All The Pretty Dead Girls. John Manning

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Three Months Earlier

      4

      “Damn it!”

      Sue Barlow swore as she drove right past the exit for Lebanon. She stabbed at the brakes, but it was too late.

      I’ll have to turn around at the next exit and come back, she thought, annoyed with herself for missing it. But they should have it better marked.

      The sun was shining bright that day, and the trees on either side of the highway were a vibrant green. But it was upstate New York after all, and here and there Sue had spotted a few patches of pinkish gold, evidence of autumn’s impatience to put an end to summer’s run. She’d missed the exit for Lebanon, in fact, because she’d been admiring the rolling hills of trees as far as the eye could see. She’d also been speeding, she realized now. She’d come around that last curve at nearly eighty-five miles per hour, humming along with the CD of The Magic Flute.

      Now she could make out another exit ramp about a mile down the highway. With a quick shake of her head and a rueful laugh at her stupidity, Sue pressed the gas pedal down harder and the car picked up speed. She reached the second off-ramp in the blink of an eye, and a joyful giggle erupted from her throat. Speeding up the incline, she made sure no cars were coming in either direction before she coasted through the stop sign at the top. She shot across the bridge and headed back down the ramp in the other direction, rocketing back onto the highway.

      I love this car, Sue thought again as the speedometer reached eighty with an amazing ease.

      The brand-new white Lexus two-door was a graduation gift from her grandparents. They’d surprised her with it that very morning as she got ready to leave for her first day of college. They’d taken her down to the parking garage beneath their building and there it sat, gleaming.

      “You’ll need a car up there anyway,” her grandmother told her, seeming to try to rationalize their extravagance, her soft Southern accent still pronounced despite years of vocal coaching. “And this way, we don’t have to worry about you taking trains, or sending Radcliffe up to get you for holidays.”

      Radcliffe was their driver. He routinely carried Sue’s grandparents to every occasion, big and small, in the austere black Lincoln town car parked in the spot next to the Lexus.

      “Thank you, thank you!” Sue exclaimed, giving both her grandmother and grandfather giant hugs before running over to the car and slipping inside. It was love at first sight. She’d always wanted her own car, even though she didn’t really need one in Manhattan—the traffic was always horrendous and she’d been getting around on the subways or grabbing cabs ever since her grandparents decided she was old enough to go out unsupervised. When necessary, her grandparents had given the nod for Radcliffe to chauffeur her around in the town car, but riding around with a uniformed driver always made Sue uncomfortable. Putting on airs, as her grandmother liked to say. So when she turned sixteen, finally old enough to drive, Sue had asked for a car of her own—but while her grandfather had agreed she might take driving lessons and get her license, he’d refused outright to get her a car.

      “You are too young,” he’d told Sue in no uncertain terms—and Sue had learned early in life not to argue with her grandfather. His word was law in their family.

      Still, she’d been kind of hoping that she might get a car for her graduation from Stowe Academy. There had been hints, like commenting on other cars to get Sue’s reactions to them. She’d scrunched up her nose at the Mini Cooper, and declared the Range Rover to be “too masculine,” but she’d licked her lips when they’d passed a white Lexus much like this one. Yet when graduation rolled around, she was left confounded. Her graduation gift, her grandparents announced, was a three-week holiday in Paris.

      As much as she’d enjoyed their strolls down the Champs d’Elysée, however, Sue kept wondering about a car. And finally, here it was, her own wheels, just in time for her move to college, when she would finally be out from under her grandfather’s thumb. No more rules or restrictions. Sue felt like singing.

      Of course, it wasn’t like Wilbourne College didn’t have its own set of rules—part of the reason, Sue suspected, that her grandparents had pushed the school so insistently on her. That and some other reasons, of course. Life in the dorms, Sue had read in the school manual, was pretty strict. No parties, no alcohol, and certainly no boys. But compared to living in her grandparents’ apartment on Central Park West in what some of her friends from Stowe called “the concentration camp”—she was indeed free.

      And now, driving herself more than three hundred miles to her new school, speeding along the highway and coasting through stop signs, Sue exulted in that freedom.

      It was hard not to be excited. She was eighteen, and on her own for the first time in her life. She’d been looking forward to college for as long as she could remember. And she now had her own car to boot.

      And nothing had prepared her for the joy of hurtling down a highway at over eighty miles per hour, the stereo blaring, the wind down and her hair getting tossed about in the wind. Nothing had prepared her for how it felt to have a warm sun coming through the windshield, her expensive sunglasses perched on her nose, stopping whenever she felt like it, passing slower cars without a second thought as she drove farther and farther north. Now I know why people are so attached to their cars, she thought with another grin. It’s all about freedom, she thought as she glanced into the rearview mirror. For eighteen years, her life had been defined by the walls of her grandparents’ apartment. While she had her trips to Florida and Paris, they were always arranged and controlled by her grandfather. For the first time, Sue was on her own.

      If I wanted to, she thought giddily, I could just keep driving, see wherever the road leads, see parts of upstate New York I’ve never seen, head to the border and cross over into Canada. I can go wherever I want to whenever I want to.

      College was the first step to adulthood, and this was just a small taste of freedom. But the practical side of her mind soon stepped in.

      Don’t be silly, you can’t just keep driving on. You have responsibilities and dreams and ambitions—and college is the first step.

      Sue had a feeling she was destined for big things. She was smart—all her teachers at Stowe had told her so—and certainly her grandparents had raised her with the expectation that she would be special. They might have been strict—rarely letting her roam through the city with her girlfriends, never allowing her to bring a boyfriend home—but that was only because she was all they had. Manhattan was a dangerous place for a girl to grow up. Girls disappeared all the time—as Gran was always reminding her. “Always pay attention and keep your eyes open and be aware of your surroundings,” Gran had lectured.

      Last night, in their final heart-to-heart, Gran had delivered a new warning. “Remember, Susan, just because you’re going to college in a small town in the country doesn’t mean that you can let your guard down for a minute. You’re a pretty girl. Very pretty. Very special. And lots of people get very jealous of pretty, special girls.”

      Heading back along the highway, Sue couldn’t help but laugh out loud at her grandmother’s words. Both Gran and Granpa were very old school, so out of touch with modern life. Of course Sue loved them—they’d been the only parents she’d ever known—but it would sure be refreshing to see the world without the filters they imposed, to make her own decisions and follow her own rules. That is, as much as Wilbourne College would allow.

      She made sure she didn’t miss the southbound exit, coasting to a stop at the top of the ramp. A battered old Chevrolet pickup truck from СКАЧАТЬ