The jerking grew worse. She pressed the gas pedal harder in frustration - and the Pinto squirted ahead, the engine smoothing out once more.
'Yay!' Tad said, so suddenly and loudly that she lumped
'We're not there yet, Tadder.'
A mile farther along they came to an intersection marked with another wooden sign, this one reading TOWN ROAD NO. 3.
Donna turned in, feeling triumphant. As well as she remembered, Camber's place was less than a mile and a half from here. If the Pinto gave up the ghost now, she and Tad could ankle it.
They passed a ramshackle house with a station wagon and a big old rusty white car in the driveway. In her rearview mirror, Donna
noticed that the honeysuckle had really gone crazy on the side of the house that would catch most of the sun. A field opened up on their left after they passed the house, and the Pinto began to climb a long, steep hill.
Halfway up, the little car began to labor again. This time it was jerking harder than it ever had before.
'Will it get up, Mommy?'
'Yes,' she said grimly.
The Pinto's speedometer needle dropped from forty to thirty. She dropped the transmission selector lever from drive into the lower range, thinking vaguely that it might help compression or something. Instead, the Pinto began to buck worse than ever. A fusillade of backfires roared through the exhaust pipe, making Tad cry out. Now they were down to fast running speed, but she could see the
Camber house and the red barn that served as his garage. Flooring the accelerator had helped before. She tried again, and for a moment the engine smoothed out. The speedometer needle crept up from fifteen to twenty. Then it began to shake and shudder once more. Donna tried flooring the gas yet again, but this time, instead of smoothing out, the engine began to fail. The AMP idiot light on the dashboard began to flicker dully, signaling the fact that the Pinto was now on the edge of a stall.
But it didn't matter because the Pinto was now laboring past the Camber mailbox. They were here. There was a package hung over the mailbox lid, and she saw the return address clearly as they passed it: J. C. Whitney & Co.
The information went directly to the back of her mind without stopping. Her immediate attention was focused on getting the car into the driveway. Let it stall then, she thought. He'll have to fix it before he can get in or out.
The driveway was a little beyond the house. If it had been an uphill driveway all the way, as the Trentons' own was, the Pinto would not have made it. But after a small initial rise, the Cambers'
driveway ran either dead level or slightly downhill toward the big converted barn.
Donna shifted into neutral and let what was left of the Pinto's forward motion carry them toward the big barn doors, which stood half open on their tracks. As soon as her foot left the accelerator pedal to tap the brake and stop them, the motor began to hitch again ... but feebly this time. The AMP light pulsed like a slow heartbeat, then brightened. The Pinto stalled.
Tad looked at Donna.
She grinned at him. 'Tad, ole buddy,' she said, 'we have arrived.'
'Yeah,' he said. 'But is anybody home?'
There was a dark green pickup truck parked beside the barn. That was Camber's truck, all right, not someone else's waiting to be fixed. She remembered it from last time. But the lights were off inside. She craned her neck to the left and saw they were off in the house too. And there had been a package hung over the mailbox lid.
The return address on the package had been J. C. Whitney & Co.
She knew what that was; her brother had gotten their catalogue in the mail when he was a teenager. They sold auto parts, accessories, customizing equipment. A package for Joe Camber from J. C.
Whitney was the most natural thing in the world. But if he was here, he surely would have gotten his mail by now.
Nobody home, she thought dispiritedly, and felt a weary sort of anger at Vic. He's always home, sure he is, the guy would put down roots in his garage if he could. sure he would, except when I need him.
'Well, let's go see, anyhow,' she said, opening her door.
'I can't get my seatbelt unhooked,' Tad said, scratching futilely at the buckle release.
'Okay, don't have a hemorrhage, Tad. I'll come around and let you out.'
She got out, slammed her door, and took two steps toward the front of the car, intending to cross in front of the hood to the passenger side and let Tad out of his harness. It would give Camber a chance to come out and see who his. company was, if he was here. She somehow didn't relish poking her head in on him unannounced. It was probably foolish, but since that ugly and frightening scene with Steve Kemp in her kitchen, she had become more aware of what it was to be an unprotected woman than she had since she was sixteen and her mother and father had let her begin dating.
The quiet struck her at once. It was hot and so quiet that it was somehow unnerving. There were sounds, of course, but even after several years in Castle Rock, the most she could say about her ears was that they had slowly adapted from 'city ears' to 'town ears'.
They were by no means 'country cars' . . . and this was the real country.
She heard birdsong, and the harsher music of a crow somewhere in the long field which stretched down the flank of the hill they had just climbed. There was the sigh of a light breeze, and the oaks that lined the driveway made moving patterns of shadow around her feet. But she could not hear a single car engine, not even the faraway burp of a tractor or a baling machine. City ears and town ears are most closely attuned to man-made sounds; those that nature makes tend to fall outside the tightly drawn net of selective perception. A total lack of such sounds makes for unease.
I'd bear him if be was working in the barn, Donna thought. But the only sounds that registered were her own crunching footfalls on the
crushed gravel of the driveway and a low humming sound, barely audible - with no real conscious thought at all, her mind placed it as the hum of a power transformer on one of the poles back by the road.
She reached the front of the hood and started to cross in front of the Pinto, and that was when she heard a new sound. A low, thick growling.
She stopped, her head coming up at once, trying to pinpoint the source of that sound. For a moment she couldn't and she was suddenly terrified, not by the sound itself but by its seeming directionlessness. It was nowhere. It was everywhere. And then some internal radar - survival equipment, perhaps -turned on all the way, and she understood that the growling was coming from inside the garage.
'Mommy?' Tad poked his head out his open window as far as the seatbelt harness would allow. 'I can't get this damn old -~
'Shhhh!'
(growling)
She took a tentative step backward, her right hand resting lightly on the Pinto's low hood, her nerves on tripwires as thin as filaments, not panicked but in a state of heightened alertness, thinking: It didn't growl before.
