“You’re going to have to take him home,” the bartender said. “You don’t want him driving you anywhere, the condition he’s in.”
“He couldn’t drive me anywhere,” Annabel said. “All he’d do is fall asleep behind the wheel.”
“You’re going to have to drive him home,” the bartender said again.
Annabel waved the keys in her hand. “Before I drive him anywhere, I’m going to go to the bathroom. Then maybe I can find somebody to help me get him to the car.”
“Maybe,” the bartender said.
Annabel walked away from the bar to the back of the room, where the rest rooms sat on a small corridor near the kitchen. The Lucky Eight had a whole menu full of food it said it served, but Annabel had never seen anyone eat anything there except big plates of nacho chips with melted cheese and salsa. No one she saw tonight was eating even that. The small round tables were mostly full of couples drinking beer. Every once in a while, somebody had a shot glass or a cocktail. Off to the side, the band was setting up for the night. It would start at 10:00 P.M. and play country music until well after 2:00, or as late as it could until the state police decided to shut it down.
Annabel went into the small corridor where the rest rooms were and looked into the kitchen. The cook was smoking a cigarette and watching a game on a small television set up near the microwave. Annabel thought it must be a rerun of some kind. She kept on going and went through the back door into the parking lot.
The bright red Corvette was not difficult to find. It was especially easy because Tommy had parked it across two spaces, diagonally, to make sure nobody scraped his sides. When people did that, other people sometimes took their keys and scraped for real, but this time the car had been left alone. Annabel found the key for the door and got inside it. The alarm whooped once and stopped when she pushed the safety button. She slammed the door closed and went for the glove compartment.
It wasn’t true that she hated Kayla Anson, any more than it was true that she hated any of them, all those people she had gone to school with and grown up with, all those people who seemed to be able to get away with anything while she was left making it up as she went along. It was just that she was a little—angry—with Kayla now, because this last expulsion had been completely unnecessary. They could have lied their way out of it. It was Kayla who had insisted on coming clean and telling the truth.
Annabel took the road maps and the owner’s manual out of the glove compartment. Under all that there were two little Baggies, one full to bursting and the other with just a little in the bottom of it. The one that was full to bursting had marijuana in it. The other one had a fine white powder. Annabel supposed it was cocaine. She couldn’t be sure. These days, some of the boys had heroin. It was the latest thing in drug chic on all the best campuses in the Ivy League.
Annabel shoved everything back into the glove compartment and got the compartment shut. Then she hooked her seat belt into place and put the key in the ignition. The Corvette started up without any problem at all. She maneuvered it out of its parking space—not easy, with a diagonal position like that to start with and the rest of the lot chock full—and headed out on 209.
What she really wanted to do, right now, was find a pay phone and turn the Lucky Eight and everybody in it over to the police. She would have done it, except that she knew that if she did she would only shut the Lucky Eight down and make all the other roadhouses in the Northwest Hills scared to death of serving underaged drinkers. Tommy would not get arrested. He wouldn’t even get turned over to a drug and alcohol program.
What she was going to do instead was drive home to her own driveway and park the car and get out, with the drugs safely hidden away in her purse. Then she was going to call Tommy’s parents and tell them, more or less, what had happened and where he was. That wouldn’t get him in trouble, either, but at least she’d have the dope.
She got to the junction of 209 and 109 and turned right, toward Washington Depot. The road was dark and deserted and quiet. The moon overhead would have been full and bright, except that it was covered by clouds.
It wasn’t true that she hated Kayla Anson, Annabel told herself again. It was only true that she sometimes wished her dead.
4
Faye Dallmer believed in the Goddess. She thought she might always have believed in the Goddess, even when she was small and going to Methodist Sunday school—but she knew for sure that her belief had been strong at least since 1978, which was when she had moved to the Northwest Hills. Before she had come up here for the first time, with the man who was then her husband, Faye hadn’t realized that there were places like this left anywhere in New England. Well, maybe there were, up in Maine, say, or in northern Vermont or New Hampshire, places that were too far away and too isolated to do her any good. The Northwest Hills were the best she could have hoped for, under the circumstances. They were prime antiquing country for every overpaid corporate manager in New York, and they were home to a lot of wealthy people with pretensions about wanting to save the earth. Fay made handmade quilts and elaborately crocheted afghans, among other things, and she had a good eye for her potential customers. They almost always came from the city, and they almost never knew anything important about anything.