The Sisterhood - Michael Palmer [110]
She paused for a response, but David was staring out the window. “I thought you might be able to help me work things out,” she continued, “but that was foolish of me. You have every right to be angry. Every right to hate me. I’m going home.”
She turned and started the engine. David reached across and shut it off. “Wait, please. I … I’m sorry.” His speech was halting and thick. “I’ve been listening to my own bitterness and anger and trying to understand where they’re coming from. I thought it was my pain talking, or frustration, or even fear, but I’m starting to know better. I liked you—maybe more than I would allow myself to accept. That’s what’s doing it. I didn’t want to believe you were any part of this. Now you tell me that you were part of it, but you ask me to believe you didn’t know what your Sisterhood was capable of doing. Well, I want to believe that. I do. It’s just that …” He gave up fumbling for words. How much of what she had told him had actually sunk in? “Look,” he said finally, “I’m absolutely exhausted. I can’t seem to hold on to anything. Please. Let’s call a truce for the night and just get up to Rosetti’s place. We’ll see what things are like tomorrow. Okay?”
Christine sighed, then nodded. “Okay, truce.” Hesitantly, she extended her hand toward him. He clasped it—first in one, then both of his. The warmth in her touch only added to his confusion. Why did it have to be her? Why? The question floated through his thoughts like a mantra, over and over again, easing his eyes closed and smothering the turmoil within him. He heard the engine engage and felt the Mustang swing onto the roadway in the instant before he surrendered to exhaustion.
“David? … I’m sorry, but you have to wake up.” Christine pulled the blanket away from his face and waited as he pawed his eyes open. “Are you feeling better?”
“Only if there are degrees of deceased,” he mumbled. He pushed the blanket to his lap and peered through the windshield. They were parked on the shoulder of a narrow pitch-black road. “Where are we?”
“We’re in lost,” she said matter-of-factly.
Her humor, unexpected, nearly slipped past him. He glared at her for a moment, then stammered. “But … but we weren’t going there. I think we should take the next right, or at least the next left.”
“At least …” They both laughed.
“What time is it?”
“Two. A little after. We were right where the map said we were supposed to be, then all of a sudden, about fifteen or twenty minutes ago, the landmarks disappeared.” She handed him Joey’s drawing.
David opened his window and breathed deeply. The air, scrubbed by four days of rain, was cool and sweet with the scents of autumn. An almost invisible mist hung low over the roadway. Within a few breaths he could taste the salt captured in its droplets. Then he heard the sea, like the thrum of an endless train, up through the woods to their right. “Have we passed Gloucester?” he asked.
“Yes, just before I got lost. ”
He smiled. “You did fine, Christine. The ocean’s over there through the trees. It sounds as if we’re pretty high above it. I’ll bet a Devil Dog we’re near this place Joey marked as ‘cliffs.’ ”
“Bet a what?”
“A Devil Dog. You see I … never mind. I’ll explain tomorrow. Assuming I’m not too foggy to figure out what this map says, and if there are no other roads between us and the ocean, we should be close to the turnoff for Rocky Point.