The Third Hill North of Town by Noah Bly Read Free Book Online

and pull him back into the car while he was trying to get clear.
    Maybe I can knock her out! he thought, and began looking around the backseat for something he could use to hit her in the head.
    Thus occupied, Elijah didn’t notice that Julianna was watching him in the rearview mirror with concern. She could tell something was upsetting him, but she didn’t have a clue what that could be.
    “Did I do something wrong, Ben?” she asked. “If I did, I really didn’t mean to. Honest!”
    Elijah’s head flew up again in fright. His search for a weapon had proven fruitless. There was nothing at all in the back of the car, except for a woman’s sweater and headscarf on the seat and a flimsy-looking window scraper on the floor. The scraper had a long wooden handle, but it was so thin a child could have snapped it in two with no effort.
    He shook his head after a moment, perplexed by an odd quaver in her voice but also relieved that she seemed to have finally figured out she needed to take him seriously.
    “That’s okay,” he answered after a brief hesitation, laying the Butterfinger on the seat beside him. “But can we please stop? I’ll just walk home from here, so you don’t even have to turn around or anything.”
    The formality of his tone caused Julianna’s eyes to well up. “Don’t be angry with me, Ben,” she implored, her bottom lip trembling. “I didn’t mean to upset you, and I’m truly sorry.”
    This heartfelt apology baffled Elijah more than anything else Julianna could have done. For one thing, he wasn’t used to seeing a woman cry; his mother, Mary, never wept. Even when Elijah’s grandmother, Mary’s own mother, had died a few years ago, Mary had remained dry-eyed throughout the entire funeral. Nor did she cry in the privacy of their home later. She wasn’t unfeeling, he knew; she was just “tough as nails,” as Elijah’s father, Samuel, was fond of remarking. One of Mary’s favorite catchphrases she trotted out whenever Elijah was feeling bad was, “Boo-hooing about a thing you don’t like won’t change it a bit, little man.”
    Another reason Elijah was confounded by Julianna’s remorseful reaction was because she still wasn’t slowing down at all, and showed no sign of intending to let him out.
    “I’m not mad,” he mumbled, feeling oddly guilty for having considered knocking her out as a means of escape. Now that he had seen how emotionally fragile she was, the idea of her having a gun seemed ludicrous to him. “I just . . . feel like walking, that’s all.”
    Julianna shook her head hard enough to make a tear fly from her cheek. “I won’t hear of it. It would take you forever to get home on foot, especially with no shoes.”
    Elijah looked down at the white sneakers on his feet and swallowed hard. The woman might mean no harm, but she was seriously nuts.
    “But I’ve got shoes.” He hitched up his right leg and rested his foot on the seat between them. “See?”
    Julianna turned her head for a moment to gaze with affection at the naked foot next to her shoulder. It was covered in dirt, and had thick calluses on the heel. She snorted and felt immediately better. Ben was teasing her again, so he must have forgiven her.
    “Oh, you,” she said. “You are such a fool.”
    Thinking that she must look quite a sight from her short crying jag, she glanced in the mirror again and cried out in horror.
    “Oh!”
    She let go of the wheel for a moment and the car veered wildly into the other lane before she regained control and brought it back to the right side of the road. Elijah, off-balance from having his foot propped up, tumbled over in the backseat.
    “What the hell?” he yelped.
    Julianna tried to say something reassuring but couldn’t quite manage it. Her heart was hammering with fear.
    That’s ridiculous, she was thinking. You’re imagining things.
    When she had looked in the rearview mirror at what should have been her own reflection, she had seen a middle-aged