The Current

by Tim Johnston

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

In the dead of winter, outside a small Minnesota town, state troopers pull two young women and their car from the icy Black Root River. One is found downriver, drowned, while the other is found at the scene — half-frozen but alive.

What happened was no accident, and news of the crime awakens the community's memories of another young woman who lost her life in the same river 10 years earlier and whose killer may still live among them.

Determined to find answers, the surviving young woman soon realizes she's connected to the earlier unsolved case by more than just a river, and the deeper she plunges into her own investigation, the closer she comes to dangerous truths and to the violence that simmers just below the surface of her hometown.

Grief, suspicion, the innocent, and the guilty — all stir to life in this cold Northern town where a young woman can come home but still not be safe.

Brilliantly plotted and unrelentingly propulsive, The Current is a beautifully realized story about the fragility of life, the power of the past, and the need, always, to fight back.

Release date: January 22, 2019

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 432

Sample

The two girls, young women, met for the first time the day they moved in together, first semester of that first year of college, third floor of Banks Hall, a north-facing room that overlooked green lawns and treetops and streams of students coming and going on the walkways below. Roommated by mysterious processes, perhaps a computer algorithm, perhaps a tired administrator plowing his way through a thousand folders, the girls tried at first to become friends, then tried simply to get along, and finally put in for reassignment, each without telling the other, and by the end of the winter holidays had both moved into new rooms with new roommates. If they saw each other on campus after that, they pretended they hadn’t; they looked away, they looked at the sky, they received phone alerts of highest importance. They seemed to have made a pact of mutual invisibility, and this pact might have gone on forever, all the way through college at least, if not for a literature class in the fall of their sophomore year.

The class—The Romantics, it was called, like the band—was crammed into a too-small classroom, a space not much bigger than those dorm rooms, and yet neither girl wanted to be the one to drop, but instead kept coming to class and taking her seat. Three weeks into the semester one of the girls, arriving late, had no choice but to sit next to the other, and from then on they made a point of it: sitting shoulder to shoulder, nearly, in the crowded classroom, eyes on the professor, notebooks open . . . a game of academic chicken that neither girl felt too great about, to be honest, but felt even less great about losing, and so on it went. Until, one day, one of the girls—the one named Caroline—turned to the other girl, whose name was Audrey, and asked to borrow a pen, setting off a backpack search of such intensity that the professor herself, prowling her narrow track of floor at the head of the class, halted, one eyebrow cocked, while the girl hunted, and dug, and at last fetched up from the very last place it could have been a plain blue Bic with bite marks on the cap. The pen passed from hand to hand, and in this simple way the girls started over. Their story reset itself, and they became friends.

On February 4 of that same school year, Caroline Price turns twenty, and two days later at the Common Grounds Café her friend Audrey Sutter is telling her that her father is sick, and she needs to get home and she doesn’t have a car, and the Visa her father gave her is maxed out on tuition, and so she’s wondering, what she wanted to ask is, could she possibly borrow $150 for bus fare, she can pay Caroline back when . . . well, as soon as she can? And Caroline Price, sipping black coffee, shudders at some inner picture—perhaps the interior of that bus: God-knows-how-many miles up to the Arctic to see your sick—your dying?—father and nothing to keep you company but the smell of diesel and the cold, droning miles and probably some mullet-headed yahoo with halitosis just waiting for you to take those headphones off, like you would ever take them off!

It’s not the Arctic, Audrey could remind her, it’s Minnesota, but to a Georgia girl like Caroline it might as well be. Even Memphis, less than a three-hour ride north from her hometown, is too much. An ice storm last week, a tree limb snapping the power line behind her apartment, and all weekend in Troy’s dorm room with its stink of boys, or in the library, or right here in the café, before the city got the power line repaired . . .

Audrey sitting meanwhile across the table, holding Caroline’s image in her wet blue eyes—those pale, Arctic eyes—waiting, until at last Caroline says, Sure, of course, what time does your bus leave, I’ll drive you to the station, and like that the storm lifts from Audrey’s face, and wiping the tears from her cheeks she says, like one who has just regained her senses after a blow to the head: “Caroline, you look so nice today. What’s going on?”

