She held up her phone. “I told you, I don’t feel safe right now.”
Heaving a sigh, I stepped aside.
“That’s better. I hope you have a wonderful night alone here. Asshole.”
I took in her words and swallowed, searching for anything to say that would result in her not leaving.
I couldn’t think of anything—apart from tying her down.
And I didn’t want to have to do that.
The door shut again, and an eerie, almost deathlike calmness set into the house as I watched her put her things in her car and get the snow off her window.
I didn’t like it one bit.
16
Natalie
FOOL.
I was a complete and utter fool.
I wiped my teary eyes as I drove down the two lane highway at a snail’s pace. It was seeming more like a one lane highway with the thick snowfall crashing down around me.
That didn’t matter though. I needed to get away from Black Mountain. From Shane.
Shady Shane.
From the start, my instinct was that he gave off a slightly shady vibe, and I should have trusted my gut. He made me feel like I was a total nut job. Turned out, I should have trusted my gut from the start.
I’d fallen for some sexy but shady guys. However, falling for a man who had plotted in the past to kidnap me for real was a first.
I cranked up the heat and pulled up my phone, careful to keep my eyes on the road. I wasn’t a fan of phoning and driving, but I needed to call my mother and let her know where I was in case something happened. She didn’t even know I was spending the night at Shane’s place.
I pressed her number, but the call dropped before it even rang once. I tried again, and a third time. No signal. I was lucky the GPS was even still working.
Tossing the phone into the empty passenger’s seat, I kept my eyes focused on the road. I’d never driven in the snow before this week, let alone a crazy snow storm like this. But it was all good. I just had to make it two hours in the dark.
A thought crept up in me that two hours in thick snow would probably end up being more like four hours.
Well, at least I had a belly full of chili.
I considered going back to my father’s house, but with what Shane had told me about Jared and Bob, that didn’t seem safe, cold not withstanding.
I blew out a frustrated exhale. The vibe of this entire town had been off ever since I set foot here last week. I’d been catching weird looks everywhere I went, even at the funeral, for goodness’ sakes.
My mind raced a million miles a minute as I gripped the steering wheel with two hands. Was it possible that what Shane said was actually true about my father?
That he’d known there was a fault in the mine shaft, but ignored complaints to please shareholders?
I zoned back in when a car came my way, seemingly out of nowhere. The visibility was so bad, neither of us saw each other until our cars were fifty feet away from each other.
“Holy shit!” I yelled out loud as I swerved to the right, feeling the ridged concrete bumps on my tires, which indicated I was getting close to the edge of the road.
We came within inches of each other, and I slammed on the brakes to avoid going straight down into the ditch.
When I came to a halt, my heart pounded furiously, and my hands were shaking.
What if Shane was right?
Not only about my father. About this storm, too.
Looking to the right, my eyes about bulged out of my head when I noticed there was a semi truck on its side one hundred feet or so ahead, off the road.
I rubbed my eyes in disbelief, took a deep breath, and put the car back into gear.
It’s probably only dangerous for big cars, I rationalized.
Or hoped.
I drove on, proceeding at a snail's pace, totally wired from the adrenaline bump I’d just gotten back there.
Was that a near death experience? It was all surreal.
The entire last week had been in that category.
I couldn’t believe I was seconds away from letting Shane take my virginity! He had tried to press his tip into me. If he weren’t so big and if I hadn’t been so tight and nervous, he might have….
I gave myself a slap on the cheek.
I needed to snap out of this daze.
Shane was an asshole, like too many of the men I’d met so far who were romantically interested in me. Sure, he’d been skilled with his tongue and fingers and converted me into a withering pile of mush. But that didn’t make it okay for him to plan a fucking...a what, exactly? How was throwing me into a mineshaft going to make up for my father’s sins, even if he had known about the mine’s imperfections?
A lightbulb went off in my head as I continued on cautiously through the storm. I did have the answers. The journals! And they were in my trunk!
If there was anywhere he might have divulged something from those years, it would be in there. He’d never told me about them, and the way they were hidden in the closet, it didn’t seem like he ever intended for anyone to read them. Maybe if I read the journals around the time of the accident, I could get some insight into my father’s innocence.
Surely he had nothing to do with that accident. I couldn’t imagine him looking the other way like Shane had said.
And I didn’t know a thing about this trust fund.
With a long drive ahead of me, I decided to put on the radio. I didn’t feel like I could take my eyes off the road for even a second to put my music on from my phone.
The first station I found was an older sounding DJ telling everyone to stay safe out there before he put on the song American Pie.
I got into a rhythm of driving, and I started to think that things weren’t going to be so bad.
I’d wait out the storm in this other town, have plenty of time to go through my father’s journals, then head back to my father’s house, make sure it was reasonably clean, and get the hell out of here.
I knew I didn’t want to spend a single second more here than I absolutely had to.
A Bob Marley song came on the radio, and I took that as an omen. This didn’t seem like a Bob Marley type of station at all, and here they were playing Three Little Birds.
I wasn’t going to worry about a thing.
Sometimes omens are false, though.
And as the song neared the end, I saw the truck coming in the distance toward me, using what really seemed like the middle of the road. A clear path still hadn’t really been made in the snow, though, and I couldn’t see the traffic lines, so I couldn’t be sure if the truck was on my side, or I was on the truck’s side.
I swerved to the right as far as I could, but he was still bearing down on me.
He honked a few times, and it jolted me.
I had no choice. To avoid crashing head on into the truck, I swerved right, hard.
And then I figured out why. Invisible ice on the highway.
The next half second seemed like it took five minutes.
In slow motion, I saw my own car go off the road and into a snowy ditch, feeling more like a spectator than a driver.
But that’s what black ice did. It came out of nowhere and you were relegated to your fate. It made your steering wheel worthless.
I felt the airbag deploy.
And then everything went black.
17
Shane