Page 89 of False Idols

It’s my mother’s car.

I shake my head and grab Beau’s arm. “Something’s wrong. We have to go back the other way.”

He looks at me then. The fear in my voice is enough to make him finally stop. “What is it?”

“That’s my mom’s car. She doesn’t know I’m here.”

Even if my mom did know I was here, her car shouldn’t be on this lonely trail in the middle of nowhere. A thousand questions run through my mind. How long has it been here? Where is she? Who drove the car here? And lastly, did they know I would be the one to find it? They had to have known. Why else would my mother’s car be here? It’s too neat. God, why don’t I have my phone on me? When we left the house my headspace was all wrong. I was feeling reckless. It’s the only excuse for why I don’t have my phone on me.

“Where’s your phone?” I ask him. I want to call the cops. I programmed their numbers into our phones this morning. If we can tell Marcus and Simon, then maybe they can help us figure out why my mom’s car is here.

Beau pulls out his phone and holds it out to me. I grab it and swipe up but there’s no reception. “No bars,” I tell Beau and he takes it back with a nod.

“Shitty reception out by the lake,” he turns and glares at my mom’s car. “Someone knows we’re here.”

I look with him at the familiar car that my mom has had since I can remember. It’s only a few feet away now and I watch him make a decision. He raises himself to his full height and squares his shoulders. He’s going to go investigate. Fuck.

I don’t even try to stop him. It’s no use.

We approach the car slowly and my eyes are on the driver’s seat. I’m convinced I’ll see my mom in the driver’s seat but there’s no one there. I scan the whole car and everything looks normal. It’s still the same tan sedan that she’s always driven. It’s an old car, but it’s sound. Even when we moved into our brand new house she didn’t see the point of getting a newer car.

“We are not prideful. There’s no use in getting a new car to keep up with the Joneses.”

My mom really believed that by not getting a car, but moving into the nice house in the better part of town, she was avoiding any of the prideful behavior she loathed, even as she bought new designer clothes and bags. Her logic was screwy, but it let her keep her head up and judge everyone around her with impunity. That’s why she liked church so much. It was free range to judge under the guise of concern. Beau drops down onto his knees beside the car and checks underneath it, but a few minutes later he comes up empty handed.

“There’s nothing!” he shouts to me over the roar of the rain and tries the door. It opens. I hang back while Beau opens and shuts every door in his inspection of the car. I don’t know what he’s looking for but he comes back to me after a minute and grabs my hand.

“Come on. There’s no one here.”

We start back on our way to the lake house but I can’t help and feel like we’re being watched. I look back at the car. Its shape stands out but not for long. Not in this storm. It vanishes from sight after a minute or so of walking. It’s another fifteen minutes until I see the lake house rise up out of the storm. The path that we took started on the side of it and now that we’re on our way back I look for a way that my mom could have driven her car down past the lake house while we were here. The curtains we closed last night could have hidden her car from us but there’s no road. If she drove her car here she did it without knowing about the trail. Why would she have done that? When would she have done that? I haven’t spoken to her for the past two weeks and we came here straight from Beau’s apartment. The timing feels off. Everything feels off.

I grab Beau’s arm with both hands and pull him back. We’re so close to the house, even in the torrential downpour there’s no missing it. As eager as I was to get out of the rain, I’m nervous to do it now. Seeing my mother’s car on the trail feels like an omen.

Something bad is about to happen.

“Beau, this isn’t right. My mom’s car shouldn’t be out here. Why would it be out here?”

He wipes at his face and plants his hands on his hips. “I don’t know, Nevaeh.”

“We can’t go back up there,” I tell him and gesture towards the house.

“We have to go back inside. The storm is picking up. There’s nowhere else to go.”

“Beau, listen to me! That fucking car being out here is a message, or whatever! I know it is!”

“From who, Nevaeh?”

“I don’t know! My mom? The Reaper? I don’t know. But if we go back inside then we’re playing this little game through and I have a bad feeling.”

Beau watches me and at first I think he’s going to tell me that we’re going inside, end of story, but then he nods and grabs my hand. “Okay, let’s go down the hill to Simon and Marcus. We’ll tell them about the car and get a lift into town.”

That sounds good. If we have other people involved, then we’re doing the right thing. Going into town would be better than staying out here after we found my mom’s car abandoned on a trail it shouldn’t be on.

“Yes, thank you!” I have to yell to be heard over the rain. The storm hasn’t let up since it broke on us, and as we walk around the front of the house I try to tell myself that’s why I’m jumpy and nervous. That maybe there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for my mom’s car to be where it is and that nothing bad is about to happen to us. I even start to believe that everything is going to be okay when Beau takes my hand and holds it. That lasts all of twenty more seconds because the front of the lake house comes into view. I watch as the lights inside of the house start to come on one by one.

Someone is turning them all on as they move through the house.

They’re moving fast, it only takes a couple of minutes for the bottom floor to be lit up like the Fourth of July, and then the lights on the second floor start to come on too. The house is like a lighthouse that’s suddenly sprung up in the middle of nowhere. The warm lights shining through the windows push back at the night and the storm, but it isn’t calling us to safety. It’s daring us to keep moving towards death. But even with a murderer inside, that’s not the thing I’m looking at when it comes to the house.

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