Because, as Caroline herself would be the first to admit, unless she’s off to see Troy on a Friday night, or unless she’s going out dancing with her volleyball girls, she tends to look like what she is: a sweats-and-sneakers kind of girl, a big, loose athlete, on her way to or from practice. But when she decides to look good? When she hits the shoes and skirts and makeup? It’s like she swooped down from some other world, a sudden alter-Caroline of extreme beauty and dazzle.

But it’s nine o’clock on a Tuesday morning and Caroline is on her way to class, so—what gives?

A good question, a fair question, but Caroline must fly—running late again, always running late, Audrey watching through the glass as her friend fast-walks toward campus in her short jacket and short skirt and her tights, leaning into a cold headwind that seems to push at her with actual purpose, as if to discourage her, stop her even, turn her back—Go back to your room, Caroline Price, go back to your bed, curl up under the heavy quilt the old women of home sewed just for you, no warmth like that in the world, not even a boy’s . . .

Caroline’s boot heels clock-clocking on the sidewalk, her long fingers stuffed as far as they’ll go into the fake pockets of her jacket, batting tears from her thickened lashes and asking herself too, perhaps, what’s going on. A meeting with a professor, that’s all. After class, if she has time, said the email. So, OK. Lose the Adidas and the hoodie for a change, but that’s it, effortwise.

It’s not anything sexual, this looking nice—she has a boyfriend, after all.

And the professor is old—like, forties-old.

But there are girls she knows who want that A so badly, who learned in middle school—hell, grammar school—how these things worked. The world. Power.

But that power is a false power, girl, says her memaw. With her dentures and her bent little body. That power will turn on you like a stray dog.

And the profs themselves, these older men, these wise and fatherly teachers; you could always tell who they had their eye on. And you watched it progress over the semester, the favored girl bringing it for a 9 a.m. class: the clothes, the hair, the earrings, the lashes.

But that’s not what this is. Caroline would wear a damn Snuggie to class if she felt like it, and she would earn her grade according to her performance, just as she’d earn a win on the volleyball court where there are no grades and no flirting, only muscle and sweat and the unambiguous counting of points.

As for the perfume . . . well, a girl wanted to smell nice when she looked nice. Just a touch, a fingerprint, on the neck. That was for you and not for anyone else. Certainly not for some forty-year-old man who wanted to see you after class, if you had time.

But it was the good stuff, Audrey knew, having caught its scent over the smell of coffee even before her friend sat down: the little French bottle Caroline bought on her trip to New York City last summer, and the scent of which Audrey now associates with Caroline almost as intensely as the potent green slime she’d rub into her legs before practice and before each game and sometimes, in those old dorm room days, before going to bed. And it’s this weird remix of scents—French perfume and overpowering muscle gel—that Audrey smells as she, too, leaves the café, stepping into that same cold wind but the wind pushing at her back as she moves in the opposite direction of Caroline—a wind not to stop her but to hurry her along home, the sooner to pack, the sooner to be ready when Caroline comes to get her, the sooner (though she knows this is not logical) to get home to her father, who of course has told her not to come, to stay in school, nothing to see here, says he, just a little touch of the inoperable cancer is all, nothing that won’t keep until you come home in the spring . . .

And with such thoughts fluttering within her it seems actually a piece of these thoughts, like an escaped fragment, when the air itself bursts into violence just above her head—a sudden flurry and a kind of shriek as a bird nearly crash-lands on her head, close enough to fan her with wingbeat, low enough to sweep something soft and alive along the part line of her hair; it’s the plush tail of a squirrel, she just sees, a juvenile, who rides like a pilot in the bird’s claws, this bird and rodent combo descending with flaps and cries to earth behind a low wall of hedges, a troubled landing that no one—she looks: students plodding head-down, locked into phones, ear-stoppered—no one but her has seen or heard.

And she steps around the hedges slowly, coming all the way around before she sees the bird—a hawk, sure enough—standing with its back to her, wings fanned out on the dirt like the wings of a broken craft, great riffling wings that become arms, crutches, here on earth, keeping the hawk upright atop the body of the squirrel; young, round-eyed squirrel, unsquirming in its cage of talons.

The hawk rotates its head halfway round, puts two black eyes on Audrey and opens its sharp beak soundlessly. Audrey standing there doing nothing. Saying nothing, just watching. A passive but rapt witness to this instance of wildness on a college campus. Predator and prey. The hawk watching her with those black eyes, that sharp beak, considering her—Audrey’s—intentions here, the pros and cons of waiting it out, until at last in a single high note the hawk says, You little bitch, and lifts the great wings and unhooks the talons and with one windy beat is aloft again, and with another is gone.

