Chapter 13

Patty Sundstrom identified the back of the dashboard easily enough. It was a bare panel, pressed and dimpled with strengthening reinforcements, gray and dirty, partially covered by a thin and peeling sheet of sound deadening material. All kinds of wires and pipes and tubes went through it. Mostly electrical, she thought. The hot water for the heater would be in a thick hose. Maybe an inch or so in diameter, serious and reinforced. By convention black, she expected, clamped to a port on the engine block, which was where the hot water came from. And obviously it would be twinned with an identical black hose, for the return feed. Circulation, around and around. Because of the water pump. Which stopped when the engine stopped, Peter said.

She craned her neck and moved the flashlight beam.

She found two black hoses connected to the engine block. There were no other candidates. She followed them with the flashlight beam. They stayed low in the bay. They passed through the bulkhead into the passenger compartment very low down. Directly behind where the floor console was, with the gearshift lever. The heater was right above it.

The heater hoses go through the back of the dashboard .

No they don’t, Patty thought. She double checked. They went nowhere near the back of the dashboard. They went through level with the bottom of the foot well. Much lower down. And there was nothing near them anyway. Just thick metal components, all caked with dirt. No wires. Nothing vulnerable. Nothing that would fry from excessive temperatures. Certainly no black boxes that might contain electronic chips.

She backed away and straightened up. She looked at the house. All quiet. The barn was ghostly in the moonlight. All nine quad-bikes were neatly parked. She killed the flashlight beam and minced back to the room. She stepped to the bed and nudged Shorty awake. He sat up in a panic and looked all around for passersby or other intruders.

He saw none.

He said, “What?”

She said, “The heater hoses don’t go through the back of the dashboard.”

He said “What?” again.

“In the car,” she said. “They go through real low down, about level with the bottom of the gearstick.”

“How do you know?”

“I looked,” she said. “With one of the flashlights they gave us.”

“When?”

“Just now.”

“Why?”

“I woke up. Something is not right.”

“So you ripped the console out of the car?”

“No, I looked under the hood. From the other side. I could see the connection. And there’s no electronic chip nearby.”

“OK, maybe the mechanic got it wrong,” Shorty said. “Maybe he was thinking of a different year. Ours is a pretty early model. Or maybe Hondas are different in Canada.”

“Or maybe the mechanic doesn’t exist. Maybe they never called one.”

“Why wouldn’t they?”

“Maybe they’re keeping us here.”

“What?”

“How else do you explain it?”

“Why would they? Seriously. You mean, like an occupancy thing? Because of the bank? They want our fifty bucks?”

“I don’t know why.”

“Hell of a way to do business. We could go on TripAdvisor.”

“Except we can’t go on anything. There’s no wifi and no cell signal and no phone in the room.”

“They can’t just keep people here, against their will. Someone would miss them eventually.”

“We as good as told them no one knows we’re gone.”

“We also as good as told them we’re broke,” Shorty said. “How long can they expect us to pay fifty bucks?”

“Two days,” Patty said. “Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Six meals each.”

“That’s crazy. Then what? Then they call the mechanic?”

“We have to get out of here. We have to do the thing you said with the quad-bike. So get dressed. We have to go.”

“Now?”

“This minute.”

“It’s the middle of the night.”

“Like you said. They’re asleep now. We have to do it now.”

“Because a mechanic was wrong on the phone?”

“If there was a mechanic at all. And because of everything.”

Shorty said, “Why did they give us flashlights?”

Patty said, “I don’t know that either.”

“It’s like they knew we might want to leave in the dark.”

“How could they?”

Shorty got out of bed. He said, “We should take some food. Can’t count on getting anywhere before lunchtime, earliest. We’ll miss breakfast for sure.”

They got dressed, hopping from foot to foot in the half dark, with nothing but moonlight coming in the open door. They packed their stuff by feel and put their bags outside near the car.

“You sure about this?” Shorty said. “Never too late to change your mind.”

“I want to go,” Patty said. “Something isn’t right here.”

They walked down to the barn on the grass, not the dirt, because they felt it would be quieter. They were cautious across the last of the gravel, to the near corner of the perfect square of bikes, to the one Peter had driven away for Mark to use. Its engine was still faintly warm. Shorty wanted that exact one, because he had seen how to put its gearbox in neutral, and he knew it rolled along OK, but most of all because it was closest. Who wanted to push extra yards? Not him. He clicked the lever to neutral, and pushed back on the handlebars, kind of weak and sideways at first, but even so the machine rolled back obediently, getting faster and faster as Shorty got more and more head-on in his pushing.

“This is not too bad,” he said.

