5. Highway to Hell
Highway to Hell
Charlotte
March 1995
“ T hat was the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen. You should call the cops.” Rochelle shudders in the driver’s seat of my car. Today was Bronnie’s first trip to the doctor after coming home from the hospital. I’m not cleared to drive yet, so Rochelle offered a ride. We left her car at my parents’ place and took my Ford Escort, rather than go through the hassle of swapping car seats.
“And say what? Officer, every time anyone in my family goes out into public, sooner or later, Jeremy Polford looks at us weird?”
“It’s stalking.”
I shake my head. “How do you even prove that? It’s always in normal places, like back at the gas station. He could say it was a coincidence.”
She lifts her eyebrows. “It’s not an accident that he happened to be parked in the same medical plaza as us, then left at the same time as us, and pulled in for gas when we did. Come on.”
My skin crawls, and I twist in my seat to look out the back window. “We did lose him, right?”
“He got stuck at the light before we left town. I wish Steve’s boss had left it alone. He made everything worse. Polford used to ignore you.”
“I mean, Mr. McRae's heart was in the right place.” She isn’t wrong, though.
Rochelle takes a deep breath. “Okay. What do you say we stop at my place for lunch before I take you home? You can feed the baby there.”
“Good idea. My boobs are ready to explode.”
She shoots me an alarmed glance. “Is that a thing?”
“Who knows? People warned me about lack of sleep. Nobody told me I’d have to wear an adult diaper to deal with blood clots from hell or that I’d cry as much as the baby does either.”
Rochelle gives me a sympathetic smile and pulls onto the dirt road heading for her little house. Her warm brown eyes and long dark curls are beautiful, but it’s that smile that makes her stunning. “I’m telling Dusty all of this the next time he starts with the ‘we’d make beautiful babies’ thing.”
“Maybe wait to ask me if motherhood is sunshine and roses until after they take the stitches out,” I say.
She cringes. “You know what? I’m good playing the cool aunt.” She pulls into her driveway and puts the car in Park. “You two stay here until I put Brutus in my bedroom. I don’t want him acting like a goober with the baby. Be right back.”
Her door clunks closed as she leaves to put her German Shepherd behind a closed door, and I lean my head back. Two minutes with my eyes closed sounds like heaven.
Less than one minute passes before Bronnie makes a snuffly sound from the backseat.
I open one eye and stop breathing.
No luck. Bronnie screams her pitiful wail, and my milk lets down in a burning tingle. I grab her pacifier and turn. “You’re okay, baby girl. Just another minute.”
In my periphery, I see a sickeningly familiar champagne-colored sedan pull into Rochelle’s driveway, trapping us.
My heart pounds in my chest, adrenaline racing through me. I drop the pacifier into the baby seat and reach for my door handle.
Jeremy Polford steps out onto the gravel drive and heads straight for me, blond hair flapping in the March wind. For a hot second, I can’t process what’s happening. I sit there like a bump on a log. Then I see it. A handgun in his fist. No no no.
I shove open my door and barrel straight for him to put my body between him and the baby. “What the hell is your problem? Put that thing away.”
He keeps coming, and I spread my arms protectively. “Stop. Not another fucking step.”
He points his gun at me. “Five years ago, a stupid little girl tried to ruin my life. It didn’t work then, and it won’t work now.”
“You think killing me will help? They’ll know it was you.”
“They’ll call it a murder/suicide. You’re depressed and crazy. It’ll be you, your friend, and the kid. All of you stupid whores at the same time.”
Never . “You preach to people on Sunday about forgiveness, and—”
“If people turn against me, they turn against their faith. Coming after me is stealing people from God. Do you not understand that?” Red-faced, he spits the words. A vein pulses in his temple. So much rage.
In my periphery, Rochelle creeps toward him. If I look at her, he’ll know she’s there. I want her to run, but, God, I need her to stay. “It wasn’t me. I didn’t do it.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“I made a mistake. I didn’t realize. I’ll do anything you want,” I say desperately.
His lip curls in disgust. “Don’t play games. I know you hired a private investigator . They think they’re pulling off some sting with law enforcement.” He taps his temple. “I’m too smart to fall for that.”
Rochelle is nearly close enough to reach him, a garden shovel lifted over her head. A piece of loose gravel skids out from beneath her foot and Polford turns his head toward the sound.
I slap the hand holding the gun as hard as I can, batting it away just as Rochelle slams the shovel down onto his head with a clang of metal and the sick thunk of a watermelon dropped on concrete.
Polford hits the driveway like a felled tree.
I lift my hand to my throat, freezing wind stinging my cheeks, and try to form words. Face bloodless, Rochelle stands as unmoving as a statue, still gripping her shovel like it’s a baseball bat.
Bronnie continues to scream inside the car.
“I think I’m going to puke,” Rochelle says.
“Kick his gun out of the way. Before he wakes up.”
Her head jerks in a rough shake. “I don’t think he’s waking up.”
My gaze travels from his brown loafers, up his khaki pants, to his gray coat, then to his face. Hands at my temples, I back into the car.
The man has a perfect, bloody, shovel-shaped dent in his cranium.
“Oh, God. I think he’s dead,” I say.
Rochelle lifts her left hand. “Was it the brains splattered on my driveway that clued you in?” She whispers even though there’s no one around here for miles.
“You had to do it. He was going to kill us,” I say.
“I know. We have to call the police.”
She steps toward the house, and I lurch for her. “Stop.”
Rochelle’s lower lip trembles.
