She nodded. “I have an errand that will not wait.”
“An…
an errand? Need any help? I know my way around the fair pretty well.”
“Alas, no. I must find out certain things—though I think I have already found one of the things I sought.” Alec’s heart flip-flopped. Could she possibly
mean…
Surely not!
On the other hand, maybe she did. He wasn’t bad looking, he supposed. And she was foreign, she might be grateful for any kind voice in a storm. Now he thought of it, too, she did look a wee bit troubled; he could see it in the gentle furrowing of her brow. (Lordy
Jesus,
what wonderful eyes!)
Already she was backing away, on the verge of being swept into the mob. “I— Wait,” he called. “I don’t even know your name! I—” He froze, amazed at his own forwardness. Usually he was shy around girls—certainly shyer than Davy had recently become. Except that somehow all that had left him. Suddenly he felt newborn, as an unfamiliar confidence welled up in him, making him almost giddily reckless.
The girl ducked past the skinny, hard-looking woman who had threatened to come between them. “Call me Eva!” She pronounced the first letter somewhere between
E
and
A
. “And you
are…?”
“Alec. Alec McLean. I live over in MacTyrie.”
The girl’s face brightened. “MacTyrie! Ah—truly I may see you, then. I am visiting this area, you see, and—”
“Where’re you from?”
Another laugh, like silver. “Many places, my sudden friend, many places!”
“But—”
The crowd eddied in once more. “Truly, I must leave,” Eva cried, as it took her. “But perhaps we will meet again. In fact, I think I would like to.”
Alec’s grin stretched so wide it made his cheeks hurt.
“Wait!”
he called, as the girl turned to go. He started after, but found his way blocked as the sweaty throng swirled in to make way for the hot-dog cart a clown was pushing past. Then someone jostled him from behind and someone else from the side, and when he found his balance again, Eva had vanished.
How strange,
he told himself.
How very strange.
Now that had certainly been interesting. Jesus, she’d been pretty, and nice, as far as he could tell. Maybe not
too
nice, though: because she sure hadn’t been the least bit shy. She had actually appeared to like him, too. Was it
possible…?
Nah, no such luck, not for skinny Alec McLean. Not with all the hot-blooded muscular young jocks on the prowl. But still—she’d said she might see him again. Suddenly he was looking forward to that encounter with a fervor that bordered on irrational.
*
Eva, Eva, Eva:
The name was still dancing through Alec’s brain when he climbed into Apocalypse Now, Runnerman Buchanan’s tan VW van ten minutes later. He could still lower his lids and see her, see that secretive flash in her eyes, the devilish curve of her smile. He had tried to find her, of course; had searched the fairgrounds until he had no choice but to abandon his quest or miss his ride, and that was a for-real bummer.
And now, perhaps ninety seconds into the journey home, he found himself presented with another.
They had just trundled noisily through the morass of traffic in the fairgrounds parking lot and eased onto the MacTyrie road. Their first bits of shouted conversation (Darrell had a Guns N’ Roses tape on full) had been casual enough: a round of cheerful kidding about Dr. McLean’s refusal to allow the new Volvo 760 in such heavy traffic. And then Alec had fallen silent, too distracted to pay much attention to his dizzy buddy’s random chatter—which was hard to hear anyway over the thundering stereo and the rude-sounding blatts of the Vee-dub’s near-nonexistent muffler.
Until, he suddenly realized, the voluble Mr. Buchanan had just raised
that
subject again.
“Okay, McLean, fess up. It’s time you leveled with me, man.”
“Huh? What’d you say?”
Darrell glared at him sullenly from under brass-blond hair caught back in the impressive ponytail the members of the Enotah County High track team affected. His narrow face looked sharp and weasel-like. “Don’t give me that shit, man; you know what I said: What went on at the Traders’ camp that time? What was all that B.S. with the fire and all, and you and G-Man and Mad Dave and his sweetie bein’ gone all night?”
Alec grimaced in irritation. He didn’t need this right now. Shoot, even if he had wanted to spill the facts, there was no way he could have, at least not to Darrell. The whole mess had been an affair of Faerie, and the Ban of Lugh was therefore in effect. The upshot was that Alec
couldn’t
tell his friend what he wanted to know. The best he had been able to manage when the topic had arisen in the almost-two-weeks since the incident was to say that he had sworn an oath to the Traders not to tell and feared their wrath if he did. David’s tongue was under similar interdict, as was G-Man’s—which meant that, except for Aikin Daniels who had been out of town the whole time and still was, the illustrious Mr. Buchanan was the sole member of the MacTyrie Gang who was still ignorant. Unfortunately, it looked like staying that way. Certainly there was nothing
Alec
could do to change the situation.
Darrell, however, was not so easily dissuaded. “Come on, Mach-one, spill it; I mean it’s not like I wasn’t involved or anything. It was
me
had to spend three hours tellin’ the cops I didn’t know shit about you guys disappearin’, and then
blammo
back you are on Sunday mornin’ like nothin’ happened. That ain’t cookin’ with gas, man.”
Alec took a deep breath and turned his gaze to the vistas of motels and marinas flashing by on his right, all blocking the gray-purple humps of the mountains. “I told you, I can’t! I mean look, I would if I could, but I can’t, okay? I took an oath.”
“Bullshit.”
Alec’s fists clenched automatically. “I
can’t
,”
he repeated. “You’re just gonna have to make do with that.”
Darrell’s glare almost pinned him to the window. “Bullshit, I say. I’ve had enough of your and Sullivan’s secrets: boys-in-white, shiny people in the woods, that ring that burned G-Man that time…I mean,
Jesus,
you’ve even got him doing it! You guys took an oath as a member of the MacTyrie Gang, too; remember? Straight talk, honest answers to honest questions, no secrets.
