No Controlling Legal Authority Ch. 24

"My God, what was that?" she gasped, jerking instantly to a bolt-upright position and looking toward him with startled, wide-open eyes.

The roaring noise continued unabated, while he wrestled with both hands on the wildly jerking wheel to bring the wayward automobile back to the paved surface. The wheels on her side of the car plowed through the loose gravel of the shoulder beneath her, flinging up a shower of fist sized rocks that clanged and pinged deafeningly against the undercarriage. The car fishtailed crazily for a hundred feet or so, and she felt a sickening fear that they were about to crash into the dense woods that crowded the edges of the roadway. He tapped the brake, sending the car into a sideways slide toward a solid phalanx of maples.

"Oh, shit!" he exclaimed in surprise as the car seemed to accelerate toward the trees with the loss of traction.

He tensed and fought the wheel for control, and she realized he was about to hit the brakes again.

"Don't brake, accelerate and steer into it," she instructed him cooly, reaching for the wheel to guide the wheels into the slide.

"Easy!" she warned when he overreacted and gunned the accelerator too much, but she was already in control and had stopped the headlong slide toward the ditch. When she had righted the car, centering it in the roadway headed in the proper direction, she relinquished the wheel and fell back against the seat. Almost as an afterthought, she glanced at her skirt that was nearly bunched around her hips, and tugged it down to a respectable position closer to her knees.

"What happened back there?" she asked him with a tremor of excitement still ringing in her voice.

"I'm not sure," he replied apologetically with a sheepish glance toward her. "You were sleeping and…"

"And what?" she challenged him when his voice trailed off without finishing the sentence.

"Dreaming, I guess. You were sort of moaning, and you kept repeating the name 'Timmy' over and over real softly, you know, like a whisper."

"Oh, yeah," she replied suspiciously, and she fixed a cold eye on him to test his mettle. "So, why did you nearly wreck the car?"

Because you stopped talking and got still, and it was so quiet in here and the windshield wipers kept…" he explained with halting breathlessness.

"So, you're telling me you fell asleep?" she asked incredulously, because his explanation certainly didn't match the facts as far as she was concerned.

"I'm afraid so," he sputtered, nearly choking in embarrassment.

"Where were your hands?" she asked him pointedly, because she didn't believe a word.

"On the wheel, of course," he answered without guile or hesitation, and he turned to look at her with a look of such bewildered innocence that she felt her conviction beginning to waver.

"Both of them?" she queried, but her interrogation had lost its sharpness and its purpose.

"Both of them, honest Injun," he quipped with a puzzled look, holding both hands in the air for emphasis.

"Don't" she protested quickly, lunging for the untended wheel as the car drifted toward the shoulder again.

"Sorry," he apologized again, slapping his hands back on the wheel before any real damage could occur.

She studied him silently for a moment, and mulled the possibilities in her mind. Maybe she was dreaming, she rationalized, despite the lack of any memory of a dream involving Timmy. Maybe the shadowy fingers on her thighs had been only imaginary; perhaps it was her imagination that had been playing with her, not his. His profile was both reassuring and unsettling to her, because he radiated a boyishly backward innocence that conflicted with the mature sagacity she knew he had to possess to succeed in his line of work.

"Pull over," she said finally after realizing the puzzle was beyond her solving. "I'll drive; you sleep."

"But, you don't know where we're going," he protested weakly, because, thanks to his narrow escape from disaster, he knew this was an argument he couldn't win. "I'll get us close enough. We cross the river at Cairo, then head toward Paducah and cross the Ohio there. From Paducah, I'll head east toward Murray, Kentucky; I went to track meets at Murray State a couple of times, it shouldn't be too hard to find again. From your description, I figure Posey's Bend can't be much off the line between Paducah and Murray."

That's right," he responded in amazement. "Not more than fifty miles, give or take ten. There are signs along the way around Mayfield that'll take you straight to Posey's Bend."

"Great, you're nearly home already. Now stop the car and move over."

So it happened that Anne was driving as they crossed the Mississippi into Illinois and the Ohio into Kentucky and shortly thereafter when she turned south in Mayfield and entered Tennessee. Caleb slept soundly, exhausted from excitement and his lack of sleep, and narrowly avoided the commission of the felony of having transported a woman across state lines for immoral purposes.