Strange Highways

that."
     Again he teetered on a precipice of revelation, but a tide of anguish washed him back from it rather than over the edge. "They've got to be her eyes."
     "The blonde in the plastic tarp."
     "Yeah. And I think somehow ... somehow I know who she is, know how she wound up dead with her eyes cut out. But I just can't quite remember."
     "Earlier you said that she was more than a vision, more than drunk's hallucination."
     "Yeah. For sure. She's a memory. I saw her for real somewhere, sometime." He put one hand to his forehead, gripping his skull so tightly that his hand shook with the effort and the muscles twitched the length of his arm, as if he could pull the forgotten knowledge out of himself.
     "Who could have gotten in your car to leave the jar?" she asked.
     "I don't know."
     "Where were you early in the evening, before you set out to go to college?"
     "Home. Asherville. My folks' house. I didn't stop anywhere between there and your Valiant."
     "Was the Mustang in the garage?"
     "We don't have a garage. It's not ... that kind of house."
     "Was it locked?"
     "No."
     "Then anybody could have gotten into your car."
     "Yeah. Maybe."
     No one had come out of the house in front of them, because it was one of the first properties condemned in Coal Valley, abandoned for months. On the white aluminum siding, someone had spray-painted a big "4" and drawn a circle around it. As red as fresh blood in the Mustang's headlights, the number was not graffiti but an official designation: It meant that the house would be the fourth structure to be torn down when the last citizens of Coal Valley moved out and the demolition crew came in with its bulldozers.
     The state and federal bureaucracies had been so inefficient and slow in dealing with the mine fire that it had been allowed to spread relentlessly until its white-hot tributaries lay under the entire valley, whereupon it had grown too far-reaching to be extinguished by anything other than time and nature. With the destruction of the village, however, the authorities clearly intended to be as orderly and speedy as a clockwork military operation.
     "We're sitting ducks here," he said.
     Without checking Celeste's hands, certain that this immobility had already resulted in a resurgence of the stigmata, he shifted the Mustang into reverse and backed across the lawn to the street. So much rain had fallen that he was worried about getting bogged down in the soft sod, but they reached the blacktop without trouble.
     "Where now?" she asked.
     "We'll look around town."
     "For what?"
     "Anything out of the ordinary."
     "It's all out of the ordinary."
     "We'll know it when we see it."
     He cruised slowly along Coal Valley Road, which was the main thoroughfare through town.
     At the first intersection, Celeste pointed to a narrow street on the left. "Our house is over there."
     A block away, through beaded curtains of rain and past a few screening pines, several windows were filled with a welcoming amber light. No other house in that direction appeared to be occupied.
     "All the neighbors are gone, moved out," Celeste confirmed. "Mom and Dad are alone over there."
     "And they may be safer alone," he reminded her, crossing the intersection, driving slowly past her street, studying both sides of the main drag.
     Even though Coal Valley Road led to destinations beyond the town of Coal Valley itself, they had encountered no pass-through traffic, and Joey figured that they weren't likely to encounter any. Numerous experts and officials had assured the public that the highway was fundamentally safe and that there was no danger of sudden subsidence swallowing unwary motorists. Following the demolition of the village, however, the road was scheduled for condemnation and removal, and the residents of those mountain towns had long ago become skeptical about anything the experts had to say about the mine fire. Alternate routes had become popular.
     Ahead of them, on the left, was St. Thomas's Catholic Church, where services had once been conducted every Saturday and Sunday by the rector and the curate of Our Lady of Sorrows in Asherville, who were circuit priests covering two other small churches in that part of the county. It was not a grand