“Don’t cry. Bronnie’s already crying. If you start, then I’ll join you, and you’re the one who always says we can ’ t think when we ’ re crying ,” I say.
Her face crumples. “We can’t call the cops, can we? I heard him. He said he was framing you for a murder/suicide. That gun isn’t going to be registered to him.”
“Neither of us has a mark on us. The last time he came after me, I had his blood under my fingernails and bruises all over me. The sheriff said there was no way to prove I wasn’t the one who attacked him first.”
“Everyone knows we hated him. They’re going to say we lured him out here and killed him,” she says.
I crouch carefully beside him, pain spearing through me from my torn stitches, and attempt to locate a pulse.
His eyelids drift open.
Rochelle screams.
I scream.
Lightning fast, I grab the shovel from her hands and smack him in the head again. This time, his eyes stay open.
“His head is bashed in. What did you think he was going to do to us with half a brain?” she whisper-screams.
“I don’t know. I panicked!”
I stand and blow out a hard breath. “Nobody knows he’s here. He wouldn’t have told anyone he was on his way to follow me around and frame me for murder.”
She nods. “This is good.”
Nothing is good right now.
“No one can see us from the road. We take care of it ourselves. We make him disappear,” I say.
“Maybe you could call that lawyer,” she says.
“Even if he believes us, which is a huge ‘if’, what’s he going to do? He’ll tell us to turn ourselves in, and we’ll end up convicted. This looks like we murdered him. I did murder him.”
“That could have been his eyes popping open like dead people’s eyes do. Or if not, then he was probably going to die from his previous injury already, which was definitely self defense.”
“You’re right. That’s how we’re thinking of it from here on out.”
“What do we do with him?” she wails.
“We have to think,” I say.
“What about feeding him to the pigs? Pigs could work,” she says, her voice too fast and too high.
“It would be lovely to have a whole farm full of pigs, but we have two, and I don’t trust the ones we have to eat him in a timely fashion , Rochelle.” My tone rides the edge of hysteria. “Mabel’s been off for the last two days. Dad said the vet was coming to check on her this afternoon.”
Rochelle moans. “How do we get rid of his body? What do we do with his car?”
I nudge the corpse with the tip of my sneaker and swallow. “We’ll work out a plan.”
“We could put him in his car and push him over a ravine into the river.”
“That’ll work for his vehicle. But if they find it, and he’s in it, that shovel-shaped dent will look suspicious.” The longer we stand here with his body cooling, the more urgency floods through me. We have to do something now.
“Bury him in the woods?” she asks.
“It’s the first place they’d take cadaver dogs, and the ground is frozen solid.” I pace and ignore the pain.
I open the door to the backseat and offer Bronnie her pacifier. She screams harder in response.
“I know,” I soothe. “Mommy will feed you in a couple minutes. I’m so sorry, baby.”
“I’m not trying to be dramatic, but we have to triage. Dusty will be home in fifteen minutes,” Rochelle says.
I ease out of the backseat, then freeze when I look at her. “That’s it. The community theater building.”
Rochelle squeaks and shakes her head.
“It’s perfect.” I count off the ways on my fingertips. “It has a dirt floor basement. There are heaters and heat guns there to thaw the ground if it’s partially frozen. It has the garage bay doors to the scene shop, so we can drive the car straight inside, close it behind us, and we won’t have to take his body out in the open. It’s been there for forty years. It’ll be there for another century. Plus, there is zero budget for renovations. Nobody will touch it. If someone does find him from construction in fifty years, no one will know who the skeleton is for sure. The ghost-in-the-theater rumor has existed since at least the seventies.”
“I can’t lift him into the car or drag him down those stairs myself.”
“I can help. I’m like the Hulk. Fueled by adrenaline. If I have to, I’ll take one of my pain pills.”
“Your stitches—“
They’re already torn. “I’ll tell my OB I had an accident on the farm.”
“How do we get into the theater?” she asks.
“I have a key for working on costumes at odd hours. The building will be empty right now. The next show doesn’t audition until the middle of April.”
She blows out a controlled breath. “It could work.”
It better. “Do you have a plastic tarp and some bungee cords? We’ll wrap him up and stuff him in the trunk. I’ll drive my car. You put a ski mask on and drive his. There’s a place less than a mile from here where we can put it in neutral and push it down the ravine and into the river. After that, we go to the theater. The scene shop doors are in the back. No one will even know we’re there.”
“Okay, yes. Okay.”
I pop the trunk. The kitty litter and shovel I keep there for when the car gets stuck in the snow are in the way, so I move them to the driveway while Rochelle races to her garage.
She returns two minutes later with a blue tarp and a handful of bungee cords. “Dusty is going to bitch about all this going missing. I’ll have to come up with some reason they’re gone.”
“One crisis at a time. Lay it out in the trunk.”
She does.
“I’ll take his shoulders, you take his feet. We pick him up on ‘three’ and stuff him in there. Then we wrap the tarp around him,” I say.
Her eyebrows lift in the center. “Thank you for taking the gross part.”
“All of Jeremy Polford is ‘the gross part,’ but right now, we think of him the way we would a package of raw hamburger. He’s nothing but meat. Don’t get squeamish.” The pep talk is as much for me as it is for her.
“I don’t like this. I don’t like this. I don’t like this,” Rochelle chants as she bends and wraps her arms around his knees. “Charlotte, we killed someone."
I blow out a breath, crouch to pick him up, and do my best to angle his head so he doesn’t contaminate me. “You saved my life. You saved my baby . No matter what else happens or how bad it gets, don’t you ever forget it.”