Just then, the thin guy in the hoodie, his face obscured by a balaclava, rose up from the ground like smoke on the driver’s side. His face was separated from mine by an eighth of an inch of glass, and I could see his breath and the level look in his pale blue eyes. Where had he come from? Was he the one running behind me? Was he under the car? I tried to scream, but my voice was as balky as the ignition. Then I reached into my pocket and found the whistle Jep put there and blew on it like all the sons of Aaron at Jericho. A car horn stuttered and then blared. But the hoodie figure didn’t take off running. Horribly, he slid back down out of my sight and, when I glanced in the rearview mirror, he was nowhere to be seen. Did he drop down a manhole? Crawl into a yard behind one of the rows of picket fence, no more than two feet tall?
Suddenly, I was able to turn the key. My car roared to life. And then another lock clicked over as well, this one in my brain.
I blew on the whistle again, a sustained blast, and was relieved when I heard the whoop of a police car and the scoop of blue lights as a single officer approached in one of the little sport utilities they drive now. He made a motion for me to roll down the window, and I did, but just a couple of inches.
“You’re the one with the whistle?” the man said. I nodded. “Can you step out of the vehicle, ma’am?”
“No,” I told him.
“I need you to step out of the vehicle, ma’am.”
“I’m afraid to,” I said. “If you’ll escort me to the parking lot of the B&B where I’m staying tonight, I’ll get out of the car. Someone was just following me, and he came right up to my car. And he could still be here somewhere.”
“Can I see your license and registration, please.”
I put down the whistle and gathered them and pushed them through the narrow opening in the window.
“Do you know Detective Sunday? Pete Sunday?” I said.
The police officer looked up. He nodded. “I’m here in town for an appointment with him tomorrow. I’m here to get some documents…about a murder.”
“A murder.”
I gave him the short version of the story, but not my married name, and thus not Stefan’s last name. I didn’t want to see that particular lock click into place. He left and after an interminable time in his squad car, the officer came back and agreed to follow me to the bed-and-breakfast, which was called Connell’s Glory Be Inn. There, I stood awkwardly in the gravel parking lot while the cop shined his flashlight into my car and under my car as the innkeeper watched from the porch, occasionally lifting her hand to flutter a wave.
“Do you mind if I look in the trunk, ma’am?”
“Actually, I do.”
“Any particular reason?”
“I don’t have to have a reason. I know that much. All I did was blow a whistle because I was scared. I don’t have anything in the car except my overnight bag and my laptop.”
“No firearms?”
“Firearms?”
“You said you were here about a murder.”
“I’m looking into a murder. I’m not planning to commit one.” I sighed then. “Go ahead and look in the trunk if you want to.”
“Is everything okay?” the innkeeper called.
“It’s fine, Sherri!” the police officer called back. “Just a mix-up!” To me he said, “You don’t need to open the trunk, ma’am. You’re good.”
I was soon ensconced in a room where all the wall art and reading material and seemingly all the TV channels, too （although this was impossible） were concerned with fundamentalist Christianity. While I’m all for people’s beliefs, the strangeness of the inn bled into my paranoid fantasy. As I locked the door, Sherri, who owned the place with her husband, Wayne Connell, a farmer, asked if I wanted a glass of wine or some cheese and crackers. “Our own cucumbers with that, and our own dill!”
“That would be nice,” I said, agreeing to the cheese and cucumbers. But no wine, just water, I told her, and she said there was water and orange juice in the mini-fridge. I drew the shades and then the curtains, thanking god almighty, or whoever else might be listening, for letting me be here under this soft quilt in this warm room.
Jep’s phone call wakened me. To my surprise, I’d slept all night.
“Are you okay?” he asked. “I tried to call you a few times last night.” As I swam up from sleep, I recalled the sound of the phone boring into my consciousness several times, and ignoring it.