Page 12 of Forever Dark
And then there was Connor Chase.
Selena tightened her grip on the wheel and gave a small, humorless shake of her head.
Connor as sheriff still sounded ridiculous.He had been wild when they were teenage sweethearts.Even though he was a deputy by the time she left, it still seemed like a bad fit.A boy who hated anyone telling him what to do becoming a lawman?Selena had been certain it would crumble down on top of him.Maybe a part of her wanted that to be the case, but she had to admit to feeling some happiness for him when she heard he made sheriff.You can’t wipe away years of love and marriage completely.The hate doesn’t always win.Sometimes old wisps of what’s left vent through the old wounds.
A memory surfaced without permission.Summer heat.The high school parking lot.Connor at seventeen, shirt untucked, sun in his hair, standing beside the principal’s sedan with a mischievous look that usually meant trouble was already well underway.By the time anyone realized what he had done, the car had been smothered in mayonnaise from hood to trunk.Not a few streaks.Not a prank anyone could wash off with a bucket.A thick, gleaming coat of it, slapped across the windshield, door handles, mirrors, roof.It had taken several large jars of the stuff to turn the entire car white.
He had gotten suspended.
Selena could still see the grin he wore for the next two weeks.Satisfied.Unrepentant.A little proud of himself, even while adults fumed around him.
That boy had hated authority on principle.
Now he was authority.
The thought might have amused her if it hadn’t unsettled her, too.
Headlights flashed around the next bend.
The oncoming car came too fast.
Selena saw it instantly, saw the way the beams bounced with speed, saw the front end drift wide as it rounded the corner, chewing up more of the road than it should have.She jerked the wheel right.Gravel spit under her tires.The rental shuddered hard enough to throw her against the belt.
The other car roared past.
No horn.No brake lights.Just a dark shape and white glare and then nothing but its taillights shrinking in the mirror as it vanished behind her.
Selena held the wheel and kept the car straight.
For half a second her mind stopped seeing the road ahead and was engulfed by another memory.A terrible one.
A different road rose in its place.Wet blacktop.A body twisted wrong.A woman lying in the wash of headlights with one side of her face pressed to the pavement, eyes open and moving.Not dead yet.Not then.Looking at Selena with a panic so raw it still lived in memory like something preserved.
Hit-and-run.
An old file.An old county rumor.Old pain with Connor wound through the middle of it.She had held him responsible.
The image came hard and bright, then lingered.
Selena swallowed and reached for the radio.
Static burst from the speakers before a country station came through, faint and scratchy.Steel guitar.A man singing about loss in a voice too cheerful for the subject.She left it on anyway.Anything to put a layer between her and the dark.
A roadside sign appeared ahead in the headlights.
WILSON MOTEL
VACANCY
The red neon around the word VACANCY flickered on one side.The arrow beneath it pointed down a short access road lined with cracked asphalt and weeds sprouting through the seams.
Selena eased off the gas.She was now at the boundary of her old hometown.
The old Wilson Motel sat on the outskirts of Elmsview exactly where she remembered it, a low row of rooms with faded doors and a narrow office at one end under a slanted awning.The paint had once been white.Years of weather had pushed it toward yellow-gray.A soda machine stood outside the lobby with one dead fluorescent tube buzzing behind it.
“This’ll do,” she murmured.
She turned in.