He dragged the machine to a stop and took up a new position and pushed it forward again, in a tight curve, a perfect neat maneuver, like reversing out of a parking space and turning and driving away. Patty joined in on the other side, and they pushed together and got up to a decent speed, steering along the center of the track toward the motel building, pretty much silently, apart from the scrape of their shoes on the dirt, and a lot of close-up squelching and popping from stones under the bike’s soft rubber tires. They pushed on, breathing hard, around room twelve’s corner, and onward to the Honda, two bays down, outside room ten. They stopped the bike right behind the car. Shorty popped the hatch.

“Wait,” Patty said.

She walked back to the corner and watched the house. No lights, no movement. She came back to the Honda and said, “OK.”

Shorty turned to face the open hatch square on, and he bent forward with his arms spread wide, and he wriggled his fingers under the suitcase, both ends, and he heaved it up at the front, and dragged it forward until it rested at an angle on the lip of the hatch. He grabbed the handle and hauled, intending to balance the case weightless on the lip, so he had time to change his position and adjust his grip, ready for the clean-and-jerk, and the turn toward the bike.

But the handle tore off the suitcase.

Shorty tottered back a step.

He said, “Damn.”

“Proves we couldn’t have carried it anyway,” Patty said. “That would have happened sooner or later.”

“How are we going to get it on the bus?”

“We’ll have to buy a rope. We could wrap it around a couple of times, and make a new handle. So we need a gas station or a hardware store. For the rope. First place we see.”

Shorty stepped forward again and bent down and got his fingers under the case. He grunted and lifted and gasped and turned and set it down on the bike, lengthways, the top corners resting on the handlebar, the bottom edge digging into the padded seat. He nudged it a little and got it balanced. It ended up pretty solid. Better than he thought it would. He was pleased, overall.

He shut the Honda’s hatch, and they strapped their overnight bags on the bike’s rear rack. Then they took up position, Shorty on the left and Patty on the right, each of them with one hand clamped tight on the short length of handlebar visible either side beyond the suitcase’s corners, and the other hand close to it, partly pushing, partly juggling a flashlight. Which gave them twin makeshift headlight beams, and it made steering easy, and it meant they could steady the suitcase between them, with Shorty’s right forearm and Patty’s left at the top end, and with his right hip and her left at the bottom end, assuming they both walked kind of bent over at the waist, which clearly they would need to, because the weight of the load made pushing a whole different thing than before. Getting started required a full-on effort, both of them straining like a strongman show on cable television, and then keeping going afterward required nearly as much, although it got a little better when they bumped up out of the stony lot and onto the blacktop, at the very end of the road through the trees.

More than two miles to go. They entered the tunnel. The air was cool, and it smelled of rotten leaves and damp earth. They gasped and trudged. Through trial and error they learned it was best to keep their speed as high as they could bear, so that momentum alone would carry them through the long shallow potholes. It meant a lot of effort all of the time, but it was better than starting over whenever the front wheels bumped down into a pit. They kept on going, almost running against the weight, very quickly no fun at all, just grinding it out.

“I need to rest,” Patty said.

They let the bike coast to a stop. They nudged the suitcase left and right to perfect its balance. Then they stepped away, and arched their backs, and clamped their palms low down on their spines. They huffed and puffed, and eased their necks.

Shorty said, “How much further?”

Patty looked back, and then forward.

“About a mile and a half to go,” she said.

“How long have we taken so far?”

“Maybe twenty minutes.”

“Damn, that’s slow.”

“You said four hours. We’re about on schedule.”

They took up their positions again, and forced the thing to roll. Like a bobsled team at the top of the hill, going harder and harder with every step. They got it up to speed and kept it there, jamming their forearms against the trembling suitcase, ducking their heads, breathing deep, glancing up again to check their direction. They did another half mile, and rested again. And another. A whole hour had gone by.

“Coming back will be easier,” Patty said. “Without the weight.”

They passed through the section where no trees grew. They saw a belt of sky, full of stars.

“Getting close,” Patty said.

Then she said, “Wait,” and she hauled back on the handlebar and dug her heels in, way out in front, like a kid stopping a home-made cart.

Shorty said, “What?”

“There was a wire. Like at the gas station. For ringing a bell. Laying across the road. It probably rings in the house.”

Shorty hauled the bike to a dead stop. He remembered. As fat and rubbery as a garden hose. He searched ahead with his flashlight. They saw nothing. They rolled on, half speed, which was a pain through the potholes, with one beam ranging far, and the other sweeping close.

A hundred yards later they saw it.

Fat and rubbery and laying across the road.

They stopped four feet short.

Patty said, “How does it work?”

“I guess inside there are two metal strips. Somehow held apart. But when a wheel goes over, they get pressed together and a bell rings. Like a push switch.”

“So we can’t let a wheel go over.”

“No.”

Which was a problem. Shorty couldn’t lift the quad-bike. Not at either end. Maybe an inch for a second, but not enough to ease it over the wire and set it down again.

