Tail Spin

lapping of water against the pilings of a wooden pier. They’d walked out onto the pier and thrown her out into the water, believing it deep enough. She eased back under the water and swam under the pier to hide behind the pilings.
    She surfaced very slowly, very quietly, wanting to suck in so much air she’d never run out again, but she only let her face clear the surface. She forced herself to take calm, light breaths. She was alive. Slowly, her breaths became deeper and deeper. She filled her lungs. It felt wonderful.
    She heard voices again, but couldn’t understand any words because they were moving away now. Men? Women? She couldn’t tell, she only knew there were two of them. She heard feet clomping on the wooden pier, heard a car engine, heard the car drive away. She swam out from under the pier and saw the taillights of a car in the distance.
    Good. They thought they’d killed her.
    How had they drugged her? For a moment she couldn’t think, couldn’t remember, couldn’t picture what she’d eaten or drunk earlier. She’d eaten dinner by herself, in the kitchen. The wine, she thought, the bottle of red on the table that she’d opened. Where had it come from? She didn’t know, hadn’t paid any attention.
    She smiled. What none of them had realized was that she’d drunk only a bit of the wine. Any more and she’d be lying dead at the bottom of this lake. No one would know where she was. She’d just be gone. Forever.
    She pulled herself out of the water, shivered as she slapped her hands against her arms and looked around. There were no houses, no lakeside cottages with narrow docks and tethered boats, only a skinny two-lane road winding off into the distant darkness. She shuddered with cold and shock, but it didn’t matter. She was alive.
    She came upon a sign: BLACK ROCK LAKE . Where was Black Rock Lake?
    It didn’t matter. She had two legs that worked fairly well. She began to walk in the same direction as the car.
    It seemed like forever, but it was maybe only fifteen minutes when she saw the lights of a small town—ORANACK, MARYLAND, according to the small black-and-white sign.
    It was late. She didn’t know exactly how late because her watch had died in the water. She walked through the deserted town, her eyes on a neon sign that beamed out in bright orange— mel’s diner — all glass so you could see back to the swinging door to the kitchen. Two people sat in a booth next to the glass, a limp waitress standing beside them, a pen poised over her pad. She saw a taxi sitting outside the diner, saw the cabbie at the counter drinking coffee and she smiled.
    When the cab pulled into Jimmy’s driveway, she asked the driver to wait and prayed they hadn’t taken her purse. The alarm wasn’t set, thank God, and the window in her bedroom was still cracked open. She found her purse downstairs on the kitchen counter, where she’d left it earlier that night. Was it really only three, four hours ago? It seemed a lifetime.
    Thirty minutes later, she took one final look at Jimmy’s big redbrick Georgian house, built in the thirties, the centerpiece of this well-tended neighborhood, nestled among huge oak trees on Pinchon Lane. She’d never had the chance to think of him as her father, to call him Father; she wondered now if he would remain Jimmy forever.
    She’d had only six weeks with him.
    She drove her white Charger through the quiet streets until she reached the Beltway. She knew where she was going and also knew she’d be crazy to try to drive through the night, because she was so exhausted she was shaking. But she had no choice. She ate two candy bars, felt a brief spurt of energy. She had to think, had to plan. She had to hide. She forced herself to drive through the night, surviving on hot black coffee and a half dozen more candy bars and, at eight a.m., stopped at the Cozy Boy Motel off the highway in Richmond.
    She awoke fourteen hours later, groggy at first, every muscle in her bodyprotesting, but her strength was surging back. Fear, she thought, an excellent energizer.
    She wasn’t about to go to her mother’s house. She wasn’t even going to call her. No way would she put them in that kind of danger. She realized with a sort of depressed relief that she had no close friends to call, to tell them not to worry about her. She hadn’t kept up with friends she’d made in Richmond. As far as she could think, there was no one to even wonder where she was. Mrs. Riffin, Jimmy’s