“I’ll rephrase,” she says, forcing some steel into her voice. “Is this animal wild?”
“It can be. The wildest.”
Josh smirks as he says it. A knowing, winking, bordering-on-smarmy upturn of his lips that tells Charlie more than any spoken answer could.
“You’re talking about humans, right?” she says.
“I am.”
“And is this object you’re thinking of part of the body?”
“You’re good at this game, you know that? You’ve only asked—” Josh pauses to count the fingers on his right hand, the digits flexing. “Ten questions and you’re so close already.”
Charlie’s not sure if that’s a good or bad thing. It’s hard to tell without knowing the stakes. But since Josh seems to be in no hurry to do anything but continue to play the game, Charlie decides it’s best to do just that.
Keep him occupied.
Keep him happy and calm and driving until they reach a place where they can stop and Charlie can get out of the car and never get back in again.
That’s another thing she’s decided. To do what she’s starting to fear she should have done back at the 7-Eleven just before the highway—tell Josh she’s changed her mind, leave the car, get her things from the trunk, and let him drive away without her. She doesn’t care if she’s overreacting and Josh is just some harmless weirdo who only wants to drive her to Youngstown. It’s better to be safe than sorry. And right now, safe is a place outside of this car.
“Is this body part useful?”
“Oh, it’s very useful,” Josh says, again with the knowing smirk. This time, though, its accompanied by a lift of the eyebrows that suggests something both sexual and sinister. Seeing it makes Charlie shift in her seat.
It occurs to her—just now, when it’s far too late, and not back when she was still safely at Olyphant—that Josh could be a sexual predator. Someone who lures college girls into his car, rapes them, dumps them on the side of the road. Then he drives off to a different university and the process begins anew. Josh is certainly physically capable of it. His size was one of the first things Charlie noticed about him.
The worried lump in her stomach expands, rising upward into her chest, pushing against her lungs. Her rib cage tightens. So much so that she takes a deep breath, just to prove to herself that she still can.
“Do all humans have it?” she asks, silently pleading that Josh says yes and she can stop tallying all the pornographic possibilities he might be thinking of.
“We do,” Josh says, more straightforward this time, as if he’s realized he’s crossed some invisible line he didn’t intend to breach. Not that it makes Charlie feel any better. Now that the idea of Josh being a rapist is in her head, she can’t shake it.
Her fingers have never left the door handle. She flexes them against it. A test. Seeing how long it might take to pull the handle and fling the door open, if it should come to that.
She desperately hopes it doesn’t come to that.
“Is this body part located above the waist?”
“As a matter of fact, it is,” Josh says.
“Is it above the neck?”
“Yes.”
“Is it something we’re born with?”
Josh appears thoughtful, taking a moment to squint at the thinning fog outside the windshield. Charlie does the same, relieved to see not only the lightening of the gray outside but a set of taillights glowing not too far in front of them. She checks the side mirror, and her relief grows. There’s a car behind them now, headlights cutting through the dissipating gloom. Another pair of headlights joins it. Then another.
Charlie’s hit with a faint shimmer of hope. Maybe one of the cars will try to pass them. Maybe she can flag down the driver.
“It’s funny you should ask that,” Josh says, still gazing out the windshield. “Because we’re not.”
In an instant, all of Charlie’s hopefulness disappears. Because she knows the object Josh is thinking of—a realization that makes it feel as if all the blood has drained from her body. Ice water pours in to replace it, leaving Charlie motionless and numb.
“You know the answer, don’t you?” Josh says.
Charlie nods, too unnerved to speak.
“Then say it, smarty-pants.”
Charlie swallows and forces herself to speak, willing the words onto her tongue and into the stifling air of the car.
“Is it a tooth?”
“It is.” Josh smiles, proud of himself. “Very good. You solved it in sixteen questions.”
“What made you pick that object?”
“I don’t know. It just came to me.” A stricken look crosses Josh’s face. “Oh, shit. I’m so sorry, Charlie. I wasn’t thinking. No wonder you look like you’ve just seen a ghost. It’s because of your friend. That guy pulled out one of her teeth after killing her, didn’t he?”
Charlie shakes her head, wanting him to stop talking. Needing him to stop. The urge to shut him up is so great that she’d lunge into the driver’s seat and clamp a hand over his mouth if there was a way to do it without them running off the road. Because the more he talks, the worse the situation becomes.
Still, she has another question. One she must ask. She needs to hear Josh’s answer. She wants to believe what he says, even though every ice-cold nerve in her body tells her she won’t.
“How did you know about the tooth?”
“I read about it in the newspaper.”
“It wasn’t in the papers,” Charlie says.
“I’m positive I read it there,” Josh says.
He’s lying. The police wouldn’t have made her swear not to tell anyone about Maddy’s missing tooth if they planned on giving that information to the press, and Charlie assumes she would have heard about it if they had.
She runs through all the ways Josh could know about the missing tooth, the least scary being that he’s somehow related to Maddy and heard it from her mother. But that makes no sense. If Josh was a family member, it’s likely Charlie would have known about him when Maddy was alive. Even if Maddy hadn’t mentioned him—and she loved to talk about her family—there’s no reason why Josh wouldn’t have brought up the connection immediately.
Next, Charlie considers the idea that Josh could be a cop. Or used to be one. Again, it’s unlikely. Any cop familiar with Maddy’s case would also know Charlie had been her roommate.
That leaves one last possible reason Josh knows about the tooth.