Christine

They find no dents, no touch-up repainting, no blood stains. They find no embedded brown paint-flakes from the Squantic Hills road barrier that was broken off. In short, Junkins finds absolutely no evidence that Christine was used in either crime. Now jump ahead to Darnell’s murder. Does Junkins hustle over to the garage the next day to check on Christine? I would, if it was me. The side of a house isn’t a feather pillow either, and a car that has just crashed through one must have sustained major damage, damage that simply couldn’t have been repaired overnight. And when he gets there, what does he find?

Only Christine, without so much as a ding in her fender.

That led to another deduction, one that explained why Junkins had never put a stakeout on the car, I hadn’t been able to understand that, because he must have suspected that Christine was involved. But in the end, logic had ruled him—and perhaps it had killed him, as well. Junkins hadn’t put a stakeout on her because Christine’s alibi, while mute, was every bit as iron-clad as those of her owner. If he had inspected Christine immediately following the murder of Will Darnell, Junkins must have concluded that the car could not have been involved, no matter how persuasive the evidence to the contrary seemed.

Not a scratch on her. And why not? It was just that Junkins hadn’t had all the facts. I thought about the milometer that ran backward, and Arnie saying, Just a glitch. I thought of the nest of cracks in the windscreen that had seemed to grow smaller and draw inward—as if they were running backward too. I thought of the haphazard replacement of parts that seemed totally without rhyme or reason. Last of all, I thought of my nightmare ride home on Sunday night—old cars that looked new clumped up at the kerb outside houses where parties were going on, the Strand Theatre intact again in all of its yellow brick solidity, the half-built development that had been completed and occupied by Libertyville suburbanites twenty years ago.

Just a glitch.

I thought that not knowing about that glitch was what had really killed Rudolph Junkins.

Because, look: if you own a car long enough, things wear out no matter how well You take care of it, and they usually go randomly. A car comes off the assembly line like a newborn baby, and just like a newborn, it starts rolling down an Indian gauntlet of years. The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune crack a battery here, bust a tie-rod there, freeze a bearing somewhere else. The carburettor float sticks, a tyre blows, there’s an electrical short, the upholstery starts getting ratty.

It’s like a movie. And if you could run the film backward—

“Will there be anything else, sir?” the Records Clerk asked from behind me, and I nearly screamed.

Mom was waiting for me in the main lobby, and she chattered most of the way home about her writing and her new class, which was disco dancing. I nodded and replied in most of the right places. And I thought that if Junkins had brought in his technicians, his high-powered auto specialists from Harrisburg, they had probably overlooked an elephant while looking for a needle. I couldn’t blame them, either. Cars just don’t run backward, like a movie in reverse. And there are no such things as ghosts or revenants or demons preserved in Quaker State motor oil.

Believe in one, believe in all, I thought, and shuddered.

“Want to turn up the heater, Denny?” Mom asked brightly.

“Would you, Mom?”

I thought of Leigh, who was due back tomorrow. Leigh with her lovely face (enhanced by those slanting, almost cruel cheekbones), her young and sweetly luscious figure that had not yet been marred by the forces of time or gravity; like that long-ago Plymouth that had rolled out of Detroit on a carrier in 1957, she was, in a sense, still under warranty. Then I thought of LeBay, who was dead and yet undead, and I thought of his lust (but was it lust? or just a need to spoil things?). I thought of Arnie saying with calm assurance that they were going to be married. And then, with a helpless clarity, I saw their wedding night. I saw her looking up into the darkness of some motel room and seeing a rotting grinning corpse poised over her. I heard her screams as Christine, a Christine still festooned with crepe streamers and soaped-on JUST MARRIED signs, waited faithfully outside the closed and locked door. Christine—or the terrible female force that animated her—would know Leigh wouldn’t last long… and she, Christine, would be around when Leigh was gone.

I closed my eyes to block the images out, but that only intensified them.

It had begun with Leigh wanting Arnie and had progressed logically enough to Arnie wanting her back. But it hadn’t stopped there, had it? Because now LeBay had Arnie… and he wanted Leigh.

But he wasn’t going to have her. Not if I could help it. That night I called George LeBay.