The young squirrel remains, wide-eyed, belly to the ground; in a state of rodent shock maybe. Or maybe it’s the dead-like stillness prey is said to adopt when all hope is lost, when it’s time simply to die. But then, suddenly, the squirrel leaps to its feet and flies into the hedges and there’s nothing where it had been, where the hawk had been, but a random patch of ground—and no one sees any of this but Audrey, and she will tell no one, not even Caroline; it’s her own personal event flown down from the sky—some kind of sign, surely, some kind of message: a last-second reprieve from death.

And so enlivened—so incited—by this vision, she takes the four wooden porchsteps of the little gray rental house in two bounds, then likewise flies up the staircase that leads to the two upstairs bedrooms and begins tossing things onto her bed like one making her own escape. Like one whose own reprieve has just been assured.

After class, as per his email, Caroline follows him down the hall and into his office and watches him close the door behind her but not all the way, no click of latch, just enough gap to keep it private but not too private in the cramped little room—“Have a seat, please.” Two old leather chairs from somebody’s yard sale. Books everywhere. Authors on the walls: old dead white men in offhand moments, as if he’d known these men himself, snapped the shots himself between cigars and whiskeys in the sepia past.

She sits, crossing her legs, and he takes the other leather chair and crosses his too, showing her a length of brown dress sock and a light-brown wingtip, the nose of the wingtip so close to her knees the decorative perforations seem olfactory, almost, like pores by which he might sniff her. The office is so small she can smell the French perfume like there’s another girl in the room, and her heart thuds with embarrassment.

He doesn’t look anywhere below her throat, his eyes a light clean steady blue, and so it’s surprising when he says, “You look nice today,” and keeps his eyes on her face. “Is it a game day?”

“No,” she says, “it’s Tuesday.” As if everyone, including an English professor, knows the women’s volleyball schedule.

“Ah,” he says, and nods, and she nods too in the silence that follows.

“So,” he says, turning to lift a sheet of paper from the desk, then turning back. “I just wanted to ask you about your response to last week’s reading.” And holding the paper before him he reads: “‘Highly accomplished work of the post-9/11 epoch, incorporating multiple points of view to great effect, but to what end? Empires, entire civilizations vanish, so what matter these living few? These little human lives?’”

He holds the paper, his eyes on the sentences. As if with patience they might replicate. Spawn others. She thinks about recrossing her legs and decides against it. Audrey Sutter’s flushed, wet face comes to mind. The way a tear dove through the latte foam and left its neat tunnel.

The professor floats the paper back to the desktop, turns back again, and fixes her with those eyes.

“So—what’s the deal here?” he says, and Caroline glances down at her knees, brushes at the topmost one, and when she looks up again he looks up too, just an instant late.

What is the deal here, Prof? she thinks. How do these things generally work? Who makes the first move? In the movies, in a book, how would it go? Would I click the door shut or would you?

“What do you mean?” she says finally.

“I think you know what I mean,” he says. “Why do you make so little effort with these responses? You are a smart, articulate young woman, and I . . . well, I—” He falters, and just then a group of students pass by the gapped door—boys, laughing and cussing down the hall. Shit, they say. Motherfucker, they say.

The professor clears his throat. He folds his hands together and rests them on his knee. He looks her in the eye again.

“Caroline,” he says, drawing the name out like it’s something sweet and melty in his mouth. “Come on, now. Am I asking too much?”

What are you asking? she’d like to ask. What do you want from me?

But in the end she’s only sorry—very sorry, she says. She understands. She’ll try harder next time, she says, even as she feels pretty certain that what he really wants is another excuse to call her into this little room. That what he really wants is to open up one of those folded hands and let it fall through space, through every kind of alarm going off in his heart, and place it, under the eyes of the dead authors, smack onto her knee.

And then what, girl? What happens when the ol’ dog wants a bite?

After that it’s back across campus for Caroline, to Troy’s dorm—she is dating a boy who still lives in a dorm—and ten hard bangs on the door before it unsticks like a gummy eye and there stands Phil, the roommate, in nothing but boxers. Annoyed and bony and pale as any cadaver, giving her the up and down—the skirt, the tights—and saying finally, “He’s not here.” A fact she already knows by the smell coming off him, the stink of burned weed among several notes of stink. Because Troy does not abide smoking of any kind in the dorm room, most especially weed, which just a whiff of on his clothes could get him kicked off the team. Good-bye scholarship. Good-bye college. Good-bye warm Caroline in his bed.

