she hadn’t felt in danger until now. She hesitated on the threshold. Retreat would be no reason for embarrassment.
She had nothing to prove.
Or do I?
If her forgetfulness wasn’t simply time erasing details as time did, if she had diligently washed the color from all recollections of Rustling Willows and hung the faded memories deep in the back of her mind, then among them might wait to be discovered a disturbing truth that caused her to undertake that vigorous laundering of the past.
She switched on the overhead lights in the garage and crossed the threshold and went around the Continental to the port side of the Aviator. When she opened the door, the SUV’s engine stopped racing and once more fell to idling.
Sensing a presence, she surveyed the garage. “Who’s there? What do you want?” But no one answered; no one appeared.
She got into the driver’s seat and pulled the door shut and looked at the map on the computer screen and saw the orange square bearing the word START. As had been the case weeks earlier, when this first happened, the female voice of the navigation system told her to obey all traffic laws and follow instructions to her destination, even though Joanna did not touch the START prompt.