Cool damp air slapped her face as she stepped down onto the side of the road, but Mary barely noticed, she was shining her flashlight around in search of her dog. Catching a glimpse of Bailey’s tail end disappearing around the back of the RV, Mary muttered a curse under her breath and moved a bit more swiftly, which still wasn’t very fast. The side of the road was uneven, littered with stones and weeds. The last thing she needed was to stumble and fall and break something in the middle of nowhere. Help would not come for a while out here, if at all.
“Bailey?” Mary called as she reached the back of the RV and was startled to hear the slight quaver in her voice. She sounded like a scared old woman, and the knowledge annoyed the hell out of her. Irritated now, she snapped, “Bailey! Get back here or I’ll get your leash.”
A bark sounded to her right, on the driver’s side of the RV and she started in that direction, but paused when Bailey appeared before her, tail wagging and excitement in every line of her body. Once Bailey had her attention, the dog barked again.
“What is it?” Mary asked, and in her head heard Joe’s voice finishing the question with “Did Timmy fall down the well?” It was one of his little jokes. He’d had many of them and they’d always made her smile no matter how often he used them.
Pushing the thought away with a little sigh, she turned her flashlight to run it over the road behind the RV. By her guess it must have taken them a good twenty or thirty feet to stop, but it may have been as much as sixty or even a hundred. With 20,000 pounds of weight behind it, the RV wasn’t designed for fast braking. Mary often thought that should be written on the front and back of the large vehicles. “Give wide berth, RVs need space to stop.” It would certainly help with tailgaters and those idiot drivers who seemed to like to cut her off on the highways. That was the reason she was on this lonely back road. She hadn’t wanted to have to deal with aggressive drivers on the highway today. And perhaps she’d also wanted to avoid the stretch of highway where Joe had suffered his heart attack last year.
Pushing that thought away as well, Mary swung the flashlight from left to right on the road, frowning when the light didn’t reveal anything but wet tarmac. It had obviously rained here earlier, the road was soaking and the air was heavy with moisture.
Raising her flashlight to see farther down the lane, Mary started away from the RV, but hadn’t gone far before she began to feel unaccountably nervous at leaving the safety of the RV behind. It was silly, she supposed, but the night was so very dark out here. And there was an odd almost waiting quality to the silence around her. The only sound she could hear was the rustle of leaves in the breeze. Shouldn’t there have been the chirps and hoots of crickets, frogs, and owls or something? For some reason the lack of those sounds bothered her a great deal.
“Nothing,” Mary muttered nervously, and found herself easing backward step after step until she felt the bumper of the RV against the backs of her legs. She almost turned and hurried back inside the vehicle, but her conscience wouldn’t let her. She’d hit something. The best scenario was that she’d run over garbage, but if that were the case there would be trash all over the road, and there just wasn’t. The next best option was that she’d hit a deer or some other animal but there was nothing on the road. She hadn’t just hit something; she’d run over it. Mary distinctly recalled the way the RV had bounced over something in the road. She’d think whatever it was might have got caught and been dragged, but there had been two bumps over whatever it was—front tires and back.
Of course, whatever she’d hit could have got caught behind the back tires and been dragged, some part of her brain pointed out, and Mary turned to shine the flashlight under the RV. The double back tires were a good six feet before the end of the RV and she bent at the waist to see more, then straightened abruptly when Bailey began to bark. The dog had moved up the passenger side of the RV and Mary stepped out beside it to find her with the flashlight beam.
Bailey stood next to the door to the RV, she noted, but the dog was staring off into the dark trees along the side of the road, body stiff and growling.
Mary promptly turned the flashlight beam toward the woods where Bailey had focused her attention. She caught a glimpse of something in the trees, but it was gone so quickly. It may have just been a shadow caused by her flashlight, she reassured herself. Still, something had Bailey upset.
Fear suddenly tripping through her, Mary swallowed and began to ease toward Bailey. She did so by shuffling sideways so that her back was to the RV and her flashlight beam and gaze could remain trained on the woods. It seemed to take forever to get to the door, but some instinct was telling her not to turn her back to the dark woods.
She wasted no time in opening the door and the moment she did, Bailey rushed in, galloping up the steps as if the hounds of hell were on her tail. That did not ease her anxiety. Bailey was not a cowardly dog. She was the type to rush into confrontation and stand between any threat and her people. The way she raced into the RV had the hair on Mary’s neck standing on end as she scrambled up the steps after her.