“Where then?” she says, checking her phone again for the time. For the text reply that won’t come; she knows his class schedule, his practice schedule, his feeding schedule. As he knows hers.

Bony shoulders rise and fall and Phil says, “Cannot say, man, as I am not his keeper.”

She looks beyond him, and Phil opens the door wide for her to look. Beds and desks and clothes and pizza boxes and socks and Troy’s gym bag and his Nikes, and she knows just by looking, just by smelling, that he did not spend the night here. And there it goes, inside her chest: her heart stepping up to a ledge and tottering, dizzied, ready to fall. It’s the sensation of losing at the net, of rising up for the block and knowing she’s failed even before the ball goes sizzling by her ear to boom against the floor—a sound for her heart alone. Beaten, it says. Outplayed, schooled.

“You’re welcome to come in and wait,” Phil says. “Smoke a little bud, if you like.”

Weighing his chances, she thinks. Liking the look of her legs in those tights. She sees herself in the skirt and tights and understands she’s come not to see Troy but to be seen by him, at this hour, looking good.

Because if you dressed up for your boyfriend, then you didn’t dress up for your professor. Although either way you are a vain and stupid girl.

Phil stands watching her. Scratching his ribs.

But now the ball comes back over the net into deep court where her girls, her sisters, take it onto their wrists, take it lightly onto their fingertips and gentle it once more her way, nice and high, and she is ready, she is coiled hard and tight, a perfect rattlesnake of timing: “Gonna have to take a pass on that invite, Phil,” she says, “but could you give Troy a message for me?”

“Sure thing, man. Messages are my specialty.”

“Tell him I came to say good-bye.”

“Good-bye?”

“Yes. I just found out I have cervical cancer. Stage four. I’m going home and I don’t want him to try to contact me.”

Pale, dull-eyed Phil, speechless. His face goes one way but his eyes stay on her. “I sense a certain lack of sincerity here,” he says, and without taking her eyes off his she presses her hand to his boxers and cups the whole soft works in her palm, her long fingers. His body bows and he shows the pinked whites of his eyes and gasps.

“Listen, Phil. I want you to tell Troy this—right here.” She holds his gaze. His balls. “You got that message?”

Thirty minutes later she’s in front of the house, fifteen minutes late, and Audrey is sitting on the porchsteps in her black peacoat and black watchman’s cap and sturdy winter boots, a seaman off to sea, and the girl has got some luggage.

“Damn, girl,” says Caroline, and Audrey says, “I know, I’m sorry . . . I don’t know when I’ll be back,” and Caroline takes half the load and they get it all squared away in the back of the RAV4 and they buckle up and they’re off. Five minutes later, doing forty down Union, Audrey cranes around to watch the bus depot go by and, doing so, sees the large blue gym bag in the back seat. Fully loaded, Caroline’s jeans, socks, her favorite sweater busting out. Audrey looking her friend over, then, taking note of the flannel pajama bottoms she wears, the old gray hoodie, the pink Adidas, and Caroline turning briefly to meet her eyes and then turning back to the road.

“What the fuck,” Caroline says. “Road trip.”

Because the truth is she’s glad for the excuse to get away, she says. If Audrey was just homesick for her pet chicken she’d still be on board, so will she please not sit there being so darn grateful the whole way?

They’ve got their coffees, and the RAV4 is climbing the eastern coast of Arkansas, up the 55 North toward Missouri. A gusty but otherwise fine day for driving.

Audrey is silent awhile and then says, “Who would have a pet chicken?”

“I’m just saying.”

“What would you even do with it?”

Caroline sighs. When asked by housing why she wanted a new roommate after their first semester, Caroline wrote: “Irreconcilable species.” No idea what Audrey wrote.

“Is it Troy?” Audrey says.

“Is what Troy?”

“Why you’re glad to get away.”

Caroline looks over, looks back to the road. “It could be a lot of things, Audrey. I might be having a psychological crisis. I might’ve decided college is a waste of time and money. I might be sleeping with my professor. I might’ve decided life is too fucking short. I might—”

“Which one?”

“What?”

“Callaway?”

“What? No. Seriously?”

“Buford?”