No
goddamn secrets, man!”
Alec’s only response was to lower his head and close his eyes in despair.
“Oh…
shit
!”
Darrell spat in exasperation. “Damn it, McLean, I’m sick of this!”
Alec slumped down even further, wishing this trip would end sooner than the fifteen or so minutes it would take.
Darrell’s face suddenly lit with a fiendish glow. “By God, I bet I know
one
way to get the truth out of you!”
He bent forward over the steering wheel—and jammed the accelerator to the floor.
The van farted and jerked and spat out a cloud of oily black smoke, then slowly began to gather speed, though with far more noise than enthusiasm.
“Look, Darrell,” Alec began reasonably—or tried to, though he could feel the shuddering of worn-out suspension as the van hustled along at speeds it was no longer easily capable of, especially given the tourist-season traffic. “If you want to talk about being straight, and all, you oughta realize there’re some things a guy just can’t tell anybody—like confession and all. I mean, I’m in a moral dilemma, man. I don’t like it any better than you do!” Tank-topped shoulders shrugged in calculated nonconcern. “So level with me, then.”
“Darrell, I—oh,
crap
!”
Darrell slammed on the brakes to avoid a dawdling Nissan Sentra that changed lanes right in front of them, then turned hard right into the little-used back road that had once been the main route to MacTyrie. The van began to gather speed again. He reached over and cranked up the stereo, let “Welcome to the Jungle” thunder through the cavernous space behind them.
“Tell me!”
he screamed.
“I can’t!” Alec shouted back, wondering helplessly if his companion had finally gone off the deep end.
Darrell began to weave across the road, inscribing ever-widening arcs. Once, Alec was certain, the right-side wheels lifted off the ground. He knew they were going to flip—but Darrell lifted off a fraction, and the van thumped back to the pavement. But now there was a hill ahead, and beyond it a series of long, tight curves. And perhaps no place in the whole county filled him with such terror, because if you were a good driver and had a fast enough car, you could get completely airborne coming over the top, and still live to tell about it. Unfortunately, though, Darrell was
not
a good driver; and even Alec, who was not much of a car nut at all, knew that there were considerable differences between the dynamic qualities of classic Mustangs like David’s or late-model Lasers like Gary’s, and decrepit Vee-dub vans like this one. If they went off, they’d not even have to bother about a coffin.
And Darrell was obviously going to do it.
The VW gathered speed; the volume of the stereo increased; Axl Rose’s voice broke into a staccato chatter.
“
Tell
meeeeeee!” Darrell shrieked gleefully, by now so far gone with his game that Alec doubted he much cared about the information.
All Alec could do was close his eyes and pray.
Faster and faster, and then the engine note changed and an awful, sick feeling slid into Alec’s stomach, followed immediately by a falling sensation and—the longest moment of his life later—a sickening crunch as the van landed hard, fully compressed its inadequate shocks, and slewed across the road, miraculously still under control and upright.
Darrell swerved onto the shoulder. His face, when Alec looked at him, was white. “Dammit, McLean!” he raged. “You
know
what you just did? You almost got us
killed
!”
“
I
almost got us killed?
You’re
the asshole who came over Oh-shit Hill at ninety in a friggin’ Volkswagen van!”
“And you’re the asshole that made me so mad I did! Shit, man, I’ve had it with you! I’m sick of all this secret stuff. You can take your goddamn secret and walk! Just get the hell out of my car!”
Alec stared at him incredulously. “You’re not serious.”
“The hell I’m not! Get out! Get out right now!”
Alec sighed and opened the door. It wasn’t that far to MacTyrie, and who needed jerks like Darrell anyway? Guys that wouldn’t take you at your word, and then went off the deep end and tried to kill you, and then blamed it all on you when they got the shit scared out of them.
Before he was truly aware of it, he was standing on pot-holed pavement, with a stand of pines leering down at him from the bank at his back as he watched the tan bread-loaf putting angrily away amid a symphony of clanks and a billow of smoke that had not been there before.
“Bullfuckingshit!”
Alec spat, and started walking.
*
Fortunately, it was not a long hike on to MacTyrie, and as it turned out, he did not have to walk most of the distance, for less than a mile down the road an older neighbor insisted on picking him up in her Lincoln Town Car. The gray-haired woman tried to engage him in conversation, but he was still too pissed to bother with more than mumbled thanks when she let him out at the end of his street.
Even with such unasked-for aid, though, it was nearly suppertime before Alec finally found himself turning up the sidewalk between the banks of ivy that fortified his folks’ Cape Cod. He was not, however, in any mood for food.
Nor did he know what he
was
in a mood for, what with the emotional (and almost literal) roller coaster he’d just gotten off of. First meeting that girl—the marvelous Eva whose very name filled him with an excitement he had never known; who made him wonder if perhaps even he, skinny Alec McLean, might at last be about to join the ranks of the amorously experienced. And then having the whole thing ruined by a real-and-true fight with his number-three best buddy. The whole thing made his head hurt.
What he wanted to do was talk to somebody. He pushed through the front door, ducked into the den, and picked up the phone, too impatient to bother with his own upstairs—then paused, wondering whom he should try. Not David this time;
he
was part of the problem. And besides, maybe it was time Alec started putting his emotional eggs in some other basket, just in case the old familiar one became
too
full. His friend
had
been mighty distant lately—well, not exactly distant, more like love-struck. Not that Alec blamed him, exactly or had any right to: Liz
was
awfully nice-looking and obviously a perfect match for him, and if what David was going through now was anything like what Alec had gotten a taste of that afternoon, he thought he understood a little better. Still, David wasn’t as available as he once had been, and that was a fact; and though Alec’s rational part understood the reasons, it was still not very pleasant to deal with when he needed him but did not dare call.