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

woman with short brown hair and alarming green eyes staring back at her.
    Her knuckles were white on the steering wheel and her neck was stiff with tension. She tried to keep her eyes firmly on the road, but she could almost feel the mirror taunting her, daring her to take another look.
    She squared her shoulders. Pull yourself together, you silly girl. It was just a trick of the light.
    Biting her lip, she gazed boldly at her reflection again. The only thing in the mirror this time was herself: a thin, rather pretty young lady, with long brown hair and smooth, glowing skin. She sighed with relief and her breathing slowly returned to normal.
    “Goodness gracious.” She gave an odd little laugh. “I must be losing my mind.” She glanced over the seat at Elijah, who was upright again, but clutching his door handle in a death grip.
    “Are you all right, Ben?” she asked. “I’m sorry for the rough ride, but the strangest thing just happened.”
    Elijah was too rattled to ask her what she was talking about, but the “rough ride” was no longer his chief concern: He had just seen something that might allow him to put an end to the whole bizarre situation he found himself in. Half a mile in front of them was an intersection with a four-way stop sign. And approaching this intersection from the other direction was a white Ford pickup, which looked as if it might be stopping at almost the exact same time as the Edsel.
    Here’s my chance, Elijah thought.
     
    Cecil Towpath’s wife of thirty-seven years, Sarah, wouldn’t shut up, and he was sick of it. She’d been at him for the better part of six hours now, ever since they’d left their granddaughter’s home in upstate New York, and it was all he could do not to reach across the seat and slap her silly.
    “For God’s sake, Cecil,” Sarah was saying. “Stop pretending it’s fine she married that little weasel. I told you Wally would never make a good husband and provider for Tina, but did you listen?” She sniffed and stared out the open passenger window of their pickup.
    Cecil knew what that snooty little sniff of hers meant. It meant she thought Wally wasn’t the only one who didn’t qualify as a “good husband.” Damn her, he thought.
    The Towpaths lived in Bar Harbor, Maine. Their only granddaughter, Tina, had married Walter Abernathy three years ago and moved to New York, where Walter (“Wally”) had since shown himself, in Sarah’s words, to be “a worthless, free-loading skunk.” He couldn’t hold down a job, because he claimed to be an artist of some sort. What kind of art he did had never been clear to Cecil. It had something to do with half a dozen ugly metal-and-wood things in their backyard that Wally called “sculptures,” but if you asked Cecil, they looked a lot like a bunch of monstrous dog turds, lying in the grass.
    Tina worked for a lawyer and supported Wally through thick and thin, and wouldn’t listen to a thing Sarah said about him. Cecil didn’t much care one way or another about Wally, but Tina loved him, so he, unlike Sarah, had decided to just let them be. Tina seemed happy about her life, and that was good enough for him.
    And this irritated Sarah beyond all bearing.
    A stop sign was coming up and Cecil tapped on the brakes to begin slowing. There was another vehicle getting close to the intersection, too, but it was headed the other way. It looked like an Edsel, he thought. The front bumper was separated in the middle by a silver, shield-like ornament on the grille.
    Yep, it’s an Edsel, he nodded to himself. No other car has a grille like that.
    “I swear to God, Cecil, you’re not listening to a word I say,” Sarah complained.
     
    Now or never, Elijah thought as they approached the stop sign. The white pickup facing them was slowing down, too, and he could see a man with a white beard driving it, sitting next to a woman with a big head of poufy white hair. Elijah had to get out of the car almost immediately to flag