“Buford? He’s like, a hundred years old and smells like old bedsheets.”

“Nice eyes, though.”

“Nice eyes. Jesus, Audrey, I am not sleeping with my professor, I was just making a point. I was just posing hypotheticals—remember those? Remember when we talked about those?”

“Yes. But it just stuck out, that one.”

“Well”—pushing out the flat of her palm—“stick it back in.”

“All right. Sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologize,” Caroline says, flicking hair out of her eyes. Sliding a glance at Audrey, who sips at her coffee.

“Is that how you see me?” she says. “Someone who would sleep with her professor?”

“No. I never thought about it until you mentioned it.”

“But you went there pretty quickly.”

Audrey holds her coffee in midair. Then sips, and says, “Not because I think of you like that, though. But because you always surprise me, Caroline. You always do. I count on you surprising me. That’s all.”

The girls face forward. The fields sweeping by, unrolling like great corduroy rugs, brown and white, the white not cotton now but lines of ice from the storm caught in the furrows. Above them bends the deep and empty sky. Audrey reaches to touch the colorful loops of beads that hang from the rearview mirror. The beads click when they get swinging, and in the thick of them, like a little thing nested there, is a white rabbit’s foot, stained in shifting spots of colored light. The RAV4 was a gift from Caroline’s father, the rabbit’s foot a gift from her brother. Not so lucky for the rabbit, said Caroline’s father. And: A moving vehicle is no place for luck, daughter. May this vehicle be safeguarded by intelligence, by great care and caution, and not the amputated paw of a rodent.

“So what is it, then?” Audrey says, and Caroline swipes at her eye—a single tear, where did that come from?

“Let’s just say it includes but is not strictly about Troy,” she says, and neither girl says another word for a mile, two miles. Then Audrey says, “I’m sorry, Caroline,” and Caroline says, “Screw it. Screw him. Are we going to listen to these tunes or what?”

They are just a few miles into Missouri when the first text comes, a two-note chime, and Caroline’s heart jumps to it like a trained animal.

But she defies the chime, her heart’s response to it. Eyes on the road, hands at ten and two. They’ve been listening to an old Radiohead CD—the RAV4 is pre-Bluetooth by, like, one year—each in her separate thoughts, and Caroline waits for the end of the song before she fishes up the phone from her tote bag, reads the message, places the phone in her lap and takes the wheel two-handed again. Now it begins.

The phone chimes and vibrates on her upper thigh, sending its hum, its message, deep. The times when he would text at night and she would hold it there, waiting, her heartbeat beneath it, in her belly, everywhere . . .

A full minute passes without a third text and she lifts the phone, and the car drifts and she corrects with a jerk. She holds the phone at the crown of the wheel, as if she’s going to text back, and Audrey, reaching, says, “Here, let me,” and takes the phone from her. “What do you want to say?”

The first yellow speech balloon reads: WTF, C? Where r u? The second reads: U don’t know what u think u know. In class, will call u in 1 hr.

Caroline tosses her hair and says, “Tell him, ‘You don’t know what I know. Don’t call me, I’m driving.’”

Audrey thumbs it in and sends the message and places the phone in her own lap, and Caroline eyes the phone there, her phone, in a lap not hers, before looking away.

She turns up the music and taps at the wheel and bobs her head to the beat, but it’s no use; it’s as if there’s a third person in the cab now, as if they’ve picked up a hitchhiker. They wait to see what he’ll say.

The phone chimes and vibrates on Audrey’s thigh. She reads aloud: “‘Please please be cool, C’—C as in the letter C,” Audrey says. “‘Gotta talk to you.’”

“Tell him, ‘Talk to Phil,’” Caroline says. “Tell him, ‘Ask Phil how he liked it this a.m.’”

Audrey looks over. “Liked what?”

“Just type it.”

She types and sends the message, and Caroline tells her what happened with Phil, and Audrey sits holding the phone. Silent for a long while.

“What did it feel like?” she says at last, and Caroline gives her a look.

“What do you think it felt like?”

“I mean,” Audrey says, “in that context. The fact that it was Phil.”

Caroline sputters her lips and turns back to the road. “The usual, Audrey. Nothing to write home about.”

The sun is going down; the swaying beads catch its light and throw prisms on the girls’ legs. Music pulses in the speakers.

“Phil,” Audrey says after a while, as if to herself. “I hope you washed your hand.”

