Barclay, Linwood Novel 08 - Never saw it coming

Keisha, “I’ll see that you get your money this afternoon.”
    Keisha Ceylon smiled modestly.
    Justin weakly put his own arms around his mother and stepfather. His face was buried in his mother’s neck, his eyes closed. But then they opened, and fixed on Keisha.
    Justin winked at her.
    And Keisha winked back.

Two
    Ellie Garfield had been dreaming that she was already dead. But then, just before the dream became a reality, she opened her eyes.
    With what little energy she had, she tried to move, but she was secured, tied in somehow. She wearily lifted a bloody hand from her lap and touched her fingers to the strap that ran across her chest, felt its familiar texture, its smoothness. A seat belt.
    She was in a car. She was sitting in the front seat of a car.
    She looked around and realized it was her own car. But she wasn’t behind the steering wheel. She was buckled into the passenger seat.
    She blinked a couple of times, thinking there must be something wrong with her vision because she couldn’t make anything out beyond the windshield. There was nothing out there. No road. No buildings. No street lights.
    Then it dawned on her that it wasn’t a problem with her eyes.
    There really was nothing out there. Only stars.
    She could see them twinkling in the sky. It was a beautiful evening, if she overlooked the part about how all the blood was draining from her body.
    It was difficult to hold her head up, but with what strength she still had, she looked around. As she took in the starkness, the strangeness of her surroundings, she wondered if she might actually be dead already. Maybe this was heaven. There was a peacefulness about it. Everything was so white. There was a sliver of moon in the cloudless sky that illuminated the landscape, which was dead flat and went forever. It was, it occurred to her, more like a moonscape than a landscape.
    Was the car parked on a snowy field? Off in the distance, she thought she could make out something. A dark, uneven border running straight across the top of the whiteness. Trees, maybe? The thick black line, it almost had the look of a . . . of a shoreline.
    “What?” she whispered quietly to herself.
    Slowly, she began to understand where she was. No—not
understand
. She was starting to
figure out
where she was, but she couldn’t
understand
it.
    She was on ice.
    The car was sitting on a frozen pond. Or maybe a lake. And quite a ways out, as far as she could tell.
    “No no no no no,” she said to herself as she struggled to think. It was the first week of January. Winter had been slow to get going, and temperatures had only started to plunge a week or two ago, right after Christmas. While it might have been cold enough for the lake to start freezing, it certainly hadn’t been cold long enough to make the ice thick enough to support a—
    Crack.
    She felt the front end of the car dip ever so slightly. Probably no more than an inch. That would make sense. The car was heaviest at the front, where the engine was.
    She had to get out. If the ice had managed to support something as heavy as a car, at least for this long, surely it would keep her up if she could get herself out. She could start walking, in whichever direction would get her to the closest shore.
    If she could even walk.
    She touched her hand to her belly. Everything was warm, and wet. How many times had she been stabbed? That was what had happened, right? She remembered seeing the knife, the light catching the blade, and then—
    She’d been stabbed twice. Of that, she was pretty sure. She remembered looking down, watching in disbelief as the knife went into her the first time, then seeing it come back out, the blade crimson. But it was only out of her for a moment before it broke her skin and was driven in a second time.
    After that, everything went black.
    Dead.
    Except she wasn’t.
    There must have been just a hint of a pulse that went unnoticed as she was put into the car and buckled in, then driven out here to the middle of this lake. Where, someone must have figured, the car would soon go through the ice and sink to the bottom.
    A car with a body inside it, dumped in a lake close to shore, someone might discover that.
    But a car with a body inside it that sank to the bottom out in the middle of a lake, what were the odds anyone would ever find
that
?
    She had to find the strength within her. She had to get out of this car now, before it dropped through. Did she have her cell phone? If she could call