“How much further?” he said.

“About three hundred yards.”

“I’ll carry the suitcase.”

“Wait,” she said again.

She ducked down and eased her fingers under the fat rubber wire. She lifted it. It came up easily, an inch, a foot, as much as she wanted. She tested it side to side, and pulled and tugged to make it equally loose.

“Get ready,” she said.

She lifted it up, gently, on open palms, head high, arms wide. Shorty ducked low and pushed the bike under it. She held it until he was clear. She felt like she was performing a dance ceremony at a hippy’s wedding.

“OK,” Shorty said.

She laid the wire back down, gently, like she was bowing. Then they pushed on, energized. Safe. On the last lap. Not far to go. Their flashlight beams bounced and swayed, first showing nothing but trees and the track between, but then a different kind of void loomed up ahead. The two-lane road. Where they had turned in, what felt like a thousand years ago. Shorty had said, OK? Patty hadn’t answered.

Now she said, “We need to find a place to hide the suitcase. But not too far from the road. So we can load it easy when we get a ride.”

They let the bike slow to a stop where the mouth of the track widened out to meet the road. Hiding places looked to be in short supply. Tree trunks crowded in either side. The last yard of shoulder was thick with underbrush. Although maybe a little thinner where the frost-heaved posts were set. Maybe the ground had been disturbed many years earlier. Maybe the brush was coming back slower. Maybe there was a suitcase-sized hole behind one or the other.

Patty went to check. In the end she figured the right-hand hole was better than the left. They huffed and puffed and got the bike as close as possible. Shorty spread his arms wide and lifted the suitcase off the bike, and then he grunted and gasped and turned and dropped it in the bushes, where it scraped and crackled through the lower branches and came to rest pretty well hidden. Patty walked up the road a spell and used her flashlight like an approaching headlight beam, and said she saw nothing much. Certainly nothing anyone would stop for. Just a dark shape, way low down, behind the base of the post. It could have been the corpse of a deer. She was satisfied.

Then her voice changed and she said, “Shorty, come here.”

He went. They stood together on the county blacktop and looked back the way he had come, back along her flashlight beam, which was wavering on a wide area centered on the frost-heaved post, with the dark shape low and behind it. Which you couldn’t really see unless you knew it was there. He was satisfied too.

He said, “What am I looking for?”

“Think, Shorty,” she said. “What did we see when we turned in?”

He thought. He visualized. He took two sideways steps left, nearer the center line of the road, where the Honda’s wheel had been. He squatted down a little, to approximate the level of the driver’s seat. What had he seen? He had seen a frost-heaved post, on which was nailed a board, on which were screwed ornate plastic letters, and an arrow pointing into the woods. The letters had spelled out the word Motel .

He compared his memory with the scene in front of him.

He was pretty sure it was different.

He stared. Then he saw. Now there was no board. No letters, no word, no arrow. Now there was just a post. Nothing on it. Same both sides of the track.

“Weird,” he said.

“You think?”

“So is it a motel or not? Sure feels like one to me. They’re taking our money.”

“We have to get out of here.”

“We are. First car that comes.”

“After we take the bike back to the barn.”

“We don’t owe them that,” Shorty said. “We don’t owe them diddly. Not anymore. Not if they’re pulling weird shit on us now, with the motel signs. We should dump the bike here and let them come get it themselves.”

“They get up with the sun,” Patty said. “If there’s a bike missing they’ll know right away. But if it’s back in its proper place, they might not think about us for hours. They’ll assume we’re eating breakfast on our own, in our room. They’ll have no reason to come by until later in the morning.”

“It’s a gamble.”

“It could buy us a lot of time later. They’ll come looking for us as soon as they find us gone. We need to delay that moment as long as possible. We need to be miles away by then. We definitely can’t afford to be still stuck down here with our thumbs out. I think we should buy ourselves as much time as we can get.”

Shorty said nothing. He looked along the dark and silent road, first one way, and then the other.

“I know it feels weird to go back,” Patty said. “Now that we just got here. But there are no cars coming anyway. Not yet. We’ll do better closer to dawn.”

Shorty was quiet another long moment.

Then he said, “OK, we’ll take the bike back to the barn.”

“As fast as we can,” Patty said. “Now it’s all about speed.”

They unstrapped their overnight bags from the rack and stashed them close to the suitcase, and then they eased the bike around a wide circle on the blacktop. The air smelled sweeter in the open. They got the bike pointed back down the track. They took up their positions. They set off. The same two-plus miles all over again, in the reverse direction. But Patty had been right. Pushing was much easier without the weight of the suitcase. The bike felt buoyant. Like it was floating. They did the hippy dance under the wire again, and then they got it going and kept it up at a fast walk with what felt like barely any effort at all. They didn’t stop and they didn’t rest.