And Caroline laughs then, deeply and truly, and the laugh releases the Georgia in her chest like walking into her memaw’s house, like the drug-strong smell of hot pecan pie, and she says in the voice of home, “Oh, Audrey, sometimes I just love you.”

And Audrey—who loves this voice, who has always loved this voice—says, “I know. It’s the same with me.”

They drive out of day into night, out of cotton country into wheat and then into corn, all such fields indistinguishable in the dead of winter, all brown and empty, increasingly drifted in dunes of snow. Off to their right somewhere the wide Mississippi slugs along through its turnings, back the way they’ve come, south as the girls drive north. The girls talking and talking until, in the midst of a lull, Audrey works her head into a pillow stuffed up against the passenger window and sleeps.

Caroline drives on, alone now and aware of the car around her—the road beneath it, the four small dashes of rubber that connect car to road—in a way she hadn’t been just a moment before, and soon enough she puts it together: that this awareness, this alertness, comes with the surrendering of the same thing in her passenger, and that this is an intimacy, this exchange, modern in its specifics and yet ancient to the species, old as blood: the deep, unthinking trust of children who slept in open caves, who sleep now in cars piloted by their parents flying down deadly highways; the fierce tenderness of responsibility that pounds in the chests of parents, the father or mother at the wheel . . . and following this current of thought Caroline doesn’t think of Troy for miles, and then she realizes she hasn’t thought of Troy for miles and it’s all over—he’s back. Those eyes. Those hands. The smell of that chest.

She would like to let Audrey sleep but they need gas, and ten miles later she takes the exit and pulls into the station, and Audrey raises her head, then pushes the black knit cap up from her eyes.

“Where are we?”

“We’re not in Kansas anymore.”

“We were never in Kansas.”

“I know, Audrey.”

They take turns in the ladies’ and then they look over the food: the wedges of old pizza, the paper baskets of breaded chicken parts, the fat corn dogs that crack them up just to think about putting them in their mouths, finally settling on a family-size bag of Cheetos and two milky coffee drinks in glass bottles. Audrey offers the last of her cash but Caroline waves her off. The big dude behind the counter looks from one girl to the other, boldly, as if to make some kind of point. Caroline catches and holds his eye: Is there a problem, bubba?

Outside the air is so cold, and there’s the smell of snow although they can see the deep glitter of outer space, and they stand awhile with their faces lifted, lips pursed, blowing pale breaths that rise and vanish in the stars.

Audrey drives now, and they talk, and Caroline learns that Audrey’s father has lung cancer—the cancer is back, actually—and there’s no hope. Her mother died when Audrey was just seven, a rare blood disease, and there are no brothers, no sisters—Caroline knows these facts from the dorm room days, from those early days when they were still trying—and she understands that in a few months, or however long it takes, Audrey will be an orphan at the age of nineteen.

The cold night rolls by, northern Iowa, flat and snowy, a few farmhouses lit up in the empty reaches. Caroline imagines Audrey out there—walking out there in her winter boots, her black knit cap, all alone. She reaches to touch the colorful beads, the white rabbit’s foot within, so soft. Everything strange from this vantage. A girl who is not her sitting in her seat, hands on her steering wheel. As if she’s been transformed. If she looks in the vanity mirror now what will she see? Her mind is playing tricks on her. She needs sleep.

She sips the cold coffee drink through a straw and says, “What will you do?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean . . . after. Will you come back to school?”

Audrey doesn’t answer. Then she says, “I don’t know,” and sinks her hand into the Cheetos bag.

Caroline slips her own hand into her tote bag and steals a glance, but no new messages. That’s seven hours now.

Not that she’s counting.

Not that she’s thinking where is he where the fuck is he.

Not that she’s picturing certain big-eyed skanks swatting their eyelashes at him.

Audrey, at the helm, sails on. Steady as she goes. Taking her time catching up with and passing a semi, giving the old boy behind the wheel a nice long look down into the car. Caroline sitting there in her pajama bottoms with the shells and starfish so faded they could be anything, What’re you looking at, truck-driver man? Why don’t you watch where you’re driving?

When they are well past the semi and back in the right lane again Audrey says, “Want to hear what he told me, last time I saw him?”

“Who?”

“My dad. The sheriff. The ex-sheriff.”

“Sure.”

“He said there’s never a good American with a gun around when you need one.”

“What’s that supposed