Wildwood Road Read Online Free Page B

When he did, he glanced up to see a green street sign gleaming in his headlights. A left turn. In the glare he could not read the street name, but he turned, distracted by the girl's agitation. As he made the turn she glanced over her shoulder, looking out through the rear window. Michael checked the rearview mirror.
    “What are you looking for?” he asked, a bit surprised by the sound of his voice, by the tremor in it.
    “I don't like the dark.”
    He didn't bother to point out that he had found her walking along by herself at night on a stretch of road that had been pitch black except for the moon.
    They drove like that for a while, mostly in silence, and from time to time the girl told him to turn. One street was very suburban, lined with lampposts, cars in driveways, Halloween decorations on nearly every stoop. Another was almost entirely woods. Several times, Michael looked in on Jillian in the backseat, but she snored on peacefully. Though his thoughts were muffled by the Guinness, he found his mind wandering, or at least drunkenly stumbling. The girl was afraid of something. First she was lost. Then she wasn't. She recognized a street, but now they had followed an odd zigzag through the valley so that he was no longer certain they were even in the same town.
    Several times he began to drift and had to jerk the wheel to keep the tires from hitting the rutted shoulder of the road. They were now on a broad, winding way that led up a hill. Ranch houses hid in the trees, and he spotted an A-frame, which he'd always thought one of the oddest choices for a home. His face felt pleasantly warm, his hands as oddly numb as his feet. He was tired, and combined with the alcohol in his system and the warm air pumping out of the heating vents in the car, the tiredness was catching up to him.
    Michael opened his window about halfway. The October air rushed in and he breathed it in, enjoying the feeling of it in his lungs. Fresh, crisp autumn air, with more than a hint of winter. He blinked, sat up a bit straighter, and glanced over at the girl.
    She made no response, only continued to search the road ahead. Whatever had spooked her about the trees before no longer seemed to bother her.
    “If you're cold, I can close it.”
    As if she had not heard, she raised a hand and pointed through the windshield. “That one. That's where I belong.”
    About time,
Michael thought. But when he looked out through the windshield, he frowned, and without even being aware of it, moved his foot from accelerator to brake, slowing the Volvo's ascent up the hill.
    The house was in a dead-end circle at the top of the road. The hill continued upward, however, and though set back and surrounded by trees, the house loomed over the road as if it stood watch. It was an enormous, sprawling thing with darkened windows, the property untended. Once it would have been called a mansion, but Michael felt that size alone shouldn't earn a place that word. Its condition had to count for something. Michael knew only a little about architecture, but even so he felt that the house was an odd combination of styles. In front there was a single turret splitting a gabled roof, and a porch that seemed entirely out of place, wrapping around one side of the house's face but not the other. In the moonlight he could see that several shutters were hanging, shingles were missing from the roof, and at least one window was broken. The place was simply falling apart.
    Yet someone was home. A light burned in a second-floor window, and another up in the turret.
    This is where I belong,
the girl had said.
    Michael shook his head, brows knitted. In the backseat he heard Jillian mumble softly in her sleep. She whimpered, as though she were having a bad dream.
    “Listen, are you sure—” he began, turning to the girl.
    But even as he spoke, she popped open her door.
    “Wait. Wait a second,” he said quickly.
    She held the door open and turned to him. Her face had gone slack again, the