The Second Mouse - Archer Mayor [98]
He checked what he’d seen in the rearview mirror by swinging his head around. “We gotta get out of here.”
“Ellis, maybe not. We haven’t done anything.”
“You haven’t. I’m an accessory to murder, and they probably think I’m a terrorist, too.”
He swung the bike around in a tight circle, putting their backs to the roadblock and facing the single approaching car.
“Hang on.”
He gunned the throttle, and she felt the bike heave forward beneath her, its rear wheel squealing. Ahead of them, the car fishtailed slightly and positioned itself so that it could move forward or backward, depending on how the Harley tried to cut around it.
Nancy could feel Ellis’s body tense.
“Okay, here we go,” he shouted back at her, and launched up a driveway to their right, marked “Southern Vermont College.” Behind them, sirens began to wail.
Southern Vermont College occupied the once remote five-hundred-acre Everett estate, carved into the side of Mount Anthony. Neither Ellis nor Nancy knew anything about the place—or more important, whether there was another way off the campus.
They were aimed at a huge, pale hangar-size building up the hill and slightly to their right, opposite what looked like an apartment complex. Ahead and higher still, the steep drive continued toward something huge with multiple pointed red roofs. Ellis hung left at the complex, not wanting to go any farther up and hoping to double back somehow onto Monument Avenue. The sirens were closing in. Nancy glanced quickly over her shoulder and saw that the previously nondescript cars were now sparkling with hidden blue strobe lights.
Traversing the hillside on what turned out to be a parking lot, Ellis poured on the speed, heading around a slight curve in front of the apartments, to discover at the far end that a police car was closing in from a feeder road below and to the left. Not only that, but a large pond had appeared on the right, just past the apartments, and the parking lot petered out to a narrow drive.
Ellis took off across country at a slight angle, roughly parallel to the pond—terrain to which the Harley was poorly suited.
Nancy screamed as they hit the first series of dips and humps.
“You okay?” Ellis yelled back at her.
“Yeah,” she answered before reclenching her teeth. She felt as if she were walking on a tightrope—so precariously perched, she didn’t dare to look down, didn’t dare even to think.
Somehow or other, in defiance of gravity and common sense, Ellis reached the upper end of the same feeder road the police car was still traveling. He hit the smooth surface with an explosion of power, causing Nancy to almost lose her grip on him, and aimed, engine screaming, for the school’s showcase centerpiece, Edward Everett’s eccentric, Norman castle-like mansion, built in 1914. Beyond that, however, all Nancy could see were the trees clotting the rest of Mount Anthony. It looked as though they were heading into the top end of a box.
The road ended at the narrow end of the mansion’s enormous rectangular parking lot, which was located to the building’s south side so as not to interfere with its view down the mountain, to the east.
Ellis, in a last desperate attempt to find a way back into the valley and Bennington beyond, shot off toward the mansion, hoping there might be a road beyond it. Nancy watched the fairy tale structure, red-roofed, ornate, absurdly otherworldly, grow in size before them as Ellis aimed for the narrow alleyway to its rear.
It wasn’t to be. There was no road. It was a dead end. Again Ellis slammed on the brakes, kicked the bike into a skid, and swung the large machine around to face the direction he’d just traveled from.
For the few seconds they had left, they watched four cars abreast, all with blue lights firing like flashbulbs, bearing down on them.
“Down the hill,” she shouted, pointing at the steep grassy slope back down toward the main driveway, in effect suggesting closing the circle they’d begun by entering the estate.
But Ellis shook his head, patting the Harley